The Source Signals
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Taste Labs emerges from stealth with $18.5m to sell judgment to an AI industry drowning in its own output
The New York company, co-led in its seed round by CRV and Amplify Partners, is betting that the dominant method for aligning AI models has been quietly manufacturing the sameness now derided as slop, and that curated taste is the infrastructure layer the industry forgot to build.
Global Venture Capital Contracted 72% Between May 2025 and May 2026 — But the UAE Collected Eightfold More Capital in the Same Period
A year-on-year comparison of the January to May funding windows reveals a market that did not simply shrink but reorganised around a narrower set of convictions: early-stage equity replaced private equity, military AI, and autonomous systems replaced datacentre infrastructure as the dominant trending categories, and the United Arab Emirates emerged as the single most anomalous data point in a period otherwise defined by contraction.