This holiday shopping season is acting as a coming out party for TikTok Shop, the video app’s new shopping feature, which has been wooing shoppers with big discounts. To get a sense of how the first Black Friday weekend for brands using TikTok Shop went, I caught up with Paul Jauregui, the cofounder of BK Beauty. The Austin-based seller of makeup brushes has caught fire on TikTok over the past... Read more ›
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Many would argue that today marks the one-year anniversary of the investor frenzy for generative artificial intelligence startups. It was exactly this time last year that OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, one of the most transformative new tech products in recent history. Investors had already gotten a taste for AI deals before then, thanks to breakthroughs by OpenAI and others. Then ChatGPT came along, lighting the fuse for dealmaking that transformed a... Read more ›
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There’s much speculation about the reasons for the abrupt removal and subsequent return of Sam Altman as the CEO of OpenAI. Irrespective of who leads the company going forward, OpenAI faces a fundamental challenge in reconciling its mission with its choice of corporate structure and business model. To solve it, we can learn from the history of tech innovations. Much of the discourse on OpenAI’s dysfunction has focused on tribal... Read more ›
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In the lucrative world of artificial intelligence, data are king. Model developers like OpenAI have inked multi-million dollar deals with companies such as The Associated Press to get access to hard-to-find data with which to train their AI models. And startups like Amsterdam-based Adaptive have landed eight-figure sums of capital just with the promise of developing another form of training data. Adaptive claims to be working on a product to... Read more ›
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Several months ago, executives at Alibaba tried to persuade some big investors to take a stake in its cloud unit—which Alibaba was then planning to spin off as a separate company—at a $40 billion valuation. Alibaba’s idea was that the outside investments could signal to the stock market the appeal of the cloud unit ahead of its public debut. The plan flopped. Investors balked at the valuation Alibaba sought. They... Read more ›
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Traditional and next-generation electric vehicle battery companies have laid off hundreds of employees in the U.S. and Europe in the last couple of weeks, a symptom of a new industry malaise triggered by lower-than-expected EV sales growth. The layoffs are part of a broad move by the battery makers to conserve cash as costs have soared and investors that have been willing to tide startups through bad stretches have turned... Read more ›
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Microsoft is to become a non-voting observer on the non-profit board that governs OpenAI, newly reinstated CEO Sam Altman told employees on Wednesday, while confirming he had officially rejoined the firm. Microsoft’s new status will give it some insight into the board’s deliberations, but it won’t have a vote, thereby limiting its ability to influence decisions. Microsoft is the biggest shareholder in OpenAI, with a more than 49% stake in... Read more ›
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Woof! There is deal-making going on out there that doesn’t have to do with artificial intelligence (unless of course you mean animal intelligence). Blackstone’s $2.3 billion purchase of pet-sitting marketplace Rover Group, unveiled Wednesday, demonstrates that Rover is that rarest of gems, a company that went public via a SPAC merger and turned out not to be a dog. SPACs, as you might remember, are those cashed-up shell firms known... Read more ›
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Creators have started using generative artificial intelligence to make their jobs easier, and more startups are looking to provide those tools. At least 19 creator startups center on AI, according to our Creator Economy Database.Still, creators are worried they won’t get credit for their work. Already, some like comedian Sarah Silverman have sued Meta Platforms and OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement. Earlier this month, Kaya moderated a discussion on how... Read more ›
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Sequoia Capital has finalized a key aspect of its landmark breakup with its Chinese and Indian affiliates one month ahead of schedule. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture firm has completed the process of separating IT systems and other back-end functions such as finance and accounting from the Chinese and Indian entities, formerly known as Sequoia Capital China and Sequoia Capital India, according to two people familiar with the matter. The... Read more ›
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A congressional committee is preparing to question officials from the federal banking regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, over the appointment of its first chief financial technology officer, who The Information reported fabricated his work history to get the $300,000-a-year job. The House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion has asked representatives of the OCC to appear at a hearing on Tuesday.... Read more ›
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Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group announced last week that it sold its crypto news subsidiary CoinDesk to the crypto exchange Bullish. Silbert said in a tweet that the sale made CoinDesk, which DCG bought for $500,000 in 2016, “one of our best investments of all time,” but the sale price was not disclosed and could not be learned.What is clear, though, is that CoinDesk has seen its business slow dramatically... Read more ›
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Clem Delangue‘s got some hot takes on AI, and he’s not afraid to share them.Yesterday, the cofounder and CEO of Hugging Face, a popular large-language model repository, joined the company’s chief ethics scientist Margaret Mitchell and head of global policy Irene Solaiman to share their thoughts during a press briefing on the past year of AI and what’s coming next. The highlights included what comes after LLMs, the open-source versus... Read more ›
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Microsoft-backed cloud startup Rubrik, which has been preparing for an initial public offering, may have the same problem that complicated the recent IPOs of Instacart and Arm: unusually slow revenue growth. Rubrik’s revenue grew about 8% year over year during the six months that ended in July, to nearly $290 million, a person familiar with the matter said. That was a slowdown from about 18% growth the previous year. But... Read more ›
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In 2017, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son gathered a group of executives from Arm Holdings, the British chip designer SoftBank had just bought, to complain about one of its most important customers: Apple. In a conference room in Tokyo, Son told the group that Apple paid more for the piece of plastic that protects the screens of new iPhones than it did to license Arm’s intellectual property, according to a person... Read more ›
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OpenAI’s board appointment of two rhetorical graybeards—tech veteran Bret Taylor and, for some reason, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summer—mercifully helped avert its pre-Thanksgiving leadership crisis. It has more board vacancies to fill (but not with investors), governance rules to set and a CEO to investigate.I’d pose another priority: Deepen OpenAI’s roster of experienced executives, not just its board members. There’s a serious disconnect between OpenAI’s early accomplishments and the... Read more ›
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Even cybersecurity startups are starting to use influencers to market their products.Aura, a five-year-old cybersecurity startup last valued at $2.5 billion, started working with influencers about two years ago as a way to raise awareness about its AI-powered product that protects families against online fraud, such as identity theft. In 2024, Aura plans to grow its influencer marketing budget by more than 50% from $15 million to $20 million this... Read more ›
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX is parachuting in to rescue one of its vendors from bankruptcy. The rocket company is acquiring Pioneer Aerospace—which makes parachutes for space vehicles as they return to Earth—for $2.2 million, according to a Florida bankruptcy filing by the parent company of Pioneer. The acquisition, which was approved by a judge on November 22, hasn’t been previously reported. It’s SpaceX’s first publicly known acquisition since 2021, when the... Read more ›
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OpenAI’s revamped board of directors doesn’t plan to include representatives from outside investors, according to a person familiar with the situation. It’s a sign that the board will prioritize safety practices ahead of investor returns. The new board hasn’t been officially seated and things could change. But the person said Microsoft and other shareholders, such as Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital, aren’t expected to be offered a seat... Read more ›
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This might not be at the top of Sam Altman’s priority list now that he’s back at OpenAI, but the CEO may soon have to deal with a looming threat to the business. Customers, such as fintech startup Ramp, are using OpenAI models like GPT-4 to customize cheaper-to-run open-source alternatives. Technically, that behavior goes against OpenAI’s terms of use but OpenAI doesn’t seem too bothered by it—yet. But if this... Read more ›
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01.04.2026 05:49
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