OpenAI Eyes $1.5T Valuation, Factory AI Hits $5B, and More Tech News

AI

OpenAI Weighs $1.2-1.5 Trillion Private Funding Round

OpenAI is shelving its 2026 IPO in favor of a private funding round. Bloomberg reports that investors have offered a $1.2 trillion valuation, but the company believes it is worth at least $1.5 trillion. That would roughly double its most recent private valuation of $730 billion.

Annualized revenue surpassed $40 billion as of August. CEO Sam Altman ruled out a 2026 listing on September 12, citing AI safety concerns, and the company is now targeting a 2027 IPO instead.

If completed, this round would make OpenAI the most valuable private company in history. The sheer scale of capital flowing into AI now rivals what the semiconductor industry sees.

Factory AI Raises $200M, Tripling Valuation to $5 Billion

Autonomous coding agent startup Factory has raised $200 million. According to Reuters, the company’s valuation jumped from $1.5 billion in April to $5 billion in just five months.

Factory’s “Droids” platform automates the full software development lifecycle: building, testing, and maintenance. It is model-agnostic and supports cloud, on-premises, and fully air-gapped deployments. Enterprise engineering teams are the primary customers.

Surveys suggest developers now produce roughly half their code with AI assistance, and Factory’s rapid valuation growth reflects how aggressively enterprises are investing in autonomous coding infrastructure.

TypeSafe AI Emerges From Stealth With $40M Seed

TypeSafe AI, founded by RLHF and ChatGPT co-inventor Diogo Almeida alongside Erik Gafni and Sasha Sheng, has emerged from stealth with a $40 million seed round led by DCVC.

The company is building “machine-native, composable AI” designed to run inside software systems rather than chat with humans. Early access to its first frontier model, Jev, is available via waitlist at typesafe.ai.

Where most LLMs focus on conversational interfaces, TypeSafe targets direct integration into software pipelines. A $40M seed is unusually large, signaling strong investor conviction in this approach.

Big Tech

Meta Begins Production of MTIA “Iris” Custom AI Inference Chip

Meta is putting its fourth-generation MTIA (Meta Training and Inference Accelerator) chip, codenamed “Iris,” into production this September. CNBC reports the chip was co-designed with Broadcom and manufactured by TSMC.

For Meta’s targeted inference workloads, the chip delivers a 44% reduction in total cost of ownership and 40% improvement in power efficiency compared to general-purpose NVIDIA GPUs. It cleared testing in roughly six weeks, a fast turnaround for custom silicon.

Model training still relies on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. MTIA is a complement, not a replacement, aimed at bringing inference costs down. Industry analysis notes that big tech’s custom chip strategies are gradually loosening NVIDIA’s grip on the AI hardware market.

SpaceX Targets First Orbital Starship Flight on September 22

SpaceX has circled September 22 for Starship’s 14th flight and its first attempt to reach orbit. The mission will deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites during a roughly 10-hour flight at an altitude of 275 km, completing about six orbits.

The 75-minute launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. CT. The Super Heavy booster will ditch in the Gulf of Mexico, while Starship splashes down in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile.

All previous flights intentionally followed suborbital trajectories to maximize public safety while learning. Reaching orbit opens the door to the next development phase: making Starship fully and rapidly reusable.

Startups

Anew Labs (ByteDance Spinoff) Raises $290M for AI Drug Discovery

AI drug discovery company Anew Labs, spun off from ByteDance, has raised $290 million in its first external funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation. HSG (formerly Sequoia China), IDG Capital, and Hillhouse Investment co-led the round, with ByteDance retaining a 56% stake.

The company has developed structure-prediction model Protenix and protein-design model PXDesign. Its AI platform supports drug development from target identification through clinical development. China’s Shanghai Future Industries Fund also participated as a strategic investor.

The spinoff signals ByteDance’s expansion beyond TikTok into AI-driven biotech. Securing a $1.5 billion valuation right out of the gate reflects the growing appetite for AI-powered pharmaceutical R&D.

Noetive Emerges With $41M Seed for Industrial AI

Noetive, founded by AI researchers and operators from Meta, Google, Amazon, and Fortune 500 companies, has emerged from stealth with a $41 million seed round led by Eclipse. Craft Ventures, The Westly Group, and Swish Ventures also participated.

The company calls itself “the intelligence of record for the physical economy.” It applies frontier AI research to complex operational challenges in manufacturing, logistics, construction, and other industrial sectors through real-world deployments.

AI startup investment has largely focused on software. Noetive’s sizable seed round, at $41 million, suggests the capital is now following AI into the physical world, where the operational complexity is higher but so is the potential impact.

Cornelis Networks Raises $205M, Unveils Active Compute Fabric

AI infrastructure networking company Cornelis Networks has raised $205 million led by IAG Capital Partners and announced a strategic collaboration with Qualcomm.

