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OpenAI Launches ChatGPT for Excel Powered by GPT-5.4

Posted on by Amita Parul

San Francisco: OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Excel in beta, an add-in that embeds the company’s latest AI model directly inside Microsoft workbooks. Powered by GPT-5.4 Thinking, the tool lets users build financial models, run scenario analysis, trace formula errors, and generate structured outputs using plain language without leaving Excel.

The beta is rolling out now to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Team, Business, Enterprise, and Edu subscribers in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Support for Google Sheets is confirmed as coming soon.

The launch coincides with OpenAI’s release of GPT-5.4, which the company describes as its most capable and efficient frontier model for professional work. The model comes in two variants: GPT-5.4 Thinking, available to all paid ChatGPT subscribers, and GPT-5.4 Pro, reserved for Pro and Enterprise plan users requiring maximum reasoning depth.

On OpenAI’s internal spreadsheet modeling benchmark designed around tasks a junior investment banking analyst would perform GPT-5.4 scored 87.3%, up sharply from 68.4% for GPT-5.2. Across general tasks, the model produces 18% fewer errors and individual claims are 33% less likely to be false compared to its predecessor.

The Excel add-in is designed with auditability at its core. Before modifying any cell or formula, the tool asks for user confirmation. It explains its reasoning by linking outputs directly to the cells it references, allowing teams to trace exactly how assumptions flow through a model. For enterprise customers concerned about data privacy, OpenAI confirmed that data shared within ChatGPT Enterprise is not used to train or improve its models.

Alongside the Excel launch, OpenAI introduced new financial data integrations inside ChatGPT connecting the platform directly to Moody’s, Dow Jones Factiva, MSCI, Third Bridge, MT Newswire, and LSEG, with FactSet coming soon. The integrations allow users to pull institutional-grade market data, filings, and research reports into a single workflow reducing the need to switch between tools during analysis or due diligence.

GPT-5.4 also introduces native computer-use capabilities in Codex and the API, making it OpenAI’s first general-purpose model able to operate software environments autonomously across multi-step workflows. It supports up to one million tokens of context in the API, up from 400,000 tokens on GPT-5 and GPT-5.3-Codex.

The release puts OpenAI in more direct competition with Anthropic’s Claude for Financial Services and Google’s Gemini integrations across Workspace both of which have been pushing aggressively into enterprise productivity workflows over the past year.

Armadin Raises $190M to Automate Enterprise Cybersecurity With AI

Posted on by Amita Parul

San Francisco: Armadin, an AI-native cybersecurity startup founded by Mandiant creator Kevin Mandia, has raised $189.9 million in combined seed and Series A funding, the largest combined early-stage raise in cybersecurity history.

The round was led by Accel, with participation from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, 8VC, Ballistic Ventures, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm. The company launched quietly in September 2025 and has already hired more than 60 employees and begun working with several Fortune 100 companies as early customers.

Mandia is one of the most recognized figures in enterprise security. He founded Mandiant in 2004, sold it to FireEye for $1 billion in 2014, and then watched Google acquire the combined entity for $5.4 billion in 2022.

Armadin marks his return as a founder, and his co-founders carry similarly deep credentials. Travis Lanham was a principal engineer at Google Cloud Security. Evan Peña is a former Mandiant executive. David Slater was a Google SecOps engineer. The team’s combined background spans three decades of offensive and defensive security operations at the highest levels.

Armadin’s core thesis is that the era of human-paced cyber defense is over. The company describes a new threat category it calls hyperattacks sophisticated, multi-modal campaigns that move at machine speed, executing in minutes what once took human attackers days.

Its platform deploys specialized AI agents that operate as an autonomous attacker swarm, continuously reasoning, planning, and adapting across enterprise networks to identify what can actually be exploited before real attackers do. The approach is designed to give security teams decision-grade intelligence rather than theoretical vulnerability lists, with every finding backed by auditable reasoning chains.

“In a world of machine-speed attacks, defense must become autonomous, You cannot have a human in the loop for every defense decision and expect to win.”

Kevin Mandia, Founder – Armadin

The raise arrives as AI-focused cybersecurity investment surges, with AI-native security firms accounting for more than half of global cybersecurity VC deals by late 2025. The broader cybersecurity market is projected to exceed $560 billion by 2032 at a 14% compound annual growth rate.

