Goldman’s Marquee GPT, ChatGPT’s MCP Integration & Meta’s $14.3B Scale AI Bet
Artificial Intelligence news nº 73/2025
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News 🗞️📰
Goldman Sachs Expands Availability of AI Assistant Across Firm. Goldman Sachs rolled out its in-house AI assistant, “Marquee GPT,” to thousands more employees, enabling automated data queries, deal modeling and client-chat summarization, aiming to boost productivity in trading, research and operations.
ChatGPT can now connect to MCP servers—here’s how and what to watch for
ChatGPT’s new integration with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets enterprise users link the chatbot directly to MCP-enabled servers, unlocking access to proprietary data sources and internal tools under the same secure framework that Anthropic’s Claude and other LLMs already use; setup involves deploying an MCP relay, registering it in ChatGPT’s Enterprise settings, and carefully gating permissions to prevent potential data leakage or unauthorized code execution.Meta Tried to Buy Safe Superintelligence, Now Plans to Hire Its CEO Daniel Gross: After failing to acquire Safe Superintelligence—co-founded by Ilya Sutskever—Meta is in talks to hire its CEO Daniel Gross (and former GitHub head Nat Friedman), along with taking a stake in their VC firm NFDG, to bolster Mark Zuckerberg’s “superintelligence group” and accelerate AI development under Alexandr Wang’s leadership
New Midjourney AI Video Generator Tested: Transform Your Photos into Videos. Midjourney’s experimental image-to-video tool transforms static images into 5–20 second animations via Automatic and Manual modes, offering “low” and “high” motion presets; though capped at 480p and priced about eight times higher than its image service, the feature opens creative possibilities for simple subjects—while complex scenes still challenge its motion coherence and resolution.
Indra Incorporates Artificial Intelligence Into Simulators: Indra has integrated an AI-driven tool into its military simulators, slashing the time to generate complex tactical training scenarios from days to minutes by allowing instructors to describe desired environments via text or voice and automatically creating fully detailed synthetic battlefields that adapt and learn from real-time edits.
Meta invests $14.3 billion in Scale AI after approaching Perplexity Meta Platforms confirmed it explored acquiring search‐focused startup Perplexity AI before instead committing $14.3 billion to buy a 49 percent stake in data-labeling leader Scale AI, betting on Scale’s annotation and evaluation infrastructure to underpin its next wave of AI development while Perplexity remains independent.
Saudi Arabia AI Market Predicted to Reach $7.6B by 2028. An OpenPR report forecasts the Saudi AI sector will grow at a 32% CAGR—driven by Vision 2030 investments in smart cities, healthcare analytics and autonomous logistics—topping $7.6 billion by the end of 2028.
Personalized Language Models: Easy to Make, Harder to Detect. Unite.ai warns that fine-tuned, user-specific LLMs can be built with minimal data yet evade current AI-detection tools, creating new risks for deepfake text, phishing and disinformation campaigns.
GitHub’s AI Billing Shift Signals the End of the Free Enterprise Tools Era. InfoWorld analyzes GitHub’s decision to monetize Copilot for Business—phasing out the free tier—and argues it marks a broader industry trend: AI features are becoming premium offerings, ending the era of free enterprise developer tooling.
Meta’s New AI Recruiting Push, Says Zuckerberg. In an internal memo leaked to The Wall Street Journal, Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta will deploy AI-driven tools to screen candidates and personalize outreach at scale, promising faster hires but raising concerns about algorithmic bias in recruiting.
How Can AI Impact Entry-Level Jobs?. CBS News Detroit explores AI’s effects on junior positions—showing how chatbots automate routine tasks in customer service and data entry, potentially displacing entry-level roles while also creating upskilling opportunities in AI oversight and prompt engineering.
Funding 💼💸
Ex-OpenAI Tech Chief Raises $2 Billion for New AI Startup : Tapping her track record at OpenAI, Mira Murati co-founded Thinking Machine and landed a staggering $2 billion seed infusion—one of the largest ever—at a reported $10 billion valuation, aiming to commercialize its “Business AGI” platform for enterprises ready to embed AI as a core operational layer.
