← Back to news
T

Techmeme

Windsurf's CEO goes to Google; OpenAI's acquisition falls apart (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

T

Sources: OpenAI and Windsurf talks ended after Windsurf raised concerns over how its tech would fit into OpenAI's agreement to share tech with Microsoft (The Information)

T

Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf's R&D employees to focus on agentic coding efforts at DeepMind (Hayden Field/The Verge)

T

The exclusivity period for OpenAI's $3B offer to acquire coding startup Windsurf, entered into in May, has expired (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

T

Jio Platforms debuts JioPC, a cloud PC service offered via its set-top box; Counterpoint: 70% of Indian households have a TV, but only 15% of them own a PC (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

T

The European Commission drops plans to impose a digital tax on tech giants in its upcoming 2028-2034 budget proposal, amid ongoing EU-US trade negotiations (Gregorio Sorgi/Politico)

T

Sources: xAI prepares a new fundraising round, its third in two months, targeting a valuation of $170B to $200B, up 10x from its May 2024 valuation of $18B (Financial Times)

T

Justin Sun says he is buying another $100M worth of $TRUMP, doubling his total known stake of digital coins tied to President Trump (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

T

Sources: JPMorgan Chase told fintech companies it will start charging fees for access to customers' account data, which could drastically reshape the industry (Bloomberg)

T

Sources: Zerohash, which provides crypto and stablecoin infrastructure, is raising ~$100M at a ~$1B valuation, up from $340M when it raised a Series D in 2022 (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

T

At the end of June, Australia quietly introduced rules forcing search engine companies such as Google and Microsoft to check the ages of logged-in users (Ange Lavoipierre/ABC)

T

Medium CEO says the company has been profitable since August 2024 and details its financial turnaround after losing $2.6M per month in 2022 (Tony Stubblebine/The Coach Life)

T

Source: Butterfly Effect, the startup behind Manus, has shut down its entire China-based team to minimize geopolitical risks associated with its ties to China (Juro Osawa/The Information)

T

HMD says it will "scale back" US operations, citing "a challenging geopolitical and economic environment", and appears to have stopped US sales of Nokia devices (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

T

Chinese startup Moonshot AI releases Kimi K2, an open-weight model that the company says has enhanced coding capabilities and excels at general agent tasks (Reuters)

T

Virtru, which offers data security services to clients like the US DOD and Salesforce, raised a $50M Series D led by Iconiq Capital at a $500M valuation (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

T

French prosecutors open a criminal investigation into X over allegations that the company manipulated its algorithms for the purposes of "foreign interference" (Politico)

T

Moment, which offers fixed income portfolio management software to financial institutions, raised a $36M Series B led by Index, taking its total funding to $56M (PYMNTS.com)

T

French media: French police detained Russian professional basketball player Daniil Kasatkin at the US' request due to his alleged links to a ransomware group (Daryna Antoniuk/The Record)

T

Recording: Intel's new CEO Lip-Bu Tan told staff that Intel is "not in the top 10 semiconductor companies" and it is "too late" to catch Nvidia in AI training (Mike Rogoway/Oregonian)

T

Sources: Meta won't propose more changes to its pay-or-consent model in the EU, and could face fresh antitrust charges in the coming weeks and hefty daily fines (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

T

Goldman Sachs CTO Marco Argenti says the bank will "start augmenting our workforce with Devin", Cognition's AI software engineer, as Wall Street firms adopt AI (Hugh Son/CNBC)

T

Sources on the key Microsoft-OpenAI clause: OpenAI decides when it has reached AGI, "sufficient AGI" means $100B+ in profits, and Microsoft may not build AGI (Steven Levy/Wired)

T

Delaware-based Airalo, which offers travelers eSIM roaming packages for a fixed price by connecting to local networks, raised $220M at a $1B+ valuation (Kelsey Warner/Semafor)

T

Sources: Binance wrote the smart contract for USD1, a stablecoin launched by Trump's World Liberty, and promoted it to its 275M users, before CZ sought a pardon (Bloomberg)

T

Intel spins out RealSense, its AI robotics and biometric venture, and RealSense raised a $50M Series A from MediaTek Innovation Fund, Intel Capital, and others (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

