Ema is betting that the software industry is ready to move away from per-seat or per-token pricing models in favor of charging directly for task completion and business outcomes. Following a $77 million Series B round that brings its total funding to $140 million, the company is testing whether enterprises will prefer paying for results…
CVE-2026-85102, a critical improper certificate validation vulnerability (CWE-295) affecting the VPN negotiation flow of Check Point Security Gateways and Spark Firewalls, is now confirmed to be under active exploitation — three days before a federal compliance deadline. The vulnerability was initially disclosed on September 9, 2026, with patches made available immediately. At the time, Check…
Baselayer has raised $35 million in a Series A led by M13, with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital, and Matt Thompson of Socure. The round, announced September 22, marks the first dedicated capital injection into Know Your Agent identity infrastructure — the layer that lets banks, merchants, and platforms verify which AI…
Sela, a startup building voice AI agents for the mortgage industry, has secured $21 million in funding across its Seed and Series A rounds. The investment was led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Emergence Capital. This capital injection arrives as the company reports significant traction in a sector where AI is often discussed in…
The digital asset market is currently bifurcated by the regulatory architecture of the GENIUS Act, which has effectively forced a choice between bank-native tokenized deposits and yield-optimized stablecoin wrappers. At the center of this divide is Section 4(a)(11), which explicitly prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying interest or yield to holders. Tokenized deposits function as bank…
Chairman Andrew Ferguson put the premise plainly: when consumers see a listed price, they expect it to be the same price everyone else sees. The FTC’s proposed enforcement policy on personalized pricing, which closes for comment on September 25, takes that expectation and builds a disclosure regime around it. Companies using personal data to set…
The holiday shopping season is no longer just about retail calendars; it is about the training schedules of our digital assistants. With Black Friday arriving on November 27, 2026, we are roughly nine weeks out from the start of the peak shopping window. For those considering delegating their gift lists to an AI, the time…
When an agent needs to run continuously for days — maintaining state, watching for events, serving a single user — the compute requirements look nothing like a typical web service. But when that same agent needs to spin up for a single task and tear down afterward, or handle millions of lightweight requests at the…
The Readiness Gap Only 11% of SMBs and 19% of large merchants currently qualify as agent-ready, according to the PYMNTS/Visa GDSI Merchant Edition. This stark statistic serves as the primary bottleneck for agentic commerce, separating the theoretical potential of autonomous shopping from the reality of digital retail. While the industry fixates on the reasoning capabilities…
The economics of large language models have shifted from a race to the bottom on headline token prices to a sophisticated extraction of value through opaque reasoning layers. Within a 48-hour window, the industry witnessed a flurry of releases: GPT-6 Sol and Luna, Claude Opus 5.5, and Grok 4.7, all featuring 20% to 50% price…