Armadin enters a field that is rapidly filling with well-funded competitors, JetStream Security launched with $34 million in seed funding just weeks earlier, while Fig Security emerged from stealth with $38 million. But few carry the founder pedigree or the intelligence community backing that Armadin brings to its launch.

OpenAI Acquires Promptfoo to Enhance Security for Its Enterprise AI Agents

Posted on by Anurag Shukla

San Francisco: OpenAI has agreed to acquire Promptfoo, an AI security startup founded in 2024 by Ian Webster and Michael D’Angelo, and will integrate its technology directly into OpenAI Frontier, the company’s enterprise platform for building and operating AI agents.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Promptfoo had raised $23 million in total funding, including an $18.4 million Series A in July 2025 led by Insight Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. PitchBook data places its last valuation at approximately $119 million. The startup’s 23-person team will continue building inside Frontier after the deal closes.

Webster conceived the idea while running Discord’s engineering team, shipping AI products to 200 million users with no reliable way to test whether those systems would hold up under adversarial pressure. The platform he and D’Angelo built became one of the most widely adopted AI security tools in enterprise software.

Promptfoo’s open-source CLI and library are now used by more than 25% of Fortune 500 companies, with over 350,000 developers having pulled it into their workflows and 130,000 active monthly users. Its core function is adversarial evaluation, systematically probing AI systems for prompt injections, jailbreak vulnerabilities, data leaks, tool misuse, and out-of-policy agent behaviors before those systems reach production.

That capability is precisely what OpenAI needs as enterprises begin deploying AI agents, what the company calls “AI coworkers” into live business operations. OpenAI launched Frontier on February 5, 2026, with early customers including Uber, State Farm, Intuit, and Thermo Fisher Scientific.

As those deployments deepen, the attack surface expands. Agents connected to real data, internal tools, and external APIs introduce security risks that static model testing cannot catch. Promptfoo’s integration into Frontier will make automated red-teaming, agentic workflow evaluation, and compliance reporting native features of the platform rather than third-party add-ons.

“As AI agents become more connected to real data and systems, securing and validating them is more challenging and important than ever,” said Webster. “Joining OpenAI lets us accelerate this work, bringing stronger security, safety, and governance capabilities to the teams building real-world AI systems.”

OpenAI has committed to maintaining Promptfoo’s open-source project alongside the proprietary enterprise features it will build into Frontier. The acquisition follows a clear pattern of OpenAI using targeted M&A to close product gaps at speed earlier this year the company acquired healthcare tech startup Torch for approximately $100 million, and previously bought Software Applications, maker of the Sky AI interface for Mac.

It also arrives as rival Anthropic launched Claude Code Security in February 2026, targeting the same vulnerability scanning space, signaling that enterprise AI security is fast becoming a competitive battleground among frontier labs.

Meta’s Ex AI Chief Yann LeCun Backs AMI’s $1.03B Bet on World-Model AI

Posted on by Anurag Shukla

Paris: Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, or AMI, has closed a $1.03 billion seed round at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, believed to be the largest seed round ever raised by a European startup. The company was co-founded by Turing Award winner and former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who serves as executive chairman, alongside CEO Alexandre LeBrun, former founder and CEO of clinical AI startup Nabla.

The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions — Jeff Bezos’ personal investment vehicle. Strategic backers include Nvidia, Samsung, Toyota Ventures, and Singapore’s Temasek, alongside prominent angels including Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt, and Tim Berners-Lee.

AMI Labs is building what researchers call world models, AI systems that learn from physical reality rather than predicting patterns in language. Where large language models generate plausible text by learning statistical relationships between words, world models aim to build internal representations of how environments actually function, then use those representations to reason, plan, and make decisions.

LeCun has argued publicly for years that LLMs represent a fundamental dead end on the path to human-level AI, citing their inability to reason causally or handle situations outside their training distribution.

AMI’s technical approach centers on JEPA, Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, a framework LeCun developed during his time at Meta that processes inputs at a higher level of abstraction than token-by-token transformers, allowing the system to ignore irrelevant detail while retaining semantic structure.

The company has no product and no near-term revenue plans. LeBrun has been explicit about that timeline: AMI is a fundamental research venture that could take years to move from theory to commercial deployment. Target industries include healthcare, robotics, aerospace, and hardware design, domains where AI must exhibit genuine causal reasoning rather than pattern matching, and where hallucinations carry real-world consequences.

