← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

GM plans to roll out Google Gemini in its vehicles starting in 2026 and plans an advanced driver-assistance system with eyes-off driving capabilities in 2028 (Michael Wayland/CNBC)

ShopMy, which lets brands run influencer marketing efforts, raised $70M led by Avenir at a $1.5B valuation, up from ~$410M after raising $77.5M in March 2024 (Diana Pearl/The Business of Fashion)

Starbridge, which helps businesses monitor public sector opportunities by consolidating fragmented data, raised a $42M Series A led by David Sacks' Craft (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

The UK CMA says it will label Apple and Google as having "strategic market status", imposing stricter rules on how they run their platforms to boost competition (Financial Times)

Sumble, which offers an AI sales intelligence service, emerges from stealth and raised a $30M Series A led by Canaan Partners and $8.5M seed led by Coatue (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)

YouTube now lets mobile users set a customizable daily limit to restrict how long they can scroll Shorts feeds; the limit notifications are dismissible (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Meta is cutting roughly 600 jobs out of several thousand roles within its Superintelligence Lab, including in its FAIR unit, to create a more agile operation (Ina Fried/Axios)

The NHL reaches multiyear licensing agreements with prediction market startups Kalshi and Polymarket, the first major US league to allow use of its trademarks (Alexander Osipovich/Wall Street Journal)

Shenzhen-based humanoid robot maker Leju Robotics raised $200M+ led by Citic Goldstone and Shenzhen Investment Holdings ahead of a planned IPO (Bloomberg)

Crypto trading firm FalconX agrees to acquire 21shares, one of the main crypto ETF managers, for an undisclosed sum; 21shares had $11B+ in assets in September (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Apple has cut production orders for the iPhone Air to levels near "end of production" but increased those for the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro (Nikkei Asia)

UEFA joins the MPA-led anti-piracy coalition Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, the first sports governing body to join the group, which has 50+ members (Adam Leventhal/The Athletic)

Sources: Microsoft is significantly increasing the price of its Xbox Development Kit from $1,500 to $2,000, after hiking Series X prices by $150 in September (Tom Warren/The Verge)

China is racing ahead of the rest of the world in the adoption of robovans, despite limitations like slow speeds; Neolix has deployed 10,000 robovans so far (Wataru Suzuki/Nikkei Asia)

Sources: Chinese chipmaker YMTC considers an IPO in China at an up to ~$40B valuation as soon as 2026, in what could be one of China's biggest IPOs in years (Bloomberg)

Researchers detail systemic vulnerabilities in AI agentic browsers, including Perplexity's Comet and Fellou, related to indirect prompt injection attacks (Brave)

Apple's Vision Pro with the M5 chip is assembled in Vietnam, according to labels on its packaging; the M2-based model, launched in 2024, was built in China (Bloomberg)

Baidu and Swiss Post's PostBus plan to launch Baidu's Apollo Go autonomous vehicle service in Switzerland, testing in December ahead of rollout by Q1 2027 (Reuters)

EBU/BBC study: 45% of responses from top AI assistants misrepresented news content with at least one significant issue and 31% showed serious sourcing problems (Olivia Le Poidevin/Reuters)

Electricity demand from data centers powering the AI boom has caused a gas turbine supply crunch, as the US becomes the epicenter of new gas-fired power plants (Financial Times)

Keycard, which lets enterprises manage AI agent access to internal systems, raised a $30M Series A led by Acrew Capital and a $8M seed led by a16z and boldstart (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE)

Nonprofit Cyber Monitoring Centre estimates that the Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack cost the UK economy at least £1.9B and affected over 5,000 UK organizations (Financial Times)

Sources: Fal.ai, which hosts multimodal AI models for developers, raised ~$250M at a $4B+ valuation, less than three months after announcing a $125M Series C (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

Hyro, whose AI agents let US health care organizations automate tasks like scheduling and prescription renewals, raised $45M, taking its total funding to $95M (Sophie Shulman/CTech)

