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According to Business Insider, Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI and current head of Meta's Superintelligence Lab, stated at a Y Combinator event that AI has significantly narrowed the power gap between startups and giants. He recalled that when he founded Scale AI in 2016, "startups faced giants like David against Goliath, needing to find market entry points more intelligently"; however, with the development of AI agent technology, "it now feels more like Goliath against Goliath," and as long as startups apply AI agents in "the most ambitious way," it is not difficult to defeat large companies that already have an advantage.Scale AI, founded by Wang, is one of the earliest data annotation companies, employing thousands of contractors worldwide to train models for large AI labs. Last June, Meta reached a $14.3 billion deal with Scale AI, and Wang subsequently joined Meta. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also stated at the same event that "there has never been a better time to start a business."

AI security operations startup Mate Security announced the completion of a $35 million Series A financing round, led by Canaan Partners, with participation from Insight Partners, Team8, and Microsoft's venture fund M12, bringing the total funding to over $50 million.It has been less than a year since the company emerged from stealth mode. Mate Security was founded by former employees of Wiz and Microsoft, and its core product is the "Security Context Graph," which empowers AI security agents with business context by building an organizational knowledge layer, enabling them to make judgments based on actual operational conditions when handling alerts, effectively reducing false positive rates.

According to Jinshi reports, Musk stated that if Starship can achieve instant and complete reusability, and local production of liquid oxygen and liquid methane, its launch cost will drop to far below $100 per kilogram.

AI supply chain management startup Freehand announced the completion of a $75 million financing round, co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from Nexus Venture Partners and the fund PSP Growth under former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.Freehand's AI agents can autonomously handle tasks such as contract interpretation, vendor rate negotiations, overbilling identification, payment processing, and ERP system reconciliation. Clients include leading companies such as Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin', and Cardinal Health.

According to Techcrunch, New York AI detection startup Pangram announced the completion of a $9 million financing round, led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Haystack, ScOp, Script Capital, and Cadenza.Pangram also released the next-generation AI text detection model Pangram 4 and the AI image detection model Pangram Image, with the text detection accuracy exceeding 99%, capable of identifying AI-assisted writing, mixed human-machine content, and text generated by AI impersonation programs; the image detection model is currently in research preview stage, based on pixel-level distribution analysis, capable of identifying AI-generated images across models and detecting AI images present in real photographs.

Coursera (NYSE: COUR) announced a strategic equity investment of $100 million in LearnVector, an AI-native learning company newly founded by its co-founder Andrew Ng. This investment gives Coursera approximately one-third equity in LearnVector, corresponding to a company valuation of about $300 million.LearnVector was founded by Andrew Ng, who serves as CEO, and is positioned as an AI education startup aimed at white-collar workers. The core goal is to create a one-on-one personalized learning experience using agent AI, shifting from traditional "one-to-many" teaching to "one-to-one" exclusive tutoring. The AI agent will plan personalized paths for each learner, adapt to their learning styles, and provide continuous support until they truly master the skills. The first batch of courses is expected to launch in early 2027, and the transaction has been unanimously approved by Coursera's independent board special committee.

According to TechCrunch, Fish Audio announced on Tuesday that it has completed a $50 million seed round of financing. This round was led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with participation from institutions such as 359 Capital, Parable, Play Time, Alphalist Partners, Bayhouse Ventures, Carya Venture Partners, and HF0.Fish Audio was initially a small project initiated by former NVIDIA researcher Shijia Liao. Dissatisfied with the lack of expressive synthetic voice technology on the market, he trained a voice generation model using a single GPU and made it open source. Today, the Fish Speech project repository on GitHub has received over 31,000 stars and is widely used by independent developers, game designers, and content creators.In the past year, Fish Audio has launched five models, including four voice generation models and one speech-to-text model. The company has open-sourced three of the voice generation models, but the latest S2.1 Pro model is currently only available through a paid API. Since its launch last year, the startup's open-source and hosted version models have attracted over 8 million users, with current annual recurring revenue (ARR) reaching $21 million.

SSI received $2 billion in funding last year from top venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, with a valuation of $32 billion at that time.

