← Back to news
T

Techmeme

Google unveils Gemini 3, its "most intelligent" and "factually accurate" model yet, with improvements across coding and reasoning, and offering less "flattery" (Emma Roth/The Verge)

T

Edtech startup Physics Wallah closed up 44% in its Indian IPO, giving it a ~$5B market cap; it was last valued at $2.8B in 2024 when it raised a $210M Series B (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

T

Agentio, which uses AI to help brands automate and scale campaigns with YouTube creators, raised a $40M Series B led by Forerunner at a $340M valuation (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

T

Anthropic commits to buy $30B in Azure capacity in a new deal with Microsoft and Nvidia, which commit to invest up to $5B and $10B, respectively, in Anthropic (Microsoft)

T

Rebecca Heineman, legendary game designer, Interplay co-founder, programmer, and the first formally recognized US Space Invaders champion, died at 62 in October (Ted Litchfield/PC Gamer)

T

Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht says "we failed our customers and the broader Internet" when a Cloudflare issue "impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us" (Dane Knecht/@dok2001)

T

Researchers demonstrated a major WhatsApp flaw that exposed 3.5B users' phone numbers, with 57% also showing a profile photo; Meta fixed the enumeration problem (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

T

Larry Summers steps back from public commitments after his Jeffrey Epstein emails were released; OpenAI still lists Summers as a board member and didn't comment (Raquel Coronell Uribe/NBC News)

T

OpenAI and Intuit sign a multiyear deal, set to generate $100M+ in OpenAI revenue, in which Intuit will deepen its use of OpenAI models and launch ChatGPT apps (Steven Rosenbush/Wall Street Journal)

T

Klarna reports Q3 revenue up 26% YoY to $903M, above $882M est., a $95M net loss, and expects $1B+ revenue in Q4, in its first post-IPO earnings release (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

T

Xiaomi President Lu Weibing says the company expects a shortfall in memory chips to push up mobile device prices in 2026, after SMIC's similar warning last week (Bloomberg)

T

Roblox plans to require all users to undergo an age estimation process to access chat features, starting January 2026, in an effort to enhance child safety (Jay Peters/The Verge)

T

Lambda, which rents access to AI chips, raised a $1.5B Series E led by TWG Global, after raising $500M in April 2024, taking its total funding to $2.3B (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

T

Filing: the US FTC ends its review of SoftBank's $6.5B acquisition of chip designer Ampere, granting an early termination; SoftBank announced the deal in March (Josh Sisco/Bloomberg)

T

Cloudflare says "a fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved", after a major outage impacted X, ChatGPT, and others from 11:48am UTC (Andrew Griffin/The Independent)

T

PDD, which owns Pinduoduo and Temu, reports Q3 revenue up 9% YoY to ~$15.2B, above ~$15.1B est., and net income up 17% YoY to ~$4.1B, as it weathers US tariffs (Bloomberg)

T

Sundar Pichai says the AI boom has some "irrationality", tech's investment cycles can "overshoot", and "no company is going to be immune" to the bubble bursting (BBC)

T

Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko steps down from the decentralized social network as part of its transition to a nonprofit structure governed by a board (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

T

Xiaomi reports Q3 revenue up 22.3% YoY to ~$15.9B, below ~$16.4B est., and net profit up 80.9% YoY to ~$1.59B, above ~$1.5B est., driven by AI and EV revenue (Reuters)

T

The EU Commission opens an investigation into AWS and Azure to determine whether they should fall under the DMA and says they "occupy very strong positions" (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

T

Sources: Larry Ellison is overhauling a £10B science initiative in Oxford after clashing with President John Bell, who left in September, and COO Lisa Flashner (Financial Times)

T

Baidu reports Q3 revenue down 7% YoY to ~$4.4B, its biggest quarterly revenue decline ever, and a ~$1.5B net loss, as the search giant battles falling usership (Zheping Huang/Bloomberg)

T

The UK CMA opens probes into StubHub, Viagogo, and others over allegedly deceptive online pricing practices; the UK plans to ban above face value ticket resales (Martin Arnold/Financial Times)

T

GlobalFoundries acquires Advanced Micro Foundry, a Singapore-based silicon photonics foundry, for an undisclosed sum, and plans a new R&D center in Singapore (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

