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CrowdStrike acquires Israel-based browser security startup Seraphic, a source says for ~$400M; Seraphic was founded in 2020, employs 50+, and had raised ~$37M (Meir Orbach/CTech)

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Austin-based webAI, which is building AI models that run locally on devices, raised "high double-digit" millions in a Series A at a $2.5B pre-money valuation (Dan Primack/Axios)

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Sources: CoinGecko, a prominent crypto market data and analytics company, is seeking a potential sale for ~$500M, after starting the sales process in late 2025 (Will Canny/CoinDesk)

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Sources: Meta and EssilorLuxottica are discussing potentially doubling Ray-Ban Meta production capacity to 20M+ units by the end of 2026 or even as high as 30M+ (Bloomberg)

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Sources: carmakers have found a workaround for chip shortages amid Nexperia's internal battle, buying wafers from its Dutch arm and then shipping them to China (Financial Times)

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Apple unveils Apple Creator Studio, a "groundbreaking collection" of creative apps like Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro for $13/month or $129/year (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

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Meta confirms it is laying off Reality Labs staff and will "reinvest the savings" in wearables; CTO Andrew Bosworth says 1,000+ staff will be notified Tuesday (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

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Latin American VC funding rose 14.3% YoY in 2025 to $4.1B, with early-stage investment up 31.9% YoY to nearly $2B and late-stage/growth deals reaching $1.63B (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

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Deepgram, which is building enterprise voice-recognition tech, raised a $130M Series C led by AVP at a $1.3B valuation, taking its total funding to $215M (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Microsoft changes its data center approach, pledging to pay its own power costs, reject tax breaks, and replenish more water than it uses, amid local opposition (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

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Crypto scams received $14B+ on-chain in 2025, up from 2024's $12B and potentially rising to $17B+ as more wallets are found; impersonation scams jumped 1,400% (Chainalysis)

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Salesforce makes Slack's new AI-powered Slackbot generally available, helping users answer workflow questions, draft documents, schedule meetings, and more (Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET)

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Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone and other execs discuss the challenges Netflix faces in streaming live events, after broadcasting 200+ live events since March 2023 (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

IDC: global PC shipments rose 9.6% YoY to 76.4M units in Q4 2025, helped by Microsoft ending Windows 10 support and OEMs pulling forward inventory amid tariffs (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Boston- and Tel Aviv-based Converge Bio, which uses AI trained on molecular data to help pharma and biotech companies develop drugs, raised a $25M Series A (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

NYC-based Proxima, which uses AI to design drugs that control protein interactions, raised an $80M seed led by DCVC, with participation from Nvidia and others (Agnee Ghosh/Bloomberg)

Sources: OpenAI plans a 60-second Super Bowl ad during NBC's broadcast, the second straight year of doing so; ad buyers say clients pay $8M+ for just 30 seconds (Suzanne Vranica/Wall Street Journal)

Interviews with Spotify founder Daniel Ek on his CEO exit, and new co-CEOs Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström, who face algorithmic fatigue and angry artists (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

Warhammer maker Games Workshop says it banned its staff from using AI in its content or designs and it is taking a "very cautious" approach to protect its IP (Philip Stafford/Financial Times)

Sources: Google will start developing and making high-end Pixel phones like the Pro and Fold from scratch in Vietnam in 2026; the Pixel A remains in China (Lauly Li/Nikkei Asia)

A profile of Eric Migicovsky's Core Devices, a five-person company that he says is "not a startup" and aims to be "sustainable", as it builds new Pebble devices (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

PJM, the nonprofit operator for a 13-state power grid across the US, expects 4.8% average annual power growth over the next decade driven by the AI boom (Wall Street Journal)

The US House passes a bipartisan bill to expand US export controls to restrict Chinese companies' remote access to US AI chips from data centers outside China (Juro Osawa/The Information)

Researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and others are studying LLMs like living things, not just software, to uncover some of their secrets for the first time (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

