Salesforce’s AI Stumbles Shake Confidence, While Shield AI and Ozak AI Signal What’s Next

Today, Salesforce dropped the ball just as Shield AI picked it up and ran. Wall Street punished legacy laggards in AI, while venture capital bet $240M that combat drone autonomy isn’t science fiction anymore. Meanwhile, crypto got a jolt from Ozak AI's rally, a speculative frenzy or the next builder playbook?

📈 AI Market Movers & Trends

Salesforce reminded the market that slapping “AI powered” on your pitch deck isn’t enough. After issuing weak FY26 guidance and failing to show real traction in monetizing its Einstein AI platform, the stock fell nearly 7% in late day trading, shaving over $18B in market cap. That’s not a correction, it's a reckoning.

Finance Magnates summed it up, “Investors expected AI led margin expansion. They got managed mediocrity.” In an AI driven market cycle, your earnings call is either a victory lap or a confession booth. Salesforce waffled, and the Street noticed.

Meanwhile, Ubiquiti Networks quietly surged to an all time high of $544.79. It doesn’t describe itself as an “AI leader,” but its machine learning driven network optimization is likely behind the move, a case study in subtle, effective implementation. Investors want results, not buzzwords.

And don’t ignore the silent climber, Pony.ai. The autonomous driving upstart, now public, traded flat today but remains under close watch by bullish funds betting on China’s robotaxi revolution. Pair that with Eurowag’s strong H1 growth (thanks in part to AI fleet optimization), and you’ve got underlying signals that AI applied smartly, not shouted loudly, still wins.

Bottom line, Legacy tech can’t fake AI fluency. Meanwhile, industrial and infrastructure plays with applied AI are quietly rewriting market leadership.

💸 Funding Watch

Startups aren’t waiting for public markets to reward their AI strategy, they’re closing monster rounds before Wall Street catches up.

Shield AI just pulled a $240M Series F at a $5.3B valuation, led by Snowpoint and Moore Strategic, to scale Hivemind, a combat tested autonomy stack for aircraft and drones. That’s on top of recent Department of Defense deployments, making it one of the most legit “AI + defense” platforms on the planet.

In civilian space, Anaconda, best known for its Python package manager, raised $150M at a $1.5B valuation. A16z and Bessemer backed the Series C, as Anaconda pivots toward enterprise grade AI deployment tools with a focus on data scientists beyond Silicon Valley. It’s nerdy, niche, and necessary, exactly what VCs want right now.

Then there’s EnCharge AI, taking the hardware plunge. It just closed a $100M Series B to develop edge AI chips designed for ultra efficient inference. NEA and Thrive backed the round. This is a bet that the AI hardware game isn’t only Nvidia’s to win, and that inference (not training) is where next gen compute margins are hiding.

And in a refreshing pivot from hype to harvest, Orchard Robotics raised $22M for machine vision systems that boost farm yields by up to 30%. Agriculture’s AI moment is overdue, and this round, backed by AgFunder and Index, suggests investors think AI’s most unsexy sectors might be its most valuable.

Big picture? The funding’s still flowing but it’s funneling toward where AI actually drives performance, defense, chip design, agricultural ops. Not another chatbot.

🪙 Crypto Moves

AI tokens continue to blur the line between narrative fuel and frontier bet, but this week, Ozak AI is making both bulls and skeptics sweat.

Ozak, a low float AI token tied to decentralized model training, spiked 38% in 48 hours on whale accumulation and a new whitepaper hinting at GPU rental markets via smart contracts. Messari data shows on chain activity hitting all time highs, and Telegram groups are calling it the “Render killer”, a stretch, but the narrative’s sticky.

Why it matters? This isn’t about Ozak’s fundamentals. It’s about the resurfacing of the “infrastructure for decentralized AI” thesis that fueled Ocean, Render, and Bittensor’s earlier runs. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong fanned the flames by hinting at "AI aligned decentralization protocols" in a recent investor livestream, no names, but the market heard it loud and clear.

Meanwhile, the SEC and CFTC finally cracked the door open for regulated spot crypto trading in the U.S., which could legitimize hybrid tokens like FET, AGIX, and others flirting with AI utility. Call it regulatory “maybe lift,” not greenlight, but sentiment just shifted from defensive to cautiously ambitious.

And don’t miss this, Ozak AI’s recent treasury report shows cross holdings in EnCharge AI, yes, the same chip startup from earlier. The convergence is happening in real time, AI hardware on chain, startups issuing tokens, and token treasuries betting on startup equity.

Crypto native AI isn’t just memecoins anymore. It’s becoming a messy, inventive experiment in venture capital without gatekeepers, and the VCs are noticing.

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