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Nvidia Shares Increase Following New Revenue Sharing Initiative for AI Startups

A bright, sunlit open-plan startup workspace at dawn, with a large illuminated Nvidia logo on a sleek pedestal. Golden digital coins stream out from the logo and split into multiple glowing trails that feed into assorted laptops on surrounding desks. Behind it, a semi-transparent green stock chart soars upward, its line glowing at the peak. A small group of adult entrepreneurs in business casual lean in eagerly over one of the laptops, mugs of coffee in hand, celebrating the revenue-sharing news under warm natural light.

Nvidia Stock Rises Amid New Revenue Sharing Plan for AI Startups - Barron's

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Nvidia Stock Rises Amid New Revenue Sharing Plan for AI Startups

A significant development is unfolding within Israel's high-tech sector as Decart is reportedly in advanced discussions to be acquired by a leading global tech firm for an estimated $6 billion to $7 billion. Sources indicate that negotiations are progressing in their draft stages and may culminate in a signed agreement within the week.

Initially, Nvidia was in talks to acquire Decart, but as the negotiations neared finalization, a new major competitor entered the fray, prompting the company’s founders to reconsider their options.

Speculation among industry insiders suggests that one of the new contenders might be SpaceX, led by Elon Musk. Other potential suitors include Amazon and Nebius, a cloud service provider based in Israel. Notably, the discussions are taking place in the U.S., and Decart has opted not to comment on the situation.

Should the sale proceed, it could profoundly influence Israel's tech ecosystem. If SpaceX becomes the buyer, it could establish its first research and development center in Tel Aviv, leveraging Decart's resources as a foundational base.

Musk has been invested in Decart since 2024, following the launch of Oasis, a game that utilizes Decart’s real-time video generation technology. His enthusiasm was apparent when he shared a "wow" reaction on social media after trying the game, which quickly amassed a million users in just three days, outpacing ChatGPT in downloads.

Continued discussions between Musk and Dean Leitersdorf, one of Decart's co-founders, have persisted since that time. Another connection linking Musk to Decart is Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital, who supported Decart since its initial $21 million funding round and is regarded as a close associate of Musk. Maguire played a role in arranging Musk's visit to Israel following the onset of conflict on October 7, during which Musk visited the Gaza border.

Musk has long expressed interest in Israel's tech landscape. Recently, SpaceX raised $75 billion during its IPO, aimed at bolstering its AI infrastructure and advancing the Grok large language model, competing with major players like Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. Following the IPO, SpaceX acquired AI startup Cursor for $60 billion, suggesting an ongoing push for expanding its computing capabilities. Furthermore, earlier in 2026, Musk integrated xAI into SpaceX, valuing that AI arm at $250 billion.

In the recent public financial disclosure by SpaceX, Musk estimated a potential revenue rate of $100 billion by December, implying significant upward growth. Decart's technology could enhance this strategy by optimizing computing performance on existing hardware.

Amazon's interest in Decart is also noted, though historically, the company has been cautious about massive acquisitions. In April, Amazon made a rare move with an $11 billion acquisition of satellite firm Globalstar, aiming to better compete with SpaceX's Starlink.

Domestically, Decart has demonstrated revenue in the tens of millions, with its growth largely driven by working on projects for semiconductor manufacturers. Previously, Decart was negotiating with Nvidia, which also invested in its latest funding round, but those talks fell through as more lucrative offers emerged.

A potential sale would mark a rapid exit for a company that was founded in 2023 by Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, though it may not align with their original aspirations for the company. Just three months ago, Decart secured $300 million in funding, resulting in a valuation around $4 billion, with notable Israeli venture capital firm Aleph now among its investors.

In total, Decart has raised close to $450 million and currently employs about 100 individuals. For investors, a sale in the range of $6 billion to $7 billion would yield substantial returns. Yet, Leitersdorf, a prodigy who earned a doctorate in computer science by age 23, has long articulated ambitions that transcend merely establishing a successful startup.

Leitersdorf, at 27, serves as CEO and is joined by 38-year-old Shalev as CPO; the pair's collaborative journey began in IDF Unit 8200. They recently enlisted Yossi Sariel, a former commander of their unit, who retired following the conflict that began on October 7.

Decart stands as one of the few Israeli companies developing its own large-scale AI models, focusing particularly on tech that facilitates real-time video generation. The company's innovative capabilities were highlighted early on when it showcased Oasis, allowing for real-time video generation while enabling a unique virtual reality for each player.

Despite generating revenue swiftly, Decart prioritized not being pigeonholed as a gaming company. Over the past two years, it has sought to pivot towards broader applications for its underlying technology.

Decart's key advantage lies in its ability to produce video at significantly lower costs than competing models, making its technology appealing across the AI landscape. This was bolstered by deepening relationships with chip manufacturers—initially using Nvidia's GPUs, with recent collaborations shifting to Amazon.

The company’s funding journey is indicative of the extraordinary interest it has garnered since inception, securing a $21 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital, followed by further investments shortly thereafter, rapidly elevating its valuation.

From the outset, Leitersdorf's ambitions have been clear. In an interview with Calcalist after Decart was celebrated as the most promising Israeli startup of 2025, both leaders expressed a commitment to building a company capable of addressing monumental challenges and reconfiguring the technological landscape.

Leitersdorf’s vision includes positioning Israel among the top five countries in AI, asserting that only within this scope can Israel become a dominant force in the technological realm.

This ambition makes the potential acquisition particularly relevant. A traditional buyout by a chipmaker or cloud service provider could yield quick financial returns, yet aligning with Musk might give Decart a distinct status in the global tech sphere and usher in a substantial new player into the Israeli market.

Leitersdorf comes from a prominent financial lineage, with family ties that include his brother Yoav, who founded the cybersecurity-focused venture capital firm YL. His early education in computer science at 17 led to advanced degrees, including a postdoctoral fellowship in Singapore.

Conversely, Shalev's background contrasts sharply; he grew up in a Haredi household, later pursued academic qualifications while working, and ultimately served in Unit 8200, where he spent 13 years in various capacities.

Their serendipitous meeting at the base occurred shortly after a major military operation, ultimately leading them to register Decart on September 7, 2023. A month later, both were called to reserve duty amidst ongoing conflict, at a time when their vision for Decart was still forming, centered around groundbreaking advancements in generative artificial intelligence.

Israeli AI company Decart approaches $6 billion sale, with SpaceX eyeing the deal.

A rooftop balcony at sunset overlooking the Tel Aviv skyline, bathed in warm golden natural light. In the foreground two silhouetted executives clasp hands over a sleek glass table. On one side sits a leather-bound contract folder embossed with the Decart logo; on the other, a polished metal briefcase bearing a large SpaceX logo. Behind them, an Israeli flag waves gently in the breeze, capturing the tension of a nearly $6 billion deal.

Israeli AI startup Decart nearing $6 billion sale, Musk’s SpaceX circling - calcalistech.com

- Decart is in advanced talks for a $6-$7 billion sale to a major tech company.  
- The original buyer, Nvidia, was outbid by another international technology giant.  
- Elon Musk's SpaceX and Amazon are potential bidders for the Israeli high-tech firm.  

A huge deal is taking shape in Israeli high-tech: Calcalist has learned that Decart is in advanced talks to be sold to a major international technology company for approximately $6 billion-$7 billion. The deal is believed to be in advanced draft stages and could be signed in the coming week.

The original negotiations were with Nvidia, which wanted to acquire Decart. But when the two sides were close to reaching an agreement, another giant international player entered the picture, and the founders decided to pursue a deal with the new bidder.

2 View gallery Decart founders. ( Photo: Yonatan Blum )

Several high-tech sources speculated that the new bidder could be Elon Musk’s SpaceX. However, according to estimates, Amazon and Israeli-based cloud company Nebius are also among those interested in Decart. The entire process is taking place in the United States, rather than in Israel. Decart declined to comment.

If the negotiations are completed, the deal could have a major impact on Israel’s technology industry. If the buyer is SpaceX, the company would establish an R&D center in Tel Aviv for the first time, using Decart as its base.

