Joyce Shen’s picks: musings and readings in AI/ML, August 24, 2026

📌 Musings and Readings

“Are We Thinking Correctly About AI Intelligence?” (Link)

“DOE selects Fermilab-led AI initiative to advance particle accelerator performance” (Link)

“Agentic Data Operations Platform (ADOP): Data engineering into hours” (Link)

“Why AT&T Is Betting Big on Open-Weight AI” (Link)

“Online streamers sue Twitch, Amazon over generative AI training” (Link)

“Alibaba launches $10 billion Hong Kong share placement to fund AI spending” (Link)

👏 Deals

Molt AI, A Miami, FL-based company developing an AI security and assurance solution that helps enterprises identify and mitigate risks in autonomous AI agents, has raised $1m in pre-seed funding.

Terra Industries, a Danville, CA-based defense tech company developing ArtemisOS to secure critical infrastructure, has raised additional financing.

Worldscape.ai, a Redmond, WA-based company offering an AI-native geospatial intelligence and mission simulation solution for defense, government, and enterprise applications, has raised $10m in seed extension funding. 

xpander.ai, a CA-based company building a vendor-neutral AI agent solution that enables enterprises to build, deploy, and manage AI agents across their systems, models, and infrastructure, has raised $7.5m in seed funding.

Peripheral, a Toronto, Canada-based company using AI-powered reconstruction and neural rendering to transform standard video feeds into photorealistic 3D volumetric video, has raised $8.7m in seed funding.

Space, a CA-based company building an AI-powered, cloud-native file system, has raised $2.4m in pre-seed funding.

Hypercubic, a CA-based company providing an agentic AI solution that helps enterprises understand, maintain, and modernize legacy COBOL and mainframe systems, has raised $5.3m in seed funding.

Boom, an Austin, TX-based company providing a leasing solution that helps property managers automate leasing, tenant screening, fraud detection, and rent reporting, has raised $15m in series A funding.

Medly AI, a London, UK-based education technology company that helps students prepare for exams, has raised $8m in seed funding.

Synthefy, an Austin, TX-based company building AI foundation models for structured data to enable businesses to generate forecasts, predictions, and scenarios, has raised $6.5m in seed funding.

Callosum, a London, UK-based company building AI infrastructure that orchestrates heterogeneous models and chips to optimize inference performance and cost, has raised $100m in seed funding.

Velatir, an Odense, Denmark-based company building an AI governance and control solution that enables enterprises to monitor, secure, and manage AI usage, data flows, and compliance, has raised €5m in funding.

Heybreez, a Wilmington, DE-based company providing the infrastructure layer for enterprise voice AI to scale autonomous voice agents, has raised $2.5m in seed funding.

 Multiplier, a NYC-based company offering an AI-native research and workflow solution for public-market investors, has raised $6m in seed funding.

Twin1 AI, a CA-based company developing the AI workforce layer by creating digital twins that capture and operationalize individual expertise of knowledge workers, has raised $20m in seed funding.

Math Magic, a Beijing, China-based AI company, has raised $50m in series A+ funding.