GoKawiil
Tech News
Apple has pushed out a second round of release candidates for macOS Tahoe 26.7.1 (build 25G313) and macOS Sequoia 15.8.1 (build 24H212), just days after the first RCs. Apple describes both updates as containing important security fixes recommended for all users, without further detail yet on what's being patched.
Apple has pushed out the first release candidates for macOS Tahoe 26.7.1 (build 25G309) and macOS Sequoia 15.8.1 (build 24H208), just days after releasing macOS Tahoe 26.7 and Sequoia 15.8. Both updates are described only as containing important security fixes recommended for all users, with no other changes noted in the release notes.
AI-search marketing startup Profound announced a $180 million Series D funding round led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, valuing the company at $1.8 billion. The raise comes less than seven months after its $96 million Series C, with existing backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and South Park Commons also joining in. Profound says revenue has tripled in six months and it now serves over 1,000 enterprise clients, including Comcast, Estée Lauder, and Walmart.
Mecka AI, a startup that pays people to record themselves performing everyday tasks to generate motion data for training humanoid robots, is close to finalizing a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital valuing the company at roughly $500 million. The deal comes just three months after Mecka raised $60 million in a round led by Framework Ventures, though the exact size of the new round remains unknown and terms could still change.
Apple has released a fourth round of release candidate builds for macOS Tahoe 26.7 (build 25G229) and macOS Sequoia 15.8 (build 24H23) to developers and public beta testers. The updates focus primarily on bug fixes and performance improvements rather than new features, and come shortly after Apple's product event.
Cymphony, a New York- and Tel Aviv-based startup, raised a $25 million Series A co-led by Sequoia Capital and SMBC Fin Atlas Beyond Fund, pushing its valuation above $100 million after a previously undisclosed Sequoia seed round. The company builds a 'workforce graph' that gives security teams visibility into which employees, AI agents, and other non-human identities can access sensitive systems and data.
After Sequoia Capital chairman Doug Leone recounted undergoing a root canal without Novocaine to prove his toughness before a meeting, the American Association of Endodontists pushed back publicly. The group, representing over 8,000 specialists, stressed that patients should never endure severe pain during the procedure and should ask for more anesthetic if needed.
Sequoia Capital chairman Doug Leone, worth an estimated $11.7 billion, told his dentist to perform a root canal without novocaine so he wouldn't miss a scheduled meeting. He described gritting through the drilling by comparing it to a soldier's battlefield injuries, then went straight to his meeting before changing his sweat-drenched shirt.
A blog post highlights a handy jq trick from Sequoia McDowell that pretty-prints JSON copied to the clipboard and pastes it back automatically, using pbpaste and pbcopy on macOS. The author adapts this for Linux using xclip, then identifies a flaw: if the clipboard doesn't contain valid JSON, jq fails silently and wipes the clipboard content. The fix adds a fallback so the original clipboard text is preserved when jq errors out.
Empirik, incubated inside Sequoia Capital since 2023 by former infrastructure executives Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati, is now launching as an independent company with $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures. The startup, now led by CEO Kartik Chandrayana, builds software that monitors infrastructure changes and predicts how they might cascade into failures before they happen. It already counts startups and Fortune 500 firms like S&P Global among its customers.
Israeli startup AIR, founded by former Unit 8200 cybersecurity officers Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman, has raised $50 million across two seed rounds to build a platform that monitors and vets the skills, plugins, and MCP servers that AI agents use inside companies. The rounds, led by Sequoia and Greenoaks respectively, closed weeks apart and included several notable angel investors from the cybersecurity world.
Clipto, a San Francisco-based startup with teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, closed a $15 million all-equity funding round that values the company at $250 million. The startup's software indexes videos, audio, images, and meeting recordings stored on a user's computer, letting people find files by describing them in natural language or through AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude. Founder Henry Kang, whose prior startup ZenVideo was acquired by Tencent in 2020, built Clipto around the idea that AI has created a glut of unused content rather than a shortage of it.