Market & RegulationInvestment · $311M
Enveda raises $311M for AI drug discovery
TechCrunch AIhigh confidence
Why it matters
- →Validates the niche of AI-driven discovery of natural compounds over synthetic chemistry.
- →Demonstrates investor confidence in AI-discovered drugs reaching clinical trials.
- →Highlights the growing capital influx into biotech startups leveraging machine learning for drug identification.
Enveda Biosciences has secured $311 million in Series E funding led by Catalio Capital Management, valuing the company at $2 billion. Founded in 2019 by Viswa Colluru, the startup uses AI to identify drug candidates from natural sources like plants and microbes. The company currently has multiple assets in clinical trials, including treatments for severe skin conditions and weight loss maintenance following GLP-1 therapy cessation. This investment marks a significant valuation increase compared to its previous round.
Read originalMore from TechCrunch AI
© TechCrunch AIModels & Labsagents
ChatGPT mobile gets voice-based agentic Work tab
OpenAI is finally bringing its desktop 'Work' capabilities to the ChatGPT mobile app, allowing Plus and Pro users to trigger complex workflows like drafting documents or summarizing Slack messages via voice. This moves beyond simple chat into agentic territory, letting users build sites or access finances through richer text output generated from voice commands. While Anthropic has focused on merging interfaces, OpenAI keeps chat and workspaces separate but is closing the gap by enabling seamless handoff between mobile and desktop. The real shift here is making multi-step automation accessible via voice on a pocket device, not just typing on a keyboard.
TechCrunch AI
© TechCrunch AIVideo & Creative AIother
YouTube Music adds conversational AI and podcast guides
YouTube Music is finally catching up to Spotify’s AI ambitions with two features that move beyond simple search. Ask Music lets users build queues or dig into music history using natural language, tapping into a catalog of over 300 million tracks. Meanwhile, Your Podcast Lineup generates spoken previews to cut through the noise of endless show recommendations. This isn't a breakthrough in model capability, but it signals that major platforms are standardizing conversational interfaces as the primary way to consume media.
TechCrunch AI
© TechCrunch AIGeneral AIother
YouTube launches AI-powered custom feeds
YouTube is finally letting users curate their own discovery streams using natural language prompts powered by Gemini. This moves beyond simple keyword filtering into semantic understanding, allowing for nuanced requests like 'relaxing commentary' or specific commute contexts. It aligns YouTube with Bluesky and Threads in the race to democratize feed curation, acknowledging that one-size-fits-all algorithms no longer satisfy diverse user intents. The feature pins these custom streams to the home tab without disrupting the main recommendation engine, offering a parallel layer of control over the platform's massive 20 billion-video library.
TechCrunch AI
More in Market & Regulation
© WIRED AIMarket & Regulationother
US-China AI Hotline Faces Delays Amid Policy Friction
The Trump administration is pushing for a US-China AI notification hotline to prevent national security escalations, but the initiative is stalling over fundamental disagreements. Key hurdles include defining what constitutes a reportable incident and securing explicit Chinese commitment, which remains noncommittal. The delay is further complicated by internal debates over enforcement mechanisms and the appointment of a new 'AI czar' to lead interagency coordination. This friction underscores the difficulty of establishing guardrails in an industry defined by rapid technological advancement and geopolitical rivalry.
WIRED AI
© The Verge AIMarket & Regulationother
California mandates data center energy and water transparency
California has signed seven bills forcing data centers to disclose their electricity and water usage, closing a major information gap that has left communities in the dark about infrastructure impacts. The legislation requires monthly energy reporting and specific water disclosures during permitting, while also directing regulators to create separate power rates to prevent costs from being passed on to general consumers. This marks a significant shift from voluntary sustainability pledges to enforceable transparency, driven by concerns over grid strain and local resource depletion. It signals that the era of opaque AI infrastructure expansion is ending in one of the world's largest tech markets.
The Verge AI
© WIRED AIMarket & Regulationother
Pope’s AI Advisor Warns Labs of Cartel Behavior
Father Paolo Benanti argues that the current safety debate is a distraction engineered by big labs to maintain market dominance. By framing superintelligence as an existential threat requiring exclusive technical solutions, these companies effectively exclude public oversight and democratic regulation. This narrative shift protects their commercial interests while ignoring the real issue: ensuring human control over statistical computation. The warning reframes AI governance from a technical safety problem to a political one.
WIRED AI