Companies
6 stories, newest first.
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Appeals court keeps Anthropic on the Pentagon's risk blacklist
A federal appeals court ruled 2-1 that the Pentagon was right to label Anthropic a supply chain risk, blocking the military and its contractors from using Claude, CNBC reports. Judge Gregory Katsas wrote that Claude's integration posed a "statutorily covered national-security risk."
Why it matters. Anyone selling agent tools into defense or adjacent federal work now has a real precedent for a platform being blocked outright.
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Anthropic commits $11.6 billion to Akamai for cloud CPU capacity
TechCrunch reports Anthropic agreed to pay Akamai $11.6 billion across seven years for cloud infrastructure, mostly CPUs for jobs like running code and browsing the web. In return, Akamai gave Anthropic a warrant for up to about 5% of its stock, with the deal able to grow to $20 billion.
Why it matters. Agent work such as running code and browsing the web needs ordinary CPUs as well as GPUs, and that capacity is now being bought years ahead.
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Ando raises $20 million for a team chat where AI agents are members
Ando came out of stealth with a messaging app that gives AI agents their own identities and inboxes, so they can join channels and message people directly, TechCrunch reports. Its pre-seed and seed rounds total $20 million, with Accel and Index Ventures among the investors.
Why it matters. It is a bet that agents will sit in team chat as members, with their own inbox and the right to speak first.
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Anthropic's seven founders seek majority vote before its IPO
TechCrunch reports Anthropic is asking shareholders to approve special shares that would give CEO Dario Amodei and six co-founders 50.1% of votes on most company matters once it goes public. Each founder owns roughly 2% of the company, and the shares carry no extra economic value.
Why it matters. If you build on Claude, the people who set its direction would stay the same after a public listing.
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Ema raises $77 million to run company processes with teams of AI agents
Ema raised a $77 million Series B led by Bengaluru-based Creaegis, taking its total funding to $140 million, TechCrunch reports. The startup says it has more than 50 active enterprise deals and that its software can draw on more than 150 models.
Why it matters. Ema builds on other companies' models and sells the integration and orchestration around them, the same layer most agent builders work in.
Agents at workCompaniesIndia and Gulf Permalink Read at techcrunch.com
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Firecrawl raises $75 million to build web scraping for AI agents
Firecrawl, which builds web scraping tools for AI agents, raised a $75 million Series B led by Smash Ventures, SiliconANGLE reports. It launched a new service called Alexandria alongside the round, and offers an agent-optimized search engine plus a "smart wait" feature for slow-loading pages.
Why it matters. Reliable data-gathering is turning into its own paid layer underneath agents, not something every team builds in house.