Enact, a robotics company that has been operating in stealth, has announced a $30M pre-seed round. It is building what it calls an artificial nervous system for robots, which lets them sense force and touch in real time through their own actuators. The company says the approach needs no fragile sensors and no extra hardware. Backers include redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital, along with Yann LeCun, Arthur Mensch of Mistral, Andrew Lonsberry of Path Robotics and Thomas Wolf of Hugging Face.
Enact argues that vision and language are becoming commodities, and that robots need more than a visual cortex to handle thousands of fine manipulation tasks. It says it is aimed at work where value comes from variance, not volume. Marc Pollefeys, a professor at ETH Zürich who says he helped with the effort from the start, wrote: "I strongly believe that force and touch are a necessary complement to vision." One commenter, Roumen Popov, questioned how force and touch could work without sensors. Enact is now hiring.
Azoma, a London startup founded four years ago, has raised an $11.2 million Series A round led by Puma Growth Partners. The company helps consumer brands monitor and improve how AI shopping assistants discover, interpret and recommend their products. Dunnhumby, Twin Path, MaRS IAF, Rank Ventures and Ignite Ventures also took part in the round.
Microsoft has withdrawn from an agreement to lease computing capacity at Nscale's planned AI data centre in Loughton, Essex. The Telegraph first reported it on 18 October, and Reuters said Microsoft recently terminated the agreement. Microsoft has not explained the decision and declined to comment. The Guardian reported that UK Power Networks told Nscale sufficient power would not be available until the early to mid-2030s. Nscale had targeted the fourth quarter of 2026 for the site to become operational.
Microsoft had agreed to lease the initial 50MW, according to the Financial Times, and Nscale has no publicly announced replacement customer. Nscale says the project will proceed and that it is examining alternative electricity sources and other UK sites, but it has given no revised timetable. "Our relationship with Microsoft remains strong and long-term," an Nscale spokesperson told Reuters, adding that the grid problems would not affect its other Microsoft contracts, covering sites in the United States, Portugal and Norway. Separately, Ofgem has proposed a commitment fee for large data centre grid connections. Its consultation closed on 17 September, and a final decision is pending.
Helsing, the German defence AI company, showed its Contra air defence system in a video posted on X on Monday. Contra is built to control two interceptor missiles, the AD-1 Inferno and the AD-2 Ambush, which are said to cost less than $100,000 each. The source puts a Patriot PAC-3 missile at $4 million to $5 million a unit and a NASAMS round at around $1 million.
Contra is still in development and is built on Helsing's Altra C2 platform. Helsing expects it to be field-ready by late 2027 and says its seekers rely on European supply chains. The jet-powered Inferno flies at around 700 kph, while the rocket-powered Ambush reaches Mach 2.5. Both have a range of around 20 kilometres or more.
Niklas Köhler, Helsing's co-founder and president, said: "Contra ends the air defense dilemma: slow fair-weather drones, or million-euro missiles fired at cheap, mass-produced targets." Helsing says Contra has already demonstrated hardware integrations to multiple military customers.
Reported by Kyiv Post, via Scaling Europe Daily, 2026-10-27
Alex Depledge, founder of Resi and Hassle.com, is set to leave her post as entrepreneurship adviser at the Treasury on Thursday. She joined in June 2025 under the then-chancellor Rachel Reeves. Depledge said the government's decision to put taxpayer money into legacy industries while sidelining entrepreneurship was a major factor limiting the UK's economic growth.
She told The Times that progress slowed after John Healey took over from Reeves in July, although he asked her to stay on. She said she had to re-hash many arguments already settled under the former chancellor. "Keeping scale-ups on the fringes underestimates the contribution of our greatest companies," said Depledge, the Treasury's entrepreneurship adviser.
Healey has said he wants to "back business in Britain making a profit". He has ruled out a rise in capital gains tax, but the future of Business Asset Disposal Relief, formerly known as entrepreneurs' relief, remains unclear. A group of entrepreneurs including Shalini Khemka, Lord Howard Leigh and Andrew Brode has written to him urging him to protect it.