Nabla, LeBrun’s former company and AMI’s first disclosed partner, is already embedded in clinical workflows across hundreds of health systems and expects priority access to AMI’s early models for FDA-certifiable agentic applications.

The raise lands as investor appetite for world model research accelerates globally. Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs raised $1 billion last month, while New York and Geneva-based General Intuition secured $134 million at seed stage in October. AMI Labs initially targeted approximately €500 million when LeCun announced the venture late last year after departing Meta.

Investor interest pushed commitments well beyond that figure. The company is now operating across four cities, Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore with a research team that includes former Meta and Google DeepMind scientists.

Legora Raises $550M Series D to Expand AI Legal Operations

Posted on by Amita Parul

New York: Legora, the Swedish AI platform built for lawyers, has closed a $550 million Series D round at a $5.55 billion valuation, tripling its worth in just five months. The round was led by Accel, with existing backers Benchmark, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, ICONIQ, Redpoint Ventures, and Y Combinator all returning.

New entrants include Alkeon Capital, Bain Capital, Firstmark Capital, Menlo Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Sands Capital, and Starwood Capital. The company has now raised a total of $816 million since its founding in Stockholm in 2023.

The capital will accelerate Legora’s US expansion. Less than a year after opening its first American office in New York in March 2025, the company is now opening additional offices in Houston and Chicago, two of the country’s most significant legal and commercial hubs. It expects to grow to more than 300 US employees by the end of 2026, up from a headcount that has already scaled from 40 to 400 globally over the past year.

Legora’s platform targets the workhorse tasks of legal practice: document review, legal research, contract drafting, due diligence, and M&A coordination. Its tabular review feature converts folders of contracts into structured comparison grids.

An agentic workflows layer automates multi-step processes such as due diligence sequences. The platform integrates directly into Microsoft Word and Outlook, removing friction in an industry where partners have spent decades calibrating their relationship with those tools.

“Over the past year, the pace of adoption in the US has exceeded our expectations, as leading firms and in-house teams move decisively from experimentation to embedding AI across their organisations,”

Max Junestrand, CEO and co-founder of Legora

The platform now serves 800 customers across more than 50 markets, up from 400 in October and 250 in May. Clients include White & Case, Cleary Gottlieb, Goodwin, Linklaters, Deloitte, and Dentons. The raise arrives as the AI legal tech sector heats up significantly.

Rival Harvey AI is already valued at $8 billion and reportedly seeking to raise at an $11 billion valuation, while Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel reached one million users in February 2026. The legal AI market, valued at $1.4 billion in 2024, is projected to reach $3.9 billion by 2030 at a 17.3% compound annual growth rate and today’s round suggests investors believe the ceiling is considerably higher.

Google Brings Gemini in Chrome to India, Canada & New Zealand

Posted on by Yashika Aneja

San Francisco: Google is expanding its Gemini AI features in Chrome to India, Canada, and New Zealand, giving more users access to its built‑in browser assistant. With this update, a new Gemini sidebar appears in Chrome that lets you ask questions, summarize pages, compare tabs, or get help without switching screens. 

The assistant can also pull information from apps like Gmail, Maps, Calendar, Drive, and YouTube, so you can easily draft emails, check your schedule, or get summaries of videos while you browse. It can also work across multiple tabs, which is useful for comparing products or planning trips. 

A big upgrade is language support. Gemini in Chrome now works in 50+ languages, including major Indian languages like Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil. This means more users can interact with the AI in their preferred language. 

Google has also added its AI image‑editing tool, Nano Banana 2, directly into Chrome. You can upload a photo, say, a picture of your room, and ask the AI to show how different furniture or decor would look. 

The update also brings Gemini to Chrome on iOS in India, where users will find it from the tools icon in the address bar. With these updates, Google is making Gemini a more useful everyday assistant inside the browser. 

India’s Software Exports Rise to USD 222 Billion in 2024-25 

Posted on by Yashika Aneja

New Delhi: India’s software exports grew to USD 222 billion in 2024–25, up 11% from USD 200 billion the year before, according to the Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC). The growth includes exports of computer software, IT-enabled services (ITeS), and BPO operations, highlighting India’s continued dominance in global technology services. 

ESC Chairman Veer Sagar revealed that IT software and services remain the biggest contributors, accounting for USD 147 billion, or 66% of total exports. Engineering services also grew strongly, crossing USD 11 billion with a 13.99% growth rate, making it the fastest‑growing sector this year. BPO services contributed USD 58 billion, remaining an internal part of India’s service‑led export economy. 

