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Sources: at least six Chinese AI companies, like chip firms Montage and GigaDevice, are set to IPO in Hong Kong in the coming weeks, aiming to raise up to $1B (Bloomberg)

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Sensor Tower: ChatGPT had 73M DAUs in India as of last week, up 607% YoY and more than double the US, boosted by its free plans, far above Gemini's 17M DAUs (Munsif Vengattil/Reuters)

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Bengaluru-based e-commerce platform Meesho is up 95% from its IPO offer price, valuing it at nearly $11B and making it India's best-performing major IPO of 2025 (Ashutosh Joshi/Bloomberg)

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Crypto exchange HashKey closed flat in its Hong Kong debut, after rising as much as 6.6% before falling 8.4% intraday, amid a weakness in digital assets (Reuters)

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Sources: top Monzo shareholders, including Accel and Iconiq, are pushing to oust Chair Gary Hoffman and retain CEO TS Anil, who is in the role until February (Financial Times)

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Ankar, which develops LLM-powered AI tools to streamline the process of drafting patent applications for patent attorneys, raised a $20M Series A led by Atomico (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)

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Monzo receives an Irish banking license, letting the London-based digital lender offer its personal, business, children's, and savings accounts across the EU (Aisha S Gani/Bloomberg)

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Bhutan unveils a pledge of up to 10,000 bitcoin to develop Gelephu Mindfulness City; Arkham says Bhutan holds 5,984 bitcoin, ranking 7th among sovereign holders (Vismaya V/Decrypt)

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The Marshall Islands unveils a national UBI scheme that offers payments of ~$200 per quarter to every resident citizen via stablecoin or traditional currency (Prianka Srinivasan/The Guardian)

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Berlin-based Trade Republic says early investors will sell €1.2B of shares to Sequoia and others at a €12.5B valuation, becoming Germany's most valuable startup (Financial Times)

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Dune and Keyrock: bets placed on prediction markets rose from <$100M per month in early 2024 to $13B per month in November, as Polymarket and Kalshi compete (Jill R Shah/Financial Times)

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Daniel Kwan and 500+ writers, actors, and technologists launch the Creators Coalition on AI to push standards for AI training and use across creative industries (Chris Gardner/The Hollywood Reporter)

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Sources: Disney has been hesitant to license its IP to Roblox because it doesn't consider it a safe platform, bucking the trend followed by Netflix and others (Jennifer Maas/Variety)

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TeamLease Digital: Global Capability Centers in India have grown tech headcount to ~2M from 1.2M in 2022, rising 18%-27% YoY, compared to 4%-6% at IT companies (Tanya Pandey/The Economic Times)

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Customer engagement service MoEngage raised $180M in a follow-on Series F, split into a $57M primary and $123M secondary round, weeks after raising $100M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Sources detail Mark Zuckerberg's all-in bet to make Meta an AI leader, with some saying Alexandr Wang finds Zuckerberg's micromanagement of AI work suffocating (Financial Times)

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Super Bank Indonesia, a Grab-backed digital lender, rose by 24% during its stock market debut in Jakarta, after the company raised ~$168M in its IPO (Ismi Damayanti/Nikkei Asia)

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Meta is partnering with Singapore-based K-ID to add its AgeKey age-verification tech to Meta apps, with plans to roll it out across multiple countries in 2026 (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

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Chinese AI chipmaker MetaX's shares jumped as much as 755% in its Shanghai debut after a heavily oversubscribed $585.8M IPO, pushing its market cap past $42B (Bloomberg)

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Adaptive Security, which uses AI to simulate social engineering attacks and help companies prevent them, raised an $81M Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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Sources: Amazon is in talks to invest $10B+ in OpenAI at a $500B+ valuation, with OpenAI using AWS Trainium chips; Microsoft keeps rights to sell OpenAI models (The Information)

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Sources: Apple is in preliminary talks with India's CG Semi, which offers chip assembly and testing services, to assemble and package chips for the iPhone (Dia Rekhi/The Economic Times)

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Sources: New York-based data security startup Cyera is raising $400M led by Blackstone, valuing the company at $9B, up from $6B in June (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

