OpenAI's moving smart speaker | Emergent hits $1.5B

In partnership with

Try the AI that knows your customers. No commitment.

Most platform evaluations start with a demo request and end three weeks later in a conference room. This one takes 15 minutes and puts you directly inside Gladly's interface — navigating it on your own terms.

See how AI surfaces real-time customer context before a conversation starts. Watch how a single conversation thread pulls in purchase history, channel history, and account details without a handoff.

No installation. No commitment. Start the interactive demo and see the platform for yourself.

See it yourself

In today's issue

01 · Business

OpenAI's first hardware is a screenless smart speaker that moves, per Bloomberg

OpenAI is building a screenless smart speaker that moves on its own, designed to act as a physical ChatGPT companion in your home. The device learns from your emails and digital life, and development involved ex-Apple engineers—now the center of a legal fight after Apple sued OpenAI last week for allegedly stealing trade secrets.

The details:

The device has no screen and includes mechanical elements that move independently, positioning it as a humanlike companion rather than a traditional smart speaker.
OpenAI says the product is unlike anything Apple currently makes, sidestepping the iPhone form factor to compete with Amazon Echo and Google Nest instead.
Rival startup Hark raised $700 million at a $6 billion valuation in May to build AI-native hardware, signaling major investor confidence in the category before any product ships.

Why it matters: OpenAI is betting that a moving, screenless companion avoids Apple's legal and competitive territory while opening a new category where Amazon and Google have been slow to integrate AI. The race to build ambient AI devices with custom hardware is accelerating—no ship dates or prices yet, but capital is flowing fast.

Read the full story →

02 · Business

Emergent hits $1.5B valuation with $130M Series C led by Creaegis

Emergent, an Indian AI coding startup, raised $130M at a $1.5B valuation — a five-fold jump in six months — as its annual revenue hit $120M with over 200,000 paying customers. The company is betting on a different angle than AI coding assistants for developers: a platform that lets non-technical people build, deploy, and debug full applications without writing code themselves.

The details:

Revenue grew 70% in four months, driven by customers like trucking companies, factories, and property managers building their own internal software tools.
North America and Europe each account for about a third of revenue; India, where Emergent is based, contributes only 8 to 9%, giving it a genuinely global customer footprint.
The company was founded in June 2025 and has raised $230M total in just over a year, with backers including Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and Y Combinator.

Why it matters: Emergent is competing in the crowded AI coding space by targeting a different market — non-technical business owners and small teams — rather than head-to-head with OpenAI, Anthropic, or Cursor. That focus on end-to-end application building (not just code generation) is working: a $1.5B valuation on $120M revenue is aggressive but justified by the 70% quarterly growth. Expect more international hiring and European expansion by year-end.

Read the full story →

03 · Business

Apple FaceID co-inventor raises $52M for brain-diagnostic AI startup Hemispheric

Hemispheric, co-founded by Apple's FaceID inventor Gidi Littwin, raised $52 million to diagnose brain disorders like PTSD, depression, and Parkinson's using AI trained on 250,000 hours of brain scans from 100,000 people. The company plans to replace subjective questionnaires with a quick EEG headset scan that takes 15 minutes.

The details:

Littwin left Apple in 2020 after shipping FaceID and working on Vision Pro hand-tracking—both projects required hundreds of thousands of subjects' training data, a template he brought directly to Hemispheric.
The company will submit its first product, a PTSD diagnostic tool, to the FDA in early 2027, with public rollout planned for later that year.
Hemispheric is building its own brain scanners because standard EEG hardware was never designed for AI workloads, giving it cleaner data than competitors.

Why it matters: Brain diagnostics has been stuck on old methods like questionnaires and guesswork for decades. A trained model on real brain data could let doctors diagnose and track treatment for neurological disorders in minutes instead of hours, and spot Alzheimer's before symptoms appear. That's why this matters: faster, cheaper diagnosis at scale.

Read the full story →

AI Box

Every AI model. One chat.

The latest models from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Sora, ElevenLabs — 80+ models in a single chat. Compare answers side by side. Pick the best one every time.

● ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek — in one chat

● Generate images & video with Sora, Veo, Ideogram

● Compare any two models side by side

● From $8.99/mo · 80+ models, all included

Try AI Box →

aibox.ai

Trusted by 3,000+ teams

04 · Business

OpenAI researcher Miles Wang in talks to raise $200M for drug discovery startup at $2B valuation

Miles Wang, an OpenAI researcher, is leaving to start an AI drug discovery company and is in talks to raise $200 million at a $2 billion valuation, with venture firm Lightspeed leading the discussions. Several other OpenAI researchers are expected to join him in building AI models to find new uses for existing FDA-approved drugs.

The details:

Wang's company would focus on drug repurposing—finding new applications for molecules that already passed safety tests—which can cut time-to-market from over a decade to something a startup can actually fund.
Chai Discovery, founded by another ex-OpenAI researcher, just raised $400 million at a $3.8 billion valuation; Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1 billion in May, showing massive investor appetite for AI-driven biotech.
Wang joined OpenAI in 2024 after dropping out of Harvard and co-authored research on using AI to automate scientific discovery—the same ideas now forming his startup's foundation.

Why it matters: AI researchers from big labs are increasingly betting that building focused companies around narrow, high-value problems beats another round of general-model improvements. Drug discovery economics are enormous and repurposing existing drugs sidesteps years of regulatory work, making it an obvious first target for this talent wave.

Read the full story →

05 · Security

OpenAI staff donate $215K to super PAC opposing Brockman-backed group

OpenAI staff are funding a political action group that opposes their own company's leadership. Eight employees and ex-employees have donated over $215,000 to Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC pushing for stricter AI regulation, directly countering a $100 million pro-industry group backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman.

The details:

Research engineer Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe gave $200,000 alone, the largest disclosed employee contribution to Guardrails Alliance ahead of the July 15 filing.
Brockman and his wife committed $50 million to Leading the Future, which opposes AI regulation and recently helped defeat the author of New York's AI safety law.
Guardrails Alliance aims to raise $15 million this cycle, less than one-seventh of the pro-industry PAC's war chest, but enough to support regulation-friendly candidates in key races.

Why it matters: The donations reveal real conflict inside OpenAI over the company's political direction. Employees say they spent years working on AI safety at the company, then watched leadership spend tens of millions fighting the safeguards they built—so they're putting their own money elsewhere.

Read the full story →