Developer tooling startup Convex has raised $57 million in Series B funding led by Insight Partners, with participation from Etna Labs, Andreessen Horowitz, and Spark Capital. The round brings the company's total funding to $110.5 million. Founded in 2021 by former Dropbox infrastructure engineers, Convex provides an AI-optimised application backend. The platform offers building blocks that companies can use to develop custom software. The San Francisco-based startup focuses on simplifying backend development by providing developers with tools to build applications more efficiently. The fresh capital will support Convex's continued development of its backend infrastructure platform.

AI cloud startup Volta has raised $300m and lined up $5bn in financing at a $2.4bn valuation, backed by a16z, Altimeter, Nvidia, and Michael Dell.

OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and fellow billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are investing in Berkeley-based KoBold Metals, which uses artificial intelligence to find critical minerals for data centres and electric vehicles. The company, valued at nearly $3 billion, is now the second-most valuable tech firm in Berkeley. KoBold employs AI to locate copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt deposits. In April, it broke ground in Zambia on what may be one of the world's largest copper deposits, one of 60 projects across 14 countries. The firm has also announced the largest lithium exploration in history in the Democratic Republic of Congo, spanning 3,000 square kilometres. However, some mining executives question whether KoBold's technology truly discovered the Zambian deposit and highlight technical challenges in extracting ore from deep underground. The Trump administration has supported KoBold's operations through foreign policy initiatives aimed at securing US access to critical minerals.