Musk has been following Decart since 2024, when the company launched Oasis, a game based on Decart’s technology for generating video in real time. After trying the game, Musk posted “wow” on X. Oasis reached 1 million users within three days and surpassed ChatGPT in downloads.

Calcalist has learned that Musk and Dean Leitersdorf, one of Decart’s two founders, have remained in regular contact since then.

Another connection between Musk and Decart is Shaun Maguire, a Sequoia Capital partner who has backed the company since its unusual $21 million Seed round and is considered close to Musk. Maguire, a vocal supporter of Israel who became increasingly outspoken after the outbreak of the war, organized Musk’s visit to Israel after Oct. 7. During that visit, Musk toured the Gaza border area.

Musk has expressed interest in Israel’s technology industry for years. A little over a month ago, SpaceX raised $75 billion in its IPO, among other things to expand its AI infrastructure and advance its Grok large language model, which is currently competing with Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.

Immediately after its IPO, SpaceX acquired the AI startup Cursor for $60 billion. Adding Decart’s capabilities could represent another layer in that strategy.

Earlier in 2026, Musk merged xAI into SpaceX at a valuation of $250 billion for the AI company. Since then, he has sought to deepen its activities in computing and cloud infrastructure.

When SpaceX published its first financial statements as a public company last week, Musk said: “A revenue rate of $100 billion in December is not a question mark. That’s what we’ll reach if we basically do nothing. I think it will be even higher.”

Decart could fit into that strategy as software capable of extracting more computing power from the same hardware.

Amazon could also be interested in Decart, although Jeff Bezos’ company has historically been reluctant to pay very large sums for acquisitions. In April, the company entered into an unusual $11 billion deal to acquire satellite company Globalstar, which is intended to help it compete with Musk’s Starlink. Globalstar has an annual revenue run rate of approximately $250 million.

Decart, meanwhile, is estimated to have revenue of several tens of millions of dollars, with uneven growth driven largely by projects carried out for chip manufacturers.

Until recently, Decart was negotiating with Nvidia, which also invested in the company in its most recent funding round. Those talks collapsed after higher offers emerged.

A sale would represent a remarkably quick exit for a company founded in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev. But compared with the founders’ ambitions, it would not necessarily represent the outcome they originally envisioned.

Just three months ago, Decart completed a $300 million funding round at a valuation of approximately $4 billion, with Israeli venture capital firm Aleph joining its list of shareholders.

During its short life as an independent company, Decart has raised approximately $450 million and employs only about 100 people.

For investors, a sale at $6 billion-$7 billion would represent a substantial return. But Leitersdorf, a child prodigy who completed a doctorate in computer science at the age of 23, has long spoken about ambitions that go far beyond building a successful startup.

2 View gallery Decart founders. ( Photo: Yonatan Blum )

Leitersdorf, 27, serves as CEO, while Shalev, 38, is CPO. The two met while serving in Unit 8200. They recently brought in Yossi Sariel, who commanded the unit during their time there and retired following the Oct. 7 attack.

Decart is one of the few Israeli companies developing its own large AI models, with a particular focus on technology capable of generating video in real time.

The company gained international attention before it was even a year old when it released a demonstration of Oasis, a game that generates video in real time and allows each player to create a different virtual reality.

The technology quickly generated revenue for Decart, but the company did not want to become a gaming company. Over the past two years, it has been searching for a business direction that could turn its underlying technology into a broader product.

Its main technological advantage is the ability to generate video at significantly lower costs than competing models, making the technology potentially attractive to companies across the AI industry.

Decart has worked closely with chip manufacturers. It initially ran its technology on Nvidia GPUs, but has more recently significantly deepened its cooperation with Amazon.

The company’s funding history reflects the extraordinary investor interest it attracted almost from the moment it was founded.

Its unusual $21 million Seed round was led by Sequoia Capital with the participation of Oren Zeev. Just one month later, the company raised another $25 million at a valuation of approximately $500 million. That round was led by Benchmark, one of the major American venture capital firms that had barely operated in Israel until then.

Less than a year later, Decart raised another round at a valuation of $3.1 billion. That round brought its total funding to $153 million, before the additional $300 million round announced in May.

“We want to be the Google, Apple or Facebook of AI”

Leitersdorf’s ambitions were also clear from the beginning.

In an interview with Calcalist after Decart was named the most promising Israeli startup of 2025 , Leitersdorf and Shalev said: “When we founded Decart, we decided that the goal was to establish a company that would solve a huge challenge because we lived in a time that was bigger than us.”

They said it took them a year to recognize that they would need to invest five years in building a company that could fundamentally change the world.

“We want to be Google, Apple or Facebook in the field of AI,” they said, describing their ambition to create a company after which the world would be different from the one that existed before it.

Leitersdorf has also spoken about his desire to put Israel on the global AI map. A year ago, he said: “Israel must be one of the five leading countries in AI. Only then will we become a powerhouse.”

That ambition makes the possibility of a sale particularly significant. A conventional acquisition by a chipmaker or cloud company that already has a presence in Israel would produce a fast financial return for investors. A deal with Musk, however, could potentially give Decart a different role in the global technology landscape and bring a major new technology company into Israel.

Leitersdorf is a member of a prominent Israeli financial family that also includes his brother Yoav, founder of venture capital fund YL, which specializes in cybersecurity.

He began studying computer science at 17. He subsequently completed a master’s degree and earned a doctorate in computer science at 23. His dissertation received a prestigious award and led to an opportunity to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at the National University of Singapore.

Shalev, 12 years older than Leitersdorf, came to Unit 8200 from a very different background.

While Leitersdorf’s family moved between Switzerland and the United States following his father, senior physician Eran Leitersdorf, Shalev grew up in a Haredi household in Bnei Brak.

After graduating from Haredi educational institutions, already married and the father of two children, Shalev began studying for a bachelor’s degree in accounting through evening classes while working to finance his studies.

At 23, he decided to enlist in the IDF. Through a program for integrating Haredim into technological military units, he joined Unit 8200, where he served for 13 years in a variety of roles.

Leitersdorf and Shalev met by chance at the base a week after Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021. Their first conversation centered on what they described at the time as a “classified technological issue.”

They registered Decart as a company on Sept. 7, 2023. Exactly one month later, both were called up for reserve duty for many months following the outbreak of the war.

At that point, the two founders were not yet entirely sure what Decart would become. They knew only that they wanted to build something revolutionary in generative artificial intelligence.

Israeli AI startup Decart nearing $6 billion sale, Musk’s SpaceX circling

These days, U.K. AI startups are primarily focused on a pressing question: how can they secure office space in King’s Cross?

This area has become remarkably desirable, so much so that a venture capital firm recently clinched a deal by offering office space to a startup founder in the neighborhood. When I inquired about this rumor, the firm confirmed its commitment to securing deals for founders, including helping them find suitable office locations, but it chose not to divulge any specifics.

King’s Cross saw its rise to prominence around 2016 when DeepMind, freshly acquired by Google, established its presence there. This move attracted a wave of AI startups eager to tap into the powerhouse atmosphere that Google DeepMind created. Today, these startups are capitalizing on the rich talent pool available in this booming tech enclave.

As a result, King’s Cross has evolved into one of the leading AI hotspots globally, alongside San Francisco and Beijing. Locally known as the “Knowledge Quarter,” the area boasts major players such as OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Wayne, Recursive, and further down, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) has recently moved into a sleek new office nearby, and University College London is just around the corner.

Amid the bustling developments, trendy eateries like Hoppers and BAO have also set up shop, making the area more vibrant. From King’s Cross, founders can quickly get to Cambridge in 45 minutes to scout for talent or reach Paris in just two hours for potential business deals.

It’s hard to believe that just over two decades ago, this location was considered one of London’s most notorious districts. Investor Hussein Kanji from Hoxton Ventures recalls the area’s grim past during the ’80s when it became infamous for a narcotics market, with syringes found in tree trunks and gang activity on the rise. “In 1982, the local church was occupied for 12 days by the English Collective of Prostitutes,” Kanji reminisced. However, the early 2000s saw a real estate developer envision a new future for the area, transforming it into the AI hub of the U.K.

