The Weekly Tech Pulse: July 21-27, 2025

Gigi Kenneth
Jul 27, 2025
11 min read

From a $2 billion seed round that redefined startup funding to critical zero-day vulnerabilities affecting millions of organizations, this week showcased both the incredible promise and pressing perils of our digital future.

The big themes? AI agents are finally becoming real, with companies deploying autonomous systems that can browse, purchase, and reason independently. Cybersecurity moved to the front lines as state-sponsored hackers exploited SharePoint vulnerabilities across 100+ organizations globally.

And femtech funding hit a surprising downturn just as breakthrough innovations in women's health are reaching market maturity.

Let's dive into the stories that will define the rest of 2025.

🤖 AI: Corporate Mandates and Geopolitical Tensions

This week, AI moved from boardroom strategy to mandatory workplace reality, while geopolitical tensions around AI technology reached new heights.

Yahoo Japan's Productivity Revolution

The week's most controversial AI development came from Yahoo Japan's unprecedented mandate requiring all employees to use generative AI tools daily, with a company-wide goal of doubling productivity by 2030.

The policy includes mandatory AI training and usage tracking, making Yahoo Japan the first major corporation to implement such comprehensive AI integration requirements.

Executives stated that AI adoption is "no longer optional but essential for future competitiveness."

This aggressive approach sparked intense debate about employee autonomy and the future of human creativity in corporate environments.

Geopolitical AI Tensions Escalate

North Korean academic sources confirmed that the regime is sending AI researchers to Russia to deepen scientific and technical cooperation, highlighting a new axis of AI collaboration between sanctioned states. Experts warn of potential dual-use applications, including military AI systems.

Meanwhile, UK authorities launched AI-enabled traffic cameras that use machine learning to detect phone usage and seatbelt violations in real-time. The cameras have already caught thousands of violations during trials and are expected to roll out nationwide, representing a significant expansion of AI surveillance infrastructure.

DeepMind's Genomics Breakthrough

Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaGenome in late June, a groundbreaking model designed to interpret the human genome's "dark matter"—the 98% of DNA that doesn't code for proteins but influences gene activity. This represents a major leap in AI-powered biological research with immediate applications in drug discovery and personalized medicine.

What this means for you: Corporate AI mandates like Yahoo Japan's represent the beginning of a fundamental shift in workplace expectations. Within 18 months, basic AI literacy will likely become as essential as email proficiency was in the 1990s. Start identifying AI tools that can augment your specific role now, before mandatory adoption programs make the learning curve steeper. The geopolitical AI race also signals that access to advanced AI capabilities may become increasingly fragmented by geography and political alignment.

Enterprise AI Infrastructure Push

Meta appointed Shengjia Zhao from OpenAI as chief scientist of its AI Superintelligence Lab, continuing the talent war between major AI companies. This follows Meta's aggressive hiring of 11 new AI researchers from competitors including Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI throughout the summer.

SoftBank announced major investment negotiations with OpenAI, exploring collaborations in robotics, AI infrastructure, and chip development through Arm Holdings. The potential deal could create powerful synergies between SoftBank's hardware portfolio and OpenAI's software capabilities.

📈 Marketing: Automation Becomes Non-Negotiable

The marketing technology landscape shifted dramatically this week as automation moved from "nice-to-have" to "business-critical" across enterprise organizations.

The Great Automation Investment Surge

According to Mediaocean's H1 2025 Advertising Outlook Report, automation is the only investment area that grew compared to their previous survey, with 17% more marketers naming it as their most critical priority.

However, a staggering 86% of advertisers report complete lack of synchronization between creative and media processes—highlighting the massive efficiency gains still on the table.

Generative AI dominated marketer priorities, with 63% of respondents identifying it as the most critical consumer trend they're watching, surpassing even connected television adoption.

Platform Wars and AI Integration

Zoho launched Zia LLM, their in-house large language model available in 1.3B, 2.6B, and 7B parameter tiers, along with 25+ ready-built AI agents and a no-code Agent Studio. This represents a major challenge to Microsoft and Google's enterprise AI dominance, particularly for mid-market companies seeking integrated solutions.

Ditans Group launched an AI marketing platform specifically for small businesses, automating email campaigns, social posts, and ad creation through pre-built templates and workflows.

