Artificial Intelligence

December 8, 2025 @ 1:39 pm By Tony Zerucha  |  

Pine, an AI agent for consumers’ digital chores, has closed a $25 million Series A funding round. Investors included Fortwest Capital. This financing positions Pine to advance its “ask-and-it’s-done” AI, an autonomous digital agent that makes calls, handles emails and operates software to complete real-world… Read More

December 8, 2025 @ 8:14 am By Tony Zerucha  |  

Flex, an AI-native bank for high-net-worth (HNW) people, this week announced a $60 million Series B funding round led by Portage with participation from CrossLink Capital, Spice Expedition, Titanium Ventures, Wellington, Companyon Ventures, Florida Funders, FirstLook Partners, Tusk Venture Partners and others, bringing its total… Read More

December 8, 2025 @ 8:12 am By Tony Zerucha  |  

InFlow, a payments system purpose-built for agentic commerce, has launched to help AI agents onboard and pay autonomously while enabling online businesses and digital platforms to seamlessly activate and monetize AI agents. Today, when an agent needs to access a paid service, it can’t complete… Read More

December 7, 2025 @ 4:59 pm By Tony Zerucha  |  

Hedy Wang is a bridge builder. The co-founder of BlockStreet, Wang believes now is the time to build bridges between TradFi and DeFi. By doing so, she also sees BlockStreet as the bridge that allows retail investors to generate wealth. Wang is a big believer… Read More

December 5, 2025 @ 8:22 am By Omar Faridi  |  

Klarna (NYSE:KLAR), the global digital bank and flexible payments provider, launches the new feature Tap to Pay across 14 European markets, with the aim of bringing more flexible payments into physical retail at scale and “transforming the Klarna app into an everyday contactless wallet.” With… Read More

December 4, 2025 @ 9:35 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

Experian released its latest Data Breach Industry Forecast, offering a look at the cyber threat ecosystem. The predictions address how the coming year could bring another new wave of more sophisticated attacks driven by artificial intelligence along with various other threats as well as significant… Read More

December 3, 2025 @ 4:03 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

Visa Inc. (NYSE: V) released survey data, revealing AI’s influence and overall impact in commerce / shopping and spending, a generational shift in consumer spending behavior, and emerging payments trends this festive season. Bruce Cundiff, vice president, Consumer Insights at Visa said: “The data tells… Read More

December 3, 2025 @ 12:30 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

Feedzai, the AI-native RiskOps platform for financial crime prevention, released “The AI Advantage: Fraud Fighters’ New Career Guide,” a new research report showing that financial services employees who embrace AI are outperforming their peers “across every measure of career success — from compensation to promotions… Read More

December 3, 2025 @ 8:05 am By Tony Zerucha  |  

As AI agents make inroads into payments, they’re raising many questions that the industry is rushing to answer. In some cases, the industry isn’t moving fast enough. Sift’s senior trust and safety architect, Brittany Allen, said AI agents are a popular session topic at conferences…. Read More

December 3, 2025 @ 8:01 am By Omar Faridi  |  

Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and OpenAI announced a collaboration to help enterprise clients unlock new levels of innovation and growth by bringing agentic AI systems into the core of business. As part of the deal, Accenture will equip professionals with ChatGPT Enterprise, leveraging it in its… Read More

December 3, 2025 @ 8:00 am By Omar Faridi  |  

Tether Data announced the launch of QVAC Fabric LLM, a new LLM inference runtime and fine-tuning framework that makes it possible to execute, train and personalize large language models on hardware, including consumer GPUs, laptops, and smartphones. What had once reportedly required more high-end cloud… Read More

December 2, 2025 @ 9:00 am By JD Alois  |  

 xAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) firm started by Elon Musk and incorporated into his social media platform X (Grok), is actively pursuing a funding round that aims to raise $15 billion at a pre-money valuation of $230 billion. The funding round is expected to close… Read More

December 2, 2025 @ 5:00 am By JD Alois  |  

ThetaRay, a firm providing Cognitive AI financial crime compliance, has released a study on the future of anti-money laundering (AML) in Europe. The study warns that Europe’s anti-money laundering system is approaching structural failure, and that financial institutions will be unable to meet upcoming supervisory… Read More

December 1, 2025 @ 2:34 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

Nubank (NYSE: NU), which claims to be one of the largest digital financial services platforms in the world, announced the hiring of the Dex Labs team. dex Labs is known for developing an AI-enabled data engineering and cloud infrastructure platform that brings together data collection, transformation,… Read More

December 1, 2025 @ 12:38 am By Omar Faridi  |  

Experian, the global data and tech company, has released a report examining UK business professionals’ perspectives on so-called Responsible AI, which is described as a framework for designing, building and deploying AI “safely across its lifecycle.” The research shared by Experian shows that AI is… Read More

November 30, 2025 @ 6:11 pm By Tony Zerucha  |  

VibeFunnel, a new AI-driven landing page optimization platform that links with sites like Shopify and PayPal, has officially launched to help teams create smarter, higher-converting pages leveraging AI-powered insights. VibeFunnel combines automated testing, real-time insights, and brand-consistent design tools into one streamlined workspace. With VibeFunnel,… Read More

November 30, 2025 @ 4:52 pm By Tony Zerucha  |  

Fears of an AI bubble and how the current market turmoil is good for DeFi generated a bonus Web3 Thoughts of the Week Market turmoil is DeFi’s opportunity “Downturns are uncomfortable, but they create the exact conditions where decentralized finance shines. When liquidity dries up… Read More

November 30, 2025 @ 1:27 pm By Michael Wong  |  

Harmonic, a Palo Alto-based artificial intelligence startup backed by Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, said it raised $120 million in a Series C funding round that values the company at $1.45 billion post-money. The round was led by Ribbit Capital, with significant participation from Sequoia Capital,… Read More

November 28, 2025 @ 5:16 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

By the end of H1 2025, very little around AI investment had been seen in public bond markets, with the sector’s “hyperscalers” said to be generating a considerable level of cash flow and leveraging private equity, private credit and other sources to “fund their capital… Read More

November 28, 2025 @ 3:14 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

BKN301 Group, a Fintech Architecture Provider, has recently announced milestones marking a new phase in its growth journey: it has secured credit facility from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, and acquired Planky, a UK-based tech firm specialized in AI-driven financial analytics and open banking…. Read More