Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: How a Chinese megabillionaire became the Jensen Huang of batteries. • Style and Shopping: Tech invaded Cannes. Then we went shopping.• Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “Long Buried,” “How to Not Die in Prison” and “Dust Bunny”On Tuesday, a closely watched Congressional primary in New York City ended in defeat for Alex Bores, a former Palantir engineer turned state legislator who... Read more ›
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After a rough couple of years, software companies are finding it easier to sell their products to businesses. New data show that privately held software companies selling subscription services spent less time and money in the fourth quarter of 2023 to secure new customers, compared with earlier in the year. Preliminary data from January suggest the trend has continued, said Miguel Fernández, co-founder and CEO of startup lender Capchase, which... Read more ›
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Welcome back to The Electric!China dominates the global batteries industry, including the supply of components and metals. But its power is not fixed. This week, we examine two flashpoints where China and the U.S. both have much at stake. At a nickel smelter in Sorowako, Indonesia. Photo: Hariandi Hafid/SOPA/LightRocket/GettyLast week, Canada’s Ivanhoe Mines and Singapore’s Trafigura signed a deal to ship cobalt and copper from Zambia and the Democratic Republic... Read more ›
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Welcome to your Weekend!A week or so ago, I did a double redeye trip from New York to San Francisco, largely to see Brex co-founder Pedro Franceschi. As often happens these days, we spent part of our time in San Francisco talking about New York, where Franceschi had recently lived for a year and a half, stationing himself in a swank SoHo pad. In New York, he devoted much of... Read more ›
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Money may not be able to buy happiness, but who’s to say it can’t generate a pretty nice ROI when it comes to love? Go ahead and test that theorem on romantic returns with our Valentine’s Day gift guide, which we assembled by talking with power couples in tech about what presents they’re giving each other this year and what they’ve given in the past. Their answers ranged from the... Read more ›
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Be careful what you wish for, particularly if your wish is to sign Apple as a customer. That’s true whatever business you’re in, including, as The Information revealed this week, freight transport. As my colleagues Theo Wayt and Ann Gehan detailed in this report, freight firm Flexport’s biggest-name customer—one that hasn’t been disclosed before—is Apple. Flexport flies Apple products from Asian factories to U.S. cities. But the freight firm effectively... Read more ›
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You rarely know where new technology is going to lead. In some ways, Apple's Vision Pro has seemed like a watershed product. Some believe it is the start of how computing will look five, ten, twenty years from now. Others think it is essentially a flat-screen television—the latest cool entertainment device. We debated that, of course, on the pod this week. We also welcomed our friend Brian Singerman, a partner... Read more ›
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When pain clouds the present, the past can provide a welcome escape—a reality I see reflected on Pedro Franceschi’s face as we headed down Market Street in San Francisco last week. With the Muni trams crawling past us, he pointed out several of Brex’s former offices, narrating his startup’s high-speed rise: one at 580 Market (“Our first one! We were, like, 15 people then”) and another at 115 Sansome, a... Read more ›
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In October, we identified 50 companies for the fourth edition of The Information 50 Most Promising Startups. Today, we’re revisiting our latest picks. In less than six months, more than one in five have raised fresh funding, despite a lackluster investing climate. In the fourth quarter of 2023, global venture funds invested less money in startups than in any quarter since early 2017, according to CB Insights. Read more ›
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In 2015, fintech founder and eventual FDIC Chief Innovation Officer Sultan Meghji was sitting in a co-working space when a loud bang clapped through the room. It startled his colleagues, a group of founders from the St. Louis startup community, according to a person who was there. Meghji turned to a colleague and said the violent pop gave him flashbacks to the time he was shot. Many of Meghji’s former... Read more ›
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Wonders never cease: Arm’s pre-IPO promise to investors that the chip design firm would soon show decent growth turned out to be true! The company’s stock rocketed as much as 60% on Thursday after Arm reported a better-than-projected 14% revenue increase in December-quarter revenues. You might be thinking that 14% is hardly home run territory, particularly in tech. Still, given that Arm’s revenue was flat in fiscal 2023, and the... Read more ›
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Add Pinterest to the same boat as Snap: a social media company that’s showing growth in digital ads, but far from the strength that wowed investors after Meta Platforms results. Pinterest stock fell 9% in extended trading Thursday afternoon after revenue rose 12% to $981 million during the fourth quarter compared to a year earlier. That was slightly below investors’ expectations and in the middle of the company’s prior guidance.... Read more ›
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Disney’s $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games values the Fortnite maker at $22.5 billion, a person familiar with the matter said. The price is about a 29% drop from where investors last valued the company less than two years ago. The investment makes the “Fortnite” maker one of the largest private, venture-backed companies to sell new shares at a steep discount since higher interest rates hit tech valuations. Disney’s $1.5... Read more ›
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The market for investing in mature startups has been in the dumps for the last year, as higher interest rates curb these startups’ growth. But plans by one of Silicon Valley’s oldest growth-stage VC firms to raise a new fund suggest such investors are ready to get back to work.IVP, a 43-year-old venture capital firm that’s backed Coinbase and Twitter and usually focuses on Series B deals or later, plans... Read more ›
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I’m Kalley, a reporter covering Meta Platforms and social media. I’m now regularly contributing to AI Agenda.Google this morning launched Gemini Ultra, the long-awaited flagship version of its most advanced large language model. It also renamed its ChatGPT rival to Gemini from Bard, which seemed like a logical move. These announcements had already leaked over the weekend in an accidental post by Google, but how Google is rolling out Ultra... Read more ›
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For Flexport, a logistics company billing itself as the future of trade, it’s hard to think of a more impressive client than Apple, the poster child of globalization. Since late 2022, the iPhone maker has been using Flexport’s air freight services to fly products from some of its factories in Asia to U.S. cities for distribution to customers, according to two people familiar with Flexport’s business. While that previously unreported... Read more ›
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Shaking up its troubled battery development unit, General Motors has hired Kurt Kelty, a senior executive with silicon anode developer Sila Nanotechnologies, for a newly created position as vice president of batteries. Read more ›
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Taylor Swift! Fortnite! Disney CEO Bob Iger dropped the names of both entertainment icons as he ramped up his campaign to defeat the two activist shareholders—Nelson Peltz and Blackwells Capital—trying to win seats on Disney’s board. Using the power of incumbency, Iger on Wednesday unveiled a deluge of glitzy new entertainment ventures alongside improved earnings for the December quarter, a 50% increase in the quarterly dividend and the first stock... Read more ›
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When you’re not scanning Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast for a Taylor Swift sighting, look out for some high profile creators like MrBeast, Mark Rober and Deestroying. The National Football League, as part of a strategy to turn more Gen Z viewers into football fans, is working with a record number of creators around the big game this year—in the dozens—in large part due to its partnership with YouTube for its... Read more ›
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OpenAI’s first major product, ChatGPT, proved so popular that it sparked a generation of wannabes. But as rivals like Google catch up, OpenAI is hustling to release a product that could prove almost as revolutionary. OpenAI is developing a form of agent software to automate complex tasks by effectively taking over a customer’s device. The customer could then ask the ChatGPT agent to transfer data from a document to a... Read more ›
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Sex sells, and sex created by artificial intelligence is no exception.While many generative AI startups have struggled to manage the exploding costs of AI and retain their customers, AI-powered romantic chatbots haven’t had much trouble attracting and keeping their users. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, a thriving ecosystem has emerged, ranging from relatively tame AI “companions” to pornographic chatbots accompanied with explicit pictures. Many of these companies have... Read more ›
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03.07.2026 03:16
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