About 18 months ago, Kanji’s portfolio company, BioCorteX, relocated from Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross to be at the center of this thriving landscape. “London is very active right now,” stated BioCorteX Co-Founder Nik Sharma, noting the influx of large tech firms. Notably, Jeff Bezos' AI venture, Prometheus, is rumored to be considering a move to the same location.

Currently, London is home to around 3,600 AI startups that have collectively raised approximately $12.1 billion out of the $14.8 billion generated in the city since the end of July, as per Dealroom. Since June, AI firms have leased over 1 million square feet of office space in London, leading prime rents in King’s Cross to climb 18% in the last three years, according to Chris Dunn from Knight Frank.

This percentage only reflects larger leases of at least 10,000 square feet, similar to those made by OpenAI and Prometheus. Shorter contracts are commanding even higher rates, and the vacancy rate for typical office spaces has plummeted to a mere 0.9%, showcasing how demand has far outstripped available supply.

A dominating discussion point in the area is the concept of sovereignty. The recent closure of access to Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable prompted many in the ecosystem to reconsider their reliance on external resources. Saul Klein, co-founder of VC firm Phoenix Court, explained that this led to the realization that Europe needs to cultivate its own AI capabilities. Phoenix Court operates in King’s Cross and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix, which recently announced a staggering $3.3 billion valuation. Klein emphasized that the shutdown served as a sharp reminder that Europe cannot merely rely on rented AI expertise; it must foster its own development.

Klein posed a crucial question about the future: Will the U.K. invest in the necessary infrastructure—compute power, energy, and capital—to ensure sustainable self-reliance rather than just becoming a host to U.S. AI operations?

Top founders are choosing to stay put as well. Simon Kohl, who leads Latent Labs, maintains offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. Currently, growth is more robust at the London office, prompting Kohl to express optimism about the local ecosystem. “The vibe now feels less about London catching up and more about it becoming one of the primary locales to launch a serious AI venture,” he noted.

If you stroll through the area, you might spot Wayve, a prominent player testing its autonomous vehicles. Co-founded by Alex Kendall in 2017, Wayve has emerged as one of London’s success stories. Kendall reflected on the transformation, stating, “A decade ago, launching a frontier AI company in London seemed unconventional. Now, it’s a clear choice.” In 2018, Wayve moved to King’s Cross to find a space that could function as both an office and a garage—something rare in Central London. He’s observed the ecosystem evolve to the point where startups can effectively operate, attract substantial investment, hire top-tier AI talent, and remain competitive on a global scale.

A stone’s throw from Anthropic’s new expansive office is Sierra, an AI agent builder, and Synthesia, which specializes in AI video technology. Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, shared that the company moved into its modern office building last year to accommodate its expanding workforce. The area’s appeal lies mainly in its proximity to the airport and the concentration of potential investors, she stated.

With approximately two-thirds of Synthesia's engineers working remotely, the company benefits from a diverse, international talent pool, allowing it to scale rapidly. “From London, we can seamlessly hire people from a wide range of locations, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she shared.

It’s no surprise that London’s burgeoning AI scene has triggered a competitive race for talent. Job postings in the U.K. for AI roles have surged in recent years, as data from PwC indicates. When Anthropic announced its entry into the London market earlier this year, it posted a job for a machine learning research engineer with a salary range between £260,000 and £630,000—a stark contrast to the average salary of around £102,000 for similar positions in London. As with their counterparts in Silicon Valley, U.K. founders find themselves needing to secure larger funding rounds to remain competitive.

Zain Ali, founder of the AI legal firm Centuro based in King’s Cross, voiced a critical observation. He expressed that the genuine measure of success will be whether significant AI enterprises can be established, financed, and grown from the U.K. while continuing to draw top talent. If this trend persists, he predicted that King’s Cross could evolve from merely being an AI hub into an indispensable strategic asset for the U.K.

Once infamous for its red-light activities, this area has transformed into a leading global AI center.

On a sunlit cobblestone avenue of a former red-light district, the trademark red-lit windows are now gentle white-lit screens streaming AI code and neural-network diagrams. Historic brick facades bear subtle digital murals, and groups of adult researchers in smart-casual attire huddle at café-style tables with open laptops and notebooks. A sleek “AI HUB” sign hangs above a renovated arched doorway, warm morning light casting natural tones across the scene to evoke urban renewal.

This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs - TechCrunch

- King’s Cross has transformed into a top global AI hub since DeepMind's arrival in 2016.  
- Demand for office space surged, with prime rents in King’s Cross rising 18% recently.  
- U.K. AI startups face a talent war, driving competition for salaries and funding.  

What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?

The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.

The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.

This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.

Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.

Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?

“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.”



Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.

There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around $12.1 billion out of the $14.8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me.



That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.

Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.

Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a $3.3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.

“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”

Image Credits:Phoenix Court

Top founders want to stay

Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said.



Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.

“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said.



Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.

Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.

Image Credits:Synthesia

Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.

Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.



U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.

“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”

This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs

In a significant move for the tech landscape, NextSlide has officially joined forces with OpenAI, integrating its innovative team into the ChatGPT development process. Founder Ahmed Beshry shared via the NextSlide website that the company’s product enables users to transform prompts, notes, documents, or research into refined and editable presentations.

Beshry emphasized that the core mission remains focused on enhancing visual communication, striving to empower individuals to articulate their ideas with clarity. Joining OpenAI aligns with this vision, as the team will continue to create AI-driven tools that facilitate effective communication and meaningful project execution.

While the specifics of the financial arrangement have not been revealed, Beshry noted on LinkedIn that the announcement might be "a few months late," as the acquisition was finalized earlier this year. Prior to this role, Beshry co-founded Caper AI, a smart checkout solution that was acquired by Instacart in 2021.

OpenAI purchases presentation company NextSlide

A sunlit modern conference room with warm morning light streaming through tall windows; on one wall a bold NextSlide logo fills a large screen, on the opposite glass partition the words “OpenAI” appear in simple text with no logo; a sleek laptop on the table shows a slide deck morphing from NextSlide branding into OpenAI’s style, as two silhouetted executives shake hands over the deal.

OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide - TechCrunch

- NextSlide has joined OpenAI, with team members now working on ChatGPT.  
- The startup aims to enhance visual communication through AI-driven presentation tools.  
- Founder Ahmed Beshry previously co-founded Caper AI, acquired by Instacart in 2021.  

In Brief

NextSlide recently announced that it’s joining OpenAI, with the presentation startup’s team members now working on ChatGPT.

The NextSlide website currently displays a note from founder Ahmed Beshry describing the startup’s product as one “that could turn prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable presentation.”

The ultimate goal, Beshry said, was “to make visual communication more accessible and help more people express their ideas clearly.” So by joining OpenAI, the team will “continue pursuing that same mission: building AI products that help people create, communicate, and turn their ideas into meaningful work.”

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a note on LinkedIn, Beshry said the announcement is coming “a few months late,” as the acquisition took place “earlier this year.”

Beshry was previously a co-founder at Caper AI, a smart cart/cashier-less checkout startup acquired by Instacart in 2021.

OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide

Recent research indicates that the venture capital sector is not just a haven for questionable AI startups; it also creates an environment that can foster fraudulent activity. 

A collaborative study from the UK’s Imperial College and France’s Emlyon Business School examined 12 firms involved in 27 legal cases concerning civil or criminal allegations of securities fraud. Collectively, these cases resulted in approximately $688 million in financial losses and led to a staggering total of 73 years in prison sentences.

The researchers uncovered a consistent phenomenon referred to as “façading,” where entrepreneurs conceal the poor performance of their businesses through a range of deceptive practices. As detailed in the research, reported by TechCrunch, three distinct types of façading were identified: surface, reinforced, and deep façading. These categories reflect the degree to which there is a disparity between what audiences expect and the actual performance of the ventures.

Surface façading occurs when founders fabricate narratives of impending success—think along the lines of the AI hype that peaked in 2024, exemplified by companies like Builder.ai, which ultimately crumbled like a fragile house of cards. 

This practice intensifies into reinforced façading as entrepreneurs begin to concoct misleading documents such as bank statements and customer contracts to support their superficial claims. A notable example is iLearning Engines, a $1.5 billion AI startup that a Department of Justice investigation found was misrepresenting nearly all of its customer interactions and revenue.

