Fraud detection is a race against massive transaction volumes. Mastercard processes about 160 billion transactions yearly, with surges up to 70,000 per second during peak times like the holidays. Their fraud platform, Decision Intelligence Pro (DI Pro), uses advanced AI to analyze each transaction in under 300 milliseconds. At its core is a recurrent neural network that assesses transaction patterns to determine fraud risk, treating it as a recommendation problem. Mastercard also addresses data sovereignty by using anonymized global data to make local decisions quickly.
Fraudsters continuously evolve, but Mastercard fights back using "honeypots," artificial traps that help reveal illicit networks through AI and graph analysis. This approach enables the mapping of complex fraud webs to block scammers before they succeed.
The podcast accompanying this article explores how Mastercard builds these AI tools, emphasizing engineering alignment, prioritization, and phased AI deployment, as well as innovations like malware sandboxes and global yet privacy-conscious data strategies.
Since 2016, Benchmark Capital has been backing Cerebras, a competitor to Nvidia, and has now raised an additional $225 million through special funds to intensify its support for the company.
You don't have to be a financial expert to leverage AI for smarter business deals.
Alexandra Mousavizadeh, CEO of Evident AI, emphasizes that banks should prioritize AI investments in areas beyond back-office functions, focusing on aspects that offer a clear competitive advantage and differentiation in the market.
Investors are increasingly focusing on larger late-stage startup rounds, signaling a shift in funding patterns. While overall late-stage investment has climbed, funding for rounds $30 million and under has steadily declined for six consecutive years, hitting a low in 2025 with just $1.36 billion invested in 69 rounds, less than 2% of all late-stage investments. Early 2026 shows an even sharper decline, with smaller rounds representing only about 0.2% of late-stage funding—the lowest ever recorded.
This trend contrasts sharply with 2016, when over half of late-stage rounds were under $30 million, representing more than a sixth of the investment share. Now, small rounds rarely dominate, reflecting a broader investor preference for backing a few potential winners rather than spreading capital thinly.
Factors contributing to this shift include less appetite from major tech companies for smaller acquisitions due to antitrust concerns, and reduced interest from private equity because of higher borrowing costs. As a result, clear exit opportunities for moderate-scale startups are limited, pushing investors to prioritize those with the highest growth potential.
Some startups still pursue smaller rounds when sufficient to reach their next milestone, but the startup funding landscape increasingly favors large, bold investments, especially amid the rise of generative AI and mega-rounds.
Backed by Accel, Sapiom is developing a financial platform that manages authentication and micro-payments, enabling AI agents to independently acquire their necessary technology tools.
Amazon holds convertible notes in the AI startup Anthropic. As Anthropic secures additional funding rounds, this debt is being converted into equity, significantly increasing the value of Amazon's stake.
A developer receives a LinkedIn message from a recruiter about a legitimate-looking role. The required coding assessment involves installing a package that secretly steals all cloud credentials from the developer’s machine—including GitHub tokens and AWS, Azure keys. The attacker gains access to the cloud environment within minutes without triggering email security or dependency scanners. This escalating threat, known as the IAM pivot, exploits a major blind spot in enterprise identity monitoring. Organizations see the package but miss credential theft during installation. Attackers then use stolen credentials to assume cloud IAM roles undetected, often bypassing traditional perimeter defenses entirely. A recent CrowdStrike case revealed attackers compromised a European FinTech firm, diverting cryptocurrency through this method. Industry reports confirm these widespread campaigns use social messaging platforms like WhatsApp to deliver Trojanized packages, circumventing corporate email defenses. To combat this, experts recommend deploying runtime behavioral monitoring on developer workstations, implementing Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) for cloud identities, and introducing AI-based access controls to detect suspicious usage patterns beyond simple authentication. This sophisticated attack chain underscores the urgent need for enterprises to evolve beyond conventional security tools and build identity-focused defenses that operate at machine speed.
ElevenLabs' valuation has surged over threefold in the past year, reflecting robust growth and strong investor confidence.
Alphabet, Google's parent company, has surpassed $400 billion in annual revenue for the first time, as revealed in its Q4 2025 earnings report. This milestone comes alongside a 15 percent year-over-year revenue increase, fueled by strong performances in its cloud division and YouTube platform. Google's Cloud business hit a $70 billion run rate in 2025, while YouTube's combined ad and subscription revenue topped $60 billion. CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted YouTube's status as the leading streaming service, referencing Nielsen's data to support the claim.
