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Sycamore, founded by former Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath to let enterprises build, deploy, and monitor AI agents, raised a $65M seed led by Coatue and Lightspeed (Lucinda Shen/Axios)

After Copilot injected an ad into a pull request on GitHub, referencing Raycast, GitHub says it "disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback" (Sean Endicott/Windows Central)

Examining the Smartphone Theory of Everything, which blames phones for anxiety, populism, and polarization, despite harms being concentrated in the Anglosphere (Derek Thompson)

ScaleOps, which makes automated cloud spend tools, raised a $130M Series C led by Insight Partners at an $800M+ valuation, bringing its total funding to $210M+ (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Uber agrees to acquire Berlin-based chauffeur booking app Blacklane for an undisclosed sum to bolster its Uber Elite service, set to close by the end of 2026 (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Microsoft rolls out Copilot Cowork to its Frontier program for early-stage testing, including a new Researcher Critique tool using Anthropic and OpenAI models (Jared Spataro/Microsoft 365 Blog)

AI chip startup Rebellions raised $400M in a pre-IPO round at a $2.34B valuation, bringing its total funding to $850M, with $650M in the past six months (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

New York-based Qodo, which offers AI agents for code review, testing, and governance, raised a $70M Series B led by Qumra, taking its total funding to $120M (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

OpenAI's ChatGPT app store now has 300+ app integrations six months after its launch, but faces sluggish adoption due to limited functionality for many apps (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Finnish startup IQM Quantum Computers raised €50M from BlackRock to accelerate its global growth, ahead of a planned dual US and Helsinki IPO later in 2026 (Anne Kauranen/Reuters)

London-based money transfer company Wise plans to launch UK bank accounts, joining an increasingly crowded market; Monzo reports 15M personal and business users (Aisha S Gani/Bloomberg)

Space data center startup Starcloud raised a $170M Series A led by Benchmark and EQT at a $1.1B valuation, and plans to launch Starcloud 2 later in 2026 (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

How Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean has been an outspoken voice on politics, a rare tech leader openly criticizing Trump actions and an ICE shooting (Katherine Blunt/Wall Street Journal)

A study finds ~$143M in suspicious profits on Polymarket over two years, using patterns consistent with the use of nonpublic info, as prediction markets boom (Bloomberg)

Some schools in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Michigan are reevaluating classroom tech usage, including Chromebooks, amid student screen time concerns (New York Times)

Q&A with NYU professor Julian Togelius on his recent paper about LLMs' limitations in playing video games, why coding is a kind of well-designed game, and more (Matthew S. Smith/IEEE Spectrum)

Amazon MGM's Project Hail Mary becomes its highest-grossing film ever, crossing $300M globally, including $54.1M just this weekend; the movie cost $200M to make (Brent Lang/Variety)

Emails, texts, and NTSB reports show Waymo and an Austin school district struggled for months to train robotaxis to stop for school buses as required by law (Aarian Marshall/Wired)

Chinese photonic chipmaker Yuanjie reported 2025 revenue up 138.5% YoY to ~$86.99M, data center revenue up 719% to ~$56.89M, ahead of its April 1 Hong Kong IPO (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)

PwC: 76 mainland Chinese companies listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2025, up from 30 in 2024, despite the city's waning appeal to international investors (Sylvia Chang/BBC)

Some defense tech startups are considering relocating to the US due to the UK's military spending delays, as some execs say the UK sector is at a "standstill" (Financial Times)

An analysis of four large private-credit funds finds an average of ~25% software share exposure vs. ~19% disclosed, amid investor concerns about software stocks (Wall Street Journal)

Inside the rise and fall of Sora, whose team worked separately from OpenAI's core research team, as OpenAI shuts down Sora and redirects compute to other tasks (Wall Street Journal)

Some developers say the App Store review process is taking significantly longer, up to multiple weeks, with an influx of vibe-coded apps as the likely cause (Business Insider)

Midjourney CEO David Holz says the company's revenue "significantly surpassed" $200M in 2023, and has "gone up" since then, despite its declining web traffic (Jemima McEvoy/The Information)

