IJR News — today's news from every sideFalconTST 2.0 Rolling Out Across Six Banks — Aug 20, 2026Ant International launched Falcon Time-Series Transformer Model 2.0, signing six major banks including Citi, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, and Barclays to apply the AI for cross-border payments, FX risk, and liquidity management as part of a broader push to embed specialized AI in finance. The model boasts a leading time-series benchmark with over 93% forecast accuracy, a MASE of 0.666, and the company has highlighted a $1.2 billion fundraising last month to expand its use across industries such as aviation, e-commerce, and logistics.
Etched raises $300M Series C at $10.3B valuation — Jul 23, 2026Etched, a San Jose-based AI chip startup building GPU-free inference processors, raised $300 million in a Series C at a $10.3 billion post-money valuation led by Sequoia with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion, doubling its previous valuation and signaling rapid scale. The company plans to expand production, deploy facilities near its headquarters, and commercialize its inference hardware to challenge Nvidia in transformer-based AI workloads, with over $1 billion in orders already booked.
