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Ambient AI is having a moment. Amazonlaunched a new wrist-worn devicewith Bee; a former Plaud execlaunched ambient appsthrough a startup called Ambi, which aims to also build its own hardware; and Applelaunched Voice Intelligence featuresduring its iPhone launch in September. Now, a company calledNirvais betting on a jewelry-like pendant and its ability to listen only to the wearer. The startup today announced a new $25 million pre-Series A round, adding to the $8 million it raised earlier in the year from investors like Lightspeed and South Park Commons, bringing its total raise to $33 million. Nirva was founded in 2025 by two former Meta Reality Labs employees, Wei Lyu and Jason Chen, along with Hanying Hu, who founded a fashion and jewelry brand. The company’s first device is a pendant, which can also be worn as a bracelet. The device weighs only around eight grams, making it easy to wear all day. Its battery lasts up to three days on a single charge. Longer term, Nirva aims to release more devices. In a call with TechCrunch, Nirva CEO Lyu said that the company wanted to build a wearable that blends in with fashion, but also provides value to users. “This is a piece of jewelry that only focuses on listening to your own speech. We are not like a voice recorder or like a meeting note taker. One key difference between us, Taya, Vocci, or Sandbar Ring is that we’re always passively listening to your own speech. So it’s always on. It keeps modeling the user and modeling your mind,” Lyu said. For ambient devices, privacy is a big question, as people might not like to be recorded all the time. Plus, devices like the Ray-Ban Meta have instilled fear in those who are around the person wearing the smart glasses that they are being recorded too. Nirva gets around this problem by asking users to record snippets of their voice during onboarding and building its model based on that. During use, the device filters out conversations or data captured from the other people around the device. That means it’s only recording the wearer. In addition, Nirva by default doesn’t keep any audio data or transcripts after processing the conversations. Nirva is positioning itself as a personal insights company rather than a productivity startup. However, its app shows you reminders or action items and ways to act on them. Lyu said that through its app, the startup wants to help users show up for others in a better way in their lives. “I think there’s no universal way to help everyone to solve their problems. We are building a tool to help people to improve their self-understanding, self-compassion, and self-awareness,” Lyu said. The companion app parses users’ speech and creates insights that it infers are related to the user’s personality, including patterns, the people who tend to be around them, the places they’ve been to, and other daily notes. Lyu emphasized that the app shows users insights around their emotions, communication style, and ways they can improve. Wyu gave an example of an incident when she forgot to thank her mother for something, and the app later nudged her with a reminder about this. The company also said that, before it discards the audio, it’s able to track the tone, pitch, volume, and speed, which are useful for deriving emotion-related understandings that are then surfaced in the app. Nirva will start taking orders for its devices in November, with an aim to ship them to early users by the end of the year. The $249 device will be available in silver, brushed silver, black, and gold. The startup has competition in the AI wearables area. There are companies like former Apple employees’Taya, which is also building intelligent jewelry. Plus, startups like Friend and Bee are trying to be companion gadgets as well.
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The AI world is flooded withpersonal and productivity-based assistants, with new ones launching every week. Now, Anthropic is entering this battle in the hopes of gaining user attention with a new app called Claude Duet, aimed at rivalingMeta Muse,OpenAI Dots,Hark,Instinct,Grok Bot, andFo. Anthropic said the new agent is meant to cater to professionals and small businesses to help them with automating and managing tasks. The company is making a distinction from personal agents such asInstinct, by noting that Duet isn’t good at handling errands or booking tickets, and it can’t show you its browser use as it happens. Instead, Duet can build a daily briefing for its users, create dashboards, or suggest actions based on the user’s data. Like other agents, Duet can complete tasks in the background through its own virtual machine while you handle other things, then come back to you if it needs your approval. The launch arrives as the market shifts beyond AI assistants to agents that can work on users’ behalf. Many of Anthropic’s rivals are focusing on business use cases. While Meta’s Muse is a personal AI assistant, the company also released a version to cater tosmall businesses with connections to other apps. OpenAI’s Dots has a business slant as well, with itsintegration with professional tools. Anthropic says Duet proactively delivers its recommendations as it monitors ongoing tasks. Built on the Claude Opus 5.5 model, Duet can connect to over 6,000 connectors and plugins in the Claude Marketplace. It can also make online purchases on users’ behalf via Stripe’s Link digital wallet or Shopify’s Shop Pay. The company said sensitive steps like payments would require user approval. However, Duet won’t trade securities or move money between accounts. Anthropic also released a new classifier to check each message to prevent sensitive information from leaking out. It said that, by default, the agent would turn down requests asking for credit card numbers and government identification. Claude Duet is available as an app on iOS and Android, and on the web through Claude.ai for Pro and Max customers in research preview. Users have to joina waitlist to try it.
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According to Wiz, the vulnerabilities affect PHP releases dating back to version 5.4.
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The Bengaluru startup says its agents resolve around 70% of borrower queries at a home loan company, cutting the cost per query by approximately 50%.
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The Australian SAP partner has more than 300 employees and a delivery presence in the Philippines. The deal is expected to close in Q1 2027.
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The offering uses AI agents and virtual simulations to test automotive software, including rare and safety-critical scenarios, before release.
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The partnerships aim to connect AI education and university research with rural challenges, helping young people explore entrepreneurship and develop local solutions.
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Nutanix plans to work with NVIDIA, Supermicro and Netris to help enterprises and AI cloud providers deploy production AI faster and cheaper.
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The VC firm has appointed former Google executive Kishore Kanakamedala as Venture Partner to lead its US expansion and help portfolio companies enter the market.
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This follows the discovery of eight eMudhra certificate authorities with weak private keys that could potentially have allowed attackers to create fake website certificates and impersonate legitimate websites.
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Claude Duet was released by the Dario Amodei-led AI giant on Wednesday as its new personal AI assistant, Anthropic has announced. The AI assistant is currently available in Anthropic's home market as a research preview. Subscribers can join the waitlist to get access to Claude Duet. It supports more than 6,000 connectors. The AI assistant is capable of checking messages at predetermined intervals and letting the user know when they miss an alert. Users can also ask Claude Duet to check topics they want to know about in connected apps and set when they wish to receive the alert.
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The investment will support Vegafin’s AI-led MSME lending platform and its acquisition of a majority stake in Bizloan, which operates more than 35 branches across five states.
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