February 19, 2026

OpenAI reportedly finalizing $100B deal at more than $850B valuation: OpenAI is reportedly getting close to closing a $100 billion deal, with backers including Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank, and Microsoft. The deal would value the ChatGPT-maker at $850 billion. Read More

This VC’s best advice for building a founding team: This season on Build Mode, we’re diving into what it takes to build a world-class founding team.  To kick off season two, Isabelle Johannessen is joined by Yuri Sagalov, managing director at General Catalyst and former founder, YC partner, and seed investor at Wayfinder Ventures. Sagalov has worked with hundreds of pre-seed and seed-stage companies and has seen firsthand the best (and worst) ways to hire in the early days. Read More

Current is a new RSS reader that's more like a river than an inbox: Current introduces a stress-free, totally reimagined RSS news reading app as a one-time paid download. Read More

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Altman and Amodei share a moment of awkwardness at India's big AI summit: When Prime Minister Narendra Modi prompted speakers at the event to join hands and raise them in a show of unity, all executives on stage obliged, except OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, who held their hands conspicuously apart. Read More

Freeform raises $67M Series B to scale up laser AI manufacturing : “I think we're the only quote-unquote manufacturing company out there that has H200 clusters in a data center on site." Read More

Bug in student admissions website exposed children's personal information: Ravenna Hub, which lets parents apply and track the status of their kids' applications across thousands of schools, allowed any logged-in user to access the personally identifiable data associated with any other user, including their children. Read More

These former Big Tech engineers are using AI to navigate Trump's trade chaos: Amari AI is making custom AI-powered software that helps customs brokers modernize and minimize constantly shifting trade policies. Read More

For open-source programs, AI coding tools are a mixed blessing: AI coding tools have enabled a flood of bad code that threatens to overwhelm many projects. Building new features is easier but maintaining them is just as hard. Read More

AI-native applications are dynamic, unpredictable, and moving at machine speed. Evo by Snyk introduces a new era of "agentic security"—using specialized AI agents to discover, test, and protect your AI ecosystem.

OpenAI, Reliance partner to add AI search to JioHotstar: The rollout includes two-way integration that surfaces streaming links directly inside ChatGPT. Read More

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