The United States continues to be India’s largest software market, importing USD 117.43 billion, roughly 52.9% of all Indian software exports. The United Kingdom remains the second‑largest destination at USD 34.41 billion, followed by Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands. These highly competitive markets, as per ESC leaders, showcase strong global trust in India’s software capabilities. 

In this regard, ESC’s Chairman for Global Outreach, Sandeep Narula, said India’s consistent year‑over‑year performance in the US and UK markets highlights the reliability, quality, and scale of Indian technology companies. He also added that winning and maintaining such large shares in these demanding markets “speaks volumes about what Indian firms deliver”.  

YouTube Ad Revenue Beats Disney, NBC, Paramount Combined

Posted on by Shobhit Kalra

Bengaluru: YouTube posted remarkable financial results in 2025, highlighting the growing dominance of digital platforms in the entertainment and advertising industries.

According to estimates from research firm Moffett Nathanson, YouTube generated about $40.4 billion in advertising revenue during the year. This figure surpassed the combined ad revenue of major Hollywood companies, Disney, NBC, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery, which together reported $37.8 billion.

The milestone reflects a major shift in how audiences consume content and how advertisers allocate their spending. Just a year earlier, in 2024, YouTube had reported $36.1 billion in ad revenue, which was still behind the $41.8 billion earned collectively by the same studios. The latest figures show how quickly the balance has changed.

Traditional entertainment companies have long dominated the industry with blockbuster films and popular television shows. However, declining linear TV viewership and rising production costs have made it harder for them to maintain their lead, even as they invest heavily in streaming platforms.

Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, reported that YouTube’s total revenue reached $60 billion in 2025. A significant share now comes from subscriptions, including YouTube TV, YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, and NFL Sunday Ticket. For comparison, Netflix reported $45.2 billion in revenue for the same period.

Despite its success, YouTube’s ad business still trails tech giants such as Meta, which recorded $196.2 billion in advertising revenue in 2025.

Microsoft Unveils Copilot Cowork for Task Automation

Posted on by Yashika Aneja

Redmond: Microsoft recently introduced Copilot Cowork, an AI tool that helps people get things done automatically across Microsoft 365 apps. With it, users can hand off multi‑step tasks, like preparing meeting notes, checking calendars, or doing research, and the AI handles the work on its own. The feature is part of Microsoft’s push towards AI agents that can perform real tasks, not just answer questions. 

Copilot Cowork is currently in a research preview and will become available to more users soon. Microsoft says the feature is built using technology from Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, showing a deeper partnership between the two companies. The tool can work across Outlook, Teams, Excel, PowerPoint and other apps, making it more flexible than typical chat‑based AI assistants. It can also run on different large language models, not just one. 

The launch comes at a time when tech companies are racing to bring AI agents into workplace software. Anthropic’s own Claude Cowork introduced earlier this year sparked conversations about whether AI tools could eventually replace some traditional software. Microsoft, however, says Copilot Cowork is designed to run safely inside a company’s existing security and governance systems. This is crucial for businesses that handle sensitive information. 

Industry experts say this shift towards AI agents showcases how quickly workplace tools are changing, as AI moves from simply assisting users to managing tasks on its own. 

Apple Hits 50, CEO Cook Credits Steve Jobs’ Vision 

Posted on by Yashika Aneja

Cupertino: Apple is all set to celebrate its 50th anniversary on April 1, 2026, and CEO Tim Cook says the milestone has given the company a moment to pause and reflect. In an interview highlighted by 9to5Mac, Cook said Apple is “in a party of one”, meaning he believes no other company can truly replicate Apple’s culture or way of working. 

Cook explained that looking back is not something Apple usually does. The company has always focused on the future, improving products people already love and creating new ones customers don’t even know they need yet. Because of that forward‑focused mindset, acknowledging 50 years felt like “building a new muscle” for the team. 

A big part of this reflection includes remembering Steve Jobs, who co‑founded Apple in 1976 and passed away in 2011. Cook said Jobs left behind strong principles that still guide Apple today. Principles like focusing on enriching people’s lives and always pushing for the next breakthrough. Jobs also advised Cook not to run the company by constantly asking “What would Steve do?”, to help Apple, as a brand, avoid getting stuck in the past. 

Cook believes Apple’s biggest strengths are its people and its culture, both of which take eons to build. He said this is why Apple remains unique even after half a century.