Microsoft Fiscal Year Results, 18% Revenue Growth, 41% Growth in Azure

Annual revenue $331bn (+18%), MS Cloud $214bn (+27%), Azure $100bn+ (+41%). Models and copilots are a big future focus.

Multiverse Computing Bags Series C

Multiverse Computing has bagged 500m EUR in its Series C capital raise, seven years after its 2019 founding. This is a 2bn EUR valuation - making it Europe's newest unicorn!

The company specialises in AI model compression, using quantum computing-derived techniques to implement LLMs with reduced cost and energy consumption.

The funding round was led by Forgepoint Capital ("Backing Founders of the Digital Future"), BNPP SIVF and Bullhound Capital.

Data Companies and MCP

Data businesses are embracing MCP but motivations vary, as well as monetisation strategy.  

Research firm Asymmetrix has done a survey to gain insights into those questions. 

In their "MCP Adoption Survey" they found:

1) 96% of Data and Analytics providers surveyed have adopted or are adopting MCP - almost a full house. Asymmetrix refers to this state as being "MCP Positive"

2) Motivations - 36% new distribution channel, 32% client requests, 17% competitive pressure (doing it because others are doing it), and 17% other

On pricing MCP they found:

1) 30% customer dependent, 28% bundled with existing subscription at no cost, 25% available as a premium or add-on tier, 17% usage based pricing

As cost of tokens fluctuate, pricing programs are likely to evolve as players learn to manage token costs.

MCP is fundamentally a disintermediation technology which makes its widespread adoption (including intended adoption) amongst the distintermediated quite staggering.

Bloomberg has also published some learnings on building MCP integrations in financial services.

Ollama Raises Series B

Ollama raised $65m Series B led by Theory Ventures taking total funding to $88m.  

Benchmark, 8VC, Y Combinator, GTMFund and others participated. 

Anthropic Builds Out Formidable Talent Bench

The number of ex-builders at Anthropic is increasing. These folks are working on models and the chips for training.  Names include:

Andrej Karpathy (of course, founding member of OpenAI and former Tesla AI lead)

Rahul Patil (ex Stripe CTO)

Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram and former CTO)

Peter Bailis (former CTO, Workday)

Clive Chan (Ex OpenAI hardware lead)

In Silicon Valley lingo - talent density is on the up.

Meta Keystroke Logging Evokes 1984

Meta announced a new tool in April to log employee keystrokes and mouseclicks to train its AI models. The tool is known as the MCI or Model Capability Initiative and Meta added that the data "was not used for any other purpose" and there are "safeguards in place to protect sensitive content". The initiative is being led by Stephane Kasriel in Meta's Superintelligence unit. The MCI is reportedly rolled out to US employees currently, with limitations around GDPR impacting potential global rollout.

Sequoia All-In on Late Stage AI

Sequoia has raised its biggest fund ever in 2026 at $7bn.  They are after AI firms that have a proven model but lack capital to scale. It's a shift in focus to execution and distribution versus early stage innovation.

Anthropic Reaches Deeper into Finance with PE backed services arm

Anthropic has reached deeper into workflow with a new venture embedding its technology into Enterprise Services.  Both Anthropic and OpenAI signed deals with private equity to embed their engineers (in Palantir-style forward-deployed fashion) into thousands of PE-backed portfolio companies - TPG, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital are the partners in this initiative. $5.5bn in capital has been committed.

China Blocks $2bn Purchase of Manus by Meta

Manus is an agentic AI startup. Meta wanted to acquire Manus to leapfrog ahead in AI. Although Manus was incorporated in Singapore, its owners hail from China.

UK Banks to be Briefed on Anthropic's Mythos Cyberthreat

The Bank of England, UK National Cyber Security Centre, HM Treasury and FCA will brief banks, insurers and exchanges in the UK on the cyber implications of Anthropic's new (non-publicly released) AI model, Mythos, which was revealed in April.  

The briefing will include CEOs of the UK's eight largest banks, two insurers and four financial infra providers. 

The model can exploit new-found vulnerabilities autonomously when instructed to do so. Bruce Schneier has observed this is "very much a PR play by Anthropic". It is curious that Anthropic seem to have not built in any guardrails against offensive security.

