Business·36 stories·Updated July 18, 2026
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54% of enterprises deploy AI agents in production
More than half of billion-dollar US organizations have moved AI agents from pilot phase to live production, according to KPMG's Q1 2026 survey released in March—a jump from 11% a year earlier that sig
Tools
Linux Foundation launches Agent Name Service for AI identity
The Linux Foundation announced its intent to launch the Agent Name Service (ANS) on June 23, 2026, in San Francisco, establishing an open-source standard built on DNS to provide trusted identity, veri
Business
Entire raises $60M, ships Checkpoints agent tool
Entire, led by former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, raised a $60 million seed round in February 2026 and released Checkpoints, an MIT-licensed open-source CLI tool that captures AI agent context on every
Business
Cognition Labs raises $1B+ at $26B valuation in Series D
Cognition Labs, creator of the Devin autonomous software engineering agent, closed a Series D funding round of more than $1 billion on May 27, 2026, at a $26 billion post-money valuation—more than dou
Tools
MCP hits 97M downloads, moves to Linux Foundation
Anthropic's Model Context Protocol reached 97 million monthly SDK downloads in March 2026 and was transferred to the Agentic AI Foundation under Linux Foundation governance in December 2025, cementing
Business
Enterprise AI Agent Deployment Splits Wide: Big Firms Lead With 23+, S
A mid-2026 market analysis reveals 54% of US enterprises have deployed AI agents in production, but the adoption curve splits sharply along revenue lines. Companies exceeding $5 billion in annual reve
Business
Assort Health Reaches $1.2B Valuation on $120M Series C
Assort Health, a San Francisco healthcare AI startup, closed a $120 million Series C funding round led by Menlo Ventures on June 25, 2026, achieving unicorn status at a $1.2 billion valuation. The com
Launches
Microsoft ships Copilot Cowork agent to all M365 users worldwide
Microsoft made Copilot Cowork, an agentic AI system that executes multi-step tasks across Microsoft 365 and third-party tools, generally available worldwide on June 16, 2026. The rollout replaces prev
Tools
Grab Runs Hundreds of AI Agents on Palana Secure Platform
Grab's security and platform engineering teams built Palana, a Kubernetes-native sandbox for running autonomous AI agents safely, already managing hundreds of internal workloads including remote devel
Launches
NVIDIA Agent Toolkit launches with OpenClaw framework, 17 partners
NVIDIA announced its Agent Toolkit at GTC Taipei on March 16, 2026, bundling OpenShell runtime, AI-Q blueprints, and Nemotron models with formal endorsement of the open-source OpenClaw framework and a
Tools
A2A Protocol hits v1.0 production standard with 150+ adopters
The Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Protocol, originally developed by Google and now governed by the Linux Foundation, reached v1.0 in March 2026 as the first stable, production-grade specification for agent int
Business
AIsa Raises $6.5M Seed for AI Agent Payments Network
AIsa, a San Francisco startup founded in 2025, closed a $6.5 million seed round co-led by Alibaba and Tribe Capital on July 7, 2026, to build transaction infrastructure enabling autonomous AI agents t
Business
LinqAlpha Raises $22M Series A for AI Buy-Side Research
LinqAlpha, an AI-native startup building agents for institutional investment research, closed a $22 million Series A on July 2, 2026, led by AVP, Atinum Investment, and GFT Ventures. The New York comp
Business
Norm AI Hits $1.2B Valuation on $120M Series C
Norm AI, a New York–based legal AI startup, raised $120 million in Series C funding on July 7, 2026, led by Khosla Ventures and backed by Blackstone, Bain Capital Ventures, and others. The round value
Business
Lyzr AI Agent Raises $100M Series B on Agent-Led Fundraise
Lyzr Inc., a Jersey City–based AI agent startup, completed a $100 million Series B round at a $500 million valuation by letting its proprietary AI agent SivaClaw run the entire fundraising operation,
Launches
Harness Ships Autonomous Worker Agents for DevOps Pipelines
Harness made its Autonomous Worker Agents and Agent Marketplace generally available on June 30, 2026, letting AI agents run as governed steps inside CI/CD, security, and infrastructure pipelines rathe