← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

Artemis Analytics: total stablecoin transaction volumes rose 72% YoY to a record $33T in 2025, led by Circle's USDC at $18.3T and Tether's USDT at $13.3T (Suvashree Ghosh/Bloomberg)

Chinese AI startup MiniMax's stock closed up 109% in its Hong Kong debut on January 9, after raising ~$619M in its IPO, which was priced at ~$21.17 per share (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg)

Source: Lambda, which rents access to AI chips and is backed by Nvidia, is in talks to raise $350M+ led by Mubadala Capital, ahead of an IPO planned for H2 2026 (The Information)

Seattle-based Spangle AI, which makes AI tools for online retailers to build custom storefronts, raised a $15M Series A led by NewRoad at a $100M valuation (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

Docs: xAI had a net loss of $1.46B in Q3, up from $1B in Q1; sources: xAI told investors it plans to build AI that will eventually power Optimus humanoid robots (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)

Nvidia has hired Google Cloud VP of Marketing Alison Wagonfeld to be Nvidia's first CMO; source: Wagonfeld will report to CEO Jensen Huang (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)

Mississippi Gov. Reeves says xAI is set to spend $20B+ to build its MACROHARDRR data center in Southaven, xAI's third data center in the greater Memphis area (Sophie Bates/Associated Press)

Filings: Meta has hired Bill McGinley, a veteran Republican operative and the former top lawyer for DOGE, as a lobbyist (Emily Birnbaum/Bloomberg)

Snowflake agrees to acquire Observe, an observability platform built on Snowflake databases; the deal was previously reported to be valued at around $1B (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)

Sources: Strava, the fitness app founded in 2009, filed confidentially for an IPO; its revenue grew more than 50% YoY in 2025 but was still less than $500M (The Information)

Sources: UK-based cloud provider Nscale is in talks to raise about $2B, after raising more than $1.5B across a pair of rounds in September and October (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)

OpenAI is rolling out a HIPAA-compliant version of ChatGPT for clinicians to assist with medical reasoning and administrative tasks, at Cedars-Sinai and others (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

OpenAI VP of research Jerry Tworek is leaving, sources say after OpenAI sided with Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki in a dispute over its research direction (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

Statcounter: four months after its release, iOS 26 is in use by only about 15% of iPhone users; in January 2025, about 63% of users were on iOS 18 (Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac)

Sources: Google, Meta, Netflix, Microsoft, and Amazon will be subject only to a voluntary framework rather than binding rules under EU's Digital Networks Act (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

Source: a few weeks before Grok started "digitally undressing" people, Elon Musk expressed frustration over guardrails on Grok's image and video generator (Hadas Gold/CNN)

Are people updating to iOS 26? Here's what the data reportedly shows (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)

NetBlocks says internet connectivity in Iran has fallen on multiple providers as protests hit 100+ cities; Cloudflare says IPv6 traffic has dropped sharply (Cody Combs/The National)

Sources: OpenAI has been slow to expand in-app checkouts for ChatGPT as the startup and its partners Shopify and Stripe struggle to standardize merchant data (Ann Gehan/The Information)

Tailwind CSS lays off three of its four engineers after Google traffic to its documentation fell ~40% from early 2023 due to AI, causing an ~80% drop in revenue (Barry Schwartz/Search Engine Roundtable)

ThreatModeler, which helps developers identify vulnerabilities in their applications, acquires IriusRisk, its largest competitor, a source says for $100M+ (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)

A profile of Apple SVP of Hardware Engineering John Ternus; sources: Ternus is seen as the front-runner to succeed Tim Cook, who wants to reduce his workload (New York Times)

FIFA says that parts of 2026 World Cup matches will be broadcast live on TikTok and select creators will get access to press conferences and training sessions (Jessica Hopkins/The Athletic)

Chinese AI startup MiniMax raises ~$619M in its Hong Kong IPO, at the top of its marketed range; sources: its institutional offering was oversubscribed by 70x+ (Dave Sebastian/Bloomberg)

