As customers increasingly turn to gen AI for financial advice and agentic AI continues to rise, retail banks should consider how to mitigate potential disintermediation.Imagine a customer using a nonbanking gen AI agent to manage her finances. The agent scans for the best banking products, makes recommendations, and executes transactions on her behalf. In that scenario, she may no longer need to open a bank app, call a service center, or visit a branch. What sounds speculative today could become realistic within three to five years, as agent...

Menlo Ventures, Thrive Capital, Index Ventures and JPMorgan participated in Nourish’s fundraise. The company’s goal is boosting and preserving improvements from weight-loss medications.Nourish, a nutrition counselling startup, has raised $100 million in a new round of funding to help people make dietary changes while taking GLP-1s, with the goal of boosting and preserving improvements from the weight-loss medications.Menlo Ventures led the Series C financing round, with participation from existing investors, including Thrive Capital, Index...

A new framework developed by EPFL researchers makes it possible to teach a skill to robots with different mechanical designs, allowing them to carry out the same task safely without rewriting code for each.In today’s manufacturing environments, upgrading a robot fleet often means starting from scratch – not only replacing hardware, but also reprogramming tasks. Even when two robots are built to perform similar jobs, different joint arrangements or movement limits mean that a task programmed for one robot often can’t be used on another. En...

Oatly's Amsterdam bike-thru turns the American drive-thru into a piece of novelty for cyclists, no car (or behavior change) required.Amsterdam has long been a city built around the bicycle, so when Oatly went looking for a way to put its oat drinks in front of more people, the answer was already rolling past on two wheels. From May 15 to June 7, the brand is running the Oatly Bike-Thru at Papaverhoek 24 in Amsterdam-Noord: a stainless-steel kiosk with its own cycle lane, where riders pull up to a window, order, pay and pedal off.The menu fea...

Booed commencement speakers, blocked data centers, plummeting poll numbers: Fast-growing industry has a faster-growing crisis.Protesters in Detroit hold signs against DTE Energy's plan for a data center, with messages like "NO SECRET DEALS FOR DTE" and "WHO'S PAYING FOR THE POWER?".Attendees at a rally in Detroit in December opposed a utility's plan to provide power for a data center in rural Michigan.The only thing growing faster than the artificial-intelligence industry may be Americans’ negative feelings about it—as former Google Chief...

Vêtir, an AI-powered styling and shopping app, raised $5.5 million in a Series A round that valued it at $150 million, the company said in an announcement Tuesday.A group of private family offices and luxury retail and tech investors including Laidlaw & Company participated in the round, according to Vêtir.Beyond just seeing a feed of products in the app, shoppers are able to upload their items into a digital closet, build outfits, sync their personal calendar and chat with AI or human stylists, who get their own dashboards for managin...

Audible has opened a permanent physical space in New York designed around audio storytelling, built to give listeners a way to browse, sample and experience audiobooks outside of a screen or pair of earbuds.Audible Story House opened in Manhattan free and open to the public. The space covers over 6,000 square feet across three floors and contains no physical books.Instead, guests browse using Story Tiles — tactile objects representing individual audiobook titles across genres including romance, true crime, adventure and wellbeing.Tiles can...

The RIMOWA Design Prize doesn’t always produce furniture, and that’s precisely why I pay attention to it every year. The luggage brand’s annual student design competition has a way of surfacing ideas that sit at the uncomfortable, exciting edge of what design can actually do for people, and the 2026 winner is probably the best example of that yet.Samuel Nagel and Paul Feiler, two students from Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd, took home the fourth edition of the prize with NURA: a bracelet that uses EMG (electromyography) sen...