Bezos Bets Big on Physical AI

Jeff Bezos' Physical AI project, Project Prometheus, is nearing the end of a $10bn funding round.

Mistral's $830m Debt Raise for Europe Data Centres

Mistral ("Frontier AI. In your hands"), a French AI startup led by ex-DeepMind Arthur Mensch, which has a "Donkey Kong room" in its Paris office, and not to be confused with Mistral Group (UK bus and coach provider), has raised money from a consortium of banks to run a new data center powered by Nvidia chips. A non-exhaustive list of banks involved include HSBC Holdings, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, BNP Paribas ("The bank for a changing world") and Credit Agricole CIB.

Google Acquires Wiz for $32bn

Google has acquired Wiz, a cloud security company founded in 2020 that works across multiple cloud environments led by Assaf Rappaport (who previously founded Adallom, a cloud access security broker sold to Microsoft for around $320m). 

Wiz frames itself as "A new operating model for AI-era security".

Google was advised by Bank of America and Freshfields.  Wiz was advised by a slew of investment banks, including Barclays, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Bank of America has expanded its technology banking team, including hiring Jason Rowe of Goldman Sachs and others from JP Morgan and Centerview Partners (Gary Kirkham).

McKinsey's AI System Hacked by Startup Codewall

Red-team security startup Codewall has an AI agent which hacked McKinsey's internal AI platform (called Lilli, rolled out in July 2023)  gaining full read-write access to their chatbot in under two hours.  The technique used was SQL injection.

Agentic Commerce Gets Lift from Santander and MasterCard PoC

Santander and Mastercard have completed an agentic payment, billed as Europe's first agentic commerce transaction within a regulated banking environment. It was conducted using Mastercard Agent Pay.

Agentic commerce is an emerging ecommerce category.

The grand vision is to allow purchases to be conducted using Mastercard's payment rails within conversational interfaces.

AI "fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company" - Dorsey

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's technology firm Block (formerly known as Square) is cutting almost half of its workforce in the wake of AI (reducing its headcount by almost 4,000).

Stock price surged by 20%-24% in wake of the announcement, reflecting confidence in the restructuring.

Sidebar - Square is now part of Block's portfolio of products, which include Cash App, Clear Pay and Tidal - the latter which portrays as a premium music streaming service competing with Spotify.

Dorsey predicts more change to companies is on the way - and added "I think most companies are late" (to to the realisation of AI's impact).

Some pundits have accused Dorsey of "AI washing" - using AI as a cover for managerial failures including over-hiring - citing the restructuring of Twitter by Musk as a case in point. Others have pointed to "crypto winter" with Bitcoin losing a quarter of its value since the start of the year.

Block's investor relations website can be found here.  Its stock price history can be found here.

Anthropic's Series G Raises $30bn led by GIC and Coatue

The raise values Anthropic at $380bn post money (accounting for the fresh capital). Co-leaders of the round were DE Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ and MGX. But many other funds put up money too. Money will go into frontier research, product development and infrastructure expansion.

Qualcomm Investing in Indian Startups

Technology pioneer Qualcomm has announced it will invest up to $150m though Qualcomm Ventures to support India based startups focused on AI in areas like robotics, automotive, IoT and mobile.

Wealth and Etrading Stocks Now Hit by AI Fears

AI advice and AI advice driven execution is a wake-up call to wealth managers charging high fees. 

In the US, Charles Schwab (NYSE:SCHW) fell by 8% as news of AI platform Altruist's new product, that unleashes AI-powered tax planning within its Hazel platform caused a stir amongst investors. 

In the UK, IG Index dropped 3%, CMC Markets dropped 3.5% and AJ Bell dropped 6.27%.

Energy Exchange ElectronX Now Offers Hourly Hedging on ERCOT

ElectronX ("Precision Trading for Power Volatility") has announced a new product suite for US regulated power contracts.

They are providing hourly "bounded" futures and binary options on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) markets, where the "bounding" refers to predefined floor and ceiling prices, limiting gains and losses (contract sizes are for 1MWh for specific hubs and specific hours).

The capping of payoff means there is no need for daily variation margin for the exchange to manage risk. 

These contracts enable smarter (potentially AI-oriented) management of intraday volatility as reported by The AI Journal.