Weekly Roundup
Perle Labs Updates
Welcome to The AI Loop #21. $PRL landed on Binance this week, with perpetuals now live on both Bitget and Binance. Meanwhile, Q1 2026 shattered every venture capital record in history, Google open-sourced its most powerful AI model, and the FDA fast-tracked an AI that detects heart failure from a five-second voice recording. Let's get into it.
$PRL Expands to Binance, Perpetuals Go Live, and the Claim Window Closes April 8
The $PRL expansion continued this week. Binance launched PRLUSDT perpetual contracts with up to 20x leverage on the same day. This follows the Bybit perpetuals launch (25x leverage) from last week.
$PRL perpetuals are now live on both Bitget and Binance, giving traders two major venues for leveraged exposure alongside existing spot listings across Coinbase, Gate, MEXC, LBank Exchange, and PancakeSwap.
Binance Wallet also launched a $200K PRL Trading Competition, and Gate kicked off a $120,000 PRL Airdrop for new users. Perle Foundation reminded the community that the claim window at claim.perle.xyz closes April 8, 2026 (7am EST / 11am UTC). Make sure you have a Solana-compatible wallet, your linked social accounts, and access to the portal before the deadline.
The #ToPerle campaign is wrapping up: 10 days of community voices sharing real perspectives on what @PerleLabs is building.
Top AI Stories:
Q1 2026 Shatters Every Venture Capital Record | $300B Invested, $242B to AI
Biggest quarter ever for AI, but who is getting funded?
The numbers are in, and they rewrite history. Crunchbase data shows investors poured $300 billion into 6,000 startups globally in Q1 2026, up over 150% quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. AI captured $242 billion of that total: 80% of every venture dollar deployed on the planet in a single quarter.
Four companies took $188 billion between them: Open AI ($122B), Anthropic ($30B), xAI ($20B), and Waymo ($16B). That's 65% of all global VC concentrated in four organizations. Q1 2026 alone totaled close to 70% of all venture capital spending in the entire year of 2025. The message is clear: the world's capital is flowing into AI at a pace and concentration that has no historical precedent.
Sources: Crunchbase News
Google Open-Sources Gemma 4 | Runs on Your Phone, Outperforms Models 20x Its Size
Google just open-sourced its most powerful AI model. Gemma 4, released April 2, comes in four sizes (2B, 4B, 26B MoE, 31B Dense) and is the first Gemma model released under the fully permissive Apache 2.0 license. That means developers have complete control: no restrictions on commercial use, no risk of Google pulling access.
The 31B model ranks #3 on the Arena AI leaderboard, outperforming models 20x its size. The smaller E2B and E4B models run completely offline on phones, Raspberry Pi, and NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. The Gemma family has been downloaded over 400 million times with 100,000+ community variants. All models support 140+ languages, up to 256K context windows, native function calling, and audio/video input.
This is Google handing the developer community one of the most capable AI models ever built and saying: "It's yours. Build whatever you want.”
Source: The Register
FDA Fast-Tracks an AI That Detects Heart Failure from a 5-Second Voice Recording
Noah Labs just received a Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA for Vox, an AI-powered remote monitoring tool that detects worsening heart failure from a five-second voice recording. Patients submit a recording via smartphone or tablet; the AI analyzes acoustic features to identify physiological changes linked to pulmonary congestion and fluid overload, detecting deterioration weeks before hospitalization.
Heart failure affects over 6 million Americans and is the leading cause of hospitalization in patients over 65. The Breakthrough Device Designation fast-tracks FDA review and enables closer regulatory collaboration during development. This is the kind of AI application that saves lives: non-invasive, accessible on any smartphone, and capable of catching what human observation misses.
Sources: MedTech Intelligence
