AI Week in Review: July 6 – 12, 2026

Benchmark-backed Ollama has amassed 176,000 stars, and nearly 17,000 forks on GitHub by helping developers easily run AI on their PCs.

Artificial intelligence training data company Mercor.io Corp. announced today that it has acquired Deeptune Inc., a startup that builds simulated software environments used to train AI agents. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Ollama Inc., the largest artificial intelligence platform connecting developers to open models, today announced it raised $65 million in Series B funding led by Theory Ventures.

The massive round was co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Khosla Ventures.

The AI chip boom just produced its biggest Wall Street moment yet. Now SK Hynix and Samsung are being asked to build US factories.

The company is using the cash to open an office in the Bay Area and compete for talent there, "strengthening its position at the heart of the world's leading.

In Q2, Europe posted its strongest quarter in four years for venture funding, Crunchbase data shows.

The $300 million round is expected to be led by Menlo Ventures, Sifted reported.

For Paradigm, the technical frontier will stretch beyond its cryptocurrency investment roots.

Founded in 2024, Prime Intellect's goal is to give organizations capabilities to train their own agentic systems without relying on frontier AI labs.

The company is raising $10 billion, leading to a valuation of $130 billion.

Chemistry Ventures, the VC firm launched by Bessemer, Index Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz alums, is raising $500M for its second fund.

AI law startup Norm has raised a $120 million Series C round led by Khosla Ventures, valuing the startup at $1.2 billion.

MiniMax Group Inc., a Shanghai-based artificial intelligence developer, is raising $2 billion in funding. Bloomberg reported on Thursday that more than half the funds are expected to come from the sale of newly issued shares.

As AI infrastructure investment scales globally and inference workloads multiply, cache storage is emerging as the critical data layer that makes AI factories functional, persistent and economically viable in an era of disaggregated computing. VAST Data Inc.

Data scraping startup Oxylabs UAB has broken into unicorn territory after raising $130 million in funding from the private equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC.

Below, we break down some of tech's biggest stories, with analyst perspective on the moves that matter the most.

Lyzr Inc., a startup that helps enterprises build artificial intelligence agents, is reportedly raising a funding round worth about $100 million. Bloomberg today cited sources as saying that the deal has drawn $400 million worth of interest from prospective investors.

Jeff Bezos's rocket company Blue Origin Enterprises LP is reportedly looking to raise money from outside investors for the first time in more than two decades.

Artificial intelligence training startup Prime Intellect Inc. has raised $130 million in funding from a group of prominent investors. The consortium included Nvidia Corp.'s NVentures, Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital.

2 years after our first coverage, we return with Modal's other cofounder to explore why Agent Experience is working now, and everything they have learned building the new agent cloud.