Fresha’s May 2026 $80M round led by KKR’s Next Generation Technology Growth fund lifts its valuation above $1B and totals $285M raised. The London-founded platform now runs 35M appointments/month for 140,000 businesses, and plans to expand to more countries and add AI features.
Scammers have exploited a loophole in Microsoft’s email systems for several months by sending spam and phishing links from msonlineservicesteam@microsoftonline.com, a real address used for account alerts and 2FA codes, a TechCrunch report (May 2026) says. The Spamhaus Project confirmed the abuse and notified Microsoft; Microsoft acknowledged the inquiry but hadn’t confirmed whether it was stopped.
Anthropic told investors it expects Q2 2026 revenue to more than double to about $10.9B and post its first operating profit, per a May 21, 2026 Wall Street Journal report. It warned big upcoming compute costs may wipe out profitability, despite rising Claude demand and new tools for small businesses and law firms.
Clouted secured a $7M seed round in May 2026 led by Slow Ventures, with Gold House Ventures, Weekend Fund, and Peak XV’s Surge joining. Its AI selects the best platform and audience, continuously testing 30–90s clips created by a network of 100,000+ gig creators from podcasts, songs, and movies; CEO Justin Banusing said it’s like penetration testing, citing its use for &Friends, now drawing 20,000+ attendees, after completing a16z’s Speedrun accelerator in 2024.
OpenAI announced in May 2026 that its new general-purpose reasoning model has produced an original mathematical proof disproving a geometry conjecture first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946 — and this…
At a YC event Tuesday, May 20, 2026, Sam Altman offered each of ~169 current Y Combinator startups $2M in OpenAI tokens for equity via an uncapped SAFE converting at the next priced round (typically a Series A). Higher valuations mean OpenAI gets less equity; critics, including seed investor Jason Calacanis, warned about the risks of giving OpenAI an equity stake.
Tesla’s FSD (Supervised) went live in Lithuania in May 2026, becoming the second European approval after the Netherlands cleared it last month. In April 2026, Tesla reported nearly 1.3M paying FSD customers at $99/month, targeting 10M by 2035 as EU rollout lags due to regulatory scrutiny.
IrisGo’s AI desktop agent, Iris, raised a $2.8M seed in 2026 led by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund with Nvidia and Google, and has beta macOS/Windows apps plus an Acer preinstallation deal. Iris watches a workflow once to automate repeats with much data processed on-device.
Truecaller, the caller ID app used by over 500 million people monthly, launched an eSIM service for travelers in May 2026, marking a significant expansion beyond its core product as the company faces…
NanoCo landed a $12M oversubscribed seed led by Valley Capital Partners after turning down a roughly $20M acquisition offer for containerized AI agent tool NanoClaw. Built as a security-first alternative to OpenClaw, NanoClaw runs sandboxed inside a container and went from first code to term sheet in under six weeks, boosted by open-source endorsements from Andrej Karpathy and Singapore’s Foreign Minister.
Stable Audio 3.0 (May 2026) boosts music generation to 6 min 20 sec—more than double Stable Audio 2.0—across 459M (small/SFX) through 2.7B (large). Small SFX/Small/Medium are open weights; large is API/paid self-hosting and needs an enterprise license for $1M+ revenue.
A wave of AI-powered search startups is drawing significant venture capital in 2026, with Exa Labs and Parallel Web Systems among the companies raising large rounds as the search industry undergoes a…