T

Sources: Alibaba-backed Chinese AI startup Zhipu plans to raise ~$300M in a Hong Kong IPO, shifting its plans after initially filing IPO docs in mainland China (Bloomberg)

T

METR study: experienced open-source developers using Cursor, Claude, and other AI tools were 19% slower to complete tasks, despite thinking they were 20% faster (Steve Newman/Second Thoughts)

T

An Apple-backed study finds combining Apple Watch's heart rate sensor with a new Wearable Behavior Model achieves 92% accuracy for pregnancy detection, and more (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

T

How AI is being used by patients and doctors alike to recommend diagnoses and treatments, as experts warn of answers that seem confident but lack nuance (Ryan Flinn/Wired)

T

Tel Aviv- and NYC-based Datafy, which offers an autonomous cloud storage optimization service, raised a $20M seed led by Bessemer Venture Partners (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

T

Bilt Rewards, which offers rewards points for rent payments, raised $250M led by General Catalyst and GID at a $10.75B valuation, up from $3.1B in January 2024 (Paige Smith/Bloomberg)

T

Missouri AG Andrew Bailey is investigating Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta, claiming the companies' AI chatbots show biased results against President Trump (Adi Robertson/The Verge)

T

Asked "Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict? One word answer only.", Grok 4 first consults Musk's views, but only when the word "you" is used (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

T

Further tests reveal Grok 4 appears to consult Elon Musk's views on a range of sensitive topics, and its answers tend to align with Musk's personal opinions (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

T

Here's a complete unedited video of asking Grok for its views on the Israel/Palestine situation. It first searches twitter for what Elon thinks. Then it searches the web for Elon's views. Finally it adds some non-Elon bits at the end. ZA 54 of 64 citations are about Elon. [video] (Jeremy Howard/@jeremyphoward)

T

Sources: AWS is launching a marketplace for AI agents, with Anthropic as one of its partners, at the AWS Summit in NYC next week (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

T

Belkin announces it is ending support for its Wemo devices and app on January 31, 2026; a limited number of devices will continue to function via HomeKit (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

T

Florida AG's office launches an investigation into Robinhood for "falsely promoting" its trading platform as the "least expensive way to purchase crypto" (Kirk Ogunrinde/Bloomberg)

T

Bluesky rolls out age verification in the UK to comply with the Online Safety Act; users under 18 or those opting out of verification will get limited access (Emma Roth/The Verge)

T

LGND, which uses vector embeddings to analyze geospatial data and has an enterprise app to query it, raised a $9M seed led by Javelin Venture Partners (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

T

iCapital, which makes tools for wealth managers to invest in alternative assets, raised $820M+ at a $7.5B+ valuation, bringing its total funding to $1.5B+ (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

T

Sources: Apple is planning M5 MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs, a new Mac external monitor, new low-end iPads and M4 iPad Airs, and an iPhone 17e for H1 2026 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

T

The US Senate confirms Jonathan Gould to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; Gould was previously the chief legal officer at Bitfury (Sarah Wynn/The Block)

T

Harmonic, a startup co-founded by Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev that aims to build AI better at math than humans, raised a $100M Series B at a $875M valuation (Kate Clark/Bloomberg)

T

Memo: Indeed and Glassdoor, both owned by Recruit, will cut ~1,300 US jobs amid an AI-focused consolidation; Glassdoor's operations will be merged into Indeed (Brunella Tipismana Urbano/Bloomberg)

T

YouTube will remove its Trending page and Trending Now list in favor of category-specific charts, says it better aligns with the way content is discovered now (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

T

A judge rules Don Lemon's lawsuit against Elon Musk and X can proceed to trial, after Musk canceled a $1.5M/year exclusive X content deal with Lemon in 2024 (Alex Welch/The Wrap)

T

Sources: some AI researchers rejected Meta's offers to stay at jobs that align with their values; far fewer defected from Anthropic and DeepMind than OpenAI (Hayden Field/The Verge)

T

Foundation EGI, an "engineering general intelligence" startup that builds custom LLMs for engineering tasks, raised a $23M Series A led by Translink Capital (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

T