The most extreme form, known as deep façading, involves extensive market manipulation, including creating fake product demonstrations, undermining internal due diligence processes, and manipulating regulations. Current leaders in the AI sector exemplify this behavior, engaging in heavy political lobbying, obstructing their internal assessments of AI safety, and often obscuring the use of human labor by dressing it up to appear as if it were autonomous AI.

The distinction between innovation in a free market and criminal activity is a fine line, especially when it involves groundbreaking technologies like AI—which currently represents a substantial $1.6 trillion gap between what investors expect and what is actually viable.

As the paper states, "By engaging in façading, entrepreneurs effectively decouple the venture’s externally projected appearance from its operational reality, making it appear to audiences as if no expectation-reality gap exists, despite the venture’s actual (subpar) performance.” It concludes that entrepreneurs cross the threshold from exaggerated storytelling to criminal deception when their narratives become increasingly detached from reality, leading to sophisticated efforts to fabricate evidence, data, and representations of their companies’ performance.

Startups Backed by VC Funding Associated with Ongoing Fraud

A moody, shadowy boardroom lit by a single dangling amber bulb. Silhouetted venture capitalists in sharp suits push heavy leather briefcases overflowing with cash across a dark wooden table. On the table lie scattered “CONFIDENTIAL” files stamped in red, legal contracts marked “FRAUD ALERT,” and a cracked smartphone screen showing a glitching startup pitch. In the background, faint outlines of tech office windows loom like silent witnesses. Dramatic low-angle shot, deep shadows and warm highlights, dark theme.

VC-Funded Startups Linked to Persistent Fraud - Futurism

- Venture capital fosters environments conducive to fraud, impacting numerous AI startups significantly.  
- Researchers identified three types of "façading" entrepreneurs use to conceal poor performance.  
- Deep façading involves extensive market manipulation and disconnects appearances from operational reality.  

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It turns out the venture capital industry doesn’t just merely fund junky AI startups — it also systematically breeds the conditions for fraud.

A new joint study from researchers at the UK’s Imperial College and France’s Emlyon Business School analyzed 12 companies involved in 27 court cases related to civil or criminal cases related to securities fraud. The cases totaled around $688 million in financial losses, and resulted in 73 years of cumulative prison sentences.

After analyzing the individual cases, the researchers identified a persistent pattern of “façading,” in which startup entrepreneurs hide their flailing businesses from scrutiny through an assorted mix of fraudulent behavior.

The research, first reported by TechCrunch, identified three various types of façading: surface, reinforced, and deep façading, which are “contingent on the severity of the gap that entrepreneurs face between audiences’ performance expectations and ventures’ performance reality,” the paper explains.

The first form, surface façading, happens when startup founders create fictional stories of “imminent venture success,” like the kind of AI-washing that hit its stride in 2024, embodied by companies like Builder.ai that went on to collapse like a billion-dollar houses of cards.

This escalates into “reinforced façading” when founders begin to cook up things like bank statements or customer contracts to sell the surface story, and take pains to centralize the flow of information around the startup’s performance. One example of this might be the company iLearning Engines, a $1.5 billion AI startup which was found to be faking “virtually all its customer relationships and revenues” by a Department of Justice probe earlier this year.

Deep façading, the final and most severe form, encompasses broad forms of market manipulation, like faking product demonstrations, sabotaging internal efforts at due diligence, and manipulating regulation. This last form, one could argue, is embodied by the current front-runners of the tech industry’s AI boom, which have engaged in significant political lobbying, sabotaged their own internal research on AI safety, and routinely dress up human labor to appear like autonomous AI.

Ultimately, the line between criminality and free market innovation is thin, especially where seemingly-magical and proprietary new technologies like AI are involved (a technology which currently represents a $1.6 trillion gap between investor expectations and practical reality.)

“By engaging in façading, entrepreneurs effectively decouple the venture’s externally projected appearance from its operational reality, making it appear to audiences as if no expectation-reality gap exists, despite the venture’s actual (subpar) performance,” reads the paper. “Entrepreneurs transgress from dramatized discourse into criminal deception when their stories become unhinged from reality and involve increasingly sophisticated organizing efforts to fabricate material evidence, data, and information about their ventures’ performance.”

More on startups: We Are Mildly Horrified by This AI Startup That Coerced People Into Getting Tattoos of Its Logo in Exchange for a Job Interview

VC-Funded Startups Linked to Persistent Fraud

Jeff Dean, a pivotal figure in the development of Google's AI technologies, is embarking on a new journey by launching his own AI venture. On Wednesday, Dean, who held the title of Google's chief scientist, revealed that he, along with three colleagues, is departing the tech giant to establish Discovery Loop, a startup aimed at utilizing AI to address challenges in science and engineering.

What is Discovery Loop all about?

Discovery Loop is set up as a public benefit corporation dedicated to automating machine learning alongside scientific and engineering processes. Dean shared via X that the company's mission is to streamline the entire cycle—from the proposal of experiments to their execution and analysis—thereby accelerating advancements in various fields.

The concept of "loop" in the name refers to the company's aim to facilitate the automation of this experimental cycle. By harnessing this technology, Discovery Loop aspires to tackle some of the most complex issues in both science and engineering, potentially allowing for the parallel execution of thousands of experiments.

In its vision, Discovery Loop intends to confront 14 significant challenges identified by leading scientists and engineers to transform our way of life. These problems, once termed the "National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges," cover topics such as "Reverse Engineer the Brain" and "Prevent Nuclear Terror." Notably, Larry Page, cofounder of Google, was part of the committee that formulated these challenges back in 2008.

Who is behind the financial backing of Discovery Loop?

In his announcement, Dean revealed that the startup has secured initial funding from esteemed venture capital firms Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Participation also came from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital.

Dean discussed how they created a presentation to attract a select group of venture capitalists, sharing insights from their extensive experience in the tech field. Alphabet, Google's parent company, is also a founding investor and cloud partner. Google CEO Sundar Pichai expressed gratitude for Dean's 27-year tenure at Google, acknowledging his substantial contributions to the company.

A brief overview of Jeff Dean

Jeff Dean has significantly shaped Google over the past two decades, playing a crucial role in its rise to prominence in areas like search, news, translation, and advertising. As a co-founder of the Google Brain team, he has been instrumental in transforming theoretical research in neural networks into impactful products. One of his notable contributions is the development of the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which has been vital in advancing AI research.

Throughout his career, Dean has collaborated with many influential figures in the AI community, including Dario Amodei from Anthropic and Ilya Sutskever from OpenAI.

Leadership team of Discovery Loop

The founding team of Discovery Loop includes Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, all of whom are well-respected in their fields. Ghemawat, a longtime collaborator of Dean, shares a history that dates back before their time at Google. Together, they set a record as the first-ever level 11 engineers at Google.

Oriol Vinyals, a principal scientist at Google DeepMind, is celebrated for his work in machine learning and reinforcement learning, and he played a key role in the AlphaStar project, which bested professional players in StarCraft II.

Quoc Le, another founding member of Google Brain, has made significant strides in deep learning, including pioneering projects that utilized extensive neural networks to teach computers to recognize images.

Future implications for Google

Google has experienced significant changes, especially in the realm of AI. The acquisition of DeepMind in 2014 marked a pivotal moment for the company, as it led to innovative research, including AlphaGo, which triumphed over a seasoned board game player.

While Google laid an important foundation in AI, some former employees have propelled competitors like OpenAI to the forefront of generative AI technology, particularly with the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022. In response to evolving dynamics, Google merged its Brain and DeepMind teams and appointed Demis Hassabis as chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. Following Dean's exit, Koray Kavukcuoglu has taken over the day-to-day leadership of DeepMind, reinforcing the organization's commitment to advancing AI technologies.

5 key points to understand about Jeff Dean's new venture

A bright, sunlit modern workspace: Jeff Dean seated at a sleek wooden table strewn with notebooks, sketches and an open laptop, warm daylight pouring through floor-to-ceiling windows. Above the table hover five softly glowing icons—a rocket, a lightbulb, a neural-network node, a handshake and a shield—each representing one of his startup’s key pillars. On the wall behind him, a minimalist nameplate reads “Dean Innovations.”

