February was the biggest month on record for venture funding. And while the vast majority of that capital went to just three companies ' OpenAI, Anthropic and Waymo ' a whole host of under-the-radar startups also drew investor checks. Among those that most piqued our interest: A phlebotomy robot, a company that aims to revive precision manufacturing in the U.S. and Europe with a small-business franchise model, and a health beverage made from seaweed. Let's dive in. Vitestro was founded in 2017 and has raised more than $104 million to date, per Crunchbase. Its Series B investors include Sutter Health, Sonder Capital, Puma Venture Capital, Mayo Clinic and LabCorp Venture Fund, among others. Vitestro's device is designed to be installed in phlebotomy departments and combines imaging technology, AI and advanced robotics to identify suitable veins for a blood draw, guide needle insertion and collect blood samples, according to the company. 'Vitestro is redefining one of the largest and most under innovated clinical workflows with a first-of-its-kind autonomous robotic platform for diagnostic blood collection addressing an enormous unmet global market need,' Dr. Fred Moll, co-founder and partner at Sonder Capital and former co-founder and CEO of Intuitive Surgical and Auris Health, said in a statement. 'I believe this technology has the potential to establish a new standard of care, much as robotic surgery did in its early days.'...

About six weeks ago, he introduced NanoClaw on Hacker News as a tiny, open source, secure alternative to the AI agent-building sensation OpenClaw, after he built it in a weekend coding binge. That post went viral. About a week ago, Cohen closed down his AI marketing startup to focus full-time on NanoClaw and launch a company around it called NanoCo. The attention from Hacker News and Karpathy had translated into 22,000 stars on GitHub, 4,600 forks (people building new versions off the project), and over 50 contributors. He's already added hundreds of updates to his project with hundreds more in the queue. Now, on Friday, Cohen announced a deal with Docker ' the company that essentially invented the container technology NanoClaw is built on, and counts millions of developers and nearly 80,000 enterprise customers ' to integrate Docker Sandboxes into NanoClaw. It all started when Cohen launched an AI marketing startup with his brother, Lazer Cohen, a few months ago. The startup offered marketing services like market research, go-to-market analysis, and blog posts through a small team of people using AI agents....

After widespread complaints that Facebook has become an 'AI slop hellscape,' Meta on Friday announced new tools to detect impersonation, as well as updated creator guidelines that better define what Facebook considers to be 'original content.' Last year, the company announced a crackdown on spammy and unoriginal content ' things like repeatedly reusing someone else's photos, videos, or text. The goal: elevate original creator content in its feeds and push back against the AI-generated slop and other low-quality posts that had been dragging down Facebook's reputation. This is key to Facebook's continued success as a creator platform. Simply put, if unoriginal content and AI slop drown out original voices and reduce creators' ability to monetize, Facebook will no longer be a destination they prefer. Meta now says its earlier efforts caused both views of and time spent watching original content on Facebook to approximately double during the second half of 2025, compared with the same period the year before....

Many leaders can get agentic pilots rolling'but realizing ROI can mean activating thousands of AI agents enterprise-wide. Is your organization ready' 'Agency isn't a feature'it's a transfer of decision rights,' says McKinsey Partner Rich Isenberg. 'The question shifts from 'Is the model accurate'' to 'Who's accountable when the system acts''' On this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, Isenberg joins Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly to explore how leaders can scale AI safely, mitigate risk for autonomous systems, and build the trust required to make innovation stick. Rich Isenberg: People sometimes view agentic as a better chatbot. In reality, you're giving these software programs agency. They can plan. They can call tools. They can execute workflows. To manage this, your entire operating model has to change. Agentic AI is not only content generation; it's decisioning and action at machine-like speed. The question shifts from 'Is the model accurate'' to 'Who is accountable when the system acts'' Your governance must define the scope, inventory, and ownership and make that auditable....