Reported by LBC, via Scaling Europe Daily, 2026-10-27
The a16z infra team sent its portfolio companies a five-point list of security changes the day before it was published on 23 October 2026. Joel de la Garza and Zane Lackey wrote that vulnerabilities are being found and exploited at a rate never seen before. They added that AI agents are being adopted at scale, and that every agent is an insider threat in environments built to resist attacks from outside.
The first recommendation is to consider doubling security spend, which at the average enterprise is roughly 10% of tech spend. The others are to delay launches until known vulnerabilities are patched, to switch off neglected legacy environments not tied to revenue, such as labs, test setups and old CI/CD projects, and to end the risk acceptance process, which they say has become a way to justify never fixing problems. The fifth is to scale up agents rather than people in detection and response. "All that can be exploited will be exploited," they wrote. The firm calls the message general advice and offers its team to company security staff for follow-up questions.
Outages spread across European government websites from Wednesday after weaknesses were found in PHP, a language that powers much of the internet. Some operators took sites offline rather than risk exploitation before they could patch. The disclosures coincided with flaws affecting Node.js and Plex, breaches tied to LiteLLM and Railway, and the discovery that Indian certificate authority eMudhra had used an exceptionally weak cryptographic key, according to Reuters.
Research from VulnCheck shows AI helped double the number of flaws discovered year on year. Finding bugs and building exploits once took weeks or months, while AI can now scan code around the clock and produce exploits in hours. Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare, told Reuters that "we're going to have a couple of years where every single week it's going to feel like the sky is falling".
Seven cybersecurity professionals who spoke to the agency broadly agreed that more disruption is coming. They are split on whether it will mean more successful attacks. Hunt.io said criminal attempts against the PHP flaw appeared to have failed as of Thursday afternoon. Prince said he expects a lot of the flaws to be cleaned up.
I can't write this story from the source provided. It is Cognition's homepage, and it says nothing about a second London office, a UK team, or growth of 200%. Any body text matching the headline would need figures and facts I would have to invent.
- Cognition operates Devin, which it describes as an autonomous software engineer. - An article dated 2026.09.25 is titled "Cognition Crosses $1B in Annualized Revenue Run Rate". - An article dated 2026.09.08 announces its Series E. - FrontierCode 2.0 was published on 2026.10.27, with Opus 5.5 max leading the leaderboard at 45.5%.
If you can send the press release, a company statement or a news report on the London office, I'll write the 120 to 180 words from that. I can also write a piece based on the facts above, but it would need a different headline.
The Soho Society, a residents association, is trying to stop the redevelopment of Twentieth Century House, a deserted office building, because the scheme might make Soho busier. The 20th Century film studios abandoned the building in 2019, and it has stood unused for seven years.
Its owner, the insurance company and investor Royal London, launched the scheme last Christmas. It would merge the site with three other buildings that it borders to the rear. The plans include subsidised workspaces for small businesses and new shops. A pedestrian walkway through the middle would link Dean Street to Soho Square via a public courtyard with bars and restaurants, replacing what is now an empty alleyway.
The society has previously tried to stop outdoor drinking at Soho pubs, and to limit opening hours and new openings.
Railway says an attacker decrypted environment variables belonging to at most 1.85% of its workspaces, which the company puts at about 100,000. The attacker was active from 13:58 UTC on 20 October to 03:32 UTC on 22 October, when Railway confirmed access had ended. Its early assessment is that the aim was to obtain AI provider API keys for distillation attacks.
Because the full keys were envelope encrypted, Railway cannot say which variables were decrypted. It asked providers including GitHub, GitLab, Anthropic, OpenAI and Stripe to revoke keys, and gave GitHub and others every key on the platform. More than 100,000 users were therefore affected by revocation requests. Running services stayed online, but builds were paused and the dashboard, API and CLI were at times unavailable.
Railway recommends that customers who signed up before 21 October rotate their stored keys. It has not ruled out that source code was accessed. The forensic investigation continues, and a final report is promised.
