SoftBank and Sierra announced a strategic partnership on July 13, with SoftBank becoming Sierra's exclusive partner in Japan starting July 14. Sierra's conversational AI platform deploys AI agents that auto-generate optimal responses and autonomously execute follow-up tasks.
Results from LINEMO deployment: inquiry resolution rates jumped from 83% to 97%, customer satisfaction from 74% to 93%. SoftBank plans to evaluate expansion to SoftBank and Y!mobile brands.
Helsing raised $1.8B at $18B valuation. The Munich-based defense AI startup builds software for autonomous drones and battlefield intelligence, backed by Goldman Sachs, Dragoneer, Iconiq, CPPIB, and JPMorgan.
PixVerse raised $439M at $2B+ valuation from Alibaba, Mirae Asset, and BlueFocus. The AI video-generation startup claims 150M registered users. Co-founder Xie framed the field as thinning out, citing OpenAI's Sora 2 shutdown.
Richard Sutton founded Oak Lab in Toronto, aiming to build AI agents that learn continuously from their environment rather than relying solely on large pretraining runs — a bet on experience-driven learning as a path beyond current LLM training.
Source: SoftBank, my2cents.ai
Read the full bilingual version at Deskless Daily.
Top comments (0)