How Did Fresh AI Capital Top $118M Overnight? 💸🤖🚀

TL;DR

• AI funding tops $118M across specialized startups
• Big Tech doubles down on AI capex commitments
• New frontier models push agentic automation further
• Hospitality, sports sectors scale real-world AI deployments

HEADLINES

Sapiom lands $15M for AI agent payments 💳🔗

Osmo raises $70M for AI scent design 👃🔗

Daytona secures $24M for AI code sandboxes 🧪🔗

China hits 602M generative AI users 📈🔗

OpenAI unveils Frontier platform for enterprise AI agents 🧑‍💼🔗

FROM THE BIG PLAYERS

MUFG hires bankers to finance AI data centers 🏦🔗

Hyderabad Angels Fund sharpens focus on generative AI deals 🌏🔗

StashAway flags AI momentum as 2026 core theme 📊🔗

RAISES

Osmo raised $70M in a Series B led by Two Sigma Ventures 🧪🔗

Daytona raised $24M in a Series A led by FirstMark 💻🔗

Cadastral raised $9.5M in funding from Navitas, JLL Spark and others 🏙️🔗

Sapiom raised $15M in a seed round led by Accel 💳🔗

NEW LAUNCHES

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.6 frontier model 🚀🔗

International Luge Federation unveiled LAIA AI assistant for luge sport 🛷🔗

Growth Acceleration Partners announced ByteInsight AI-powered engineering observability platform 📡🔗

TRY THESE TOOLS

OpenAI Frontier powers enterprise-scale AI agent orchestration 🏢🔗

EnCompass from MIT uses search to debug AI agents 🧭🔗

AI Agents Showcase curates live demos of production AI agents 🎪🔗

METRICS

China reports 602M generative AI users, up 141.7M 📈🔗

Alphabet lifts 2026 AI capex guidance to about $180B 🧠🔗

Alethea ALI token forecast shows 1.29% near-term daily upside 🪙🔗

Nasdaq Composite falls 1.59% as AI spend shocks traders 📉🔗

BENCHMARKS

MIT CSAIL publishes reliability benchmarks for error-resilient AI agents 📘🔗

Wyndham Hotels & Resorts outlines hotel AI adoption benchmarks for 2026 🏨🔗

Linux Foundation maps 2026 open-source AI summit cadence 🐧🔗

INFRA & COSTS

Big Tech AI race sends capital spending to records 🏗️🔗

Amazon plans roughly $125B in AI-related spend ☁️🔗

Gartner sees IT spend at $6.15T by 2026 💾🔗

VALUATIONS

Software investors warn of AI-driven margin, valuation compression ⚠️🔗

TechBuzz analysis pegs $36B+ spent on AI acqui-hires 🏷️🔗

Crunchbase data spotlights healthcare AI unicorn at $3.5B 🏥🔗

POLICY

Korea forms AI Privacy Council for data governance ⚖️🔗

India DPIIT sets Feb 6, 2026 AI copyright deadline 📜🔗

Wealth regulators push responsible AI frameworks for cross-border advice 🛡️🔗

SECTORS

Hospitality deployed AI for pricing, staffing, and upsell 🛎️🔗

Sports broadcasting deployed cloud AI for Olympic coverage 📺🔗

Winter sports deployed AI assistant for luge athletes, fans 🥇🔗

Wealth management deployed AI copilots for cross-border client advice 💼🔗

COMMUNITY MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

Peter Steinberger built OpenClaw, open-source agent platform with 145k+ GitHub stars 🦀🔗