Ocient announced on November 5, 2026 that it had closed a $100 million Series C round co-led by BOKA Capital and OCA Ventures, bringing its total capital raised to $260 million. The funding will accelerate delivery of OcientAIQ Solutions for organizations running agentic AI analytics against dynamic, petabyte-scale data and critical-infrastructure workloads. All existing investors participated, alongside several new investors. Returning backers included Greycroft, In-Q-Tel, Blue Bear Capital…

The Who Pays for AI? study, published November 5, 2026, found that Claude’s share of directly billed UK consumer AI subscription spending quadrupled from 7.4% in December 2025 to 29.4% in July 2026. The paper by Nikhil Datta, Peter John Lambert and Patrick Schneider estimated that 5.1% of UK adults, about 2.8 million people, held an active paid AI subscription in June 2026, up from 2.3% in June 2025. The July 2026 dashboard recorded 52.0 paid users per 1,000 adults and monthly spending of…

ABB said on November 5, 2026 that SoftBank had informed it of a Chinese prohibition on the acquisition of the ABB Robotics business in China, creating a regulatory obstacle for the planned divestment, which has an enterprise value of $5.375 billion. The decision came from China’s Office of the Working Mechanism for Foreign Investment Security Review. SoftBank manages the process for obtaining the transaction’s regulatory approvals, which remain outstanding alongside customary closing…

Denise Herzing, the founder and director of the Wild Dolphin Project, is using AI to help understand audio and video footage of the marine mammals.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceXSI have all reached out to Husk, an influencer who regularly goes viral by exposing the shortcomings of chatbots.

The healthcare industry has spent decades moving its payments off paper. Payers now send their payment and denial detail electronically through a standard file, the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) 835, which cut out the paper and gave everyone a common format to work from. But while standardizing the data removed some of the manual effort, it didn't make the work automatic. A file arriving electronically isn't the same as a payment posting itself. The EDI 835 file lands, and people still open…

The tech industry spent big on the midterms, but it turned out to be a poor investment. Elon Musk poured a staggering $446m dollars into Republican-aligned political action committees (Pacs) and groups since last year, but his efforts didn’t pay off. Democrats won every one of the five Senate races where Musk’s America Pac spent the most money backing Republican candidates. Carter Sherman and Kai Wright are joined by the Guardian’s US tech editor, Blake Montgomery , to ask what the ‘blue tsunami’ will mean for Musk and the wider tech industry. Will this spell the end of AI datacenters? And if so, what could this mean for the US economy? Continue reading...

Gradium reported on November 5, 2026 that its Phonon on-device text-to-speech models had been downloaded more than 200,000 times in their first two weeks, in a technical follow-up published on Hugging Face. Gradium said Phonon ranked first for intelligibility in German and Spanish on the Open TTS Leaderboard and in the top three in every language it evaluated, alongside models up to 100 times its size. Gradium’s chart of 95th-percentile CPU time to first audio placed Phonon 31m English first at…

Polar DC Group Limited has secured more than €1 billion in aggregate funding commitments during 2026, it announced on November 5, 2026, adding further shareholder investment and a new Palistar Capital facility to accelerate its European AI-ready data-center platform. The milestone combines commitments made across the year rather than describing one new financing round. The additional shareholder investment comes from existing backers including H.I.G. Capital’s value-added infrastructure…