Helsing secures €600M Series D to advance European AI defence capabilities: Prima Materia—Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s investment firm—led this €600 million Series D for Helsing, Europe’s most well-funded AI defence startup founded in 2021 by Torsten Reil, Dr. Gundbert Scherf and Niklas Kohler. The capital will scale its all-domain autonomy stack, including advanced sensor-fusion software and the HX-2 drone system for real-time battlefield decision support.
Harvey Raises $300 Million for Its Legal AI Assistant: Led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue, Harvey’s Series E expands its Counsel AI platform—which serves over 330 law firms across 50+ countries—and will accelerate R&D on features like automated document redlining, natural-language case analysis and contextual checklists.
PhysicsX Shifts Gear with $135 Million Series B, Eyes $1 B Valuation : The UK-based startup founded by ex-Formula 1 strategists has drawn $135 million to scale its AI-native engineering platform—used for everything from jet-engine design to semiconductor simulation—and is on track for unicorn status.
Decagon Raises $131 Million at $1.5 B Valuation to Deliver Concierge CX with AI Agents: With Accel and a16z Growth leading, Decagon surpassed unicorn status just one year post-stealth, using funds to refine its Agent Operating Procedures and push real-time, AI-powered customer experiences at scale for brands like Hertz, Duolingo and Notion.
Seekr Launches $100 Million Funding Round Led by Danu Venture Group & AMD Ventures – ExecutiveBiz: This Reston, Virginia-based AI platform for bias-resistant model deployment closed its first $100 million tranche on June 17, aiming to bridge data silos and accelerate adoption in telecom, defense and critical infrastructure sectors.
AI Animation Startup Animaj Raises $85 Million in New Funding Round: Co-founded by Sixte de Vauplane and Gregory Dray, Animaj’s hybrid content-plus-AI model secured $85 million to fuse IP ownership (e.g., Pocoyo) with AI-driven production, slashing animation cycles and enabling rapid multiplatform expansion.
Maven AGI Raises $50 Million in Series B Funding : Boston-based Maven AGI, led by CEO Jonathan Corbin and CTO Sami Shalabi, drew $50 million from Dell Technologies Capital, Cisco Investments and SE Ventures to expand its enterprise AI agent platform across complex, high-friction customer environments.
Pano AI Raises $44 Million Series B to Scale AI-Powered Wildfire Detection: Co-founded by Sonia Kastner and Arvind Satyam, Pano AI will deploy its panoramic, smoke-detecting cameras across 30 million acres globally, using Giant Ventures capital to accelerate adoption by utilities and emergency responders.
AI-Powered EdTech Firm Knowunity Secures €27 Million in Series B Round: Berlin’s Knowunity, founded in 2020 by Benedict Kurz, raised €27 million from XAnge and others to fine-tune its AI study companion—now used by over 20 million students—and to fuel US and Asian market entry.
Tadaweb Raises $20 Million to Expand AI-Powered OSINT Platform : Luxembourg-based Tadaweb, co-founded by François Gaspard and Genna Elvin, will use the $20 million led by Arsenal Growth and Forgepoint Capital to scale its “Small Data” OSINT tools that empower human analysts in defense and cyber-threat operations.
Andreessen Horowitz Bets $15 Million on Viral ‘Cheat on Everything’ AI Start-Up – Outlook Business: Backing Roy Lee’s Cluely Inc., a 21-year-old founder’s AI toolkit known for its shock-value marketing, a16z led a $15 million seed to further develop “Interview Coder” and other attention-grabbing consumer tools.
AI Personal Styling Startup Alta Raises $11 Million Seed Funding: Founded by Jenny Wang, Alta’s seed round led by Menlo Ventures will accelerate its virtual-closet styling engine—powered by generative AI—to provide personalized lookbooks, outfit recommendations and real-time try-ons via user avatars.
SparkChain AI Raises $10.8 Million in Funding Round Led by OakStone Ventures: Built on Solana, SparkChain’s DePIN network tokenizes idle compute and bandwidth into an AI supercluster; its $10.8 million round will enhance real-time inference and expand node participation.