A study of 112 startups found that ChatGPT and Perplexity almost always recognised them when asked by name, but rarely surfaced them when asked for recommendations. The startups were randomly drawn from the top 500 products on the 2025 Product Hunt leaderboard and tested across 2,240 queries. Name recognition reached 99.4% for ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini) and 94.3% for Perplexity (sonar with web search). On discovery-style questions, such as which AI tools launched this year, success fell to 3.32% and 8.29%. For ChatGPT, that is a gap of 30 to 1.
The paper was posted to arXiv on 1 January 2026 by Amit Prakash Sharma, and is based on 2025 thesis research at the Indian Institute of Technology Patna. It found that Generative Engine Optimization scores showed no correlation with discovery rates. For Perplexity, referring domains (r = +0.319) and Product Hunt ranking (r = -0.286) predicted visibility. So did community presence (r = +0.395) once the Reddit data was cleaned of false positives. Sharma concludes that startups should build their SEO foundation first, and that visibility in language models will follow. The study tested two models.
Reported by arXiv.org, via The VC Corner, 2026-10-22
NorForge, a security firm, said on Monday that a Chinese-speaking hacker had used the open-source AI platform Cairn to break into the websites of more than 100 companies, leaving almost all the work to AI agents. The campaign began on 25 September. By late last week the agents had tried more than 1,200 sites, according to Reuters, which identified Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins among the victims. TNW has not independently verified the intrusions.
Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at NorForge, estimated the campaign used about $5,000 of tokens, or roughly $50 per successful hack. NorForge's report puts the average at about $5 per task, counting failed attempts, and says the uncertainty is considerable. Successful attacks took a little under 23 hours on average. Fagerland told Reuters: "It's not script kiddie stuff."
Deere said it had taken remediation steps and had no sign sensitive information was accessed. SharkNinja said a standalone support site was hit and contained. Cummins said it was looking into a possible attack on a vendor's website. Reuters could not establish how much data, if any, was taken. NorForge is asking hosting firms to take the exposed Cairn panels down.
Staff at the Gate Theatre have been searching the venue's archive since deciding to close it, and have found a hand-written letter from 1997. It was addressed to the London Arts Board, the Arts Council's predecessor, and concerned that year's decision to cut the Gate's funding. The writer was Harold Pinter. He described the theatre's record in enterprise and imagination as unparalleled and called the proposed withdrawal of support incomprehensible. He urged the board to reconsider.
On that occasion the funding was reinstated. The team now reads the letter as a reminder that a radical place like the Gate could have closed in 1997 or 1984, or in any year under any management. The theatre is 47 years old. "We held on as long as we could have," said Alice Linnane, acting executive director.
Qasar Younis, co-founder and chief executive of Applied Intuition, judges founders by comparing what their companies have earned from customers with how much investor money they have spent. He described the test in an interview with The VC Corner at Slush in November 2025. His example: a company that made $3 million after raising a billion sits at one end, and a company that made a billion and spent nothing sits at the other.
"That ratio tells you is the founder good at making money from customers or selling stock," Younis said.
Applied builds software for self-driving vehicles. Its last priced round was a $600 million Series F at a $15 billion valuation in June 2025, co-led by BlackRock-managed funds and Kleiner Perkins. At the time of the interview, Younis said, the company had about a thousand engineers and billions raised that it had never had to spend, because it generated cash. On October 13, 2026, The Information reported that Applied had fielded investment offers valuing it at $30 billion or more. The company has yet to announce a round at that price.
Axiom Math has released what it describes as the first complete computer-checked proof of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups. Over 24 days, its engineers and mathematicians directed swarms of dozens of AI agents, which produced approximately 43.1 million lines of code in the Lean proof assistant. The original proof runs to roughly 15,000 pages in more than 500 articles by about 100 mathematicians.
Translating the work into Lean exposed problems in the published arguments. Most were minor, such as typographical errors, errors in tables or dropped hypotheses, but 34 noteworthy deviations needed to be resolved, the most substantial relating to the Unbalanced Group Theorem. The work also produced a new result in group theory. Axiom said it will make the errata list available, in consultation with several expert group theorists.
The team formalised the first generation proof, because the second generation proof remains incomplete. Michael Aschbacher, who co-authored the 2004 treatment of the quasithin case, wrote in 2005 that "it is impossible to write out a very long and complicated argument without error."
