Israel’s tech industry is moving to the front lines of the country’s sudden war against Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Employees of Israeli software companies have been drafted to Israel’s military reserves to join or support an incursion into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip after the group gunned down hundreds of Israeli civilians and kidnapped dozens more in a surprise attack over the weekend. For example, at least 10% of the Israel-based... Read more ›
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When Microsoft took an early bet on OpenAI in 2019, investing $1 billion into the startup, it also placed a major bet on another project: creating a competitor to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, we reported back in April. Now, years later, Microsoft executives plan to unveil a chip designed for artificial intelligence next month at Ignite, its annual developers conference, we reported last Friday.To be fair, Microsoft is clearly playing... Read more ›
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There was a time, not long ago, when Masayoshi Son couldn’t keep his hands off the Vision Fund, the swashbuckling investment firm overseen by the Japanese conglomerate he runs, SoftBank Group. He micromanaged the firm’s partners, frequently butting in on deals to play Silicon Valley kingmaker by throwing billions of dollars—from both outside investors and SoftBank’s own coffers—at startups like WeWork and Uber. In many cases, he pressured startup founders... Read more ›
0
Engineers have improved lithium-ion batteries little by little since the debut of the first modern electric vehicles a decade and a half ago, making tweaks that together have tremendously reduced cell prices and boosted driving range. But a truly blockbuster breakthrough has evaded the industry, something that in a single stroke could make EVs go farther, cost less or both.Now, though, an increasing number of automakers, including Mercedes, Porsche, Tesla... Read more ›
0
Hi, welcome to your Weekend.Silicon Valley loves a wunderkind, as we covered extensively last spring. It also loves to pattern-match, projecting visions of future success on entrepreneurs who look a lot like winners of the past. So what happens when an obvious wunderkind doesn’t look anything like her predecessors? It took a lot of persistence for Melanie Perkins to convince investors to fork over money for her design software company... Read more ›
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“Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, Y Combinator president Garry Tan and Notion co-founder Chris Prucha looked up at the cartoon of a shirtless man, his six-pack abs gleaming against a swirling galactic background. They were eager to listen to what the man had to say. The cartoon was the avatar for Beff Jezos (nope, not Jeff Bezos), the pseudonymous co-founder of effective accelerationism (nope, not effective altruism), Silicon Valley’s new eccentric... Read more ›
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You might have missed it, with all the drama this week about Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial (for our deep dive, see here) and the latest updates from the world of AI, but we got a detailed update on ByteDance’s robust financial performance. And what that told us is that shareholders in the parent company of TikTok have reason to be very frustrated. The value of the privately held Chinese tech giant... Read more ›
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Flanked by his two top lawyers, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried sat, mostly silent, on the 26th floor in a Manhattan courtroom for the first week of his criminal trial, where he’s being tried for fraud and conspiracy charges related to his role in the collapse of one of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges. One of the first witnesses to take the stand was Gary Wang, co-founder of FTX and... Read more ›
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Microsoft next month plans to unveil the company’s first chip designed for artificial intelligence at its annual developers’ conference, according to a person with direct knowledge. The move, a culmination of years of work, could help Microsoft lessen its reliance on Nvidia-designed AI chips, which have been in short supply as demand for them has boomed. The Microsoft chip, similar to Nvidia GPUs, is designed for data center servers that... Read more ›
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On More or Less, we often like to discuss how startups are changing and how investors will adapt (and vice versa). And so, I took the opportunity this week to deliver a little rant about the term "lifestyle business," which has often irked me. Lots of other discussion on what's next for Twitter, Threads, social and—because we do read the internet—Taylor Swift. Hope you enjoy. Apple Spotify YouTube Read more ›
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For the last five years, a Silicon Valley supergroup has been plotting a secret city in Solano County, Calif., spending $800 million on 50,000 acres of land. Then, in August, The New York Times broke open the story, and the truth poured out. The project—dubbed “California Forever” and financed by a who’s who of tech investors—sought to build a newer, better urban experience in an area currently dominated by grazing... Read more ›
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In little more than a decade, the expectations placed on 36-year-old Melanie Perkins have gone from negligible to near impossible. Perkins, CEO and co-founder of Canva, a rapidly-growing graphic design platform and one of tech’s most highly valued private companies, was a complete unknown from Perth, Australia, when she appeared on the Silicon Valley scene in 2013. Today, she’s talked about by investors and colleagues in almost mythic terms. “She... Read more ›
0
Our Generative AI database includes 78 companies, more than half of which are developing their own machine-learning models. The others rely on models from OpenAI or rivals such as Anthropic and Cohere. But a growing number of companies in our database use more than one machine-learning provider, including Pathlight, which uses five.San Francisco–based Pathlight, which has raised $35 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins and Insight Partners, helps businesses analyze... Read more ›
0
When Ju Rhyu’s Hero Cosmetics, a brand known for its Mighty Patch acne treatments that got its start selling on Amazon, was closing in on $100 million in revenue in mid-2021, she and her co-founders began to think about selling the five-year-old brand to a bigger company. Rhyu and the company’s board began interviewing bankers that summer, and Vennette Ho and her team at Financo Raymond James quickly emerged as... Read more ›
1
When lingerie manufacturer Ariela & Associates International announced its purchase of buzzy direct-to-consumer intimates startup Parade in August, the deal appeared to be yet another example of larger holding companies and licensing firms buying up popular digitally native brands. Parade, valued by investors last year at about $200 million, wound up with a last-ditch sale, in a process similar to a bankruptcy liquidation. The process wiped out essentially all its... Read more ›
0
Maybe, just maybe, startup employees who held onto their jobs amid spurts of mass layoffs over the last year and a half can exhale. They have survived. The number of monthly job cuts at tech companies—just over 4,600—hit an 18-month low in September, according to Layoffs.fyi, the venerable tracker of employee career pain. The recent sprinkling of venture-backed IPOs helped lift the mood, too.But now isn’t the time for employees... Read more ›
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Logistics startup Flexport plans to lay off up to 30% of its workforce, according to a person close to the company. That would represent about 1,000 people based on a headcount of around 3,300 people. The cuts are the latest and most drastic in a series of cost-cutting moves founder Ryan Petersen has made at the decade-old company since he returned as CEO in September. Account management, customer service and... Read more ›
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Investment firm Andreessen Horowitz recently signaled to another firm that it was discussing leading a new equity financing for Ideogram, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to create unique images, said a person with knowledge of the situation. The Toronto startup, which has been seeking a $500 million pre-money valuation, doesn’t generate revenue. Four former Google AI researchers last year founded the company, and in August this year they launched... Read more ›
0
Meta Platforms’ decision to create artificial intelligence characters based on the likeness of some of the most famous people on the planet is paying off handsomely—for the stars themselves. Last week, the parent of Facebook and Instagram said it was paying stars including Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, MrBeast and Charli D’Amelio for allowing Meta to use their likenesses for fictional AI characters. For several top creators, the payments can amount... Read more ›
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The trial of Sam Bankman-Fried is officially underway and the spotlight is back on the bankrupt crypto exchange he founded. Recall that FTX launched a $2 billion venture fund early last year and bought stakes in some of the top crypto companies. When FTX imploded late last year, its decision to play venture capitalist seemed like an embarrassment. But maybe those investments, which extended beyond the struggling crypto industry, will... Read more ›
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Most popular sources
Business Insider
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28% 3 |
Tech Wire Asia
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28% 6 |
Eurogamer.net
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6% 3 |
Android Authority
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4% 1 |
CNET
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4% 3 |
| View sources » | |
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29.11.2024 18:54
Last update: 18:45 EDT.
News rating updated: 01:40.
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