Latest AI News
Nimble raises $47M to give AI agents access to real-time web data
Believe it or not, web search is still thriving as an industry. As businesses invest in using AI agents to make the most of their data, there’s demand for tools that not only scrape the web to inform what those AI bots do, but also return those results in a way that’s easier to use with modern data tools. That’s the promise behind web search startupNimble, which recently raised a $47 million Series B round, led by Norwest. The New York company’s platform employs AI agents to search the web in real time, verify, and validate the results, and then structure the information into neat tables that can then be queried like a database. That last part is crucial here. LLMs and AI agents are great for searching the web, connecting results from a variety of sources, and analyzing them, but they often return the results in plain text, which can be difficult to work with at an enterprise level. And that’s before you factor in hallucinations, the risk of the agent misunderstanding your instructions, or the use of unreliable sources. By validating and structuring results into tables, Nimble lets companies use web data as if it were already part of their existing databases. The startup also integrates with enterprise data warehouses and data lakes — large centralized repositories where businesses store and analyze data — offered by the likes of Databricks and Snowflake. That means its AI agents can plug into a business’s trove of data, using it to build context, and shape how search results are structured and returned. In effect, this lets enterprises have live, structured web data as part of their existing data environments, Nimble CEO and co-founder Uri Knorovich (pictured above, middle) told TechCrunch. Such integrations also allow Nimble’s software to remember constraints — such as how you want the search to be performed, or which data sources to tap. This is particularly useful for applications such as competitor analysis, pricing research, know-your-customer (KYC) processes, brand monitoring, deep research, and financial analysis. (Knorovich noted that Nimble works to ensure all customer data remains within customers’ data infrastructure to comply with data retention and security policies.) To that end, the startup has partnered with Databricks, Snowflake, AWS and Microsoft to help streamline enterprise deployments that require access to internal data sources. (Databricks also participated in this Series B.) “Models can do a lot of things, but most production AI fails aren’t because the models are not good enough — it’s because of a data failure,” Knorovich said. “What we’re seeing today is that enterprises don’t need more AI; they need AI with good, reliable web search […] If you nail it down, if you can choose what your agent can search and cannot search, this is the tipping point for enterprises to say, ‘hey we can actually trust AI. We can actually put AI to work in more use cases’.” Knorovich says the ability to search the web in real time at scale, and validate and structure search results, is what sets Nimble apart from other data brokers already in the space. The startup currently has more than 100 customers, with the majority of its revenue coming from large enterprises, Fortune 500 companies, and even some Fortune 10 companies, including major retailers, hedge funds, banks, and consumer packaged goods companies, as well as some AI-native startups. “Nimble is tackling a problem that has existed for years without a proper solution and is now becoming of critical urgency,” Assaf Harel, partner at Norwest, said in a statement. “Trusted live web data is increasingly becoming a prerequisite for AI agents performing critical business decisions.” The Series B also saw participation from returning investors Target Global, Square Peg, Hetz Ventures, Slow Ventures, R-Squared Ventures, J-Ventures, and InvestInData. Proceeds from the round will be used to expand R&D in multi-agent web search and a governed data layer that processes and validates search results. Nimble has now raised a total of $75 million.
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New Relic launches new AI agent platform and OpenTelemetry tools
Companies are increasingly launching software to build and monitor AI agents in an effort to get enterprises to adopt AI. New Relic is no different. As the data observability company launches an AI agent platform of its own, it knows it isn’t the only game in town. New Relic on Tuesday unveiled a no-code agentic platform that lets enterprises put together data observability AI agents that monitor a company’s data to catch bugs and issues before they disrupt products. Called New Relic Agentic Platform, it lets companies deploy pre-built agents and manage existing bots as well. It also supports the model context protocol (MCP), which connects AI applications to external data sources, and integrates with other New Relic tools. New Relic isn’t looking to be the only platform that companies use to manage and deploy all of their AI agents, Brian Emerson, the startup’s new chief product officer, told TechCrunch. Instead, the aim is to offer clients the same agent-building capabilities they are getting elsewhere for observability as well. “We’re not building this as general purpose,” Emerson said. “We’re building it for outcomes that we care about inside observability. It’s also a world that allows us to work with the rest of the ecosystem or tools that exist out there, but bring it back into the context of problems we’re trying to solve around our personas and the observability domain.” Software that lets users manage AI agents has proliferated in recent months as companies look to figure out how to quell enterprises’ fears about giving AI agents access to their data and software. Salesforce was arguably the first to release an agent platform in late 2024, calling itAgentforce. OpenAI launched its own version of the technology,OpenAI Frontier, earlier this year. Research organization Gartner hascalledsuch agent platforms “necessary infrastructure” and a critical component of getting enterprises to adopt AI. Sticking with the theme of increasing enterprise tech adoption, New Relic also revealed new tools focused on OpenTelemetry (OTel), an open-source observability framework. The company said its application performance monitoring (APM) agents are now equipped with OTel capabilities, letting enterprises manage OTel data streams alongside their other data sources in one place. This is aimed at solving a previous fragmentation problem that was holding up mass enterprise adoption of the OTel framework. “Just send your OTel data to us,” Nic Benders, chief technology strategist at New Relic, said. “What we’ve discovered in this process is that it’s kind of a burden for a lot of teams out there in the world to run all of the OTel [data] collectors. So having a OTel like fleet management is something that’s very important.”