Sesame, which is developing an AI agent with a natural-sounding human voice and smart glasses, raised a $250M Series B and opens an early beta of its iOS app (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Japanese regulators' plan to cull the smallest listings on the Tokyo Stock Exchange is spurring a record number of startup buyouts in Japan, while IPOs slump (Bloomberg)

A UN pact to fight cybercrime is set to be signed by dozens of countries in Hanoi; tech companies and activists warn the pact may criminalize ethical hacking (Francesco Guarascio/Reuters)

Prince Harry and 800+ public figures sign a Future of Life Institute statement urging a ban on AI superintelligence development until it can be deployed safely (David Ingram/NBC News)

Palworld developer Pocketpair says its new publishing division won't fund games that use generative AI, saying it "doesn't believe" in the tech (Chris Kerr/Game Developer)

Sources: Sequoia COO Sumaiya Balbale resigned after the firm refused to discipline partner Shaun Maguire over his comments calling Zohran Mamdani "an Islamist" (Financial Times)

Samsung says it is working on Android XR-based smart glasses in partnership with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, during its Worlds Wide Open event (Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET)

Samsung's Galaxy XR headset includes an Explorer Pack that bundles a year of Google AI Pro, YouTube Premium, Play Pass, and more with purchases through year-end (Matt Horne/Android Authority)

Samsung Galaxy XR hands-on: micro-OLED displays are good, eye tracking works well, lighter than the Vision Pro, and Android XR looks a lot like Apple's visionOS (The Shortcut)

Galaxy XR is the first Android XR headset and features Gemini Live that understands your surroundings and lets users interact with apps hands-free (Shahram Izadi/The Keyword)

Samsung unveils the Galaxy XR headset, with Android XR, 4K micro-OLED displays, a Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip, and an external battery pack, available for $1,799 (Bloomberg)

In an experiment, GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp expressed secular, Western liberal values regardless of the language of the questions (Kelsey Piper/The Argument)

Polymarket and Kalshi surpassed $2B in notional trading volume in the week ending Oct. 19, exceeding the previous peak during the 2024 US presidential election (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg)

Findem, an AI-powered talent acquisition startup, raised $51M in equity and debt, including a $36M Series C led by SLW, taking its total funding to $105M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

Sources: Anthropic is in discussions with Google about a deal that would provide Anthropic with computing power valued in the high tens of billions of dollars (Bloomberg)

Filing: Satya Nadella's total pay for fiscal 2025 rose nearly 22% YoY from $79.1M to $96.5M, including $84.2M in stock awards; MSFT is up ~23% so far in 2025 (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Meta forms a JV with Blue Owl to fund the $27B, 2GW Hyperion data center in Louisiana, its largest ever private capital deal; Meta will retain a ~20% equity (Reuters)

Filings: Meta spent the most on US lobbying in Q3, spending $5.8M, followed by Amazon, Google, Apple; Anthropic, Nvidia, and a16z hit $1M+ for the first time (Ashley Gold/Axios)

Texas Instruments reports Q3 revenue up 14% YoY to $4.74B, vs. $4.64B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue and profit below estimates; TXN drops 8%+ after hours (Arsheeya Bajwa/Reuters)

DraftKings acquires predictions platform Railbird as it prepares to launch its mobile platform DraftKings Predictions in the coming months (Contessa Brewer/CNBC)

Netflix says it is on track to more than double its advertising revenue in 2025 and is currently using AI to test new ad formats (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

Netflix reports Q3 revenue up 17% YoY to $11.51B, matching est., operating margin below est. due to Brazilian tax dispute expense; NFLX drops 6%+ after hours (Sarah Whitten/CNBC)

First impressions of ChatGPT Atlas, as browser agents remain confusing, with insurmountable security and privacy risks including prompt injection attacks (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

OpenAI says ChatGPT Atlas' opt-in browser memories feature can remember key details from users' web browsing to improve chat responses and offer suggestions (OpenAI)

Google launches new features for its Google AI Studio developer platform, including a revamped "Build" tab to vibe code AI apps (Alexey Shabanov/TestingCatalog)

Sources: Apple's foldable iPad with an 18" screen faces engineering challenges tied to weight, features, and display tech, pushing its debut to 2029 or later (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)