Meanwhile, Flamel.ai introduced social ad tools that automate campaign creation across franchise locations by generating local creative and targeting parameters from a central interface.

The Measurement Revolution

Treasure Data debuted its AI Agent Foundry, a no-code tool built on Amazon Bedrock that uses unified customer databases to let users create, test, and deploy AI agents for segmentation, journey orchestration, and data quality checks, all in natural language.

What this means for you: Marketing automation is experiencing its "iPhone moment", the technology has reached sufficient sophistication to handle complex, creative tasks traditionally requiring human judgment. Companies not investing in AI-powered automation now will find themselves at an insurmountable disadvantage by 2026. Focus on platforms that offer both automation and easy human oversight, as the most successful implementations balance AI efficiency with human creativity.

🚀 Startups: Defense Tech and Legal AI Lead the Charge

This week's funding announcements revealed a clear shift toward practical AI applications in high-stakes industries, with defense technology and legal automation capturing the largest rounds.

Specialized AI Applications Lead

Delve raised $30 million from Insight Partners to automate compliance frameworks like HIPAA, SOC 2, and GDPR using AI agents. The Y Combinator graduate has grown from 100 to over 500 customers in just months, with many being fast-growing AI companies themselves.

Asylon secured $26 million for autonomous security drones and robotic guard dogs, demonstrating investor appetite for AI applications in physical security. The Philadelphia-based startup represents the convergence of robotics, AI, and traditional security services.

Radical AI raised $55 million in one of the largest seed rounds ever to develop "self-driving labs" for materials science. Based in New York, the company is building autonomous systems that can independently discover, synthesize, and test new materials for clean energy and semiconductor applications.

Legal AI Reaches Enterprise Scale

Harvey closed a $300 million Series E at a $5 billion valuation, with funding co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue. The AI-enabled legal services platform has raised over $800 million total in just three years, demonstrating massive enterprise appetite for legal workflow automation.

The platform now handles complex legal research, document drafting, and compliance tasks for major law firms and corporate legal departments, representing a significant shift toward AI-powered professional services.

Recent Funding Highlights

Hadrian secured $260 million to modernize U.S. defense infrastructure with advanced automation, representing one of the largest defense tech investments of 2025. The startup focuses on precision manufacturing for defense contractors using AI and robotics.

Vanta crossed $4 billion valuation with a $150 million round focused on trust infrastructure for AI companies, highlighting massive demand for compliance and security automation as organizations scale AI deployments.

LegalOn raised $50 million led by Goldman Sachs Growth to expand its AI contract review platform globally. Already used by 7,000+ organizations and 25% of all publicly listed companies in Japan, the platform can reduce contract turnaround times by up to 85%.

What this means for you: The startup funding landscape has become hyper-focused on AI applications that solve immediate, measurable business problems. Generic AI platforms are losing favor to specialized solutions that can demonstrate clear ROI in specific industries. If you're building in AI/tech, focus on deep vertical expertise rather than horizontal capabilities. The largest rounds are going to companies that understand regulatory requirements, operational workflows, and industry-specific pain points better than traditional tech companies.

🏥 Healthcare: AI Approvals Surge, SharePoint Breaches Threaten Patient Data

Healthcare technology faced a week of dramatic highs and lows, with FDA AI approvals reaching record levels while critical security vulnerabilities exposed sensitive medical data across major health systems.

FDA Accelerates AI Medical Device Approvals

The FDA approved 221 AI/ML-enabled medical devices in 2024, with 107 approvals in just the first half of 2025, representing the fastest pace of medical AI adoption in history. The majority of approvals (72.4%) focus on radiology applications, with cardiology representing 13.8% of new devices.

Key developments include: Enhanced AI-powered breast imaging systems, automated ECG analysis tools, and predictive algorithms for early disease detection. However, only 45% of approved devices explicitly mention AI/ML capabilities in official FDA announcements, creating transparency challenges for healthcare providers.

New FDA guidance released this week provides recommendations for AI models used in drug and biological product submissions, emphasizing the need for credible, validated AI systems in pharmaceutical development.