Pro-AI group Innovation Council Action, praised by David Sacks, plans to spend $100M+ in the US midterms to drive deregulation and support Trump's AI agenda (Alex Isenstadt/Axios)

A look at Coinbase One and other insurance-like plans for crypto users that typically exclude coverage for many kinds of account hacks, including phishing scams (Bloomberg)

Bluesky's CEO talks about Attie, a new agentic social app built on Bluesky's AT Protocol that uses Claude and lets users build custom feeds (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Hong Kong-listed AI drug discovery company Insilico Medicine and Eli Lilly sign a drug co-development deal worth up to $2.75B, with $115M in upfront payments (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)

An AI-generated TikTok parody of reality series Love Island, called Fruit Love Island, averaged 10M+ views across its first 21 episodes after debuting last week (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

Q&A with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan on the platform's dominance, its impact on kids, the suspension and reinstatement of Trump's YouTube account, AI slop, and more (Lulu Garcia-Navarro/New York Times)

Analysis: while social media rewards sensationalism and inflammatory content, LLMs guide people away from extreme positions and towards expert-aligned stances (John Burn-Murdoch/Financial Times)

A study of 11 leading LLMs finds the models more agreeable than humans when giving interpersonal advice, affirming users' behavior even when harmful or illegal (Stanford University)

Vinod Khosla says AI is accelerating a shift of wealth and power away from workers, and an income tax overhaul in the US could offset voter fears about job loss (Financial Times)

Qualified Health, which helps health systems evaluate and adopt AI tools, raised a $125M Series B led by NEA at a valuation of between $500M and $1B (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare)

A look at why Dotcom Bubble comparisons to the AI boom are off, vertical SaaS is up +3% last 12 months vs. horizontal SaaS down 35%, and other reflections on AI (Logan Bartlett/@loganbartlett)

A profile of Mark Lanier, a TX lawyer and part-time pastor who beat Meta and Google in the LA social media case and said Zuckerberg was "rattled" on the stand (Wall Street Journal)

Report analyzing payments of 28M US consumers shows Claude adding paid subs at a steadily increasing pace; Anthropic: paid subs have more than doubled this year (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

ShinyHunters says it stole 350GB+ of data in a cyberattack on the European Commission, detected on March 24; the EC says its internal systems were not affected (Pierluigi Paganini/Security Affairs)

Sources: DHS clears seven CISA staffers of wrongdoing; the staffers had been accused of misleading CISA's former acting director into taking a polygraph test (John Sakellariadis/Politico)

Sources: Ross Nordeen, the last remaining cofounder at xAI, left the company on Friday; Nordeen reported directly to Elon Musk as his right-hand operator (Grace Kay/Business Insider)

A look at the decadelong feud between Sam Altman and Dario Amodei; sources say Amodei likened Altman's legal fight with Musk to Hitler's fight with Stalin (Keach Hagey/Wall Street Journal)

Chess grandmasters find new ways to win by making less optimal moves after AI pushed classical chess toward perfect play, breathing new life into the game (Kevin Lincoln/Bloomberg)

A look at some themes at this year's Hill and Valley Forum: embracing government-led industrial policy to onshore manufacturing, AI's unpopularity, and more (Newcomer)

Prediction market bets decided on linguistic technicalities expose how hard it is to turn language into a binary market, with payouts hinging on a single word (Christopher Beam/Bloomberg)

Meta's longtime content policy chief Monika Bickert is leaving the company to teach at Harvard; she will stay at Meta until August to work on a transition plan (Reuters)

Investment in Austin-based startups grew to a record high of $7.19B in 2025, up from $4.37B in 2024 and topping a pandemic peak of $6.1B in 2021 (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

Taiwanese memory chipmaker Nanya raised $2.5B in a private placement from Sandisk, SK Hynix's Solidigm, Cisco, and Kioxia to expand advanced chip production (Reuters)

Indonesia begins implementing a regulation that bans under-16s from digital platforms that could expose them to porn, cyberbullying, online scams, and addiction (Edna Tarigan/Associated Press)

Worth, which aims to help financial services onboard and underwrite SMBs, raised a $30M Series A led by Fulcrum Equity Partners, following a $25M seed round (Brian Contreras/Inc)