Hot Off The AI Furnace - October 16th

If you missed last week’s piece, we just announced that we’re back for the third edition of The AI Hot 100 Summit 2026 set for May 7th, 2026 in New York City. The only AI summit built for real connections where startup innovation meets enterprise implementation.

🚀 Announcing new speakers at the AI Hot 100 Summit 

We’re super excited to announce a few new speakers and attendees for The AI Hot 100 Summit 2026:

• Tsvi Gal, CTO & Head of Enterprise Tech at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

• Jayeeta Putatunda, AI Director at Fitch Ratings

• Mara Pometti, VP Data and AI Strategy at Mastercard

They’ll be joining executives from OpenAI, NVIDIA, Haleon plc, Johnson & Johnson, Adobe, Walmart, Anthropic, Cursor, Eleven Labs & more.

👉 Showcase your brand alongside the biggest companies in AI

👉 Early bird tickets are now available, grab your tickets starting from $249

Highlights from the 2025 AI Hot 100 Summit - Inside the AI Strategies & Trends Reshaping Banking Panel

Listen to the COO of Research at Morgan Stanley talk about how they went from 2 AI apps to 100+…and have ~1,000 more lined up.

Speakers: Denise McCool (Global COO of Research, Morgan Stanley), Adi Goel (Co-founder & COO, Sardine AI), Kirk McKeown (CEO, Carbon Arc). 

Watch the full Disruptive Finance panel hosted by The AI Furnace at the AI Hot 100 Summit 2025, delving into how AI is reshaping the world of banking and financial services.

📈 AI Venture Deals of the Week 

• Reflection AI, an open-source frontier AI lab challenging DeepSeek, just raised $2B at an $8B valuation, backed by Nvidia.

• n8n, an AI workflow automation platform that helps you build AI agents from scratch raised $180M Series C at a $2.5B valuation.

• Reducto AI, an AI platform turning unstructured documents into data, raised a $75M Series B led by a16z.

• David AI, a startup offering audio data for AI models, just raised a $50M Series B led by Meritech.

• Yendo, a startup building the first AI-powered digital bank, just raised a $50M Series B.

• Arbio, a German AI-first property management platform, just raised a $36M Series A.

• Resistant AI, a Prague-based AI agent platform to fight against financial crime, raised a $25M Series B.

• Clove, a UK-based startup combining AI and humans to build the partner for your whole financial life, raised a $14M pre-seed led by Accel.

⚒️ New AI Product Launches You Don’t Want to Miss 

• Synthesia 3.0, Synthesia’s latest AI video platform reimagined for the future of video, including video agents, express-2 avatars, and co-pilot

• Higgsfield AI, just released Sketch-to-Video powered by Sora 2, generating 1080p cinematic videos from a drawing

• Exa 2.0, Exa AI Labs released Exa Fast & Exa Deep, building the fastest search API and the highest quality search, beating Perplexity and Brave at every benchmark

• Orchids, released the first AI full-stack engineer ranking #1 on the UI-benchmark ahead of Figma Make, Lovable & Bolt.new

• Strawberry, released the first self-driving browser, containing AI “companions” that can click and type directly inside your tabs

• Orchestra, released a chat-centric workspace for modern teams, with AI agents natively built in

Top Jobs in AI

Join a high growth funded startup, having <100 employees, which are actively HIRING.

Reflection AI ($2B raised | ~60 employees) - open-source frontier AI lab challenging DeepSeek

• Member of Technical Staff - Data and Evals

• Member of Technical Staff - Post-Training

• Member of Technical Staff - Pre-Training

• Member of Technical Staff - Software Engineer

Stack AI ($16M Series AI | 21 employees) - AI Agents for Enterprise

• Senior Product Manager

• Head of Growth

• AI Infrastructure Engineer

• Enterprise Account Executive

• Forward Deployed AI Engineer

• Senior AI/ML Engineer

Delve ($32M Series A | 15 employees) - AI that makes compliance effortless

• Account Executive

• Applied AI Engineer

• Full Stack Engineer

• Customer Success Manager

• Frontend Engineer

• Backend Engineer

Mentra ($8M Raise | 12 employees) - The open-source OS for smart glasses

• Operations Associate - Smart Glasses

• Build the SMART GLASSES community - Head of Dev Experience

• Build SMART GLASSES – Glasses Engineer (Android)

Hiring in AI? Get featured → [email protected] 

Upcoming Events 📅

👀 ICYMI - Access the AI Hot 100 Market Report 2025

On July 10th, we dropped the 2025 AI Hot 100 Market Report by The AI Furnace. Here, we highlighted the Hot 100 startups building in AI in North America this year.

Once again, thanks to our board of advisors and committee of AI experts, technologists and industry vertical experts who helped us with the selection.

👉️ Check out the full report

📢 Interested in sponsoring? Reach out to us at [email protected] to get your brand in front of thousands of AI executives, entrepreneurs, researchers, investors, and AI leaders.