The newly unveiled Active Compute Fabric combines programmable compute, lossless transport, and in-fabric acceleration in an open architecture. Instead of GPUs sitting idle while waiting for data, the network itself processes data in transit. The CN5000 is shipping now, and the CN6000 is expected in Q4 2026.

The core pitch is a GPU-agnostic alternative to NVIDIA’s InfiniBand and NVLink. As TechCrunch notes, networking bottlenecks in AI clusters have become a critical pain point as model sizes keep growing.

Open Source

Alibaba Open Code Review Tops 27K Stars on GitHub

Alibaba’s AI-powered code review tool, battle-tested internally by tens of thousands of developers over two years, is now available as open source. It has earned over 27,600 GitHub stars and reached the number one spot on GitHub Trending.

The tool uses a hybrid architecture that pairs deterministic pipelines with an LLM Agent for precise, line-level comments. It ships with built-in multi-language rulesets covering NPE, thread safety, XSS, and SQL injection, and supports both OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.

What sets it apart is scale-proven reliability. The project holds an OpenSSF Gold badge and ships new releases every few days. Enterprise teams evaluating AI code review now have a production-grade open source option.

Gods Eye View: Browser-Based Open Source Satellite Simulator

A browser-based satellite simulator called Gods Eye View gained over 17,800 stars on GitHub this week. The project renders live spatial intelligence on a photorealistic 3D globe using real data.

It supports 13 free data sources, including OpenSky, CelesTrak, USGS, and adsb.lol, with keyless paths requiring no signup. Users can track aircraft, satellite orbits, and weather data in an integrated 3D view.

The project reflects surging interest in open source spatial intelligence tools. It even supports live radio reception linked to locations on the globe.

GreptimeDB Reaches v1.0 GA: Unified Observability Engine

Open source observability database GreptimeDB has reached v1.0 GA. It processes metrics, logs, and traces through a single columnar engine on object storage, licensed under Apache 2.0.

Rather than treating observability as three separate pillars, GreptimeDB uses a wide-event model. It ingests via OpenTelemetry, Prometheus Remote Write, Loki Push, and Elasticsearch Bulk, and supports unified querying through SQL and PromQL.

OceanBase Cloud runs over 80 GreptimeDB clusters managing 300 TB of logs, cutting log storage costs by 60% compared to Grafana Loki. The project has real production-scale validation.

Gaming

Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave Launches Today on Switch 2

The latest entry in Nintendo’s tactical RPG franchise, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, launched today (September 17) as a Switch 2 exclusive. Intelligent Systems developed the title.

Set in the Dagdan Empire, far southwest of Three Houses’ Fodlan, the game introduces a parallel-route structure. The goddess Sothis sends the player back five years to the Heroic Games, where four heroes’ fates can be played simultaneously rather than through separate playthroughs.

A “Dagdan Collection” special edition includes an artbook and themed merchandise. As one of Switch 2’s key launch titles, it strengthens Nintendo’s next-gen lineup.

Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter Ships on PS5, Switch 2, and PC

Falcom’s acclaimed JRPG remake Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter launched today (September 17) simultaneously on PS5, Switch 2, Switch, and Steam worldwide. Both physical and digital editions are available.

In the West, physical editions ship for PS5, Switch 2, and Switch. In Japan, only PS5 and Switch 2 get physical copies. Japanese pre-order buyers receive a download code for an HD remaster of the original Trails in the Sky.

Launching alongside Fire Emblem, September 17 marks a landmark day for JRPG fans. The timing also coincides with TGS 2026, adding to the gaming industry’s busiest week of the fall.

References

1. OpenAI Weighing Funding Round at Over $1.2 Trillion Valuation — Bloomberg
2. OpenAI Is Reportedly Weighing New Funding Round At $1.5 Trillion Valuation — Forbes
3. AI coding agent startup Factory triples valuation to $5 billion — Reuters
4. TypeSafe AI Emerges From Stealth With $40M in Funding — Yahoo Finance / Business Wire
5. Meta rolls out in-house AI chips — CNBC
6. In-depth Analysis of Meta’s Self-Developed AI Chip — SemiconReport
7. SpaceX - Starship Flight 14 — SpaceX
8. SpaceX’s next Starship launch will aim to reach orbit for 1st time — Space.com
9. ByteDance’s AI drug unit Anew Labs raises $290M — The Next Web
10. Noetive Emerges From Stealth With $41 Million Seed — PRNewswire
11. Cornelis Expands into Scale-Up Networking with Active Compute Fabric — Cornelis Networks
12. AI infrastructure company Cornelis raises $205M — TechCrunch
13. alibaba/open-code-review — GitHub
14. auraofintelligence/gods-eye-view — GitHub
15. GreptimeDB — Greptime
16. GreptimeTeam/greptimedb — GitHub
17. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave — Nintendo
18. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave Overview Trailer — RPGamer
19. Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter — Official Site
20. Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter launches September 17 — Gematsu