AI News — June 24, 2026
Daily news briefing for 24th June 2026. Track model releases, research breakthroughs, startup funding updates, and AI signals published on this day.
All Stories Published on June 24 (45)
AI researchers continue to leave Google for its rivals
Top AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are leaving Google for Anthropic, following departures from top scientists Noam Shazeer and John Jumper.
Experimental wine bottle tracks oxygen moving through the cork
The small bit of air in the bottle sees oxygen and other chemicals move in and out.
Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC in a $2.5B deal
Agility Robotics, the humanoid robotics startup that spun out of Oregon State University in 2015, expects to generate $620 million in proceeds.
Valor Equity Partners looks to raise a $2.5B Fund VII, per Bloomberg
New details have emerged about Valor's latest fund, which last year announced it was raising an unspecified amount of capital.
Xiaomi's HarnessX rewrites its own AI scaffolding mid-task - and smaller models gain the most
As enterprise AI agent take on increasingly complex, long-horizon tasks, their performance is often restricted by their harness, the software scaffolding...
Qualcomm Buys Buzzy Chip Startup Modular for Nearly $4 Billion
Modular, one of the most promising chip software startups of the AI era, heads for a multibillion-dollar exit.
Qualcomm shares jump 14% on Modular acquisition, guidance upgrade
Qualcomm Inc.'s stock jumped 14% in after-hours trading today after it shared a series of updates about its artificial intelligence roadmap. The company announced plans to acquire an inference software startup called Modular Inc. and previewed two upcoming AI chips. Additionally, Qualcomm...
Grammarly parent Superhuman buys AI detector GPTZero
Superhuman Inc., the company formerly known as Grammarly, said today it has agreed to acquire GPTZero Inc., the startup whose detection tools tell teachers, editors and hiring managers when a piece of writing came from a machine. The acquisition price was not disclosed. The acquisition is arguably...
Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base
Branches received exceptions to Hegseth's policy that made the shot optional.
Mistral launches OCR 4, turning document extraction into a full enterprise AI play
Mistral AI on Tuesday released OCR 4 , a document intelligence model that moves beyond raw text extraction to return structured representations of entire...
Huntington Bank: Redacting sensitive data from 400M+ documents with AWS
In this post, we walk through how Huntington built a scalable AWS solution to detect and redact Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Payment Card...
Build a Healthcare Appointment Agent with Amazon Nova 2 Sonic
In this post, you will learn how to build a voice agent that handles appointment reminder conversations using Amazon Nova 2 Sonic and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.
AI-powered BI with Snowflake and Amazon Quick
In this post, you will learn how to build an end-to-end integration between Snowflake semantic views and Amazon Quick.
How Loka Built a Natural, Low-Latency Voice Agent with Amazon Nova 2 Sonic
In this post, we demonstrate the architecture and approach Loka used to solve a common frustration: robotic, slow voice assistants that cause customers to.
Exclusive: XCures Lands $46M Series B To Clean Up Messy Medical Records With AI
XCures, a startup that uses AI to streamline patient data and medical records, has closed a Innovius Capital-led $46 million Series B financing round, it...
OpenAI and Broadcom Unveil LLM-optimized Inference Chip
OpenAI and Broadcom introduce Jalapeño, a custom AI chip built for LLM inference to improve performance, efficiency, and scale across AI systems.
NVIDIA and AWS Collaborate to Bring AI to Production at Scale
Building AI systems at scale is demanding, requiring low-latency inference, fast vector search, strong GPU price-performance and infrastructure that can grow.
Coval raises $28M as enterprises push voice agents into production
Voice artificial intelligence testing startup Coval Inc. revealed today that it has raised $28 million in new funding to expand its platform as more enterprises put voice agents into production. Founded in 2024, Coval offers software that runs simulations, tracks live performance and label data...
Kinoa pushes AI-native mobile app revenue operations after raising $10M in funding
Mobile application operations startup Kinoa Labs Ltd. said today it has raked in $10 million in funding to help app developers unlock more revenue from their users with its artificial intelligence-native software. Transcend Fund led the round, which also saw participation from Sisu Game Ventures...
Former Infosys chief has a new startup that wants to challenge the IT services world
Backed by Mayfield and Aramco Ventures, Vishal Sikka's new venture brings together veterans from SAP, Infosys, and VianAI.
Your enterprise AI agents should automatically remember which model is right for which task. Mindstone built the capability with Rebel
AI agent orchestration platforms are popping up like weeds these days, but London-based AI transformation startup Mindstone's Rebel might be among the most...
Cerebras stock plunges after earnings as CEO says margin outlook was misunderstood
In its first earnings report since going public, the AI chipmaker forecast a narrower gross margin in its core business, scaring investors.