5 Things to Know About Jeff Dean's New Startup - Business Insider

- Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist, co-founded AI startup Discovery Loop focused on automation.  
- Discovery Loop aims to address 14 significant challenges in science and engineering through AI.  
- Initial funding comes from notable investors including Radical Ventures and Alphabet as a partner.

Legendary Googler Jeff Dean is starting his own AI company.

On Wednesday, Dean, Google's chief scientist, announced that he and three other colleagues were leaving to start Discovery Loop, an AI startup focused on AI applications in science and engineering.

Here's everything we know about the new venture

What is Discovery Loop?

Discovery Loop is a public benefit corporation "whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress," Dean wrote on X.

The loop part of the name comes from the company's goal of automating the process by which scientists and engineers propose an experiment, implement and run it, and evaluate the results.

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The company hopes this automation can unlock some of the trickiest problems in science and engineering by enabling "parallel execution of thousands of experiments."

Introducing Discovery Loop ♾. We’re building AI to run experiments at unprecedented scale and to solve the biggest bottlenecks in science and engineering.



Our founders @JeffDean, @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @quocleix, @OriolVinyalsML helped build the AI infrastructure and models that… pic.twitter.com/Y3FUlMLTbf — Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI) August 5, 2026

Specifically, Discovery Loop wants to build systems that can tackle parts of the 14 challenges laid out by some of the world's most accomplished scientists and engineers to improve life as we know it. Formerly known as the "National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges," the 14 topics range from "Reverse Engineer the Brain" to "Prevent Nuclear Terror."

Interestingly, the 2008 committee that came up with the grand challenges included Larry Page, the cofounder of Google.

Who is funding Discovery Loop?

According to Dean, Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, two Silicon Valley mainstays, led the initial round. Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital also participated.

We created a pitch deck to tell a handful of VC firms about us and what we were up to (a fun experience!). Here’s a few slides about our background and some of the things we’ve worked on from the pitch deck (it was fun putting together the list of people in our teams who have… pic.twitter.com/7glcm9T9XG — Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) August 5, 2026

In a sign of how he left things at Google, Alphabet is a founding investor and cloud partner, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.

"I also want to give a huge thanks to the incomparable @JeffDean after an incredible 27-year run at Google," Pichai wrote on X.

Who is Jeff Dean?

Jeff Dean Bloomberg/Getty Images

If you've used Google in the last two decades, you have Jeff Dean to thank. As Google's 30th employee, his tenure spans from establishing Google's dominance in search to the creation of generative AI models.

Dean helped advance Google Search, Google News, Google Translate, and Google Ads.

If that wasn't enough, Dean co-founded the Google Brain team that, as the "Godfather of AI" and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton put it, turned "basic research in neural nets into game-changing products." One of the biggest breakthroughs Dean helped develop was the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which is credited with accelerating AI research.

As Google's AI head, Dean oversaw AI research and later co-led the development of Gemini, Google's family of models.

Many of the biggest names in AI worked alongside Dean, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, and more.

Who else is leading Discovery Loop?

Announcing Discovery Loop!



I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine… pic.twitter.com/ancoplyNvN — Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) August 5, 2026

Sanjay Ghemawat: Ghemawat is one of Dean's oldest collaborators, going back to before the pair joined Google when they worked at Digital Equipment Corporation.

At Google, the pair became so inseparable that Dean's kids called Ghemawat "Uncle Sanjay," according to a 2018 profile in The New Yorker. Ghemawat and Dean also became the first-ever level 11 Google engineers, carrying the title of Senior Fellows.

According to Dean's slide deck, he is the most-cited distributed systems researcher; Ghemawat is the fourth most cited.

Oriol Vinyals: Vinyals, a principal scientist at Google DeepMind, is also joining Discovery Loop.

According to his Google biography, Vinyals focused on machine learning and reinforcement learning. Before joining the team, he worked on projects that fuel tools like Google Translate.

One of his research projects, called AlphaStar, was an agent that bested a top-tier professional StarCraft II player.

Among the most-cited AI researchers, per Dean's slide deck, Vinyals is sixth.

Quoc Le: Le was a founding member of the Google Brain team. At Stanford, his advisor was Andrew Ng, who helped establish the Brain team.

Le worked on one of Google Brain's first big projects: developing a neural network of 1,000 machines containing 16,000 processors that demonstrated machine learning by teaching itself how to recognize items after being trained on 10 million images randomly pulled from YouTube videos, as The New York Times reported in 2012.

This being the internet, the system taught itself to recognize cats.

What's next for Google?

Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Shane Anthony Sinclair/Getty Images for Cannes Lions

Google is no stranger to big shake-ups, including in AI.

In 2014, the search giant acquired DeepMind, then a startup. Under Google's banner, DeepMind conducted influential research, including AlphaGo, a program capable of beating a master at the challenging board game Go.

Despite laying the foundation for several AI breakthroughs, Google saw some of its former employees, including Sutskever, push OpenAI to the front of the generative AI race with the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

In 2023, Google merged the Brain and DeepMind teams into one group led by Demis Hassabis.

In addition to Dean's departure, Google announced that Hassabis would become chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, chief technology officer of Google DeepMind and Google's chief AI architect, assumed the day-to-day operations of DeepMind and the title of senior vice president.

5 things to know about Jeff Dean's new startup

A Seattle-based educational technology startup, Wild Zebra, has successfully secured $6 million in funding to enhance its AI-driven platform designed for teaching math and reading. This funding follows promising initial results indicating that Wild Zebra’s innovative approach can compete effectively with the free educational resources recently launched by major players such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

What sets Wild Zebra apart is its Socratic method of instruction. Instead of providing direct answers, the AI engages students by guiding them toward the solution through a series of thought-provoking questions, thereby encouraging critical thinking and self-discovery.

Additionally, the lessons on Wild Zebra are tailored to align with students' personal interests, whether that be sports, cooking, music, or other hobbies. This personalization aims to make the learning process more relatable and engaging.

The platform also monitors interactions to pinpoint not just disengagement or distractions but also to celebrate moments of persistence and curiosity, providing valuable insights for teachers and parents through dashboards. “We want to recognize when kids are exhibiting positive behaviors as well,” said Edan Shahar, co-founder and CEO of Wild Zebra.

The recent funding, raised through a notably oversubscribed seed round, was spearheaded by Trilogy Equity Partners with support from Tetherpoint Capital and notable angel investors, including Shrikesh Majithia. This latest investment increases the company's total funding to $8 million.

Co-founded in 2024 by Shahar and AI expert Erik Selberg, Wild Zebra caters to students from grades 2 to 9. With a current team of ten, the startup plans to utilize the new funds primarily for hiring engineers and bolstering sales and marketing strategies.

Amy McCullough, Managing Director at Trilogy and a new board member at Wild Zebra, emphasized the potential for the platform to provide parents and educators with a real-time understanding of each student’s progress and a clear roadmap for their learning journey. McCullough, who initially came to know Shahar through his successful Test Innovators company, was drawn to Wild Zebra’s potential for tracking students’ learning over time.

When Wild Zebra was first highlighted by GeekWire last year, competitors like OpenAI and Google had just unveiled their own educational tools. Recently, Anthropic released a free version of its AI, Claude, tailored for K-12 teachers, while Khan Academy’s own AI, Khanmigo, has been in use for several years.

Shahar commented on the limitations of general-purpose chatbots, which can effectively answer individual questions but lack the ability to track a student's learning progression. In contrast, Wild Zebra employs a unique “learning tree” approach that monitors what a student has achieved, identifies gaps, and determines future learning objectives.

As for the competitive landscape, Shahar views the prominent AI labs more as collaborators than adversaries, leveraging their models within Wild Zebra’s framework.

Currently, the startup has expanded its reach to tens of thousands of students, up significantly from 6,000 just a year ago, and has facilitated hundreds of thousands of tutoring sessions. Families can subscribe to the platform for $48 per month per child, with initial users primarily being parents from pilot schools eager to enroll their other children.