According to TechCrunch, nuclear startup Antares Nuclear has completed a $470 million Series C funding round, co-led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Industrious Ventures, Point72 Ventures, and Shine Capital, including $370 million in equity and $100 million in debt.Antares is developing small modular reactors (SMRs) with a power output of 100 kilowatts to 1 megawatt, using TRISO fuel. The company is one of three finalists in the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Nuclear Power Systems program, planning to launch its first power-generating reactor next year and deploy it to U.S. military bases by 2028. Previously, Antares completed a $96 million Series B funding round last December, bringing its total funding to $604 million. The first batch of SMRs is expected to be operational in the early 2030s, with a cost of approximately $214 per megawatt-hour, higher than most new power plants except for the most expensive gas turbines.

According to a report by The Information citing informed sources, a Shanghai state-owned company whose name has not been disclosed has begun producing domestically-made immersion DUV lithography machines, planning to manufacture about 5 units this year and increase to about 20 units by 2027. The first batch of equipment will be delivered to major foundries such as SMIC, Hua Hong Semiconductor, and ChangXin Technology, but the equipment still needs to undergo verification for accuracy, stability, and production line compatibility, a process that may take several months or even longer.Currently, most components of the equipment come from domestic sources, but some key parts still rely on Japan, and the performance and manufacturing quality lag behind ASML. In comparison, ASML is set to deliver about 131 immersion DUV lithography machines as early as 2025. Although domestic equipment has made the leap from prototype testing to small-scale production, there is still a significant gap before it can replace ASML on a large scale. Previously, Reuters reported that the U.S. is considering tightening restrictions on the export of lithography equipment to China and on maintenance services in China, and the delivery of domestic equipment coincides with this backdrop.

As TRON DeFi Summer S1 enters its final sprint phase, JustLend DAO announces that it will hold a "Highlight Night" in-depth roundtable discussion on July 28 at 20:00 (SGT) in X Space. This event will feature several heavyweight industry guests, focusing on JustLend DAO's lending and borrowing market, Staked TRX, and energy leasing, among other core product matrices, comprehensively analyzing the synergistic effects of assets such as USDD, SUN, and JST within the TRON DeFi ecosystem. At that time, guests will guide you to unlock the triple play of "asset yield, liquidity release, and on-chain resources" in one go, aiming to help DeFi participants at different stages clearly outline the multiple application scenarios and value flows of TRON's core assets. Please stay tuned for the official X Space on July 28 at 20:00 (SGT) to jointly explore the highlights of the TRON DeFi ecosystem.

The Hyperliquid testnet recently introduced a new feature called "stars." This feature introduces an optional trading address whitelist mechanism for the HIP-3 DEX, allowing deployers to restrict trading to only whitelisted addresses for opening or increasing positions. Currently, the whitelist size limit on the testnet is 10,000 addresses, while unauthorized addresses can still deposit into accounts and submit orders limited to reducing positions, in order to close or lower existing positions.Community members analyze that this feature is expected to expand the application scenarios of the HIP-3 DEX. For example, tokenized stocks, real-world assets (RWA), institutional indices, and other regulated products can open trading only to users who have completed identity verification (KYC) or meet access requirements through the address whitelist. At the same time, new markets can first open testing to market makers, partners, or community members, reducing the risk of encountering junk trading, wash trading, or malicious manipulation in the early stages of the market, while allowing non-whitelisted users to continue reducing positions, thus avoiding situations where users cannot exit their holdings due to permission restrictions.In addition, the stars feature does not change the permissionless nature of the Hyperliquid base layer but adds an optional access control feature that developers can enable or disable based on their needs. This means that scenarios such as DAOs, trading clubs, private equity funds, or partner-exclusive markets can build closed trading markets with access mechanisms while maintaining the advantages of the Hyperliquid matching engine and settlement layer. Currently, this feature is still in the testnet phase, and the official has not yet announced its specific uses; further application scenarios await confirmation with the mainnet launch and more developer documentation.

OKX will launch the SLX (Solstice) Flash Earn Lite event on July 31, 2026, at 15:00. Users can participate by subscribing to BTC, OKSOL, OKB, or SLX to share a reward pool of 2,000,000 SLX.Users can start subscribing on July 27 at 15:00, and the event will end on August 5 at 15:00.

