Joyce Shen’s picks: musings and readings in AI/ML, May 18, 2026

📌 Musings and Readings

“Pope creates artificial intelligence study group as Vatican prepares to release his first encyclical” (Link)

“Keynote address by President von der Leyen at the European Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Children” (Link)

“Google Says Criminal Hackers Used A.I. to Find a Major Software Flaw” (Link)

“How Amazon Went From an AI Also-Ran to a Real Contender” (Link)

“Publicis to buy US data company in $2.2bn deal as it deepens AI marketing push” (Link)

“Companies Have a New AI Problem: Too Many Agents” (Link)

👏 Deals

Basata, a Phoenix, AZ-based AI company developing a healthcare AI operations platform, has raised $21m in series A funding. 

Coworked, a Boston-based startup building an AI-powered project management platform, has raised $1.8m in funding.

Knit Health, a CA-based company offering a clinical operations intelligence solution, has raised $11.6m in seed funding.

Greenboard, a NYC–based company providing a compliance solution that consolidates SEC and FINRA regulatory workflows, has raised $15.5m in series A funding. 

White Circle, a Paris, France-based AI safety company building an enterprise control and monitoring platform, has raised $11m in seed funding.

DesignVerse, a Romania-based company that turns product ideas and Figma designs into production-ready software, has raised $5.5m in seed funding.

Webidoo, a Milan, Italy-based company building AI tools for small and medium-sized businesses, has raised $25m in funding.

DataMission.ai, a NYC–based company providing AI-powered decision intelligence software that helps local governments, has raised $1m in seed funding.

DataMission.ai, a NYC-based company providing AI-powered decision intelligence software for local governments, has raised $1m in seed funding.

OriginLab, a CA–based company offering licensed video game data infrastructure for training AI world models and multimodal AI systems, has raised $8m in seed funding.

Outmarket.ai, a CA–based company developing an AI solution for insurance brokers, has raised $17m in series A funding. 

Chromie Health, a NYC-based company building an AI-powered healthcare benefits solution for employers and brokers, has raised $2m in pre-seed funding.

Flick, a CA-based startup building an AI-enabled filmmaking solution that enables creators to generate cinematic, character-consistent short films, has raised $6m in seed funding.

Graphon AI, a CA-based AI infrastructure startup building a multimodal data layer that structures enterprise data, has raised $8.3m in seed funding.

Synthetic, a CA-based company offering an AI-native bookkeeping solution that automates accounting workflows, has raised $10m in seed funding.

GovWell, a NYC-based company developing an AI-powered solution for local governments that streamlines permitting, licensing, and public services, has raised $25m in series A funding.