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Polygon buys crypto startups Coinme and Sequence for a total of $250M+, as it seeks to bolster its stablecoin and fintech infrastructure and compete with Stripe (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

Sources: Amazon is seeking supplier discounts, from low single digits to 30%, as it moves to reverse concessions made to limit the shock of Trump's tariffs (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

Sources: AI chip startup Etched raised $500M led by Stripes at a $5B valuation, bringing its total funding to almost $1B (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Anthropic shakes up its C-suite: CPO Mike Krieger will become the co-lead of its Labs incubator, and head of product Ami Vora will take over Krieger's duties (Hayden Field/The Verge)

Roblox's AI-powered age verification system, which expanded globally last week using tech from a company called Persona, faces criticism for misidentifying ages (David Gilbert/Wired)

Mercedes pauses the rollout of Drive Pilot, a Level 3 "eyes off" driving feature available in Europe and the US, citing low demand and high production costs (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

The US Senate passes the Defiance Act that would allow victims to sue over nonconsensual, sexually explicit AI-generated images, amid furor over Grok images (Bloomberg)

The US FCC waives a rule that forced Verizon to unlock phones 60 days after they are activated, which could make it harder for people to switch from Verizon (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

Taiwan issues an arrest warrant for OnePlus CEO Pete Lau for allegedly illegally hiring 70+ Taiwanese engineers, as it tries to stop China from raiding workers (Li Liu/Bloomberg)

A look at Confer, an open-source AI assistant project from Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike that is designed to provide end-to-end encryption for AI chats (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

Google makes improvements to Veo 3.1's Ingredients to Video feature to make videos "more expressive", and adds native vertical video generation and 4K upscaling (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Sources: India asked quick commerce companies to drop their 10-minute delivery promise due to concerns about rider safety; Blinkit already removed the assurance (Bloomberg)

Sources: China has told some tech companies that it would only approve Nvidia H200 chip purchases under special circumstances, such as for university research (Qianer Liu/The Information)

Flip, which offers an Alexa-like voice AI experience for businesses, raised a $20M Series A, bringing its total funding to $31M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

Governor Gavin Newsom says he has been negotiating for four months to neutralize California's wealth tax ballot proposal; a compromise does not appear imminent (Politico)

Onebrief, which makes AI-powered military workflow software, raised a $200M Series D, nearly doubling its valuation from $1.1B to $2.1B in about half of a year (Colin Demarest/Axios)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)