Adrian Kama

The Canadian government is taking an equity stake in Cohere, joining a ​funding round led by Germany's Schwarz Group targeting C$7 billion ($4.49 ‌billion) for the Toronto-based AI lab, Cohere said on Thursday.

Customer-first travel platform Onto has launched its services and raised $1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Stargazer Fund, with participation from Singapore-based White Venture Capital.

Vectorial, an AI startup building human behaviour simulation tools for product development, has raised $3 million in a funding round led by SenseAI Ventures. Other participants include Smilegate, Berkeley SkyDeck, Berkeley AI Research Lab, Dent Capital, Motus Ventures, SUM Ventures and angel investors

Karta AI, a voice AI platform for inbound customer operations across banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), has raised $3 million in a seed funding round led by PeerCapital and Cedar Hill Capital. Wyser VC, CDM Capital and Seedstars also participated in the round.

NewView Capital recently partnered with Carta. The collaboration combines NewView’s secondary deal-structuring experience with Carta’s equity platform. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, pitches this as a way to help startups launch and manage liquidity programs more seamlessly.

Legal AI startup Legora announced Wednesday that it raised a $550 million Series E round, valuing it at $8.8 billion. The company helps automate and assist with workflow tasks for legal professionals, as the industry moves beyond AI assistants to AI services that help them get work done.

Fitness and lifestyle platform Cult.fit has received approval from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) for its proposed initial public offering (IPO).

B2B manufacturing startup CapGrid has raised Rs 46.28 crore, or $4.87 million, in a pre-Series B funding round led by new investor Hero Enterprise Partner Ventures, with participation from existing investors

Cloudflare announced Friday that it’s acquiring Deno, the startup behind the programming runtime of the same name. According to Cloudflare’s Kenton Varda, Cloudflare will use this acquisition to improve its Workers programming model and platform

Apple revealed in a regulatory filing that it has reached an agreement to bring on team members and technology from personalized audio startup Huxe, in what’s commonly known as a reverse acqui-hire deal.

On Thursday, at the Golden Age of American Innovation Summit, President Trump awarded Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sergey Brin, and AMD’s Lisa Su the National Medal of Science, the nation’s top science prize.

India and US-based healthcare and wellness investment firm NDude Labs has led a $3 million Series A funding round in US-based functional wellness brand SuperMush.