A human had eyes, a browser, a mouse, a password manager, a credit card, an email address, a tolerance for modal dialogs, and a finite amount of patience. The entire SaaS and consumer internet stack grew around this shape of user. Search engines ranked pages for humans. E-commerce sites optimized funnels for humans. CRMs tracked human sales reps selling to human buyers. Identity systems authenticated humans. Analytics systems measured human clicks, human sessions, human conversions....

Chinese AI companies may not be swimming in as much cash as their Western rivals, but their open source models are still facing no shortage of interest from those who don't mind a performance hit in exchange for cheap inference. And investors are taking notice. Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based AI lab developing the popular Kimi series of open-weight large language models, has raised about $2 billion at a valuation of $20 billion, according to a post by Huafeng Capital, which advised some investors who participated in the round. The round was led by Chinese food delivery company Meituan's VC arm, Long-Z Investment, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Also participating were Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng, according to the post. The company raised $3.9 billion over the past six months, according to Huafeng Capital. Moonshot was valued at $4.3 billion at the end of 2025, per reports, and by early 2026, that figure had more than doubled to $10 billion following a $700 million raise....

OpenAI said Thursday that its API will now include a number of new voice intelligence features designed to help developers create apps that can talk, transcribe, and translate conversations with users. The company's new GPT'Realtime'2 is another voice model, built to create a realistic vocal simulation that can converse with users. However, unlike its predecessor (GPT-Realtime-1.5) this one is built with GPT'5'class reasoning that OpenAI says was created to deal with more complicated requests from users. The company is also launching GPT'Realtime'Translate, which, just as it sounds, is designed to provide real-time translation services that 'keep pace' with the user, conversationally. The feature includes more than 70 input languages (that is, the languages that it can comprehend) and 13 output languages (the languages it relays to the speaker). 'Together, the models we are launching move real-time audio from simple call-and-response toward voice interfaces that can actually do work: listen, reason, translate, transcribe, and take action as a conversation unfolds,' the company said....

Investors could not get enough of Ramp throughout 2025 and it looks like 2026 could be another banner year of fundraising for the corporate spend management startup. The company is in talks to raise another $750 million at a pre-money valuation of more than $40 billion, sources tell The Wall Street Journal. The deal is not yet final though, so terms could change. In November, Ramp announced it had raised $300 million at a $32 billion post-money valuation led by Lightspeed, which also included an employee tender offer. The company announced in July a $500 million Series E-2 at a $22.5 billion valuation led by Iconiq, which was just a few weeks after its $200 million Series E at a $16 billion valuation led by Founders Fund. It had raised a couple of other times earlier in 2025, each time another big valuation step up. Ramp has also had success generating revenue. In November, Ramp founder CEO Eric Glyman said his company had reached $1 billion in revenue, doubling its income in just a year. Glyman has also been evangelizing a vision of AI embedded throughout Ramp's spend management products, with agents that automatically block out-of-policy purchases, detect fraud, and move funds to interest-bearing investments....