Author: precious

India-based AI fintech startup Oolka has successfully raised $7 million in a seed funding round, setting the stage to redefine how millions of Indians would manage their personal credit and finances.  The seed round was led by Lightspeed India and Z47, with participation from 8i Ventures and other influential angel investors from India’s startup ecosystem. Unlike typical apps that offer static credit scores, Oolka leverages its agentic artificial intelligence to provide dynamic, real-time assistance, making credit management more accessible, actionable, and human-centered for the nearly two million users it serves in India. Founded just last year by Utkrishta Kumar, a…

OpenAI’s introduction of the Instant Checkout feature in ChatGPT is an audacious play to place shopping in the hands of AI agents, with users now having easy access to shop just about anything through the AI-powered chatbot. This has blurred the once-sharp boundaries between chat, advice, and commerce.  Agentic Commerce: The Technology Behind This Feature The technology behind this breakthrough is the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), a collaborative system OpenAI developed with Stripe. ACP was designed to help AI agents, users, and businesses alike to interact securely and efficiently.  OpenAI says they’ll be open-sourcing the tech to allow more e-commerce…

Apple is calling on the European Union to take a closer look at the Digital Markets Act (DMA), warning that the act is causing delays in rolling out new features to users in Europe and creating significant security risks.  The DMA, which originally came into force in March 2024, aims to regulate the major “gatekeeper” tech platforms by requiring them to allow third-party app stores, alternative payments, and interoperability with non-native devices. In April this year, the EU under the DMA ordered Apple to open up its strictly controlled iOS ecosystem to competitors for “interoperability,” granting device makers and app…

Europe’s digital watchdogs have turned their spotlight once again on three of the world’s biggest tech companies – Apple, Google, and Microsoft.  Under the European Union’s Digital Services Act, a sister regulation to the Digital Markets Act, these tech giants have been asked to show exactly how they protect users from the increasing wave of online financial scams that have cost European consumers billions each year. Annually, Europeans are reported to lose over €4 billion to scams involving fake banking apps, fraudulent search results, and phony listings. It is because of the pervasiveness of these scams that the EU sent…

The next wave in personal computing is closer than many realize. Google is preparing to redefine the personal computing landscape with plans to merge Android and ChromeOS into a unified platform specifically for desktop computing, with the new Android-powered PC platform set to launch in 2026.  Announced during Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2025, Google said they plan to unify their mobile and PC platforms by merging Android and Chrome OS into a single underlying operating system foundation for PCs and mobile devices. “We are building together a common technical foundation for our products on PCs and desktop computing systems,” Rick Osterloh,…

In an effort to play catch-up in the GenAI arms race, Google has launched Mixboard, a fresh AI-powered tool that transforms how ideas are visually brainstormed and developed. Developed by Google Labs, Mixboard combines generative AI with an open, interactive canvas to give users a seamless way to generate, organize, and refine visual concepts. Google aims to use this new approach to moodboarding to speed up creativity by blending image generation, natural language editing, and contextual text creation into a single workspace. Following its launch, Google’s Mixboard surpassed ChatGPT to reach the top spot in the U.S. App Store, driven…

Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure company backed by Nvidia, recently raised $1.1 billion in a Series B funding round led by the Norwegian investment firm Aker ASA. Marking the largest Series B funding round ever recorded in Europe, it will be used to rapidly expand Nscale’s AI data centers across Europe, including major projects in the UK and Norway. Nscale, the famous hyperscaler engineered for AI, specializes in building data centers optimized for AI workload using Nvidia GPUs and Kubernetes, providing secure, energy-efficient infrastructure to Big Techs like OpenAI and Microsoft. This massive infusion of capital is set to accelerate…

Meta has made another high-profile move in the fierce battle for AI talent by recruiting Yang Song, a prominent AI researcher formerly leading OpenAI’s strategic explorations team, to lead its Superintelligence Lab.  Song, widely known for pioneering diffusion model research that was used in building state-of-the-art generative AI like DALL-E 2, joined Meta as research principal earlier this month. Reporting to Meta Superintelligence Labs’ chief scientist Shengjia Zhao, himself an OpenAI alumnus, Song’s arrival marks a strategic boost for Meta’s ambition to further develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). Song’s expertise in multimodal AI systems, which is the foundation of advanced…

Tokio Marine Holdings (TMHD), a major Japanese financial and insurance services group, has partnered with AI pioneer OpenAI to deploy advanced AI-powered agents and services across its business operations. This collaboration aims to transform Tokio Marine’s customer service, product development, and sales team by leveraging OpenAI’s latest generative AI technologies, including capabilities from the latest GPT-5.  Through this strategic partnership, Tokio Marine plans to integrate AI agents that can autonomously conduct in-depth research, analyse company data, and engage customers more efficiently. The Japanese company also aims to automate routine inquiries and enable sales teams to develop tailored proposals by harnessing…

SAP SE and OpenAI have joined forces to bring advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to Germany’s public sector with the launch of “OpenAI for Germany,” a sovereign AI initiative set to roll out in 2026.  This collaboration will blend SAP’s expertise in enterprise applications and business AI with OpenAI’s cutting-edge AI technology, which will then be supported by SAP’s subsidiary, Delos Cloud, which runs on the Microsoft Azure Infrastructure. The Delos Cloud platform will be expanded to host up to 4,000 GPUs dedicated to AI workloads, which guarantees performance and compliance tailored to the public sector’s needs. More importantly, the OpenAI…