Since it was founded in 2019, credit card startup Ramp has won over investors with a blistering pace of growth. As card payment volume surged, the startup’s valuation exploded from $1 billion in early to 2021 to over $8 billion last year, thanks to investments from Thrive Capital and Redpoint Ventures, among others. Those heady times are clearly over. The New York–based startup, which competes with American Express and fellow... Read more ›
3
Landlords leasing spaces to WeWork have been increasingly approaching rival venture- and private equity–backed office rental startups, such as Codi, Industrious and Serendipity Labs, to gauge their interest in taking over WeWork spaces ahead of a possible WeWork bankruptcy, say industry executives. One challenge for landlords, however, is that some startups aren’t enthusiastic about taking on additional spaces, given the relatively weak demand for office space. Read more ›
0
Fintech startup Ramp is raising several hundred million from investors at a $5.5 billion valuation, measured before the investment, according to two people familiar with the matter. That’s a 32% cut to the $8.1 billion at which Ramp was valued at in 2021, reflecting how startup values have fallen in the past two years. Thrive Capital is leading the financing, according to another person familiar with the matter. The financial... Read more ›
26
Much to the dismay of antsy bankers and investors, it doesn’t look like Databricks, which has aided the rise of artificial intelligence software in the business world, will be going public anytime soon.Instead, the company, which sells tools for building machine-learning models, has been chatting with investors about potentially raising hundreds of millions of dollars, as my colleagues Cory and Amir reported yesterday.Databricks won’t take any capital at a valuation... Read more ›
2
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s latest crackdown on Wall Street bankers and traders’ use of encrypted apps is sparking interest in whether large-language models and other artificial intelligence tools can catch Wall Street workers talking in code about something they shouldn’t be—or switching to an encrypted app to continue a conversation. It’s not easy. When chatting over text, people can be cryptic even when they’re not trying to evade rules.... Read more ›
0
Alphabet’s biggest “other bet,” part of the blue-sky investment projects carved off from the company’s Google ad-based empire several years ago, is moving toward the exits. Stephen Gillett, CEO of Verily, an Alphabet subsidiary that aims to apply data analytics to healthcare, told employees this month that by the end of 2024 it would stop using its parent company for a wide range of corporate services, from real estate to... Read more ›
36
Most auto companies and their customers are obsessed with how far electric vehicles will go on a charge. To be taken seriously, most carmakers think an EV should have 250 to 300 miles of range; 400 to 500 miles on a charge is the ultragold standard. EVs that deliver such long range are kings of the hill.Lucid Motors says this thinking is all wrong. What sets a terrific EV apart... Read more ›
76
Believe it or not, U.S. companies’ biggest antitrust irritant may not be Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission. International regulators—mainly in China and Britain—are increasingly elbowing their way into foreign deals that don’t obviously require their attention. The latest example is Intel’s decision on Wednesday to walk away from its $5.4 billion acquisition of Israeli chipmaker Tower Semiconductor because it couldn’t get approval from the Chinese government. What’s worse: When it... Read more ›
48
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the war took over social media as people outside the country posted videos and photos pledging support for the residents. Ordinary people as well as professional creators also published updates from Ukraine, including a livestream of the invasion on Twitch. But 18 months later, it’s no longer a prominent topic on social media feeds around the world.From February to July, about 212,000 videos... Read more ›
39
Enterprise software firm Databricks is in early discussions with investors for a new cash infusion, likely totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, as it looks to capitalize on the fervor over artificial intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said. The investment talks come as Databricks has moved closer to break-even, after losing a total of about $900 million, excluding depreciation and amortization, in its last two fiscal years. That... Read more ›
15
Unless you’re running an AI startup, it’s tough to raise money these days. That’s especially true for crypto companies, where global venture funding fell by 78% in the first half compared to the same period last year, according to data from PitchBook.Crypto focused venture capitalists still have plenty of money to put to work though, and several have told me that they’ve increasingly been buying more shares in secondary deals.... Read more ›
0
Hello!One of the earliest companies to commercialize generative AI was GitHub, the Microsoft-owned code repository, which released its AI coding assistant Copilot under preview in June 2021. Powered by OpenAI’s technology, the assistant quickly captured the hearts of developers by giving them a tool that suggests code fragments while they type, similar to autocomplete in Gmail. Last September, just a few months after GitHub began charging developers $10 per month... Read more ›
0
As Meta Platforms has tried to cut costs and trim headcount over the past year, one area has emerged as an exception: generative artificial intelligence. Caught flat-footed by the explosion of interest in OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta scrambled to put together a team in February focused on the buzzy technology in the hopes of deploying it in features and tools across its apps. The leader of the unit, former Apple executive... Read more ›
36
For years, politicians and the public have attacked the leaders of companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google, arguing they had their “thumbs on the scales” of political discourse. Critics worried these companies had too much power over how content was amplified on their sites, were picking winners and losers in elections, and on and on.And so it was sort of stunning today to learn that Elon Musk—the new owner of... Read more ›
27
In early August, Elon Musk said X would only take a cut of its creators’ subscription revenue on the platform if their payouts topped $100,000 in lifetime earnings, a more generous offer than Musk’s prior deal, which delayed taking its 10% cut for the first 12 months of a creator’s subscription revenue. The move looked designed to attract more creators to sell subscriptions on X, which in turn could boost... Read more ›
0
With AI technology progressing, it’s getting increasingly difficult to tell what content is real and what’s not. While many deepfakes are for entertainment purposes, more and more of them are being used to defraud people or influence elections. In partnership with Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs, The Information’s Margaux MacColl sat down to discuss misinformation and deepfakes with three experts: Ben Colman: Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Accelerator Alum & co-founder and... Read more ›
2
Historically (and much to the dismay of people born in May and June), the word “Gemini” has been associated with being “two-faced” or having dual personalities.  So it’s somewhat fitting, then, that Google’s upcoming collection of large machine-learning models using that name was borne out of the forced marriage of two AI teams, Google Brain and DeepMind, with diverging and sometimes conflicting philosophies and histories.The Gemini models, which The Information... Read more ›
0
In April, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai took an unusual step: merging two large artificial intelligence teams—with distinct cultures and code—to catch up to and surpass OpenAI and other rivals. Now the test of that effort is coming, with hundreds of people scrambling to release a group of large machine-learning models—one of the highest-stakes products the company has ever built—this fall. The models, collectively known as Gemini, are expected to give... Read more ›
99
When CMC Capital, a Shanghai-based venture capital and private equity firm, started raising a new fund from global investors in 2021, its target size of more than $1 billion didn’t seem ambitious. The amount was only a tad more than the firm’s previous fund of $950 million. And CMC’s founder, Li Ruigang, is a well-known media mogul, sometimes referred to as China’s Rupert Murdoch, who has a stake in the... Read more ›
26
Venture-backed consumer lending startups are starting to fold their cards. Happy Money, an online lending startup formerly known as Payoff, is in talks to sell itself, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The Torrance, Calif.-based company, valued at $1.1 billion in a private financing announced in February last year, has held sale discussions with at least one financial institution, the person said. And Sable, a Y... Read more ›
0
Most popular sources
Business Insider
|
45% 19 |
Android Authority
|
8% 4 |
The Verge
|
6% 0 |
Gizmodo
|
5% 1 |
Engadget
|
5% 3 |
| View sources » | |
LIKE us on Facebook so you won't miss the most important news of the day!
30.11.2024 11:36
Last update: 11:31 EDT.
News rating updated: 18:30.
What is Times42?
Times42 brings you the most popular news from tech news portals in real-time chart.
Read about us in FAQ section.