AI was supposed to kill engineering jobs, but new data suggests they're the most resilient
While AI dominates the layoff narrative, engineers are actually making up a larger share of new hires, according to SignalFire data.
13 years and $500 million for a stage adapter? Report justifies NASA cancellations.
"Contract values for these efforts ballooned from nearly $2.8 billion to $5.9 billion."
Companies are scrambling to stop employees from maxing out AI budgets with small tasks
The tokenmaxxing era was brief. We now appear to be entering the era of token rationing.
I Met With China's Top AI Experts. They're Freaking Out, Too
The AI arms race between China and the US has researchers on both sides worried about a "Chernobyl moment."
Stanford researchers will discuss their agentic 'scientists' that are on course to reshape drug discovery at VB Transform 2026
Drug discovery is notoriously inefficient. Pharmaceutical projects span years, moving from one specialized human team to the next through disconnected...
Facebook rolls out an AI companion app for creators
The new app, which is currently being tested with select creators, will have Facebook's recently launched AI creator assistant built into it.
Figma adds code layers, support for animations, more AI features in new update
Figma's update adds a new code layer, support for motion and shaders, and the ability to create custom plug-ins for various tasks using AI.
Intuit will show off how it rebuilt its AI infrastructure to support fast and complex tasks at VB Transform 2026
Customer expectations have shifted from simple, fast conversational interactions to complex agentic AI-powered tasks that legacy IT architectures simply can't...
We got a sneak peek of the final space shuttle set to go on public display
"It is an incredible exhibit and incredible sight."
3 days left to save up to $190 on your TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 pass
You have just 3 days left to save up to $190 on your pass to TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 before Early Bird rates end on June 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Register...
Slate Auto's radically simple electric truck starts at $24,950
The Jeff Bezos-backed startup finally revealed more pricing details for its debut EV, including a $29,950 starting price for the SUV variant, and boosted the...
The emergence of the web data infrastructure layer for AI
AI is booming. New use cases are emerging each day. To capitalize on the technology's potential, enterprises require data at scale. In many cases, though, the...
Why Ex-Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer Says It's A Great Time To Build A Hard Tech Company: 'Infrastructure Is The Moat'
In this Crunchbase News Q&A, Gigascale Capital founder Mike Schroepfer discusses the coming power crunch, why infrastructure has become a strategic moat, and...
How to invest when everything is moving too fast
TechCrunch's StrictlyVC evening in Los Angeles late last week brought together two of the more straight-talking investors working in AI right now. They were...
Soaring memory chip demand helps Micron quadruple its revenue and crush expectations again
Memory chip maker Micron Technology Inc. more than quadrupled its revenue growth in the most recent quarter as it continued to benefit from surging demand linked to the artificial intelligence industry. The company reported third-quarter earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of...
HelloTwin launches 'Digital Authority' to bring governed AI agents to the enterprise
HelloTwin.ai GmbH today announced what it calls an accountable artificial intelligence AI twin that holds business intelligence and goals in a single source of truth. HelloTwin said it built its data model on a patent-pending compiler designed to pull answers from business context rather than...
Three insights you may have missed from theCUBE's coverage of Pure Accelerate
As enterprises advance their artificial intelligence initiatives, they're discovering that the real constraint isn't model sophistication - It's data. AI outcomes now depend on whether organizations can access, mobilize and operationalize data as an active system rather than a passive repository...
AI agents are changing work - and Dell's John Roese says it's just beginning
To gain a better understanding of the longer-term impact that autonomous agent will have on the nature of work, Dell Technologies Inc. has been taking a closer look at how AI is already changing how work gets done. This has been a central focus for John Roese (pictured), Dell's global chief...
Talos: Scaling rare disease diagnosis with automated, iterative genomic reanalysis
Talos was built to help resolve a major bottleneck in genomic medicine: human review time. The open-source system recovered 90% of in-scope diagnoses while...
Modulate launches AI music detection as synthetic tracks flood streaming
Voice artificial intelligence company Modulate Inc. today launched a tool that flags AI-generated music straight from the audio. The product, an application programming interface called AI Music Detection, scores how likely a clip is to contain AI vocals or AI instrumentals and gives a verdict on...
Upbound open-sources Modelplane to optimize inference clusters
Upbound Inc. today released Modelplane, a new open-source tool for managing artificial intelligence inference clusters. San Francisco-based Upbound is backed by $69 million from Alphabet Inc.'s GV fund, Intel Capital and others. It's best known as the creator of Crossplane, an open-source...
Knowledge Graph Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG): Structured Retrieval for AI Agents
A user asks your support agent: "is the slow-sync bug from my last ticket fixed in the version you told me to upgrade to?" Answering means connecting three documents: the customer's earlier ticket, the new release notes, and the engineering issue the.