Andy Rubin, creator of Android and a former Google executive, has launched a new startup focused on humanoid robots, said a person with direct knowledge of the venture. His venture is the latest addition to the red-hot and frothy humanoid space, crowded with companies ranging from Tesla to startups such as Figure AI. Rubin’s startup, Genki Robotics, is based in Tokyo, where he is currently living, according to the person.... Read more ›
69
When business historians look back at what happened in tech between 2020 and 2022, one subject they’ll likely explore is the mass suspension of disbelief that led venture capitalists, startup founders and big companies to go wild spending money on all sorts of crazy stuff. We’re now living through the retreat from those moves, which we at The Information have been chronicling regularly, including in our deep dive today into... Read more ›
0
Earlier today, I published a story about how creator economy startups are facing a reckoning after the 2020-2021 VC funding boom that spawned hundreds of startups trying to sell tools and services to creators. As funding has dried up, several creator-related startups—including Popshop Live, Zurp and Moetic—have been looking for buyers, pivoting their businesses or shutting down completely. As part of my reporting, I spoke to Dmitry Shapiro and Sean... Read more ›
0
Amazon Web Services has suddenly cut ties with a key firm that earns commissions for bringing new customers to AWS, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. The firm, Philadelphia-based Triumph Tech, was among a select number of “premier tier” partners, AWS’s highest designation for partners. The reason for the split couldn’t immediately be learned. In interviews, one current Triumph employee and one recently departed employee said they... Read more ›
0
When Shopify last month announced the sale of its delivery operation, it was an abrupt reversal of a strategy to compete with Amazon it had spent four years and billions of dollars developing. Just six months earlier, for instance, top Shopify executives dismissed suggestions from logistics leaders that they scale back their investment to reduce the operation’s costs. In November of last year, Shopify founder and CEO Tobi ​​Lütke assembled... Read more ›
9
Silicon Valley was perhaps the world’s greatest beneficiary of nearly 15 years of extraordinarily loose monetary policy. From this fertile mix, West Coast venture capitalists and financial institutions spun a finely tuned ecosystem that excelled at converting cheap capital into high valuations. But with interest rates high and quite possibly still rising, venture capital funding declining and investors’ path to an exit largely blocked, the difficulties facing that ecosystem today... Read more ›
6
Two years ago, Dmitry Shapiro and Sean Thielen were so optimistic about the booming creator economy that they pivoted their startup to a new product: a simple tool called Koji that lets influencers more easily link to their online tip jars, merch and other services in their social media bios. Sure, there were already dozens of other startups offering a similar type of product, but that didn’t stop the two... Read more ›
8
TCV, a 28-year-old mainstay of the venture capital industry, has raised 50% to 75% less capital for its next flagship fund for private investments than the $5.5 billion target it set last year, according to new securities filings and a document compiled by one of TCV’s limited partners. The filing doesn’t clarify whether TCV is raising more capital for the fund or has finished the process, which started last summer.... Read more ›
2
The pace of tech news is picking up—and not just because antitrust regulators in both Europe and the U.S. are busy filing new lawsuits against big tech companies. And it has little to do with the fact that Twitter is once again communicating with the news media using something other than a poop emoji. No, today’s significant tech news development was the return of overpriced acquisitions. After a deal drought... Read more ›
9
Last December, in a live event on Twitter, Elon Musk called Sacramento “possibly the worst place to have a data center,” complaining about the hot temperatures of California’s inland capital, where Twitter’s data centers once went down because a heat wave overwhelmed their equipment. Musk seems to have gotten comfortable with Sacramento’s heat. Twitter stopped using its data centers in the city at the end of 2022. Since then, one... Read more ›
1
Flavrs, a three-year-old creator-focused cooking app, is taking an unusual approach to attracting creators: It’s promising to give online food influencers a small stake in the startup if they post short-form videos on the app. Creators approved for what Flavrs is calling a creator equity fund will receive shares that vest over time. In exchange, Flavrs asks them to spend “5% to 10% of their time and energy” making and... Read more ›
0