According to Bloomberg, CME Group will launch single stock futures covering over 50 U.S. companies, including Nvidia and SpaceX, on July 27. The contracts will be cash-settled based on the closing price of the underlying stocks, trading 5 days a week for 23 hours each day. CME has partnered with over 35 retail brokers and plans to promote the product to institutional investors.

According to monitoring by Catcher Predict, in the predicted market Polymarket for the event "Counter-Strike: Aurora Gaming vs HOTU - StarLadder StarSeries European Qualifiers Playoffs," the "Match Winner" sub-market option "Aurora Gaming" has experienced significant fluctuations in winning probability, soaring from 74.5% an hour ago to the current 96.45% (a fluctuation of 21.95%). Please note the impact of related breaking news.

According to the official announcement, BitMart has announced that after assessing its operational status, market environment, and future strategic direction, the platform has decided to orderly cease trading operations. Starting from July 26 at 01:30 (UTC), BitMart will gradually stop new user registrations and cryptocurrency, fiat currency deposits. The contract accounts will enter a mode of only reducing positions, spot trading will stop accepting new orders, and automated services such as copy trading, grid trading, and API trading will also gradually shut down.Starting from August 26 at 01:00 (UTC), BitMart will stop all spot, contract, and other trading services. Any contract positions that have not been closed by then may be processed according to the marked price, index price, or applicable settlement rules. Financial management, staking, lending, and Launchpad products will be terminated in phases, with specific redemption and settlement arrangements to be notified separately.The platform plans to officially cease trading platform operations on January 31, 2027, at 15:59 (UTC). After the shutdown, users will still be able to log into their accounts, view their history, and submit withdrawal requests within a specified period. BitMart advises users to complete identity verification and close all positions before August 26 at 01:00, and to submit withdrawal requests before 05:00 on the same day.Withdrawal services are still available, but some requests may be subject to manual review due to KYC, device and account security, source of funds, withdrawal address, Travel Rule, sanctions screening, and other requirements. BitMart reminds users to download and save their account balances, deposit and withdrawal records, and transaction history in advance, while also being vigilant against scams impersonating platform personnel who charge "expedited fees," "unfreezing fees," or request passwords, verification codes, private keys, and mnemonic phrases.

According to Catcher Predict monitoring, in the predicted market Polymarket for the event "LoL: Karmine Corp vs Movistar KOI - LEC Regular Season," the "Yes" option for the sub-market "Both sides kill a dragon" has experienced a sharp fluctuation in win rate, soaring from 50% an hour ago to the current 90% (a fluctuation of 40%). Please note the impact of related breaking news.

According to monitoring by Catcher Predict, in the predicted market event "LoL G2 Esports vs. Movistar KOI LEC Regular Season" on Polymarket, the "Yes" option for the sub-market "Both teams kill a dragon" has experienced a drastic fluctuation in win rate, soaring from 50.5% an hour ago to the current 90% (a fluctuation of 39.5%). Please note the impact of relevant breaking news.

According to informed sources, SoftBank Group is considering acquiring Gravis Robotics AG, as SoftBank is targeting the artificial intelligence sector that supports robotics technology. SoftBank plans to make a significant investment in this European startup and incorporate it into its newly established company, Roze.SoftBank may complete the transaction in phases, achieving this through gradual acquisition of existing shares and injecting new funds. Informed sources say that this deal could ultimately value the Zurich-based Gravis company at over $500 million. They stated that no final decision has yet been made regarding the scale or structure of the transaction.

PPP prediction market tool monitoring shows that the probability of Polymarket's SpaceX Starship conducting its 13th test flight on July 24 has risen to 77%, up 16% in 24 hours; the probability for the 13th test flight on July 25 has risen to 83%, up 35% in 24 hours.SpaceX previously announced that due to weather reasons, the 13th test flight of the SpaceX Starship was postponed to July 24, but it is still uncertain whether the weather reasons still exist. SpaceX attempted the first test flight of the Starship on July 17, but due to some Raptor engines failing to start as expected, the automatic launch abort procedure was triggered, resulting in the failure of the first test flight. It is reported that SpaceX is currently fully "betting" on the Starship and has begun to refuse commercial Falcon rocket launch orders after 2028.