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California's DMV says a California administrative law judge recently ruled that Tesla engaged in deceptive marketing around its Autopilot and FSD systems (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

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Xiaomi releases MiMo-V2-Flash, an open-weight MoE model with 309B total and 15B active parameters, saying it excels in reasoning, coding, and agentic scenarios (Xiaomi Mimo)

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Sources: Waymo is in discussions to raise more than $15B led by Alphabet at a valuation near $100B, and has achieved an annual revenue run rate above $350M (Bloomberg)

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Perplexity updates its iPad app to improve multitasking and focus on research tools, part of a push to add business customers, after launching Comet on Android (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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X updates its ToS to claim rights to the "Twitter" trademark and countersues Operation Bluebird after the startup filed an application to trademark the term (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Hong Kong-based RedotPay, a fintech focused on stablecoin-based payments, raised a $107M Series B led by Goodwater Capital, bringing its total raised to ~$200M (Yogita Khatri/The Block)

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Amazon partners with payments startup Slope to offer loans of up to $5M to merchants selling on its platform, using Amazon sales data for candidate selection (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg)

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Netflix announces a partnership with iHeartMedia to exclusively publish 15+ video podcasts from early 2026, including The Breakfast Club and My Favorite Murder (Jessica Testa/New York Times)

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Google launches CC, an experimental AI assistant that delivers a personalized daily "Your Day Ahead" briefing email based on users' emails and calendar (Robert Hart/The Verge)

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The US threatens economic penalties against European companies like Spotify if the EU does not roll back regulations and lawsuits targeting US tech giants (New York Times)

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Leona Health, the maker of an AI copilot that integrates with doctors' WhatsApp accounts for patient chats in Latin America, raised a $14M seed led by a16z (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

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OpenAI updates ChatGPT Images to generate images up to 4x faster and edit more precisely, and adds a new section in ChatGPT's app and website for images (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)

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OpenAI hires former UK chancellor George Osborne to lead OpenAI for Countries, the global expansion arm of its $500B Stargate data center initiative (Financial Times)

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Source: OpenAI rolled back ChatGPT's model router, which sent some queries to reasoning models, for Free and $5/month Go tiers, as it was costly and hurt DAUs (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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Event software company Cvent acquires video content platform Goldcast; source: Cvent paid just under $300M to acquire Goldcast, which had raised around $38M (Dan Primack/Axios)

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DoorDash launches Zesty, a standalone AI-powered social app for users to find nearby restaurants, in public testing in San Francisco and New York (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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OpenAI launches FrontierScience, a benchmark to measure models' expert-level scientific reasoning with 700+ questions, finding GPT-5.2 is its strongest model (OpenAI)

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A look at Apple's iPhone roadmap; sources say the iPhone 18 Pro lineup will get under-screen Face ID, and the front camera will move to the top-left corner (The Information)

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Meta launches prompt-based sound separation model SAM Audio in its Segment Anything Playground, letting users isolate individual sounds from complex recordings (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

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Instagram unveils its first TV app, initially available on Amazon's Fire TV as a test with plans to expand to other TV platforms (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

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Orbital solar data centers' cost-per-watt of compute is $51.10/W, far above $15.85/W for terrestrial sites; SpaceX is uniquely positioned to try orbital (Andrew McCalip)

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Sequence, which builds AI agents to automate B2B companies' revenue operations, raised a $20M Series A led by 645 Ventures, bringing its total funding to ~$40M (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

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Q&A with Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe on founding Rivian in 2009, production challenges, the VW partnership, autonomy, AI, EVs, chips, CarPlay, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

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Adobe adds a prompt-based video editor to its Firefly app that uses Runway's Aleph model, and adds image and video models from Black Forest Labs and others (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Mozilla appoints Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as its CEO, after years of its for-profit arm juggling layoffs, restructuring, its Google dependence, and the AI landscape (David Pierce/The Verge)

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Databricks is raising a $4B Series L at a $134B valuation, up from $100B in September and $62B in December 2024, and had a $4.8B annual revenue rate in October (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

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Visa says it will allow US banks to settle transactions using Circle's USDC stablecoin over Solana, the US' first full deployment of a stablecoin settlement (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

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