Europe has a new unicorn: Italian startup Exein has just raised a $270 million funding round led by Headline at a $1.7 billion valuation on the promise of providing a cybersecurity layer for physical AI ' an evolution of its initial focus on IoT. 'The concept of Exein is that every device should be able to defend itself, regardless if they are connected to a secure network or not,' CEO Gianni Cuozzo told TechCrunch. The Rome-based company has been doubling down on this approach; its latest product, Photon, is a runtime security solution to prevent attacks at the kernel level of a device. This approach requires working in close partnership with manufacturers, and Exein says it has been doing so since its inception in 2018. According to Cuozzo, the choice to work directly with OEMs and silicon vendors was driven by the conviction that connected devices were on the rise. This created significant tailwinds for Exein, which claims to have secured more than 2 billion connected devices in sectors where cyberattacks could be paralyzing, including aerospace, industrial automation, automotive manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and semiconductors....

A power line went down outside of Washington, DC, this week. Normally, the grid would only need a few seconds to recover from such an event. But this one took more than 10 minutes because more than 3 gigawatts of data centers stopped drawing power nearly simultaneously. The event caused voltage across the PJM grid to spike from Northern Virginia to Chicago, according to data collected by Ting Labs, a startup that runs an IoT sensor network out of people's electrical sockets. The event didn't cause a blackout, but it did cause lights across the region to flicker. The incident demonstrated the effect that data centers can have on the grid ' an outcome that experts believe will become more frequent. The event echoes one that happened two years ago, also on PJM's grid, and it could foreshadow larger events if data centers aren't built to more elegantly handle disruptions to power supplies. The PJM Interconnection manages grids from New Jersey to Illinois and serves 67 million customers, making it the largest grid operator in the United States....

The transaction, which values the UK-based company at around '3.5bn ($4.6bn), allows Montagu to retain control of Wireless Logic beyond the typical private equity holding period through a new secondary vehicle. The firm is rolling over most of its existing stake from a previous continuation fund, a rare 'CV-squared' structure in the secondary market. Founded in 2000, Wireless Logic provides smart connectivity solutions that enable companies to connect, control, and secure IoT devices across multiple networks. Under Montagu's ownership since 2018, the company has expanded from a UK-focused provider into a global market leader through 15 acquisitions across Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific. Wireless Logic is the 'natural acquirer of choice in its space, and has used M&A to expand from being a UK leader to a European leader, and today as a global leader,' said Montagu Managing Partner Ed Shuckburgh, noting that the business continues to grow at roughly 30% per year. The continuation fund structure reflects a growing trend among buyout firms seeking to hold high-performing assets for longer amid limited exit opportunities. Earlier this year, PAI Partners completed a similar transaction for Froneri, its '15bn ice cream venture with Nestle....

We will publish a summary of our series about interpretability and announce a new, exciting series. We are going to dive deep into DeepSeek's new OCR model that is making quite a bit of noise. In the opinion section we are going to explore a crazy crazy thesis: will OpenAI launch a crypto token' This week's AI releases feel less like isolated features and more like a quiet re'wiring of the software stack around agents. OpenAI's Atlas reframes the browser as an automated workspace; Anthropic's Claude Code on the Web promotes coding agents from autocomplete to orchestrators; DeepSeek'OCR suggests a path to scaling context without brute'forcing token counts; and LangChain's new $125M round'paired with LangChain/LangGraph 1.0, an Insights Agent, and a no'code agent builder'signals that the ecosystem is standardizing the agent stack from design to deployment. Taken together, they compress the loop from goal ' plan ' act ' audit into something teams can run continuously'and cheaply'inside normal tools....