Cybersecurity Crisis Hits Healthcare

Healthcare systems faced their worst cybersecurity week of 2025 as threat actors exploited critical SharePoint vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-53770 and CVE-2025-53771) affecting over 75 confirmed organizations, including major hospitals, universities, and healthcare enterprises across North America and Europe.

The vulnerabilities allow unauthenticated remote code execution and enable attackers to bypass multi-factor authentication and single sign-on protections. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 classified this as a "high-impact, ongoing threat campaign" specifically targeting healthcare infrastructure.

Federal agencies were required to apply patches by July 21, 2025, under CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

AI-Powered Preventive Care Expansion

Everlab secured $10 million in seed funding to expand its AI-driven preventive healthcare platform. The startup uses AI to generate personalized diagnostics, health alerts, and lifestyle plans based on continuous biomarker data, bringing predictive care into everyday health management.

What this means for you: Healthcare AI is transitioning from experimental to essential infrastructure, but security vulnerabilities are creating massive risks for patient data. Healthcare organizations must accelerate AI adoption while dramatically improving cybersecurity protocols. For patients, expect more personalized, predictive care options in 2025, but verify that your healthcare providers have robust data protection measures in place.

👩‍⚕️ Women's Health/Femtech: Funding Downturn Amid Innovation Surge

The femtech sector experienced a surprising contradiction this week: breakthrough innovations reaching market while funding dropped significantly compared to 2024 levels.

Funding Reality Check

FemTech companies raised only $158 million across 35 rounds in the first half of 2025, compared to $353 million across 50 rounds in the same period of 2024, representing a 55.27% drop in funding. This decline comes despite the global women's healthcare market being projected to reach $12.1 billion by 2030 with a 3.8% CAGR.

However, Bay Area femtech startups bucked the trend, raising over $433 million in 2025 to date, the highest funding year on record for the region.

Innovation Breakthroughs Continue

Several promising developments emerged despite funding challenges:

Hertility Health expanded its global dataset on female reproductive health, now offering at-home testing and personalized treatment recommendations. The company built the largest global dataset on female reproductive health and provides insights that previously required multiple clinic visits.

Vira Health's menopause solution Stella leverages 90 clinical data points to provide hyper-personalized care, supporting over 2 million women through partnerships with leading healthcare organizations.

Comanche Biopharma advanced its investigational siRNA medicine designed to reduce sFlt1 protein levels in women with preeclampsia—a condition affecting over 10 million women annually that contributes to 500,000 infant fatalities worldwide.

Market Maturation Signals

150+ venture capital funds are now actively investing in women's health and femtech, according to Women of Wearables' updated database. However, female founders continue to face significant challenges, with women-led startups receiving disproportionately small shares of VC investment compared to male counterparts.

Regulatory momentum is building: Corporate wellness programs and workplace health initiatives are beginning to recognize women's unique health challenges, while regulatory bodies streamline approval pathways for female-specific drugs and devices.

What this means for you: The femtech funding slowdown reflects market maturation rather than declining opportunity. Companies with proven traction and clear revenue models are still raising successfully, but the days of concept-stage mega-rounds are over. For healthcare consumers, expect more sophisticated, data-driven women's health solutions to reach market in 2025, often through partnerships with traditional healthcare providers rather than standalone consumer products.

💻 Tech: Infrastructure Shakeups and Platform Consolidation

The technology infrastructure landscape experienced major disruptions this week, from semiconductor struggles to satellite service outages that exposed the fragility of our connected systems.

Intel's Foundry Reality Check

Intel dropped 8% after announcing major foundry business restructuring, with CEO Pat Gelsinger stating "no more blank checks" for the struggling chip manufacturing division. The company is cutting project investments and struggling to find customers for its foundry services, marking a significant retreat from Intel's ambitions to compete with TSMC.

Despite beating revenue expectations, Intel's foundry woes highlight the challenges facing American semiconductor manufacturing as the industry increasingly concentrates around Asian suppliers.

Starlink's Growing Pains

Elon Musk's Starlink experienced hours-long outages following the rollout of T-Mobile satellite service integration. The disruption affected thousands of users globally and highlighted the risks of rapid expansion in satellite internet infrastructure.

The outage came as Starlink continues aggressive global expansion, but raised questions about the stability of satellite-based internet services as they scale to serve millions of users.