T

Q&A with Ring founder Jamie Siminoff on returning to Amazon post-burnout, his goal to "zero out crime", privacy and the "surveillance panopticon", and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

T

CoinGecko: the total market value of 18K+ tracked crypto coins fell 25% since October 6, wiping out $1.2T; bitcoin fell 28% to $89,500, its lowest since April (Financial Times)

T

Berlin-based Peec AI, which helps brands manage visibility in AI-powered search results, raised a $21M Series A led by Singular at a $100M+ valuation (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

T

Sources: Databricks is in talks to raise funds at a $130B+ valuation, up about 30% from September when it raised a $1B Series K at a $100B valuation (The Information)

T

Sources: Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is in talks with potential investors to raise about $5B and is aiming for a valuation of at least $50B (The Information)

T

Artificial Analysis announces AA-Omniscience, a benchmark for knowledge and hallucination across 40+ topics; Claude 4.1 Opus takes first place in its key metric (@artificialanlys)

T

Arm and Nvidia announce that Arm-based Neoverse CPUs will be able to integrate with AI accelerators using Nvidia's NVLink Fusion tech (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

T

SCOTUS declines to hear an appeal by Gesture Technology Partners over the right to challenge expired patents, leaving in place a win for Apple, Google, and LG (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

T

Internal memo: CISA will increase its hiring efforts in 2026 to rebuild after the Trump administration's cuts and prepare for a potential US conflict with China (Eric Geller/Cybersecurity Dive)

T

xAI unveils Grok 4.1, saying it's 3x less likely to hallucinate compared to its previous models and Grok 4.1 Thinking holds the top spot on LMArena's Text Arena (xAI)

T

Eric Gillespie, the founder of Govini, whose AI software is used by the US military, was arrested last week in PA for allegedly soliciting pre-teens for sex (Lori Ann LaRocco/CNBC)

T

NetChoice sues Virginia over a law that would require parental permission for minors to use social media for more than one hour per day, arguing it violates 1A (Emma Roth/The Verge)

T

Meta launches a "content protection" tool to let creators detect and take action when their Reels are reposted on Facebook or Instagram without permission (Karissa Bell/Engadget)

T

Microsoft says it mitigated a 15.7 Tbps DDoS from the Aisuru botnet on a single Australian Azure endpoint in October, the largest cloud DDoS ever recorded (Pierluigi Paganini/Security Affairs)

T

Pinkfong prices its South Korea IPO at ~$26 per share, valuing the company behind Baby Shark Dance, YouTube's most-watched video with 16.4B views, at ~$375M (Wall Street Journal)

T

Runlayer, which aims to make it easy for companies to securely scale MCP servers, emerges from stealth with an $11M seed from Khosla Ventures and Felicis (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

T

Pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future targets NY State Assemblymember Alex Bores, co-sponsor of the RAISE Act, a bill imposing safety and disclosure requirements (CNBC)

T

Cloudflare acquires Replicate, which hosts over 50,000 AI models and simplifies AI model deployment via a single API call; Replicate will keep its brand (Cloudflare)

T

Ford and Amazon partner to let people purchase certified pre-owned Ford vehicles via Amazon Autos, initially available in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Dallas (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

T

Celero, which is developing a chip to enable long-distance connections between AI data centers, raised $140M, including a $100M Series B led by CapitalG (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

T

Coding assistant startup Sourcegraph says ads in its free tier are generating $5M to $10M in annualized revenue; the ad-supported tier was launched in October (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

T

Sources: Amazon is seeking to raise about $12B through a bond sale, its first such deal in US dollars since 2022, to help fund acquisitions, capex, and more (Bloomberg)

T

Span, which aims to help companies measure the value of AI-assisted coding, raised $25M in seed and Series A rounds from Alt Capital, Craft Ventures, and others (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)

T

Ramp says it is now valued at $32B following a $300M raise led by Lightspeed and an employee tender offer, up from a $22.5B valuation in July (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

T

Vancouver-based PowerLattice, which makes a power supply chiplet to reduce compute power needs by 50%+, raised a $25M Series A, taking its total funding to $31M (Pete Danko/Portland Business Journal)

T

Google DeepMind releases WeatherNext 2, a weather model that it says offers faster, more accurate two-week forecasts and includes more tools for energy traders (Joe Wertz/Bloomberg)

T