On the institutional side, Wild Zebra collaborates with E3n, an organization formed from the merger of the Educational Records Bureau and the Enrollment Management Association, which serves selective private schools. The ERB invested in Wild Zebra in 2024, utilizing its exam data to determine each student’s starting level, although not all partnering schools do so.

Preliminary evaluations conducted by E3n with a sample of 722 students have shown notable advancements in math and reading skills, particularly among fifth and sixth graders, boasting gains of four to eight percentage points compared to ERB benchmarks.

While the platform initially focused on private schools, Wild Zebra is now exploring partnerships with charter and public institutions. Shahar noted that schools and students skeptical about incorporating AI tend to shy away from their services, while those who opt in usually share a positive outlook, albeit with an awareness of potential risks.

Among the most common concerns voiced by students is the environmental impact of AI technologies. Shahar admitted that while he acknowledges the risks associated with AI, he remains concentrated on exploring its positive potential. “I am not overly optimistic; I recognize the challenges of AI, but my work is focused on maximizing opportunities,” he said.

This startup has secured $6M for an AI tutor designed to help children learn independently.

A bright, sunlit study nook by a large window: on a wooden desk sit open textbooks, a steaming mug, a small potted plant, and a laptop screen showing a friendly AI tutor interface of speech bubbles and lightbulb icons. Beside it, a neatly wrapped stack of cash marked “$6M” hints at fresh funding. Warm natural light floods the scene.

This startup just raised $6M for an AI tutor that helps kids figure it out themselves - GeekWire

- Wild Zebra, an edtech startup, raised $6 million to enhance its AI learning platform.  
- The platform employs a Socratic method, guiding students through questions rather than direct answers.  
- Customized lessons engage students by incorporating their interests, promoting engagement and persistence.

This startup just raised $6M for an AI tutor that helps kids figure it out themselves

A Wild Zebra math problem framed around baking, one of the interests the student selected. After the student works out that each section is 1/12 of the cookie, the AI confirms the step and asks the next question rather than finishing the problem. (Wild Zebra images, click to enlarge)

Seattle-based edtech startup Wild Zebra has raised $6 million to expand its AI learning platform for math and reading, citing early signs that its specialized product can hold its own against the free study tools released over the past year by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

One of Wild Zebra’s secrets is its Socratic approach: rather than handing over the answer, the platform works students toward it with questions, drawing out the reasoning step by step.

Another key difference: the lessons are customized to be grounded in whatever topics or hobbies the student is already interested in, such as sports, cooking, music, or anything else.

The platform also analyzes the conversations themselves, looking not just for students who are distracted or getting answers elsewhere, but for those showing persistence or curiosity — flagging those positive moments in dashboards for teachers and parents.

The idea is “to catch kids being good, too,” said edtech veteran Edan Shahar, the company’s CEO and co-founder.

Latest funding: The oversubscribed seed round was led by Bellevue, Wash.-based Trilogy Equity Partners, with participation from Tetherpoint Capital and angel investors including Shrikesh Majithia. It brings the company’s total funding to $8 million.

Wild Zebra co-founders: CEO Edan Shahar, left, and CTO Erik Selberg. (Wild Zebra Photos)

Wild Zebra, co-founded in 2024 by Shahar and longtime AI technologist Erik Selberg, serves students in grades 2 through 9. The company, with a team of 10, plans to use the new funding for hiring, primarily engineers, along with sales and marketing initiatives.

Trilogy Managing Director Amy McCullough, who is joining the Wild Zebra board, said the VC firm backed the company for its potential to give parents and teachers a real-time view of what a student has actually learned, and a path to mastering the material from there.

She said she came to the deal as a customer first: her family had used Test Innovators, the private-school admissions test-prep company Shahar ran for nearly a decade, and she was struck by how well it delivered for parents and students at a high-stakes moment.

“When we were introduced to Wild Zebra, we knew very quickly that this was the team who could build the student-centric AI partner for the market,” McCullough said.

Competitive landscape: When GeekWire first covered Wild Zebra last year, OpenAI and Google had just launched study modes of their own. Anthropic launched a free version of Claude for K-12 teachers last month, and Khan Academy’s Khanmigo has been in the market for years.

Shahar said the general-purpose chatbots are good at answering a single question or explaining a concept, but don’t keep track of what a student knows over time.

Wild Zebra builds what the company calls a “learning tree” for each student — what they’ve mastered, where the gaps are, what comes next — and uses it to decide what they work on next, rather than just responding to whatever they happen to ask.

Shahar sees the big AI labs as suppliers more than rivals. Wild Zebra runs on their models, along with others.

Traction so far: Wild Zebra says it now reaches tens of thousands of students, up from about 6,000 a year ago, and has logged hundreds of thousands of tutoring conversations.

It opened the platform to families this year at $48 per month per child. The first consumer customers, Shahar said, were parents at pilot schools who wanted it for their other kids.

On the school side, Wild Zebra works through E3n, formed this year by the merger of the Educational Records Bureau and the Enrollment Management Association, which serve selective private schools. ERB invested in the company in 2024.

Many member schools test students using E3n’s exams, and Wild Zebra uses those results to set each student’s starting point, though some schools using the platform don’t.

Early results: E3n also conducted a 722-student pilot evaluation of math and reading, measuring results against ERB norm groups collectively built from hundreds of thousands of students. It found gains of four to eight percentage points among fifth and sixth graders.

Having started in private schools, Wild Zebra is now talking with charter and public schools.

Shahar said schools and students skeptical of AI mostly don’t become customers, and the ones who do tend to share his optimism while still taking the risks seriously.

The concern he hears most often from students is AI’s environmental impact — which, he acknowledged, is not something Wild Zebra is working to address.

“I’m not a Pollyanna. I think there are certainly potential downsides to AI in general,” he said. “There are people working on the downside mitigation. I’m working on upside opportunity.”

This startup just raised $6M for an AI tutor that helps kids figure it out themselves

Google announced a significant shake-up in its AI leadership on Wednesday, as the company’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, departs after a remarkable 27 years with the tech giant. This exit is part of a broader trend of prominent figures leaving Google as the company strives to advance its position in the competitive realm of artificial intelligence.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, is stepping into the role of chairman and chief scientist. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the technology head at Google DeepMind, will take charge of developing the new Gemini 4 model, a transition outlined by CEO Sundar Pichai in a recent post on X.

According to a blog update, Dean is exiting to embark on a new venture, Discovery Loop, an AI startup he is co-founding with three other seasoned colleagues from Google. Pichai commended Dean for his exceptional contributions over nearly three decades, affirming that he leaves on amicable terms. Furthermore, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, plans to invest in Discovery Loop and will offer cloud services and computational resources to support the startup’s endeavors.

This leadership change comes amid ongoing challenges for Google as it seeks to reassure investors regarding its substantial investments in AI technology, particularly as competitors like OpenAI with ChatGPT and Anthropic with Claude remain dominant in the chatbot sector.

Notably, several high-profile engineers have departed from Google recently. Noam Shazeer, a distinguished computer scientist, has joined OpenAI, while John Jumper, awarded a Nobel Prize for his development of the AlphaFold AI model, has moved to Anthropic.

In the most recent financial quarter, Google revealed it experienced a negative cash flow for the first time, forecasting total capital expenditures could reach as high as $205 billion this year, despite not providing updates on the release of the new Gemini 3.5 Pro model. Consequently, Alphabet’s shares dipped by 4.2% on Wednesday, prompting concerns among investors about the company's pace in the AI sector.

Pichai emphasized the company’s commitment to leading the field, stating in his blog post, “We are dedicated to pushing the boundaries and intensely focused on areas needing improvement. I’m genuinely thrilled about our forthcoming model releases and the advancements we’re witnessing. We need to maintain our momentum and clarity of purpose moving forward.”

In addition to his new role, Hassabis will continue overseeing Isomorphic Labs, a London-based AI drug discovery firm that originated from Google. As the co-founder of DeepMind—acquired by Google in 2014—Hassabis has been pivotal in shaping Alphabet’s AI initiatives.

Dean's new enterprise, Discovery Loop, intends to streamline the scientific discovery process, which he contends is currently inefficient and labor-intensive. His vision includes harnessing AI for faster and more effective discoveries, particularly in drug development and tackling global issues like sustainable energy.

