Tech News · The field notes
Personal Tech — Wednesday, September 16, 2026
OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind open safety talks; Factory raises two hundred million dollars at a five billion valuation; Italy's new unicorn Exein; Delos Data's one hundred million raise; Helion's fusion round hits five hundred million.
OpenAI working with Anthropic and Google DeepMind on AI safety (Bloomberg/Reuters, Sept 15)
- global policy chief Chris Lehane confirms weeks of talks
- follows weekend pause calls, Jacob Coxon resignation warnings, Dario Amodei "We Must Pace the Frontier" essay and Altman's agreement
- antitrust debate — Amodei wants waiver, Lehane says airline precedent suffices, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez calls it a cartel
Factory raises $200M at $5B valuation (WSJ/Reuters, Sept 15/16)
- AI coding agents "Droids" for enterprise engineering teams
- Khosla, Blackstone, Sequoia
- angels Marc Benioff, Brad Gerstner
- up from $1.5B in April
- model-agnostic independence pitch vs OpenAI/Cursor feud
- SpaceX's $60B Cursor acquisition
- competes with Cognition ($2B at $48B)
Exein
- $270M at $1.7B valuation, new Italian unicorn (TechCrunch, Sept 15): cybersecurity layer for physical AI — robots, drones, self-driving cars, edge devices
- Photon kernel-level runtime security
- Headline-led, oversubscribed
- 30x valuation since Series B
- claims 2B+ connected devices secured
Delos Data
- $100M (Reuters, Sept 15): Intel veterans' network chips/software for AI data centers in the agentic era
- universal interconnect for mixed Nvidia/AMD/Cerebras chips
- Pat Gelsinger (now at Playground) investor
- "chips waiting for data" waste thesis
Helion
- funding round extended to $500M (GeekWire, Sept 15): fusion startup, Microsoft 2028 data-center power deal, 50 MW Orion plant in Malaga WA
$1.5B raised
- Axios reports full capacity may slip to 2030
- plasma physicists questioning physics
Rapid-fire
- Axelera AI launches Europa second-gen chip + AI factory supply deals (EU IT4LIA, MeluXina)
- Euclyd €200M funding round
- Google commits $15.1B to AI infra in Finland
- Universal Music licenses catalogue to ElevenLabs for opt-in fan remixes
- Perplexity local agent arrives on Windows