News linked to both this project and an event.
According to Tech in Asia, Indian consumer AI and entertainment company EloElo Group (parent company of the micro-drama app Story TV) has announced the completion of an $80 million Series C funding round, bringing its total cumulative funding to $130 million. The round was led by Hornbill Capital and NBCUniversal, with participation from existing investors including MIT Investment Co., Play Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Waterbridge Ventures, and Griffin Gaming Partners.
According to TechCrunch, robotics startup Eka Robotics announced it has closed a $150 million Series A round, reaching a post-money valuation of $1.45 billion, co-led by a16z and F-Prime. The company was founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja. Eka has developed a manipulation architecture that combines force-sensitive grippers with a "vision-force-action" model, differing from the mainstream "vision-language-action" models. By leveraging physics simulators and large-scale reinforcement learning training, the model can generate thousands of hours of robotic experience in just minutes. According to the company, its robots can grasp approximately 1,500 objects weighing no more than 1 kilogram per hour (compared to about 600 for humans), with a success rate exceeding 95%. The gripper hardware costs less than $1,000, with a rated lifespan of 5 million cycles, aiming to meet the industry standard of 20 million cycles for industrial robotic arms.
Odaily reports: Optimum has announced that its block propagation software mump2p has officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet. ether.fi previously offered the software as an optional feature, but has now mandated its adoption across all 12 of its node operators. Currently, a total of 16 node operators are running mump2p in production environments, collectively managing approximately 22,000 validator keys and over 1.4 million staked ETH, accounting for more than 3% of Ethereum's total staked supply. Partners include Blockdaemon, Everstake, P2P.org, Stakefish, and Bitcoin Suisse.mump2p operates as a sidecar gateway, rather than replacing Ethereum's default GossipSub, it layers on top of libp2p and uses random linear network coding technology. Optimum claims that mump2p achieves block arrival speeds 2.42 times faster than GossipSub, with arrival time variance reduced by approximately 7.88 times. Optimum is led by MIT professor Muriel Médard and launched its private testnet in June 2025. The company previously completed an $11 million seed round led by 1kx and plans to expand to other high-throughput blockchains beyond Ethereum.