Meta’s Creator Fast Track programme guarantees three months of pay for established creators willing to build a following on Facebook, after the company paid out a record $3 billion to creators in 2025. Facebook has a creator problem that three billion monthly users cannot solve. The platform is enormous, but the creators who drive the This story continues at The Next Web

The New York digital comics platform is combining its 300,000-title library with INKR’s AI localisation engine, and bringing in new leadership to execute the expansion. The problem with getting manga into the hands of readers outside Japan is not demand. Manga is the fastest-growing category in American book publishing; global interest has been building for This story continues at The Next Web

The Paris startup opened the EU’s emissions trading market to private investors in 2024. Now it has the backing to expand into energy, electrification, and other markets shaping the industrial transition. Valentin Lautier says he got the idea for Homaio on the Eurostar. He was reading a Financial Times article about European Union Allowances, the This story continues at The Next Web

The San Francisco startup emerges from stealth with Mayfield backing and a pitch that treats ad creative as a continuous learning loop, not a quarterly deliverable. Every B2B marketing team knows the problem. A campaign launches, the creative is fresh, the targeting feels right, and then, slowly, it starts dying. Audiences tune out. Click rates This story continues at The Next Web

An extension to the company’s Series A brings total funding to €23 million and clears the path for the first human trial of KUP101, a dual TLR agonist targeting solid tumours and drug-resistant infections. Most immunotherapy research in oncology has concentrated on the adaptive immune system, the learned, antibody-generating machinery that checkpoint inhibitors like pembrolizumab This story continues at The Next Web

The Zurich-based startup, which previously raised €3M to unify fragmented trial data, has secured a larger round to build AI agents that actively manage the complex operational layer of running a clinical trial. Clinical trials are, by almost any measure, one of the most information-intensive processes in modern medicine, and one of the least efficiently This story continues at The Next Web

Manus’s new desktop app can read, edit, and act on files and applications directly on a user’s machine. The launch puts Meta’s AI agent ambitions in direct competition with the open-source tool that has dominated the conversation this week. OpenClaw arrived on the internet last month like a weather system. Within days of its release This story continues at The Next Web

For most of its fifty-year history, Mastercard has been, in essence, a message-passing network. A transaction happens; Mastercard’s rails carry the authorisation signal between issuer and acquirer in milliseconds; settlement follows on a separate, slower track. The system is extraordinarily reliable and extraordinarily profitable. It is also, increasingly, a system designed for a world that This story continues at The Next Web

Polyacrylate is the synthetic crystal at the heart of every modern disposable nappy, is derived from petroleum, and it does not break down. It persists for centuries, leaching microplastics into soil and groundwater as it degrades. The hygiene industry has long regarded it as an engineering necessity: nothing else absorbs as fast, as much, or This story continues at The Next Web

The Oslo-based DNV spinout processed over 25,000 bunker operations in 2025 and claims roughly 40% of Singapore’s digital bunkering market. Verb Ventures leads a growth round that brings total funding to $9 million. The paperwork of global shipping is notoriously stubborn. Every fuel delivery to every vessel at every port generates a chain of manual This story continues at The Next Web