CrowdStrike acquires identity management startup SGNL, in a deal valued at nearly $740M, to bolster identity security defenses on its flagship Falcon platform (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Microsoft debuts Copilot Checkout in the US, enabling in-chat purchases via PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, and more; Shopify merchants will be automatically enrolled (Barry Schwartz/Search Engine Land)

NYC-based Pomelo Care, which offers 24/7 virtual care for women by using data to flag pregnancy risks and more, raised $92M led by Stripes at a $1.7B valuation (Amy Feldman/Forbes)

Illicit crypto addresses received a record $154B in 2025, up 162% YoY, driven by sanctions evasion; Russia's A7A5 token transacted $93.3B+ in less than one year (Chainalysis)

Protege, which offers an AI data platform to access high-quality, proprietary training data at scale, raised $30M from a16z, extending its $25M Series A (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

The European Commission orders X to retain all internal docs and data relating to Grok until the end of 2026, after criticizing Grok's nonconsensual images (Louise Breusch Rasmussen/Reuters)

Google makes Help Me Write, AI email summaries, and Suggested Replies free to all Gmail users, after previously requiring a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Google rolls out an AI Inbox view for Gmail that shows users to-dos and summaries of topics rather than a traditional email list, first for US "trusted testers" (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Israeli data security startup Cyera raised a $400M Series F led by Blackstone Growth at a $9B valuation, up from $6B after raising $540M in June 2025 (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

Sources: China is considering how to build fences around its AI know-how amid the AI race and is identifying standout companies to add to an export control list (Wall Street Journal)

Sources and US tax lawyers: the IRS' planned audit of private equity and VC firms is faltering under President Trump; nearly all the project's leaders have left (Jesse Drucker/New York Times)

Lego says its Smart Brick is "here to stay" but "does not mean that we're leaving our core proposition behind", after criticism it's abandoning non-digital play (Tom Phillips/IGN)

Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood predicts "we'll see the first 100% AI-generated hit movie" within three years and discusses Roku's new $3/month Howdy service (Jennifer Maas/Variety)

Sources: wealthy Californians are quietly mobilizing on WhatsApp chats and calls in a long-shot bid to oust Representative Ro Khanna, who supports a wealth tax (Theodore Schleifer/New York Times)

Sources: China's Salt Typhoon accessed the emails of staff on powerful US House committees, detected last December, and intercepted senior US officials' calls (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times)

A profile of VC firm Index Ventures, which saw billions in gains from exits in 2025, including Figma, Scale AI, and Dream Games, as it looks ahead to succession (Bloomberg)

A profile of Replit co-founder Amjad Masad, who was shunned in investor circles for his criticism of Israel's war in Gaza before Replit's AI agent took off (Margaux MacColl/The San Francisco ...)

China says it will investigate Meta's $2B Manus acquisition to assess compliance with laws on export controls, tech import and export, and overseas investment (CNBC)

Sources: China plans to approve some imports of Nvidia's H200 chips as soon as Q1 2026 while still barring them from military use and critical infrastructure (John Liu/Bloomberg)

Big US hospital systems have become a proving ground for AI adoption; a survey finds that 27% of health systems are paying for commercial AI licenses (Wall Street Journal)

Chinese local governments are funding dozens of "robot training centers", where human trainers mimic movements like folding clothes to teach the robots (Rest of World)

The US FCC exempts some new models of foreign-made drones and critical components from an import ban, announced in December 2025, until the end of 2026 (David Shepardson/Reuters)

Samsung says Ballie, a robot announced six years ago but never released, is an "active innovation platform" within the company helping inform other products (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

Sources: to hedge against Beijing approval risk, Nvidia is requiring Chinese customers to pay upfront for H200 chips, with no cancellations, refunds, or changes (Reuters)

Ubisoft closes its mobile-focused Halifax studio weeks after majority of the workers voted to unionize, as CWA Canada says it is "demanding information" (Chris Kerr/Game Developer)

Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz warns that the US' cuts to academic research funding could push talent abroad and hand rivals an edge in AI (Financial Times)