← Back to news
T

Techmeme

Spotify reports Q4 revenue up 13% YoY to €4.5B, Premium users up 10% YoY to 290M, MAUs up 11% YoY to 751M, and a €701M operating income, above €639.1M est. (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

T

Analysis: despite AI ads outnumbering traditional Super Bowl ad categories like beer, nostalgia-driven ads from Budweiser and Dunkin' dominated social media (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)

T

Alibaba's DAMO Academy releases RynnBrain, an open-source foundation model to help robots perform real-world tasks like navigating rooms, trained on Qwen3-VL (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

T

SMIC reports Q4 revenue up 13% YoY to $2.49B, above est., net profit up 61% YoY to $172.85M, above $139.5M est., and 2025 revenue of $9.33B, above 2024's $8.03B (Sherry Qin/Wall Street Journal)

T

Source: Chinese AI startup Zhipu anonymously released its new AI model on OpenRouter under the name Pony Alpha; Zhipu plans to launch GLM-5 later this week (Juro Osawa/The Information)

T

Chinese robotaxi operator Pony AI and Toyota begin commercial production of an autonomous Toyota bZ4X; Pony AI aims to have 3,000+ robotaxis by the end of 2026 (Chester Dawson/Bloomberg)

T

Chinese AI companies like Alibaba and Tencent are releasing new models and spending millions on "red envelope" freebies to woo users ahead of the Lunar New Year (Cissy Zhou/Nikkei Asia)

T

PitchBook: European VC investments rose 5% YoY to a post-pandemic high of €66B in 2025; AI-related deals accounted for 35%+, or €23.5B, up from €17.7B in 2024 (Financial Times)

T

French President Emmanuel Macron says the US could retaliate against EU countries, including France and Spain, over plans to ban children from social media (Leila Abboud/Financial Times)

T

Paris-based online corporate event booking marketplace Naboo raised a $70M Series B led by Lightspeed with participation from Notion Capital, ISAI, and Ternel (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

T

A court filing in the iyO-OpenAI trademark case reveals OpenAI won't use the name "io" for its AI device, which isn't expected to ship before February 2027 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

T

As OpenAI prepares to retire GPT-4o on February 13, sources say it was scrapped partly because OpenAI struggled to contain 4o's potential for harmful outcomes (Sam Schechner/Wall Street Journal)

T

London-based Tem, which uses AI to optimize energy transactions for businesses, raised a $75M Series B led by Lightspeed, a source says at a $300M+ valuation (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

T

OpenAI Responds to Critical Super Bowl Commercials by Putting Ads in ChatGPT (Ece Yildirim/Gizmodo)

T

In opening statements in New Mexico's suit against Meta, state prosecutors argue Meta misrepresented the safety of its platforms, as Meta's attorney pushes back (Morgan Lee/Associated Press)

T

Farcaster co-founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, along with the team at Merkle, join stablecoin startup Tempo after Merkle's sale of Farcaster to Neynar (Kyle Baird/The Block)

T

Sources: the White House is drafting a voluntary pact seeking commitments from tech companies to ensure data centers don't raise electricity prices and more (Politico)

T

Sources: the Trump administration plans to spare US hyperscalers from upcoming tariffs on chips; exemptions would be based on TSMC's US investment commitments (Aime Williams/Financial Times)

T

The US NLRB abandons its 2024 case accusing SpaceX of illegally firing eight engineers and signals it will steer clear of future cases against the company (Josh Eidelson/Bloomberg)

T

Chipmaker Onsemi reports Q4 revenue down 11% YoY to $1.53B, vs. $1.54B est., as its two biggest business units continue to post sales declines; ON drops 4%+ (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

T

Sources: crypto exchange Backpack, built by ex-FTX and Alameda leaders, is in talks to raise $50M at a $1B pre-money valuation, reports $100M+ in annual revenue (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

T

Oxide Computer, which lets companies build their own cloud, raised $200M led by USIT, taking its total funding to nearly $390M since its 2019 founding (Chris Metinko/Axios)

T

Sources: Stripe is in talks to launch a tender offer that could value the company at $140B+, up from $107B last fall, when it bought back shares from investors (Lucinda Shen/Axios)

T

An eight-month study at a US tech company finds AI tools didn't reduce work but intensified it, as employees worked faster and took on a broader range of tasks (Harvard Business Review)