Palantir's Meteoric Rise

Palantir joined the ranks of the 20 most valuable U.S. companies, with stock more than doubling in 2025. The data analytics company's AI-powered government and enterprise platforms are seeing massive adoption, particularly in defense and intelligence applications.

The company's success reflects growing enterprise demand for advanced data analytics and AI-powered decision-making tools, especially in sectors requiring high security and compliance standards.

Platform Consolidation Accelerates

Google's confirmed plans to merge ChromeOS into Android represent a fundamental reshaping of the computing landscape. The move positions Google to integrate Gemini AI capabilities directly into devices across all form factors—from phones to tablets to future laptop-like devices.

Samsung announced five major cybersecurity enhancements for Galaxy devices, including Knox Enhanced Encrypted Protection (KEEP) and Knox Matrix Threat Response, a proactive distributed firewall designed to protect against future threats including quantum attacks.

What this means for you: The infrastructure layer of technology is experiencing unprecedented volatility. Intel's foundry struggles and Starlink's outages demonstrate that even major tech companies are facing significant scaling challenges. For businesses, this means diversifying technology vendors and maintaining contingency plans becomes critical. The AI chip smuggling issue also suggests that access to advanced computing hardware may become increasingly restricted and expensive, making early investment in AI capabilities more strategically important.

🔮 Analysis: Three Forces Reshaping Technology's Future

Looking beyond this week's headlines, three fundamental forces are reshaping how technology development, deployment, and regulation will work for the rest of the decade.

1. The Agent Economy Is Here

We're witnessing the transition from AI as a tool to AI as a workforce. OpenAI's ChatGPT agents, Thinking Machines Lab's $2 billion bet on autonomous reasoning, and the explosion of agentic AI startups all point to the same conclusion: AI systems that can independently complete complex tasks are becoming commercially viable.

This isn't just about efficiency—it's about fundamentally restructuring how work gets done. Companies that adapt their processes to leverage AI agents will gain massive competitive advantages, while those that try to use AI agents as drop-in replacements for human workers will likely struggle.

2. Security Has Become the Ultimate Bottleneck

The SharePoint vulnerabilities affecting 100+ organizations, the surge in state-sponsored cyberattacks, and the growing sophistication of AI-powered threats all demonstrate that cybersecurity is becoming the limiting factor for technological progress.

Every major technology adoption, from cloud computing to AI deployment, now requires security considerations that didn't exist five years ago. Organizations are being forced to choose between innovation speed and security robustness, and the ones that choose wrong face existential threats.

3. Vertical AI Is Winning Over Horizontal Platforms

The funding patterns tell a clear story: investors are backing AI companies that solve specific industry problems rather than general-purpose AI platforms.

Harvey's legal AI ($300M), LegalOn's contract review ($50M), Hadrian's defense manufacturing ($260M), and healthcare AI approvals all demonstrate that the market rewards focused applications over broad capabilities.

This shift suggests that the AI revolution will happen industry by industry, led by specialized companies that understand specific workflows rather than tech giants building universal solutions.

🎯 Conclusion: The Intelligence Infrastructure Build-Out

This week confirmed that we're in the middle of the largest infrastructure build-out in technological history, not physical infrastructure, but intelligence infrastructure. Every industry is racing to integrate AI capabilities, automate decision-making, and leverage data in ways that seemed impossible just months ago.

The winners will be organizations that can balance three imperatives: adopting AI agents to dramatically improve efficiency, implementing robust cybersecurity to protect against increasingly sophisticated threats, and focusing on specific applications rather than trying to solve everything at once.

For business leaders: The time for AI experimentation is over. Companies that haven't deployed meaningful AI capabilities by the end of 2025 will find themselves at insurmountable competitive disadvantages.

For technologists: The next 18 months will define which AI applications become essential infrastructure and which remain novelties. Focus on building systems that can handle autonomous decision-making while maintaining human oversight.

For investors: The AI funding landscape is becoming increasingly specialized. General-purpose AI platforms are giving way to vertical solutions that solve specific industry problems with measurable ROI.

The intelligence revolution isn't coming, it's here. The only question is whether you're building with it or being disrupted by it.

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