The Daily Deal
Monday 5 October 2026
Yann LeCun calls Anthropic's Dario Amodei 'completely deluded'
- Chart of the day Personal AI agents are back: nine big tech launches and 21 startups raising money in 2026.
- Just raised FIXX Energy $27M, Plesh $4.1M, Neocrop Technologies $2.8M.
- Just founded Boxes.dev, Archangel Health, OpenSEO.
- In the news Yann LeCun calls Dario Amodei 'deluded' and AI doom 'the worst marketing campaign you can imagine', and two more stories.
Chart of the day
Open the chart
Venture funding for 49 personal AI agent startups rose from $87M in 2023 to $1.8B in 2026, with Instinct taking $1.4B of that at a $10B valuation. The timeline runs 29 milestones from ChatGPT in November 2022 to OpenAI Dots in September 2026, including big tech buying up the first wave: Microsoft licensed Inflection, Amazon hired Adept and bought Bee, HP bought Humane's assets and Meta bought Limitless.
Just raised
All funding news-
FIXX Energy$27M GrowthUS-based LFP battery cell and storage systems manufacturer.
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PleshBarcelona$4.1M Early VCProducer of healthy chocolate snacks.
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Neocrop TechnologiesMakati$2.8M SeedPrecision crop breeding using CRISPR gene-editing technology. Led by Zentynel.
By country
- US$70B
- China$6.6B
- France$4.7B
- UK$3.6B
- India$1.3B
- Netherlands$1.2B
By sector
- Enterprise software$49B
- Health$9.6B
- Security$8.1B
- Energy$7.8B
- Semiconductors$6.9B
- Transportation$6.9B
$96B across 2,151 rounds in September, by headquarters and by sector.
Just founded
View all from this week-
Boxes.devSan Francisco$125K raised
Cloud development environments for AI coding agents.
DR
NBDrew Regitsky & Nick Bushak founded it. Regitsky worked at Nylas and ATUM. Bushak previously founded Gem. -
Archangel HealthSan Francisco$125K raised
Physician-graded clinical data infrastructure for medical AI.
TP
ABTej Patel & Aryaa Bhatia founded it. Patel worked at SimCare AI and Cedars-Sinai. Bhatia previously founded LingoSage. -
OpenSEOBoston$125K raised
Open-source SEO platform for research and analytics.
BSBen Senescu founded it after working at Patrol and Klaviyo.
In the news
View all news stories- Yann LeCun calls Dario Amodei 'deluded' and AI doom 'the worst marketing campaign you can imagine'
In a Fortune interview, the Turing Award winner and AMI Labs founder said he has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity and that regulatory capture is the bigger risk.
- Suleyman: Anthropic is teaching Claude it might be conscious
Microsoft AI's chief says Claude answers "I'm not sure" when asked if it is conscious because Anthropic trained that answer into it. David Sacks called it "concerning".
- Broadcom's AI chip revenue triples as Applied Digital locks in $36B of capacity
Broadcom's AI semiconductor revenue more than tripled year over year last quarter, while data center operator Applied Digital secured $36 billion in contracted capacity deals with an investment-grade hyperscaler.
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