Sequoia Capital’s decision this week to split off its China operations showed the impact of growing tensions between Washington and Beijing. But the political conflict has sparked a bigger and more important change: Suddenly, American capital has stopped flowing to Chinese venture capital and private equity funds en masse. The University of Chicago, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and other major U.S. endowments and foundations have recently indicated to Chinese... Read more ›
8
Data analytics software company Sumo Logic made widespread layoffs this week, according to people familiar with the matter and an email to staff viewed by The Information, less than a month after private equity firm Francisco Partners bought the company for $1.7 billion. The exact size of the cuts couldn’t be learned. Chief Executive Joe Kim, who was named CEO three days after the Francisco Partners acquisition closed last month,... Read more ›
89
Hi, welcome to your Weekend.Jon, our intrepid Weekender in Chief, is out. I’m happily subbing for him. Indeed, I feel particularly energized this week after spotting something I haven’t seen in what feels like for-ev-er: an actually audacious piece of technology—that might never take off. I’m talking, of course, about Apple’s newly debuted $3,499 VR-AR headset, the Vision Pro. Candidly, its launch marks the first time I’ve seriously wondered whether... Read more ›
0
Oracle has invested in Cohere, an artificial intelligence startup that competes with OpenAI, the startup said on Thursday. What Cohere didn’t say: Oracle plans to make the startup a centerpiece of its strategy to catch up to bigger cloud rivals that sell services powered by large-language models. Steve Miranda, a senior Oracle executive, has told employees the company plans to sell access to Cohere’s LLMs, similar to the way thousands... Read more ›
6
Andreessen Horowitz has combined its finance and consumer investment teams into one, merging what were two of the hottest pandemic-era investment categories that have since cooled. The investment firm’s leaders have encouraged the combined team, led by general partner Alex Rampell, to pursue artificial intelligence deals, two people briefed on the change said. The shakeup is an example of how Andreessen Horowitz, one of the world’s highest profile startup backers,... Read more ›
0
Parts of the federal government are pulling back from advertising on TikTok, according to an advertising executive who works with government agencies, as the U.S. government restricts federal employees’ and contractors’ use of the app, a unit of China’s ByteDance. Last week, NASA, the Department of Defense and the General Services Administration issued an interim rule prohibiting contracts that would require using TikTok, including “where social media advertising services might... Read more ›
0
On a warm night last month, pop singer Mike Posner was working to whip up a crowd gathered in front of the Great Pyramids. “Is anybody out there aliiive?” he yelled from a stage. The 200-person group let out an affirmative whoop. Posner, clad completely in white from headscarf down, launched into a rendition of his pop-chart hit “Cooler Than Me.” It was just part of a lively desert evening... Read more ›
0
Delian Asparouhov, newly minted Founders Fund partner and co-founder of Varda Space Industries, is obsessed with speed. As a hobby, he’s getting his pilot’s license, hoping to eventually fly a fighter jet. On the ground, he prefers to listen to audiobooks at triple the normal tempo. And when he started Varda in late 2020, he set a moonshot goal: Launch one of its meter-wide pharmaceutical factories into space within two... Read more ›
0
Welcome back!This week, we added seven companies to The Information’s Generative AI Database, which now includes 46 companies building generative artificial intelligence technology or services. Six of the new entrants develop their own AI models, which ingest large amounts of data to learn patterns, even though building and training these models can be expensive and require a lot of computing power.In all, 25 companies in the database develop their own... Read more ›
0
When JPMorgan Chase struck a $400 million deal to buy WePay in late 2017, it pledged that the Bay Area fintech would become “Chase’s payments innovation incubator in Silicon Valley,” helping the country’s biggest bank compete with surging startups Stripe and Square and payments companies like PayPal. But it didn’t all go to plan. As the bank tried to digest the acquisition, WePay employees experienced botched systems integration and bureaucratic... Read more ›
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Most popular sources
Business Insider
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30% 4 |
Gizmodo
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14% 8 |
Android Authority
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10% 5 |
The Verge
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7% 1 |
Ars Technica
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5% 2 |
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21.11.2025 03:28
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