The founding team for Discovery Loop also comprises Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat, some of the foremost researchers in the scientific community. Alongside Alphabet's investment, Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are collaboratively spearheading the startup's seed funding round.

Additionally, Alphabet maintains a multi-year partnership with News Corp, the parent company of The Post, aimed at advancing AI-focused content and products.

Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean, who has served for 27 years, is departing amid a restructuring of AI leadership to join a startup.

A soft golden dawn bathes the entrance of Google’s sprawling campus, a large, vibrant Google logo mounted on the gate. A lone figure evoking Jeff Dean, briefcase in hand, strides away from a small plaque reading “Chief Scientist – 27 Years” toward a sleek, glass-fronted building in the distance labeled “New Venture.” Natural morning light, cinematic composition.

Google's Jeff Dean -- chief scientist for 27 years -- leaving during AI leadership overhaul for startup - New York Post

- Google announced significant AI leadership changes as chief scientist Jeff Dean departs.  
- Demis Hassabis becomes chairman and chief scientist, focusing on Google’s AI developments.  
- Alphabet will invest in Dean's new startup, Discovery Loop, aimed at automating discovery.  

See more of our coverage in your search results.

Google on Wednesday revealed an overhaul of its AI leadership, as its chief scientist for nearly three decades exits – the latest in a string of high-profile departures to plague the tech giant in its struggle to pull ahead in the artificial intelligence race.

Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, will become the company’s chairman and chief scientist, while Google DeepMind’s technology chief, Koray Kavukcuoglu, will lead work on Google’s new Gemini 4 model, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a post on X.

Jeff Dean – Google’s current chief scientist and one of the company’s first employees, working there for 27 years – is leaving to start his own AI startup, Discovery Loop, with three other company veterans, according to a company blog post.

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3 Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, will become the company’s chairman and chief scientist. via REUTERS

Pichai said Dean is leaving the company on good terms, congratulating him for “an incredible 27-year run.” Google’s owner, Alphabet, will invest in Discovery Loop and provide the startup with cloud and computing capacity, Pichai added.

It’s just the latest exit from Google’s tech leadership as the Silicon Valley giant attempts to convince investors that its massive investments in AI will pay off – especially as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude models remain firmly in the lead for the top chatbots.

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Noam Shazeer, a longtime Google computer scientist and leading AI researcher, recently left the company for rival OpenAI, while John Jumper, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on an AlphaFold AI model, jumped ship to Anthropic.

Meanwhile, Google reported that it turned cash flow negative for the first time in the most recent quarter while forecasting full-year capex of as much as $205 billion – even as it failed to share an update on the release of its newest Gemini 3.5 Pro model.

Shares of Alphabet fell 4.2% Wednesday as investors fear the legacy tech company is losing steam in the AI race.

“We are committed to being at the frontier, and are super focused on the areas where we need to improve,” Pichai said in Wednesday’s blog post. “I’m really excited for our upcoming model releases and the progress we’re seeing. We have to continue to move fast and with clear purpose here.”

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Along with moving into the chairman role, Hassabis will continue running Isomorphic Labs, a London-based AI drug discovery startup that was spun off from Google.

3 Jeff Dean, Google’s current chief scientist, is leaving to start his own AI startup. AFP via Getty Images

Hassabis is the co-founder of DeepMind, the AI research lab that Google purchased in 2014. He has been leading Alphabet’s AI divisions over the past few years.

Dean’s new startup, Discovery Loop, aims to automate scientific discovery, arguing the current manual process is slow and labor-intensive and can be made more efficient with the use of AI.

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Longtime Google workers Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat – some of the world’s top scientific researchers – are joining Dean to run the new venture.

Its goal is to scale this discovery automation to help advance efforts in drug discovery and world challenges like clean energy.

3 Alphabet will be investing in Discovery Loop and providing the startup with cloud and computing capacity. REUTERS

Along with an investment from Google, Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading a seed round for the new company.

Alphabet has a multi-year partnership with News Corp, which owns The Post, to develop AI-related content and products.

Google’s Jeff Dean — chief scientist for 27 years — leaving during AI leadership overhaul for startup

Jeff Dean, a prominent figure at Google with a long tenure, is departing from the company to embark on an entrepreneurial journey focused on artificial intelligence. He is joined by a team of distinguished researchers, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a leading engineer and senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a pivotal AI researcher and co-founder of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist from Google DeepMind. Dean aims to take on the role of CEO for their new venture.

The new endeavor is called Discovery Loop, envisioned as a public benefit corporation dedicated to harnessing AI to enhance scientific research. The organization intends to deploy sophisticated algorithms to run thousands of experiments concurrently, with the ambition of partially automating research processes and significantly increasing the scale of experimentation.

One of the innovative concepts Discovery Loop plans to explore is using AI to aid in the development of more advanced AI systems, a practice termed recursive self-improvement, which would ultimately remove the need for human input in the iterative process.

According to the company's press release, “Although science and engineering have advanced society tremendously over the years, innovation has historically been hindered by slow, sequential human iterations that create a notable bottleneck.” Discovery Loop is striving to create AI systems capable of leveraging vast computational power to drastically enhance the speed and efficiency of innovation through automation of entire experimental processes.

The integration of AI in speeding up scientific discoveries has intrigued both scientific and technological spheres for years, but only recently has it shifted from being predominantly experimental to having viable commercial opportunities.

Discovery Loop has secured funding from various sources, including Alphabet, Google's parent company. The startup's initial funding round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with contributions from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital.

The founding team stated, “The next significant frontier for AI is to transition from merely answering questions to actively making discoveries. By fundamentally speeding up how engineering and scientific exploration occurs, we can introduce the benefits of groundbreaking technologies to the world much more rapidly.”

Having joined Google in 1999 as the company's 30th employee, Dean has been instrumental in developing critical components of Google’s search infrastructure, including its systems for crawling, indexing, and query processing. He has also played a vital role in the advancement of Google Gemini's multimodal models and was central to the company's early efforts in AI research.

Dean expressed his vision in an interview with the New York Times, stating, “We see an opportunity for AI to fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-centered experimental loop. This approach will not only yield a greater quantity of experiments but also improve their quality, ultimately leading to significant scientific breakthroughs and advancements.”

Jeff Dean and several leading AI researchers are departing Google to create their own startup.

A sunrise-lit, ultra-modern glass building with a bold Google logo on its façade. In the foreground, a small group of professional researchers in business casual stride confidently away from the campus toward a warm, glowing horizon. One carries a sleek tablet showing bright AI neural-network schematics—symbolizing their new startup. Soft natural light, hopeful and forward-looking mood.

Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup - TechCrunch

- Jeff Dean is leaving Google to co-found an AI startup called Discovery Loop.  
- Discovery Loop aims to automate scientific research using advanced AI algorithms and technology.  
- The startup has received backing from Alphabet and notable venture capital firms for funding.  

Jeff Dean, one of the longest-serving and most influential executives at Google, is stepping down from the search giant to launch his own AI startup.

Coming with him as co-founders are several other top researchers at the company, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a top engineer and senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a key AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean reportedly plans to serve as CEO.

Together, the group is starting Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that seeks to use AI to turbo-charge scientific research.

Discovery Loop says it plans to use high-octane algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, with the goal of partially automating the research process and expanding the scale at which experimentation can be conducted.

The startup is also interested in using AI to help create more powerful AI (a process known as recursive self-improvement), which would cut human iteration out of the loop entirely.

“While science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck,” the company said in a press release. “Discovery Loop is developing advanced AI systems that leverage massive computational scale to fundamentally transform the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating complete experimental loops.”

Using AI to accelerate scientific discovery has been a key interest of the science and tech communities for many years, but until recently, it remained a largely experimental field with limited commercial application.

The company has received financial support from a number of different sources, including Google’s parent company Alphabet. The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the company announced Wednesday. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also participated.

“The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries,” the founding team said in a joint statement. “By fundamentally accelerating how engineering and scientific discovery are conducted, we can deliver the benefits of transformative technologies to the world far sooner.”