DESKi Closes $6 Million Seed Round to Bring AI-Powered Heart Scans to Market : With FDA clearance in hand, DESKi co-founders Bertrand and Olivier Moal will roll out HeartFocus—AI-guided ultrasound software—to democratize early cardiac imaging across primary care and resource-limited settings.
This Berlin Startup Just Bagged $5 Million to Kill Your Marketing Team (Kind Of): Led by Creandum, Superscale’s pre-seed round will fund its AI agents that ingest any product URL and output full go-to-market campaigns—positioning itself as an autonomous “mini-CMO” for startups.
M&A 💰
TP.ai fuels expansion with TP.ai Data Services acquisition: TP.ai has acquired Agents Only, integrating its AI-driven customer engagement platform into TP.ai Data Services to scale global data-labeling, model training, and on-demand expert workflows.
Nordic Semiconductor announces acquisition of Neuton.ai: Nordic Semiconductor acquired Neuton.ai’s TinyML neural-network framework to embed ultra-low-power AI inference directly on its nRF54 Series SoCs, enabling battery-powered IoT devices to run ML models without cloud dependency.
InceptEV acquired by Motive. Fleet-management company Motive acquired InceptEV—a provider of AI-powered EV performance monitoring—to accelerate its electric-vehicle telematics and predictive-maintenance services.
TDK acquires SoftEye to enable AI within smart glasses: TDK purchased UK-based SoftEye for its eyeGenI™ and eyeGI™ eye-tracking and object-recognition IP, aimed at powering always-on, low-power AI interfaces in TDK’s upcoming smart-glasses and wearable electronics.
Acin acquired by CUBE. Data-analytics startup Acin joined CUBE to integrate its real-time decision-intelligence platform into CUBE’s operations stack, enhancing automated insights for enterprise clients.
Canva to acquire Australian AI platform MagicBrief: Canva agreed to buy MagicBrief—whose generative-AI tools provide real-time marketing-brief creation and performance scoring—to integrate data-driven ideation and optimization into its Visual Suite for enterprise customers.
Ola’s Krutrim acquires BharatSah’AI’yak: Ola’s AI arm Krutrim bought the BharatSah’AI’yak multilingual NLU chatbot platform from Samagra—originally deployed at Maha Kumbh 2025—adding its core engineering team and accelerating vernacular voice and text AI services across India.
Interesting Reads 💡🤔
Brain on LLM launches open evaluation platform for reasoning tasks. Brain on LLM unveiled a community-driven benchmark suite that lets researchers submit large language models to a battery of cognitive tests—covering logic, math, and common-sense reasoning—and compare performance across systems in real time.
Apple’s AI reasoning models struggle with basic logic puzzles. Apple researchers found that even their state-of-the-art in-house language models fail simple symbolic reasoning and logic puzzles, collapsing when tasks require multi-step deductions, and are now exploring hybrid neuro-symbolic approaches to bolster AI reasoning capabilities.
Charted: Top 10 Companies Leading the New Era of AI. Visual Capitalist ranks the ten most influential AI firms by valuation and innovation impact, led by OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, Databricks and Canva, which together shape cloud infrastructure, defense AI, and creative tools in today’s market.
Most ChatGPT Users Make This One Common Mistake—Use These 3 Tips for Better Results. Tom’s Guide shows that vague prompts lead to unfocused AI answers and recommends: setting a clear role for the model, providing examples of the desired output, and refining results with targeted follow-ups to boost accuracy.
Anthropic MCP Toolkit Setup Guide (2025). Geeky Gadgets walks through installing Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol Toolkit—covering environment configuration, API keys and sample scripts—to enable Claude agents to call external tools via a standard interface.
From the AI Pin to Microsoft Tay: 5 AI Products That Ended in Disaster—and Why They Failed. TechRadar recounts five major AI flops—Microsoft Tay’s offensive outputs, Humane’s AI Pin hardware issues, flawed smart-home assistants, biased facial-recognition doorbells and the Fyre Festival app—attributing failure to rushed launches and ethical oversights.
