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The Pulse — Page 64

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• Melius Raises $25 Million After Scrapping Its First AI Product

  Melius announced $25 million in funding on October 6, 2026, including a $20 million Series A led by CRV and a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst. The former Ramp engineers abandoned their first AI marketing product and rebuilt the startup around tools for making campaigns, images and videos.

• Cohere Launches Embed 5 With Pro and Fast Search Models

  Cohere launched Embed 5 on September 30, pairing a high-quality model with a faster, lower-cost option for enterprise search. The models handle text, images and mixed document pages, and share an embedding space so companies can index with Pro and query with Fast.

• HelixWorld Preview Released Sept. 3; HelixBench Followed Oct. 12

  Noiz AI and HKUST made HelixWorld’s preview code, checkpoint and browser demo available on September 3, 2026, before its technical report appeared on arXiv on September 29. Noiz’s October 12 post described the system and its HelixBench results; the project repository lists that date as the benchmark’s release.

• SoftBank Completes Its Final $10 Billion OpenAI Investment

  SoftBank Group completed the third and final $10 billion tranche of its follow-on investment in OpenAI, bringing its total commitment to $30 billion. The company says its cumulative OpenAI investment is now $64.6 billion, and it has canceled the remaining undrawn capacity under a related bridge facility.

• Ampersand Raises $15M to Connect AI Agents to Enterprise Systems

  Ampersand raised a $15 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners to help AI applications read and write data in customized enterprise systems. The San Francisco company also announced a beta release of Andi, an AI agent for integration implementation work.

• Quine Narrowed a Cancer-Drug Search in One Weekend, Microsoft Says

  Microsoft Research introduced Quine, an AI system that connects biological data, research tools and lab experiments. In a pancreatic cancer study with the Broad Institute, Quine ranked thousands of compounds and helped prioritize candidates that produced measured cell-state shifts, Microsoft says.

• GW Researchers Map How AI Answers Can Tip Toward Harm

  George Washington University researchers Neil Johnson and Frank Yingjie Huo published a study proposing a formula to predict when an AI model’s answers may shift from acceptable to undesirable. The work examines competition inside transformer attention and reports tests across seven open-weight models.