Dean has worked at Google since 1999 and was Google’s 30th employee. Over the years, he has contributed to Google search’s core infrastructure, including its crawling and indexing system and its query-serving system. He has also had a significant impact on Google Gemini’s multimodal models and played a leading role in the company’s early AI research.

“We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop,” Dean told the New York Times. “You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances.”

Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup

On July 25, renowned engineer Jeff Dean addressed an audience of 6,000 aspiring entrepreneurs at Y Combinator's Startup School, held at the Chase Center in San Francisco. Dean, who has made significant contributions to Google as a cofounder of Google Brain and the chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, is also the technical colead of the company’s premier AI initiative, Gemini. He has collaborated extensively with Sanjay Ghemawat, developing critical components of Google’s computing and search systems. A humorous anecdote circulated in tech circles suggests that his resume lists only what he hasn’t accomplished, as that would be considerably shorter. During his talk, Dean was asked about essential areas for startup founders to consider.

Dean emphasized the necessity of selecting a project that one is passionate about and that holds real-world relevance. He shared his personal interest in creating an automated version of the scientific method. He described the approach: “You propose an experiment, set up the necessary elements to conduct it, assess its outcomes, and then analyze the results.” He noted that executing thousands of such automated experiments could lead to revolutionary advancements in fields ranging from science and biology to chip design and the enhancement of AI models.

What the audience didn't realize was that Dean was unveiling his own covert startup, which he had recently launched. Today, this venture is official: after nearly 27 years with Google, Dean, along with Ghemawat and two other elite AI researchers, is embarking on a new journey with a company called Discovery Loop.

While Google will maintain a stake in this new endeavor, the departure is a significant setback for the tech giant, which is striving to remain competitive in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. The exit of Dean and Ghemawat, who were among Google’s inaugural hires, is akin to legendary musicians like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards leaving the Rolling Stones to venture out on their own. To compound matters, the remaining cofounders bring their own astounding credentials: Oriol Vinyals, a VP of research at DeepMind and a technical leader for Gemini, and Quoc Le, a cofounder of Google Brain noted for his work on Google’s AutoML-Zero project, which employs machine learning algorithms to autonomously develop AI tools.

In an interview I conducted with the cofounders just ahead of their launch, Dean revealed that the concept for Discovery Loop emerged only a few weeks prior. He was quickly joined by his three collaborators, who not only share a professional history but also friendship, often vacationing together. “Though we were each working on different projects, we began to recognize how AI could potentially automate scientific and engineering processes,” he recalled.

The team's initial plan outlines that Discovery Loop will serve as its own first client, with the autonomous experimentation loops being used to refine the company’s advanced machine learning algorithms. This enhanced software will lay the groundwork for an AI system capable of addressing challenges across various domains. Quoc Le expressed his enthusiasm: “I’m very excited about automating machine learning. It might even lead us to discover a novel transformer architecture.”

Four Leading AI Experts from Google Are Departing to Start Their Own AI Company

A dark city street at dusk outside Google’s towering glass HQ, the giant, illuminated Google logo dominating the facade. Four professional silhouettes stride out of the revolving doors, each cradling a pulsing, neuron-web sphere of light. Across the street stands a smaller, sleek startup loft, its windows aglow with warm golden light hinting at fresh innovation. Deep shadows stretch behind the figures, amber streetlamps casting a moody glow as they depart to launch their own AI venture.

4 of Google’s Top AI Brains Are Leaving—and Launching Their Own AI Startup - WIRED

- Jeff Dean announced his departure from Google to cofound Discovery Loop startup.  
- Discovery Loop aims to automate the scientific method for advancements in AI and engineering.  
- Google will retain a stake in Discovery Loop, posing challenges for the search giant.  

On July 25, Jeff Dean spoke to 6,000 would-be founders at Y Combinator’s Startup School at San Francisco’s Chase Center. Dean is a legendary engineer at Google. He is cofounder of Google Brain, chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, and technical colead on the company’s flagship AI model Gemini. With his frequent collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, he’s written significant parts of the company’s computing and search infrastructure. A running joke in geekdom is a list of surreal “facts” about his technical prowess: Jeff Dean’s resume lists the things he hasn’t done; it’s shorter that way. At Chase Center, the interviewer asked him what areas startup founders should think about tackling.

Dean said that the most important thing would be to pick something you’re excited about and would be useful in the world. He then shared his own interest: an automated version of the scientific method. “You propose an experiment, you implement what you need to run the experiment, you evaluate the experiment, and then you get results from that,” he said. Dean said that running thousands of those automated loops could unlock groundbreaking advances in multiple domains like science, biology, chip design, and even making improved AI models.

Unbeknownst to the crowd, Dean was talking about his own secret startup, which he had just organized. Today it’s official: After almost 27 years, Dean is leaving Google, along with Ghemawat and two other top-tier AI scientists, to found a company called Discovery Loop.

Even though Google will take a stake in the new company, it’s a devastating blow to the search giant as it attempts to keep pace in the frantic AI model competition. It’s bad enough that Dean and Ghemawat, who were among the company’s first hires, are leaving—that’s like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ditching the Rolling Stones to start a new band. Worse, the other cofounders are also supernovas in the AI firmament: Oriol Vinyals, VP of research at DeepMind and a technical lead for Gemini, and Quoc Le, a cofounder of Google Brain and the key scientist behind Google’s AutoML-Zero, a project that uses machine learning algorithms to autonomously build AI products.

In an interview I did with the cofounders just before launch, Dean tells me the idea came up only a few weeks ago. He was quickly joined by the other three, who are not only long-time colleagues but friends who vacation together. “We were working on different things, but we were all starting to see the possibility of AI being able to automate scientific and engineering loops,” he says.

The quartet worked up a road map wherein Discovery Loop would be its own first customer. The autonomous experiment loops they create initially will be directed towards improving the company’s advanced machine learning algorithms. That improved software will then become the core of an AI system that can tackle problems in subsequent domains. “I’m very excited about automating machine learning,” says Le. “It might be that we will discover a different transformer architecture.”

4 of Google’s Top AI Brains Are Leaving—and Launching Their Own AI Startup

Google wants its AI to get better at coding. It might have found a shortcut.

The tech giant has been in discussions with San Francisco startup Mechanize in recent weeks for a potential deal that would involve Google hiring some of Mechanize's talent, four people familiar with the conversations said.

The deal, which some of the people said is worth over $1.5 billion, is in progress, and details could change. Google is discussing a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Mechanize's technology as part of the deal, one person familiar with the matter said. The talent Google could acquire from Mechanize would work on model evaluation and development, the person added.

The talks highlight two realities of the AI boom. Coding has become one of the most important — and lucrative — applications of AI, and Big Tech companies are getting creative about how they acquire the talent and technology they need to stay competitive.

It wouldn't be the first time Google has done a workaround deal for talent and technology. In the past couple of years, Google has structured acquisitions as hybrid transactions that include bringing in talent via acquihires and gathering technology through licensing and other methods. Companies sometimes take this approach to avoid the antitrust scrutiny of full acquisitions.

Related video Microsoft is betting big on AI. Company insiders have serious doubts.

Last year, Google swept in to acquire Windsurf's talent and licensed its tech after OpenAI tried to buy it. Windsurf's CEO, Varun Mohan, now leads Google's Antigravity, an agentic coding platform. In 2024, the search giant rehired Character AI cofounder Noam Shazeer and paid for non-exclusive rights to use the startup's AI technology (Shazeer recently left the company to join OpenAI).

Google declined to comment over email. Mechanize declined to comment.

Mechanize launched last year with a mission of automating every job and a star-studded group of investors, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, and podcaster Dwarkesh Patel.

The startup said earlier this year that it raised $9.1 million in a funding round at a $500 million valuation. Mechanize's CEO, Tamay Besiroglu, previously cofounded Epoch AI, which also focused on testing AI models.

Mechanize's tech can help tech companies improve the performance of their AI models at coding — something Google has struggled with, while OpenAI and Anthropic have scooped up developer customers with Codex and Claude Code.

Mechanize has wider ambitions than coding. "Our current focus is software engineering, but our long-term goal is the full automation of valuable work across the economy," its website reads.

Google is in talks for a $1.5 billion-plus deal with AI coding agent startup Mechanize

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