Lola Vision Systems, a Washington, D.C.-based AI infrastructure startup founded in 2024 by Tayo Adesanya, has built a 'compiler toolchain' that translates AI models into instructions specific chips can execute. The company says manually configuring an AI model on new hardware can take around 200 hours, and it is also developing its own semiconductor chips to automate more of that process. Clients supply their code and AI model, and Lola's software converts both for their target chip.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-05
Edge-AI chipmaker SiMa.ai closed a $150 million Series C round co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify, with Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, and StepStone Group also participating. The deal values the company at $1.45 billion, up from a $960 million valuation after its July 2025 Series B, and brings total funding raised to over $500 million.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-28
Cactus launched Needle 3, a foundation model small enough to run as a single 8-29MB binary on phones, wearables, robots, smart home hubs and cars. Built on what the company calls a Simple Attention Network, it sacrifices general chat ability to specialize in three tasks: text embedding for local search, structured data extraction from messy text, and tool calling that maps spoken requests to app functions. The company claims it outperforms models ten times larger on mobile tool calls and matches models two to three times bigger on extraction.
cactuscompute.com
· 2026-09-18
Swedish startup Scaleout Systems, born from Uppsala University research in 2018, has shifted its machine learning work from commercial vehicles toward military applications following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The company now builds compact computer vision models that run directly on drones, pilot tablets, and field command hardware to detect and select targets, and has joined NATO's DIANA accelerator program for a project called Federated Aerial Intelligence for Recon.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-17
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