AI Pulse stories about Startups & funding, newest first.
Chatbot platform Character.AI has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US. It has agreed to a $20 million deal under which Disney would act as a stalking-horse bidder for some of its intellectual property, and the company expects a sale by late November or early December. Its chief executive blamed significant legal, regulatory and operational headwinds.
London-based voice AI company ElevenLabs says a $300m employee tender offer values it at $22bn, twice its $11bn valuation at the February Series D. Wellington and T. Rowe Price led the deal, with new investors including EQT, Goldman Sachs and GIC. The company says it wants staff to share in the value they are creating.
UK angle: ElevenLabs is London-based, and the UK remains its largest base.
AMD has agreed to buy spatial-intelligence AI lab World Labs in an all-stock deal worth $8.2 billion, its second-largest acquisition ever after Xilinx. Founder Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice-president and chief scientist. The deal signals AMD's push beyond chips into AI models that reason about 3D physical space, deepening its rivalry with Nvidia for AI compute and software influence.
Instinct, a startup whose AI agent uses its own phone and computer to book restaurants, order groceries and coordinate with other agents, raised $1bn in a Series C round led by Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue, quadrupling its valuation to $10bn in about four weeks. The raise comes as the EU's AI Act now requires such agents to disclose they are not human when calling businesses, with fines of up to 3% of global revenue for non-compliance after a grace period ending in December.
DeepSeek's annualised revenue has passed $1bn, up from under $500m a few months ago, according to The Information. The jump followed an August price rise of 2.3 to 4.5 times, which CEO Liang Wenfeng told investors cost it no customers. Its models are still among the cheapest of the major LLMs, and that's the likely reason demand held. It now wants to raise about $7.5bn at a $75bn valuation by the end of October ahead of a Shanghai listing, which works out at roughly 75 times revenue on numbers that were half the size in the spring.
UK angle: UK developers on DeepSeek's API have watched prices multiply since July. Worth benchmarking the alternatives before the next bill.
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