Welcome to AI Weekly Digest 📬 Your essential AI briefing, carefully curated by me, Rubén Colomer, AI Specialist and GP at Next Tier Ventures. Stay ahead of the curve with the latest AI breakthroughs, key funding news, innovative tools, thought-provoking reads, and the best AI job opportunities - it's all here!
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News 🗞️📰
- SailPoint turns AI security fears into fresh growth fuel Identity security spend is accelerating as companies react to AI-driven risk. SailPoint reports strong ARR momentum and positions identity as a high-ROI control for AI-era threats — a signal for VCs and corporates that “AI security” budgets are now durable, not discretionary.
- Protecht launches Cognita, an AI built for GRC “Generic LLM bolted onto GRC” is out; vertical AI with explainability is in. Protecht’s Cognita embeds directly into risk workflows to help with obligations mapping and guided remediation — a template for enterprise AI that actually ships and gets adopted.
- Visa Just Made It Possible for AI to Spend Your Money—Here’s What That Means: Visa launched two toolkits—the Model Context Protocol Server and the Visa Acceptance Agent Toolkit—enabling AI agents to securely access payment APIs and complete purchases on behalf of users
- Chatbots vs. Agentic AI in contact centers Agentic AI is moving beyond scripts to goal-directed orchestration, but the winning stacks still preserve human empathy. For CX leaders and AI infra investors, this is where NLU, voice, and tooling budgets converge.
- Lenovo unveils a full AI-powered device portfolio at IFA From AI PCs to Motorola devices, Lenovo is pushing on-device inference and hybrid AI. Expect broader enterprise pilots as IT teams test TCO tradeoffs between local NPUs and cloud inference across fleets.
- Global investors rotate toward Asia on AI tailwinds BofA notes a shift out of U.S. equities as capital chases Asia’s AI build-out and easing policy. For LPs and corporates, the takeaway is simple: AI supply chains (semis, tooling, edge compute) are increasingly an Asia story.
- OpenAI adds teen safety measures to ChatGPT Following growing scrutiny, OpenAI is rolling out parental controls and crisis-routing updates. Policy pressure is translating into product changes — worth tracking for platform risk and compliance exposure.
- JPMorgan Chase uses GenAI tools at scale (LLM Suite, EVEE) Concrete enterprise playbook: an internal LLM broker (“LLM Suite”) and EVEE Intelligent Q&A for call centers move hundreds of use cases from pilots to production, with tight governance and data controls.
- OpenAI reorganizes the research team behind ChatGPT’s “personality” The “Model Behavior” group folds deeper into post-training and safety, signaling continued focus on alignment, tone and bias mitigation as product usage scales.
- Startup lets you query AI with silent speech Boston’s AlterEgo demos a non-invasive “silent speech” interface (cranial nerve signals + bone-conduction feedback), a new HCI vector for assistive tech and noisy environments.
Funding 💼💸
- Anthropic raises $13B Series F at ~$183B post-money Anthropic — founded by Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei — closed one of the largest private rounds in AI. Led by ICONIQ, with Fidelity and Lightspeed co-leading and broad crossover participation. Capital fuels enterprise push and safety research; revenue run-rate reportedly >$5B.
- Sierra raises $350M at a $10B valuation Enterprise agents startup Sierra, co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, extended its lead in production CX agents. Led by Greenoaks, following prior rounds from Sequoia and Benchmark.
- IQM secures €300M+ to scale quantum hardware Finland’s IQM — co-founded by Jan Goetz (CEO) — closed a large round backed by European institutions and strategics to expand fabrication and commercial programs.
- Exa raises $85M Series B for “AI-native” search Exa — founded by Will Bryk (CEO) and Jeff Wang — builds neural search and SERP APIs tailored for AI agents. Round led by Benchmark with Lightspeed and NVentures (NVIDIA) participating.
- Alibaba leads ~$140M into X Square Robot Embodied AI heats up in China. X Square Robot — founded/led by Wang Qian — raised to chase general-purpose service robots; capital reportedly led by Alibaba.