A look at WhatsApp's enormous global reach and influence, and how the messaging app became the dominant platform for everyday conversation worldwide (Sam Knight/New Yorker)

Microsoft warns Chinese companies, especially DeepSeek, are winning AI adoption outside the West, gaining significant market share in the Global South (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

The NYC token, launched by ex-New York City Mayor Eric Adams on January 12, saw its market cap drop from ~$600M to ~$100M after suspicious liquidity activity (Decrypt)

Sources: Balderton cashed out ~$2B of its Revolut stake in the past year, turning an early £1M bet into a historic European VC win; its fifth fund returned 25x (Financial Times)

Chinese chipmaker GigaDevice rose 54% in its Hong Kong debut after raising ~$600M in its IPO, and reported H1 2025 profit of ~$84M, up 14% from H2 2024 (Bloomberg)

Nvidia denies that it asked Chinese customers to pay upfront for H200 chips, saying it "would never require customers to pay for products they do not receive" (Reuters)

A late-2025 amendment to California's wealth tax proposal treats founder control as ownership, a move that could end founder-controlled startups in the state (Mike Solana/Pirate Wires)

SK Hynix will invest ~$12.9B to build an advanced chip packaging plant in South Korea to meet rising memory chip demand, targeting completion by the end of 2027 (Reuters)

Trump says Microsoft will "ensure" Americans don't face higher bills due to data centers' power use and Big Tech must "pay their own way" for their data centers (Business Insider)

Personal finance app Betterment says an individual accessed third-party systems to send fake crypto scam notification and believes the person accessed user info (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

Claude Cowork hands-on: looks well positioned to bring the powerful capabilities of Claude Code to a wider audience, but the risks of prompt injections remain (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

Bakkt agrees to acquire Distributed Technologies Research, the stablecoin infrastructure company founded by Bakkt CEO Akshay Naheta; BKKT closed up 18.69% (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

OpenAI acquires Torch, a one-year-old AI health care app that aggregates and analyzes medical records; a source says OpenAI is paying about $100M in equity (Laura Mandaro/The Information)

Elon Musk says Apple and Google's Gemini deal "seems like an unreasonable concentration of power for Google given that [they] also have Android and Chrome" (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

Sources: Meta plans to lay off ~10% of its 15,000-person Reality Labs division, disproportionately affecting those working on VR headsets and Horizon Worlds (New York Times)

Anthropic launches Cowork for Claude, built on Claude Code to automate complex tasks with minimal prompting, as a research preview for Claude Max subscribers (Webb Wright/ZDNET)

Italy's antitrust authority says it reduced the record fine imposed on Amazon in 2021, from €1.13B to €752M, after a recalculation (Elvira Pollina/Reuters)

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is establishing a new "top-level" initiative called Meta Compute to build "tens of gigawatts" of AI infrastructure during this decade (Sara Fischer/Axios)

The UK plans to bring into force a law this week that will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, as Ofcom investigates X (Laura Cress/BBC)

Sources: the US nears a trade deal with Taiwan that would reduce tariffs on the island's exports and include a commitment from TSMC to build 5+ fabs in Arizona (New York Times)

Google says Gemini will help power not only a more personalized version of Siri, but also future Apple Intelligence features (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

World Liberty Financial launches World Liberty Markets, letting users lend and borrow digital assets among one another, supporting its own token USD1 and others (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg)

Document: Meta said last week that it would exclude Italy from its ban on rival AI chatbots on WhatsApp, after an order from the country's antitrust authority (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

Alphabet hits a $4T market cap, becoming the fourth Big Tech company to reach the milestone, after its stock has risen 6%+ in the past month (Financial Times)

Researchers from Nvidia, Microsoft, and others develop AI models, trained on 1M+ species' data, to generate potential new gene editing and drug therapies (Financial Times)

Apple signs a multiyear Google deal to use Gemini and Google Cloud to power Siri's features in 2026, saying Google's tech "provides the most capable foundation" (Samantha Subin/CNBC)