London-based Fleek has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Burda Principal Investments, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs and H14, bringing total funding to $45 million. The company operates a B2B marketplace connecting over 2,000 wholesale suppliers with more than 50,000 retailers and resellers across 100-plus countries. Founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, Fleek provides infrastructure for the secondhand clothing industry. Its core technology, Fleek Sort, uses a custom vision-language model trained on millions of transactions to identify, categorise and grade secondhand garments from photographs or video. The platform addresses inefficiencies in a $200-billion-plus industry where up to 24 billion clothing items annually pass through sorting centres in Pakistan, India and Dubai. Fleek says its platform has kept more than 12 million items in circulation.

Turing laureates headline ACM's inaugural AI summit in Atlanta. ACM's inaugural AI Leadership Summit opens in Atlanta with Turing laureates Yann LeCun and Andrew Barto, plus UN and UNESCO leaders. What the program signals. Key takeaways. * 1ACM's first AI Leadership Summit runs its main program August 31 to September 2 at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, with a Doctoral Consortium held August 30 at Georgia Tech. * 2The opening track pairs Turing laureates Yann LeCun and Andrew Barto with roboticist Rodney Brooks, three researchers who have each publicly questioned the field's dominant assumptions about scaling language models. * 3Governance and agentic AI are programmed on separate days with almost no overlap in personnel, a structural signal that policy and engineering communities are still converging rather than merged. The Association for Computing Machinery has spent nearly eight decades running the conferences where computing gets argued out. Today it opens its first summit dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence, and the guest list reads less like a trade show and more like a standing committee on the future of the field. The inaugural ACM AI Leadership Summit runs its main program August 31 through September 2 at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, preceded by an invitation-only Doctoral Consortium at Georgia Tech on August 30. Two ACM A.M. Turing Award laureates - Yann LeCun and Andrew Barto - headline the opening day, joined by iRobot founder Rodney Brooks, the United Nations Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology, a former UNESCO Assistant Director-General, and chief scientists from Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, and The Walt Disney Studios. What makes the program worth reading closely is not the star count. It is the sequencing. ACM has put its frontier-model skeptics on stage first, quarantined governance in its own track with no engineers on the panel, and scheduled agentic AI a full two days later. For executives trying to read where the professional computing establishment actually stands on AI in 2026, the schedule itself is the story. Day one is three skeptics in a row. The Monday morning track is titled Rethinking the Future: Frontier Models and Technologies for a New Era of AI, and it opens with back-to-back talks from Yann LeCun, Andrew Barto, and Rodney Brooks, followed by a panel called The Next Decade of AI moderated by Georgia Tech's Mark Riedl. Each of the three has spent the past several years pushing against the industry's center of gravity. LeCun has argued publicly and repeatedly that large language models are a dead end for genuine machine intelligence, and he has put considerable capital behind that position. Barto, who shared the 2024 Turing Award with Richard Sutton for the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning, represents a research lineage that predates the transformer era by decades and never depended on it. Brooks has been attacking the field's assumptions about embodiment and symbolic reasoning since the 1980s, while building robot families - Roomba, PackBot, Baxter, Carter - that actually shipped. LeCun's presence carries a specific commercial subtext. He left Meta at the end of 2025 after more than a decade leading its Fundamental AI Research lab, and now appears on the ACM program as Executive Chairman of AMI Labs. In March 2026, AMI closed a $1.03 billion seed round at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, with Nvidia, Temasek, and Samsung among the participants - reported by TechCrunch as the largest prelaunch AI raise in European history. The company is building world models on LeCun's Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, aimed at manufacturing, robotics, aerospace, and biomedical applications rather than chat. A keynote arguing that the industry's dominant architecture is a detour lands differently when the speaker has just raised a billion dollars to prove it. The summit by the numbers. Figures drawn from ACM's official summit materials and press coverage of the participants. Main program, Aug 31 - Sep 2 ACM AI Leadership Summit registration page Concurrent SIG tracks on September 2 ACM published program Standard non-member registration after June 30 ACM AI Leadership Summit registration page Student ACM member registration after June 30 ACM AI Leadership Summit registration page Turing Award prize, funded by Google ACM, March 2025 AMI Labs seed round, LeCun's new venture TechCrunch, March 