AI chatbots are getting better at answering questions, summarizing documents, and solving mathematical equations, but they still largely behave like helpful assistants for one user at a time. They’re not designed to manage the messier work of real collaboration: coordinating people with competing priorities, tracking long-running decisions, and keeping teams aligned over time.  Humans&, a new startup founded by alumni of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, thinks closing that gap is the next major frontier for foundation models. The company this week raised a $480 million seed round to build a “central nervous system” for the human-plus-AI economy.…

An ongoing Microsoft outage is preventing enterprise customers from accessing email inboxes, files, meetings, and other Microsoft cloud services. The technology giant said in a post on X around 2:30 p.m. ET that the outage was caused by a “portion of service infrastructure in North America that is not processing traffic as expected.” Microsoft didn’t provide specific details of the cause of the outage, but said it was “working to restore the infrastructure to a healthy state to achieve recovery.” Microsoft said on its status page that the outage affects its Exchange Online email service, searching files within SharePoint Online…

The creators of the open source project vLLM have announced that they transitioned the popular tool into a VC-backed startup, Inferact, raising $150 million in seed funding at an $800 million valuation. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, confirming TechCrunch’s earlier reporting that vLLM has raised capital from a16z. Inferact’s debut mirrors the recent commercialization of the SGLang project as RadixArk, which sources told us secured capital at a $400 million valuation led by Accel, as we reported on Wednesday. As the focus in AI shifts from training models to deploying them in applications, a…

There’s a feeling of schadenfreude in Silicon Valley when a unicorn stumbles. So when the WSJ broke the news Thursday afternoon that Capital One will acquire Brex for $5.15 billion in cash and stock (Capital One issued an official release confirming the details 30 minutes later), you could practically hear the collective snickering from Sand Hill Road to San Francisco’s South Park. That figure represents less than half of Brex’s last private-market valuation of $12.3 billion from its 2022 Series D-2 round. Before everyone sharpens their knives, consider that for the VCs who backed Brex at its outset, the sale…

Vimeo, the video-hosting platform, is laying off some of its global staff, according to a report from Business Insider. The move comes shortly after the company’s acquisition by the Italian tech conglomerate Bending Spoons, which purchased it in an all-cash deal last year for $1.38 billion. Bending Spoons confirmed the layoffs to BI but wouldn’t share how many people would lose their jobs. The Verge reports that the cutbacks will impact a “large portion” of the company’s total workforce, citing a LinkedIn post from Vimeo’s former VP of Global Brand and Creative, who stated that he, “along with a large…