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Anthropic launches new push for enterprise agents with plugins for finance, engineering, and design
On Tuesday, Anthropic unveiledits new enterprise agents program, its most aggressive push yet to integrate agentic AI into everyday workplaces. In an official briefing, Anthropic’s head of Americas, Kate Jensen, told reporters that the new system would finally deliver on the promise of agentic AI. “2025 was meant to be the year agents transformed the enterprise, but the hype turned out to be mostly premature,” Jensen said. “It wasn’t a failure of effort. It was a failure of approach.” Under the new program, companies can use the plug-in system to deploy pre-built agents to help with common enterprise tasks, including financial research and engineering specifications. The result is a major opportunity to grow Anthropic’s enterprise client base — and a significant threat to SaaS products currently performing those functions. “We believe that the future of work means everybody having their own custom agent,” Anthropic product officer Matt Piccolella told TechCrunch. Much of the enterprise agents program draws on previously announced technology, particularly Claude Cowork and the plugin system, which was announced in research previewon January 30th. The systems launched today are largely focused on making those tools easier to deploy within a company, including private software marketplaces, controlled data flows, and customized plugins. The result is a system for deploying Claude-powered agents with the same controls a corporate IT department would expect when deploying software. “Admins want to be able to have really, really, really tailored workflows and skills for their specific organization,” Piccolella said. “And this allows the admin of a Claude Cowork organization to be able to do this in a very centralized way.” The stock plugins included at launch take aim at particular departments present within most companies, including agents designed for finance, legal, and HR departments. Each plugin includes basic skills common across different companies, although Anthropic expects that companies will modify each plugin to bring it in line with unique needs and customs. In the case of finance, the stock plugin gives Claude the basic information and data flows necessary to perform market and competitive research, financial modeling, and other common tasks for finance teams. The HR plugin includes skills for generating job descriptions, onboarding materials, and offer letters, among others. The launch also includes a number of new enterprise connectors, including integrations for Gmail, DocuSign, and Clay, among others. Previously unavailable, these connectors will allow agents to pull in data and context directly from the linked system.
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Bharat1 AI Research & Innovation City to Launch AI Superpark in Bengaluru with NVIDIA
The 5,00,000 square feet B1 AI Superpark will anchor a larger four million square feet AI district, aiming to host 25,000 researchers.
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HCL GUVI Partners with OpenAI to Integrate AI Tools Into Learning Programmes
HCL GUVI also concluded the India Impact Buildathon, which drew over 40,000 participants across 100+ cities.
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Canva Buys Cavalry & MangoAI to Boost Creative, Ad Tech
The twin acquisitions target motion design and AI-driven advertising performance optimisation.
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Xflow Raises $16.6 Mn to Simplify Cross-Border Payments for Indian Businesses
Fintech startup Xflow raised $16.6 million from General Catalyst, Stripe and PayPal Ventures to make cross-border payments easier.
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Microsoft Adds Support for Fully Disconnected Operations & Large AI Models to Sovereign Cloud
The offerings are intended for governments, regulated industries and enterprises that require operations to continue without connectivity to public cloud services.
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Riding the AI Wave, Indian IT to Hit $315 Bn in FY26: Nasscom
In FY26, over 2 million Indian IT professionals upskilled as ‘Human + AI’ teams become the dominant model.
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AMD, Meta Sign Multi-Year Deal to Deploy Up to 6 Gigawatts of AI GPUs
The infrastructure will be built on AMD’s Helios rack-scale architecture, developed jointly with Meta through the Open Compute Project.
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IBM to Expand Quantum, Cloud Investments in India: Ashwini Vaishnaw
Fresh investments from IBM in quantum computing and cloud infrastructure can deepen India’s advanced technology capabilities.
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Canva acquires startups working on animation and marketing
On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced the dual acquisition of startupsCavalry, which works on animation, andMango AI, which works on improving ad performance. UK-based Cavalry works on 2D motion animation for different verticals such as advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva said that Cavalry’s tooling will add to the existing capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s professional creative editing suite for photos, vectors, and layouts, which itacquiredin 2024 CanvarevampedAffinity’s design last year and made it free for all users. The company said that since then, people have downloaded the software over five million times. Affinity has the capabilities of photos, vector, and layout editing. With this acquisition, Canva wants to add motion editing to its suite. “By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we’re closing that [motion editing] gap and unlocking a complete professional suite spanning photo, vector, layout, and now motion editing,” the company said in a blog post. “Together, these tools form the foundation of a full-stack Creative OS for professional work, while preserving the depth and control professional creatives rely on,” it added. Besides Cavalry, Canva has also acquired stealth startupMangoAI, which was working on building reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance, according to its website. Canva said that the startup’s first product helped clients create and launch ads and observe outcomes to improve future campaigns. MangoAI was built by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said that Govind will become Canva’s first ” Chief Algorithms Officer” and Misra will work on improving Canva’s marketing products. In January 2025, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startupMagicbriefand later last year, it launched a growth tool called Canva Grow for asset creation and performance measurement. During a sit-down at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch that Canva Grow is doing “incredibly well,” especially when it comes to creating static content and publishing it to Meta platforms. “It is quite an early product, but we’ll soon be launching a lot more things around video creation, deploying across multi platform,” Obrecht had said. “So it’s very early, but it’s very much got a very loyal small user base, but a lot of big brands are spending money, and then we’re scaling up massively.” With the new acquisitions, the company wants to bolster its position as a marketing solution by potentially adding video creation and more granular measurement. Canva closed2025 at $4 billion in annualized revenuewith more than 265 million users and 31 million paid users.
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