2026 Why ACM built this event. ACM framed the summit as a cross-sector convening rather than a technical conference, positioning it alongside its governance and education work rather than its research proceedings. " Artificial intelligence is transforming every dimension of human knowledge, creativity, and collaboration. The ACM AI Leadership Summit will be a milestone event where the global computing community taps into the excitement of the moment while exploring the AI era from a whole range of perspectives. - Elisa Bertino, ACM President-Elect and co-chair of the Summit organizing committee How the three days are structured. The main program is organized as thematic day-blocks rather than parallel research tracks, with the exception of Wednesday's cross-disciplinary sessions. Track titles and speaker assignments below follow the program published on the summit site as of late July 2026 and may shift on the day. | Day | Tracks | Featured participants | What to watch for | | Sun, Aug 30 (Georgia Tech) | Doctoral Consortium - invitation only | Summit headliners acting as mentors | Early-career pipeline; not part of the public program | | Mon, Aug 31 | Rethinking the Future; AI and Scientific Discovery; AI Governance | Yann LeCun, Andrew Barto, Rodney Brooks, Amanda Randles, Amandeep Singh Gill | Whether the architecture debate gets a real airing or a polite one | | Tue, Sep 1 | AI and the Creative Arts; AI and the Workforce | Aaron Hertzmann (Adobe), Markus Gross (Disney/ETH Zurich), Jaime Teevan (Microsoft), Ed Chi (Google DeepMind), Ellen Zegura (NSF) | Authorship and labor framing from the companies actually shipping the tools | | Wed, Sep 2 | Agentic AI; A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective (six concurrent SIG tracks) | Ece Kamar (Microsoft Research), Dinesh Verma (IBM), Ahmed E. Hassan, Claire Le Goues (CMU), Armando Solar-Lezama (MIT) | The trust question for AI-written software, asked by the people building the verification tools | Governance and agents are in different rooms - On purpose. The most revealing thing about the program is what does not overlap. Monday's AI Governance track features a talk by Amandeep Singh Gill, the UN Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology, followed by a panel moderated by Dame Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton. The panelists are Virginia Dignum of Umeå University, Gabriela Ramos formerly of UNESCO, Francesca Rossi of IBM, Philip Thigo from the Office of the President of Kenya, and Yi Zeng of Renmin University of China. It is a policy panel staffed by policy people. Wednesday's Agentic AI session is three talks - Ahmed E. Hassan of Queen's University, Ece Kamar of Microsoft Research, and Dinesh Verma of IBM - framed by organizers around autonomous systems that plan, reason, and act, with safety, control, and trust presented as engineering consequences rather than regulatory categories. No panel, no policymakers. That separation answers a question a lot of enterprise buyers have been asking implicitly: is agentic AI a capability term or a governance term? On this program it is clearly a capability term, and governance got its own day two slots earlier with an almost entirely different cast. The practical implication for anyone building an internal AI policy is that the two vocabularies have not converged yet, and a compliance framework written from governance literature will not map cleanly onto what deployment engineers are actually shipping. Wednesday afternoon offers the sharpest technical session of the week: a track titled around whether software written by AI can be trusted, moderated by Claire Le Goues of Carnegie Mellon, with Armando Solar-Lezama of MIT, Lin Tan of Purdue, Erik Meijer, Margaret-Anne Storey, and Srikanth Yoginath of Oak Ridge. Program repair, program synthesis, and ML-for-correctness researchers debating verification is the closest thing the summit has to a hard engineering verdict. What business and Technology leaders should take from the program. * Treat the LeCun keynote as a capital-allocation signal, not just a research opinion - world-model architectures now have over a billion dollars of seed funding behind them and named industrial targets in robotics, aerospace, and biomedical work. * Assume your agentic AI vendor conversations and your AI compliance conversations are using different definitions of the same words, and force a shared glossary internally before either one drives a purchase. * Watch the Wednesday software-trust track for the state of the art in verifying AI-generated code - the answer there matters more to engineering leadership than any keynote. * Note the workforce panels are staffed by Accenture, Cisco, Microsoft, and Google DeepMind rather than by economists, which tells you the framing will be product-and-deployment led. * Georgia Tech, Emory, Georgia State, Kennesaw State, and Morehouse are all listed among the supporting institutions - a useful map of Atlanta's AI talent pipeline for anyone recruiting in the Southeast. * Registration ran $300 for ACM members and $400 for non-members after the June 30 early-bird deadline, with student rates at $200 and $250 - modest by industry-conference standards, which reflects the academic-society framing. Frequently asked questions. #ACM AI Leadership Summit #Yann LeCun #Andrew Barto #AI governance #agentic AI #Turing Award #Atlanta tech #world models #event-coverage #ACM AI Leadership Summit 2026