I can't write this story from the source provided. The text is a TechCrunch "Page not found" error page. It says nothing about Brightmind, Stephen Ward, a second cybersecurity fund, or any fund size, date, investor or quote.
Anything I wrote in 120 to 180 words would need figures or details I'd have to invent, which breaks your rule against stating anything not in the source.
If you can send the working URL or paste the article text, I'll write it to the house style straight away.
Reported by TechCrunch, via StrictlyVC, 2026-11-06
Carta's data on new-hire pay shows individual contributors gaining more than any other seniority level since the start of 2024. For ICs one step below senior, the median salary benchmark is up 18.5% and the median initial equity grant is up 25.4%. Carta published the findings on 28 October 2026 in its State of Startup Compensation report for the first half of the year.
Senior directors saw smaller moves over the same period: median salary benchmarks rose 6.3% and median grant size 3.9%. At VP level and above, the median initial grant has shrunk. Higher ranks still earn far more, with the median new-hire salary for senior directors in H1 2026 more than twice that of mid-level ICs. Carta says the gap is narrowing, and that many companies appear to believe AI reduces the need for management layers while raising what top ICs can do.
Elsewhere, the median salary benchmark for project management rose 14.6% from H1 2025 to H1 2026, by more than $20,000.
Ornn, a New York startup founded a year ago, runs a marketplace and financial infrastructure for buying, selling and pricing GPU compute capacity. It is reportedly in talks to raise a third tranche of its Series A. The talks reportedly value the company at more than $1 billion. A second tranche had valued it at $800 million shortly before. Axios first reported the news.
Reported by binance.com, via StrictlyVC, 2026-11-04
State adds $500M to Empire AI compute push for universities
Governor Kathy Hochul's $500 million Empire AI initiative is expanding access to advanced AI computing for New York's universities and researchers. The programme sits alongside the recently announced $10 million AI Jobs Institute in Long Island City, which aims to train up to 40,000 New Yorkers by 2032.
CoworkingCafe's Q3 2026 report counts 9,612 coworking spaces across the US. Manhattan has 12.25 million square feet of them, the largest footprint in the country. In Brooklyn, coworking accounts for 5.4% of office inventory, the highest share among the 50 largest US coworking markets.
PatternMD, a New York startup whose free symptom-tracking app launched in April 2026, has signed up more than 500 users in English, Spanish, German and Vietnamese. The app records weather, air quality, sleep and workouts alongside each entry, and other users see only an anonymous PMD-ID. In May 2026 it was accepted into the VA PathFinder Innovation Repository.
Patients pay nothing and there is no premium tier. Revenue is meant to come from sponsored placements sold to health organisations and from paid researcher and health-system access to aggregate, consent-based data. The company is bootstrapped, with a founding team of three and one engineer. Its NIH SBIR application, a Direct-to-Phase-II proposal, is under scientific review at the National Institute of Mental Health, with a decision expected this autumn.
"There is no identity to leak, sell or subpoena," said founder and CEO Pedro Infante. Within six months he also wants a first provider-portal pilot with a New York clinic or health system, though none is named.
About USD 6.36 billion left Binance wallets across ten blockchains on October 29, 2026, most of it in about 20 minutes from 20:05 UTC. TRM Labs attributes the theft to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-sponsored unit, with high confidence. Binance has confirmed a security incident and says user funds are safe. It has not published a root cause, and no government has attributed the theft.
TRM puts the infrastructure share of North Korea's stolen value at 88% including Binance, against 76% before it. Infrastructure attacks target keys, servers and signing systems. Only 13 of North Korea's 100 attributed incidents were code exploits, about 1% of the value. As of 00:30 UTC on October 30, nearly USD 2.7 billion, about 42% of the theft, had been frozen. The attacker still holds more than 420,000 ETH and 18,270 BTC, worth about USD 2.4 billion, which no issuer can freeze. TRM expects bridges, swap services and over-the-counter brokers to feature in later laundering.
Reported by trmlabs.com, via The Fintech Blueprint, 2026-11-03
4.72 million people rode the New York City subway on the Thursday before Halloween, the most on any day since the pandemic shut the city down in 2020. Friday brought 4.5 million riders, the highest Friday total since 2020. Halloween Saturday drew 3.27 million, the most on a Saturday since 2016, and marathon Sunday was the highest Sunday on record. The seven-day rolling average reached 4.19 million, the best week since the pandemic, MTA data shows.
New York City Transit added service over the weekend in anticipation of the crowds. Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director at the transit advocacy group Riders Alliance, said the numbers show the subway remains the "bedrock that connects New Yorkers" and that continued investment is needed to sustain its heavy use.
The MTA's five-year capital plan will buy hundreds of new subway cars, rehabilitate train repair yards and add modern signal systems. The Second Avenue Subway will extend the Q line by three stations into East Harlem.
Gov. Kathy Hochul committed $10 million on Monday to the first phase of a two-part plan to turn hangars 3 and 4 at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn into a public space for educational programming and cultural events. The hangars have not been open to the public in nearly a century.
The Jamaica Bay Rockaway Parks Conservancy will build onsite solar and geothermal power, add bathrooms and make other upgrades so the buildings can host events such as concerts. It plans to break ground in early 2028, after the National Park Service finishes work on the exteriors, and is still fundraising. "This money from the governor was such a huge boost to get this project to where it needs to be," said Elizabeth Stoehr, the conservancy's deputy director.
A second phase could begin shortly after, adding an observation terrace and a food and drink area. Hangar 4 would house labs and classrooms for research with the Science and Resilience Center of Jamaica Bay. The redevelopment adds approximately 50,000 square feet in total.
GreyNoise reported on 9 September 2026 that at least 440 instances of PaperCut NG/MF print-management software, hosted by 395 identified organisations in 48 countries, were compromised in a campaign run largely by AI agents. The firm says a likely Russian-speaking actor used hundreds of agents built on OpenAI's Codex harness and a DeepSeek model, plus public offensive security tools. The work began on 31 August and exploited two vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078.
From an empty workspace, the attacker reached remote code execution against a real victim in just under four hours. Once the full campaign launched, it compromised at least 11 organisations in 26 seconds. Domain administrator access was achieved at only 12 organisations, in times from five minutes to 144 minutes. The actor tried to exclude 28 countries, but victims turned up in some of them. Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall defeated at least one attempt.
GreyNoise says it is unclear whether the actor will hand access to others or pursue data theft or ransomware. Earlier PaperCut intrusions led to extortion. Victim notifications are under way.
The law firm is committing 3% of its billable time to AI, which comes to about $1.1bn over five years. Its stated ambition is to redesign the service completely. The author of Exponential View says private conversations with bosses show a similar pattern elsewhere: small wins now, and an expectation of large results within a few years.
Reported by Exponential View, 2026-11-08
Editor's note
"Brightmind's Stephen Ward raises second cybersecurity fund solo"
My news feed is full of Cyberattack news from across the globe.
Stephen is on to the right trend with this latest fund, CyberSecurity is about to get it's time in the spotlight.