- Koah raises $5M to bring ads to AI apps Monetization for LLM apps: Koah, co-founded by Nic Baird, Herrick, and Mike, is building an ad network for AI chats; early backers include community angels and operator funds.
- Starboard Maritime Intelligence closes A$20.7M Series A AI for maritime safety and domain awareness. Founded by Darren Moor and Sam Carmalt; round led by Main Sequence with AirTree and defense-adjacent LPs.
- Reveal HealthTech raises $7.2M to scale AI-enabled care ops Healthtech engineering partner Reveal HealthTech, founded by Sanchit Mullick (CEO), raised from Leo Capital and others to expand U.S. delivery and AI capabilities.
M&A 💰
Interesting Reads 💡🤔
Startups / Tools 🧰🛠️
- “Nano Banana” lands: Gemini 2.5 Flash Image goes public Google’s new image gen/edit model (“nano banana”) adds multi-image fusion, localized edits, and world-knowledge guided generation; available via Gemini API, Vertex, and — notably — OpenRouter. Design partners are already building creative ops and catalog tooling on top.
- Gemini 2.5 Flash Image arrives on OpenRouter First image model on OpenRouter, expanding the multi-model dev surface for startups. Useful if you’re standardizing on one broker for evals, routing, and billing while you test image workflows alongside text.
- Amazon “Lens Live” brings real-time visual shopping Live camera search meets product pages. Expect copycats in retail apps and a fresh wave of “grounded vision” use cases in field ops and support.
- Reality Defender ships developer SDKs for deepfake detection Practical content integrity tools for payments, marketplaces, and trust & safety teams. Detection-as-a-service is moving from pilots to platform capability.
- Pipecat Smart-Turn v2 for realtime voice agents Lower latency turn-taking and barge-in control for voice agents. Good fit for contact centers and on-device assistants testing agentic flows.
- browser-use agents keep climbing the charts Open-source, headless “do-things-on-the-web” agents continue to see rapid adoption — increasingly paired with evaluation harnesses for reliability in real workflows.
- LLM Suite (JPMorgan) Internal, secure broker to route/co-pilot employee workflows across models—useful pattern for any large enterprise standardizing GenAI access.
- EVEE Intelligent Q&A Call-center assistant surfacing policy/knowledge in real time; a concrete enterprise QA blueprint.
- Factory (Droids) Autonomous “dev agents” that plan, generate tests and ship merge-ready PRs; positioned for incident response and RFC-grade docs too.
- Mailbutler Inbox copilot: draft/summarize/track emails and turn contacts into tasks directly from mail clients.
- Clockwise AI calendar that defends maker time and orchestrates multi-team scheduling.
- Beautiful.ai Presentation co-pilot to keep decks on-brand with smart templates and shared slide libraries.
- Krisp Noise cancellation + transcripts + meeting notes—bot-free and on-device options for privacy-sensitive teams.
- Folk Lightweight, AI-assisted CRM that auto-links emails, meetings and notes for founder-led sales.
- Akiflow Command-bar for tasks/calendar/Slack—optimize focus by slashing context switching.
- Arc Browser Research-first browser with AI “browse for me”; now under Atlassian—watch Dia for work use cases.
- Waymark Turns a script or URL into agency-grade video ads—fast creative for SMB portfolios.
- Browse AI Train no-code scraping robots for competitive intel and price monitoring.
- Vocal Image AI speech coach for founders and BD—tone, pace, resonance and accent drills in an app.
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.
- During the last week of August and the first week of September, our General Partners — Patricia Pastor and Ruben Colomer — spoke at two key LATAM events: Colombia Tech Week and the Third International Congress of Digital Transformation Inhouse ESPOL Tech 2025 in Ecuador. Many thanks to the organizers and everyone who joined the sessions on AI, venture, and corporate innovation.
If you’re building cutting-edge B2B AI solutions let’s connect 👉 http://apply.nexttier.vc
