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AI Is Making Cheaper MRI Machines Look Premium
AI is improving 1.5 Tesla MRI output, prompting hospitals to rethink expensive 3 Tesla upgrades and rebalance cost, access, and diagnostic quality.
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Upscale AI in talks to raise at $2B valuation, says report
AI infrastructure companyUpscale AIis reportedly in talks to nab its third funding round since launching just seven months ago,according to Bloomberg. This latest round — which aims to raise around $180 million to $200 million — would value the company at about $2 billion. The company announced a $200 million Series A in January and a$100 million seed roundin September, when it first launched. Investors in the company include Tiger Global Management, Xora Innovation, and Premji Invest. Notably, Upscale AI has yet to release a product. However, it’s said to focus on building custom chips and on the infrastructure to enable them to communicate effectively. The company is betting on a full-stack solution and open standards as being the future of scalable AI infrastructure. The rumored valuation and raise are part of the startup playbook in this age of AI, where companies grow fast and valuations grow faster, but the hope for the next big thing outpaces it all.
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Luma launches AI-powered production studio with faith-focused Wonder Project
AI video generation startup Luma has launched Innovative Dreams, a production company built in partnership with Wonder Project, a streaming service that produces religious films and TV on Amazon Prime. The tie-up’s first show will be called “The Old Stories: Moses,” starring British actor Ben Kingsley and set to launch this spring on Prime Video. “Innovative Dreams is a production services company where seasoned filmmakers from director Jon Erwin’s team and Luma’s creative technologists work with great studios and filmmakers to help them realize ambitious ideas,” Luma said Thursday in asocial media post. The company envisages creative teams collaborating in real time with Luma Agents to make changes to sets, props, and lighting, as well as bring in footage of human actors. Luma Agents are the company’srecently launched toolsdesigned to handle end-to-end creative work across text, image, video, and audio. “This is a significant improvement over the current virtual production and performance capture processes where things come together only in post,” Luma’s post said. “This is the leverage of AI — not just faster or cheaper, but better than what came before.” Luma isn’t the only startup to move from tooling to production. AI startup Higgsfield last week launched anoriginal series, starting with a 10-minute sci-fi episode, and London-based creative studioWonder Studiosis working on a documentary with Campfire Studios. The launch comes the same week that competitor Runway’s co-founder and co-CEOCristóbal Valenzuela saidfilm studios should take the $100 million they spend on a single film and instead use AI to produce 50 films in order to increase their chances of making a blockbuster. Luma founder and CEO Amit Jain has made a similar case, telling TechCrunch that Hollywood’s soaring production costs have made filmmaking increasingly constrained. Generative AI, he argues, could make filmmaking faster, cheaper, and more efficient without sacrificing quality. That thinking underpins Luma’s new partnership with Wonder Project. Wonder Project, launched in 2023, is run by director Jon Erwin and former Netflix executive Kelly Hoogstraten with the goal of serving the faith and values audience globally. Their first project, “House of David,” a Biblical drama series about the life of King David, was released on Amazon Prime in 2025. It’s unclear whether Innovative Dreams will focus solely on religious and faith-based content or expand beyond Wonder’s remit. TechCrunch has reached out for clarification. In avideopromoting the partnership, Erwin said Innovative Dreams will use a new “real-time hybrid filmmaking” process that combines performance capture (as in “Avatar”) and virtual production (as in “The Mandalorian”), done live and more cheaply using Luma’s tools. Performance capture is a technique where actors perform in a green-screen environment wearing suits and facial markers so their movements and expressions can be digitally captured and turned into animated characters. Virtual production involves actors performing on set, often in front of massive LED screens instead of a green screen while real-time game-engine graphics create the environment around them, blending the physical and digital worlds during the shoot. Luma’s tools, Erwin said, allow them to film a human actor anywhere and then transport that to a photorealistic scene, or go even further by generating a new face so it looks like a completely different person but still maps onto the actor’s movements and facial expressions.
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Factory hits $1.5B valuation to build AI coding for enterprises
More than three years after the emergence of generative AI, AI-assisted coding remains by far the most popular and lucrative use case for the technology. Although multiple companies — including Anthropic, maker of Claude Code, as well as Cursor and Cognition — are already vying for dominance, investors believe there is room for at least one more player. On Wednesday, Factory, a startup developing AI agents for enterprise engineering teams, announced it had raised $150 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, and Blackstone. Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, joined the startup’s board. Factory founder Matan Grinberg told theWall Street Journalthat the company’s key differentiator is its ability to switch between different foundation models, such as Anthropic’s Claude or Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. However, startups like Cursor also don’t rely on a single model to generate code. Factory’s customers include engineering teams at Morgan Stanley, Ernst & Young, and Palo Alto Networks. The startup was founded in 2023 after Grinberg, then a PhD student at UC Berkeley, cold-emailed Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire. The two bonded over mutual academic interest. (Maguire’s PhD from Caltech is in the same area of physics Grinberg was studying.) Maguire convinced Grinberg to drop out and launch Factory, with Sequoia backing the startup at the seed stage.
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