Security Risks of Using AI at Work. Mashable warns that enterprise AI can expose sensitive data through logs, introduce supply-chain vulnerabilities in third-party models, and enable AI-driven phishing, urging strict data policies, encrypted storage and regular security audits.
20 Basic AI Agents Terms for Beginners. MarkTechPost defines twenty foundational concepts—like “chain-of-thought,” “tool use,” “few-shot prompting,” and “agent orchestration”—to help newcomers grasp how autonomous AI agents plan and execute tasks.
I Found the 7 Best Early Prime Day 2025 Chromebook Deals Worth Your While. Laptop Mag curates top Chromebook discounts ahead of Prime Day—featuring models from Acer, Asus and Samsung with savings up to 30%, highlighting picks for students, power users and budget shoppers.
iOS 26: Everything You Need to Know About the Next iPhone Operating System. Engadget outlines iOS 26’s AI enhancements—advanced on-device Siri reasoning, ambient dictation upgrades, multimodal widgets and granular privacy controls for app-generated data.
6 AI Terms All Content Creators Should Know. Forbes advises that creators familiarize themselves with “few-shot prompting,” “style transfer,” “hallucinations,” “latency,” “fine-tuning” and “prompt chaining” to leverage AI tools effectively and manage risks.
20 Game-Changing AI Tools Every Small Business Leader Needs Now. Forbes lists twenty AI platforms—from chatbots and sales accelerators to financial-forecasting and HR automation tools—designed to streamline SMB operations and foster data-driven decision-making.
AI Propaganda: A Potent Weapon. Decrypt analyzes how deepfakes, AI-generated text and automated bots are being deployed in disinformation campaigns, calling for cross-platform detection tools and transparency to counteract emerging AI-driven propaganda.
Startups / Tools 🧰🛠️
Text Blaze: Eliminates repetitive typing by letting you save and insert customizable snippets and templates via simple shortcuts, with dynamic forms, formulas, integrations, and shared snippet folders for team collaboration.
Squirrly SEO: An AI-powered WordPress SEO plugin offering daily SEO goals, AI-driven keyword research, real-time on-page optimization feedback, focus-page analysis, and comprehensive content performance analytics to boost search rankings.
TelescopeAI: A unified digital-transformation platform that integrates with existing systems of record to deliver AI-driven insights and resource-management apps—covering workforce planning, project health monitoring, vendor management, and IoT/device oversight.
Gamma: An AI design partner for generating branded presentations, websites, social media graphics, and documents—instantly produces layouts, content, and visuals with one click and exports to PPT, Google Slides, PDF, or live websites in minutes.
Julius AI: An AI-powered data analyst that lets you upload or link CSV, Excel, and Google Sheets to chat with your data—automatically generating charts, forecasts, transformations, and advanced statistical analyses without any coding.
Anyword: A content-performance platform that uses AI and A/B-test data to generate and optimize ad copy, social posts, emails, blogs, and web content with predictive scoring, brand-voice controls, and real-time analytics for marketers.
Visme: An all-in-one visual content creation suite featuring AI-powered tools for presentations, infographics, social-media graphics, videos, documents, and data visualizations—offers templates, brand kits, collaboration, scheduling, and interactive animations.
Vizologi: An AI business-plan generator that brainstorms unlimited startup ideas, analyzes markets and competitors, and auto-creates detailed business plans and canvases based on proven strategies from leading companies.
Cloudinary MediaFlows: A low-code/no-code workflow automation engine for image and video management—build and scale media pipelines with prebuilt templates, integrations, and AI-powered transforms like background removal, metadata tagging, and notifications.
OpusClip: A #1 AI video-clipping and editing tool that automatically converts long videos into multiple viral-ready social clips, adds animated captions, AI B-roll, thumbnails, and scheduling, with team workspaces and API integrations for end-to-end video workflows.
NTV Highlights 🪩🎉
We are actively looking for AI startups
At Next Tier Ventures, we are actively looking for the next generation of AI startup founders ready to scale and create meaningful impact. Our investments range between $500K and $2M, accompanied by strategic support to help founders achieve their vision.
If you’re building cutting-edge B2B AI solutions let’s connect 👉
http://apply.nexttier.vc
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