Future Tech
On its 14th test flight, SpaceX's Starship reached Earth orbit for the first time and deployed 26 next-generation Starlink satellites, before the company cut the mission short after losing one of the ship's six engines.
Aravind Kumar
Author
Waymo now runs about 4,000 robotaxis in 15 US cities and averages 500,000 paid rides a week. Registration data show about 80% of the fleet is in California and Texas, where it has grown 49% in three weeks, as autonomous vehicle companies choose very different routes to scale.
IIT Madras-incubated spacetech start-up GalaxEye has secured ₹63.84 crore through the Technology Development Board under India's ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Fund to develop a next-generation OptoSAR satellite that can image the Earth through clouds and darkness.
Palo Alto-based PicoJool has raised a $27.5 million Series A led by Socratic Partners, with Hudson River Trading participating, to scale its VCSEL-based optical interconnects that move data between chips in AI clusters.
US semiconductor company Mythic AI has launched a Bengaluru Centre of Excellence to build its analog compute-in-memory AI chips, targeting data centres, cars and robotics, and plans to quadruple its India workforce by early 2027.
Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet at the White House on September 24 with advanced chips, rare-earth export controls, AI safety and data-centre power among the technology issues shaping the talks.
Abu Dhabi's Space42 and US-based Viasat have committed about $1 billion to Equatys, a joint venture that plans to offer global direct-to-device satellite connectivity to ordinary smartphones from 2029.
Netherlands-based Morphotonics has raised €40 million from investors including 3M Ventures, the EIC Fund and the EIB to scale nanoimprint lithography for AR waveguides and move into co-packaged optics for AI data centres.
Shanghai-based BCI-Sonics has raised RMB200 million in a Pre-Series A round co-led by HSG and Yunqi Capital to develop a non-invasive brain-computer interface combining focused ultrasound, multimodal brain sensing and AI decoding.