Technology Sector
Artificial intelligence applications continue to expand across enterprise tools, education, and physical logistics, backed by strong venture capital funding. Startups like Rillet achieved unicorn status with a $100 million Series C, while OpenAI released ChatGPT for Teens and Calendly added native AI note-taking capabilities. Simultaneously, major tech firms are scaling drone delivery partnerships and acquiring specialized training data.
Rillet has raised $100 million in a Series C funding round led by ICONIQ at a $1 billion valuation. The financing represents the AI-native enterprise resource planning platform's third round in a single year, pushing its total capital raised past $200 million. The round follows a period where Rillet doubled its new annual recurring revenue over the prior three months, bringing its customer count to more than 600 companies. Rillet replaces legacy accounting systems such as Oracle Fusion, SAP, Workday, and NetSuite by building its general ledger from scratch to allow AI agents and finance teams to operate within a unified ledger. The company counts fast-growing technology firms including Mercor, Neuralink, and Skild AI among its users, alongside expanding adoption across non-technology sectors.
Google won a bankruptcy auction to acquire internal operational data and software code from defunct carrier Spirit Airlines for $10 million. The winning bid secures roughly 100 million employee emails across 80,000 accounts, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, 17 million OneDrive files, 20 million SharePoint files, and 516 source code repositories. Google plans to feed this digital back-office archive into its artificial intelligence models and product development pipelines. A third party will strip personally identifiable information from the files before delivery, with Google covering the anonymization costs and bearing the contractual obligation to keep the dataset isolated from specific households. The asset sale bested a $7.5 million competing bid from AI data specialist Mercor. Spirit, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2025 and ceased operations in May 2026, excluded passenger profiles and credit card records from the transaction.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens on Tuesday, a dedicated chatbot mode for users under 18 featuring stricter content filters and educational tools. The new experience automatically engages when a user self-identifies as 13 to 17 or when the company's AI estimates the user is a minor. The platform restricts conversations about self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, and sexual content, while blocking the chatbot from expressing personal feelings or consciousness toward users. It also introduces Study Mode to guide students through homework step-by-step rather than supplying direct answers, alongside parental controls for Quiet Hours and safety notifications. The rollout arrives as OpenAI faces multiple lawsuits alleging that unshielded interactions with the chatbot contributed to psychological harm and suicides among young users.