T

OpenAI says ads in ChatGPT are not eligible to appear near "sensitive or regulated topics like health, mental health or politics" (Madison Mills/Axios)

T

OpenAI says it has started testing ads in ChatGPT in the US for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go tiers and that the ads do not change ChatGPT answers (OpenAI)

T

Lyft launches teen accounts in the US more than two years after Uber, with safety features such as PIN verification, real-time tracking, and audio recordings (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

T

Neara, which builds digital twins of critical infrastructure to help prepare for disasters, raised a AU$90M Series D, a source says at a AU$1.1B valuation (Rhiannon Hoyle/Wall Street Journal)

T

Sources: Alphabet has attracted more than $100B of orders for a bond sale that's expected to be about $15B (Brian W Smith/Bloomberg)

T

Beast Industries, the entertainment conglomerate founded by MrBeast and last valued at $5.2B, acquires Step Mobile, a teen-focused banking app (Valida Pau/The Information)

T

Autodesk sues Google for allegedly infringing its Flow trademark as the name of Google's AI filmmaking tool (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

T

Monday.com's stock plunges 20%+ after the project management software company issued weak Q1 guidance, as it battles rising pressure from agentic AI tools (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

T

Sources: Alphabet plans to sell a rare 100-year sterling bond, as Big Tech companies borrow more to fund their capex growth; IBM sold a 100-year bond in 1996 (Financial Times)

T

Workday announces CEO Carl Eschenbach is stepping down and will be replaced by the company's co-founder, Aneel Bhusri, effective immediately; WDAY drops 6%+ (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

T

Databricks raised $5B in equity financing and $2B in debt at a $134B valuation and says its annualized revenue crossed $5.4B for the January quarter, up 65% YoY (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

T

EU officials and tech executives inaugurate a €2.5B chips research hub in Belgium; ASML and Imec emphasized that the US is dependent on European chip tech (Pieter Haeck/Politico)

T

Gather AI, which builds "curious" AI for drones and cameras to autonomously monitor warehouses, raised a $40M Series B, taking its total funding to $74M (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

T

Source: Apollo nears a ~$3.4B loan deal to a Valor-led investment vehicle to buy Nvidia chips for leasing to xAI; through fall 2025, xAI was burning $1B+/month (Miles Kruppa/The Information)

T

Discord says it will roll out age verification globally from March to access some content; all accounts will have a "teen-appropriate experience by default" (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

T

Uber agrees to acquire Getir's delivery operations from Mubadala for $335M in cash and says it will take a 15% stake in the remaining portfolio for $100M (Bloomberg)

T

How Oura won over DC by growing its lobbying spend to $1M+ per year, as RFK Jr. touts wearables for health and the US DOD makes the rings an employee benefit (Amanda Chu/Politico)

T

Sources: Alphabet aims to raise ~$15B from a US high-grade dollar bond sale, as it seeks to finance $185B in 2026 capex; Alphabet raised $17.5B in November 2025 (Bloomberg)

T

Slack message: Sam Altman tells staff that ChatGPT is "back to exceeding 10% monthly growth", and OpenAI plans to release "an updated Chat model" this week (CNBC)

T

Alibaba's Qwen temporarily stops issuing coupons due to customer overload, hampering Alibaba's Agentic AI ad campaign; Qwen began offering coupons on February 6 (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

T

Sources: AI legal software startup Harvey seeks to raise $200M led by Sequoia and GIC at an $11B valuation, up from $8B after raising $160M in December 2025 (Iain Martin/Forbes)

T

How the US government is adopting AI: NASA reports 420 AI use cases in 2025, up from 18 in 2024, HHS reports 398, Energy 325, DOJ 295, Interior 234, and DHS 205 (Washington Post)

T

A profile of Amanda Askell, Anthropic's resident philosopher, who is learning Claude's reasoning patterns in a bid to endow the chatbot with a sense of morality (Wall Street Journal)

T

ByteDance debuts Seedance 2.0, a new version of its AI video generation model that can produce multi-shot scenes, available to select Jimeng and Jianying users (Juro Osawa/The Information)

T

Franco-Italian chipmaker STMicro agrees to supply AWS with various chips, including for high-bandwidth connectivity and power management; STM jumps 5%+ (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

T

Chinese chip designer Montage raised $902M in its Hong Kong IPO, jumping 64% in its market debut, the biggest rise since Kuaishou's $6.2B Hong Kong IPO in 2021 (Julia Zhong/Bloomberg)

T