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NYC-based Prosper AI, whose healthcare AI tool is designed to answer patient phone calls, raised a $30M Series A led by a16z, taking its total funding to $35M (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios)

Electric bike rental company Lime is seeking to raise up to $180.9M in its US IPO, offering 6.7M shares at $24 to $26 each, giving it an up to $1.7B valuation (Jordan Fitzgerald/Bloomberg)

Chevron signs a 20-year deal with Microsoft to provide natural-gas power for a proposed West Texas data center, which could be one of the biggest in the US (Kevin Crowley/Bloomberg)

Netherlands-based Nearfield Instruments, which makes atomic force microscopes to measure chip features, raised $380M led by Fidelity at a $1.6B valuation (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

JD.com founder Richard Liu says robots will replace the company's 700K delivery workers "sooner or later", and it will help retrain them in robot maintenance (Financial Times)

Analysis: Taiwanese car display chip maker Himax, which makes driver integrated circuits for Ferrari, VW, and others, nets its founders a $1B combined net worth (Bloomberg)

SK Hynix overtakes Samsung to become South Korea's most valuable company, closing up 5.6% for a ~$1.4T market cap; South Korea's Kospi index is up 117% YTD (Kimberley Kao/Wall Street Journal)

Getty Images signs a licensing deal with OpenAI, letting its image library appear in ChatGPT's search and discovery features; GETY jumps 120%+ and is up 5%+ YTD (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Bain says it uses AI coding tools to recreate pieces of target companies' software, making hundreds of rough prototypes in recent years as part of due diligence (Ryan McMorrow/Financial Times)

S&P and IBM: 22.4% of global cyberattacks in 2024 hit Japan, the most targeted country, as it tries to improve its legacy IT systems against AI-powered threats (Catherine Thorbecke/Bloomberg)

Satya Nadella says the public wouldn't tolerate a few AI labs "doing all of the learning for the world", as Microsoft moves to provide low-cost models and tools (Wall Street Journal)

A look at JD Vance's "AI doctrine", which combines pro-innovation VC principles, worker protections, and concerns about power concentration in dominant AI labs (Vivian Salama/The Atlantic)

A profile of Sarah Polcz, the UC Davis law professor that Bernie Sanders' team consulted while developing his AI sovereign wealth fund proposal (Eli Rosenberg/The Information)

Analysis: Anthropic may have talked itself into an export ban, as its 2026 official statements and posts used AI risk-related terms 8x more often than OpenAI (Clara Murray/Financial Times)

PitchBook: defense tech companies making drones, battlefield AI, and more raised $12.3B across 175 deals in 2026 so far, up from a $9.95B from 158 deals in 2025 (Financial Times)

Tencent starts testing its new Xiaowei AI assistant powered by WeLM and DeepSeek models in its WeChat app in China, in an effort to catch up in the AI race (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Source: Morgan Stanley is pitching data center developers to use leveraged loans rather than bonds, and estimates ~$15B will be issued in 2026 in such loans (Dakin Campbell/The Information)

WiseTech's shares fell 11% after Australian police probed co-founder Richard White over sex exploitation claims; WiseTech shares are down ~67% in the past year (Sydney Morning Herald)

Sources: ByteDance shares are trading at a $600B+ valuation in gray markets; an IPO is unlikely and its growth continues to benefit its Chinese and US backers (Henny Sender/Nikkei Asia)

China adds ten US companies, including MP Materials and Teal Drones, to export controls and bars government purchases from 46 US companies, including Anduril (Wataru Suzuki/Nikkei Asia)

Shenzhen-listed Apple supplier Lingyi iTech seeks to raise $1.1B in a June 26 Hong Kong debut, as the electronic parts maker expands into AI hardware and robots (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post)

Samsung rolls out ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to all staff in Korea and DX division staff globally; OpenAI says it's one of its largest enterprise deployments (Kim Su-jeong/CHOSUNBIZ)

Japan's top five chip equipment makers posted their first-ever fall in combined China sales, down 10% in the year ended March 31, as China boosts local players (Nikkei Asia)

Sources: Shanghai-based Coowa, which develops embodied AI robots, plans to file a Hong Kong IPO; Coowa was valued at $3B after raising $600M in its latest round (Jiahui Huang/Wall Street Journal)

San Diego-based Aether AI, which is building "causal world models" to teach robots cause and effect instead of pattern-matching, raised a $20M seed led by MPCi (Cristian Dina/The Next Web)

Toto, Japan's largest toilet maker, plans to invest $495M by 2030 to expand its semiconductor materials unit, targeting R&D for next-gen 1nm chip production (Nikkei Asia)

As Europe falls behind the US and China in consumer AI, its engineering companies and AI startups are turning to industrial AI applications to boost efficiency (Marilen Martin/Bloomberg)

SF-based Humble Robotics, which is developing an electric, self-driving cabless freight truck with 200 miles range and 55 mph max speed, raised $24M (Caroline Petrow-Cohen/Los Angeles Times)

Sources: Virgin Media O2 and VodafoneThree have deployed tech to disable phones stolen from their stores, after phone makers resisted broader antitheft measures (Kieran Smith/Financial Times)

Sources: Anduril has begun exploring the possibility of establishing operations in Israel and is in talks to recruit a local manager (Sophie Shulman/CTech)

Sources: John Ternus gets ready to put his firm imprint on Apple's industrial design team, which has lost a true seat at Apple's exec table over the past decade (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

SoftBank says it is struggling to find startups in Latin America ready for major investments and has completed only two new deals over the past two years (Bloomberg)

Investigation: Polymarket is paying creators to make deceptive videos about winning bets, targeting users in the US, where its primary crypto platform is banned (Wall Street Journal)

Inside Palantir's fight to save its £330M, seven-year contract with NHS England, as public and political pressure grows to end the deal via a 2027 break clause (Financial Times)

Brazil takes its National Civil Defense warning platform offline after suspected hackers send an unauthorized alert to mobile phones in several states (Mariana Catacci/CNN)

A look at Jane Street's push to supercharge trading with AI and become a major AI investor; it invested $1B in CoreWeave in April and has a stake in Anthropic (Gregory Zuckerman/Wall Street Journal)

A look at "humanizer" and "autotyper" apps that help students evade AI-detection software by slowly auto-typing essays and making AI text sound less robotic (Dana Goldstein/New York Times)

A speculative scenario titled "Europe 2031" projects economic and political instability in the EU if it fails to keep pace with the US and China in the AI race (Aisha Down/The Guardian)

How the success of AI-related companies in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan is driving stock gains, bigger bonuses, and a retail investing frenzy in Asian markets (Wall Street Journal)

Granta says it will stop publishing short story contest winners or join publishing partnerships it doesn't control after AI use allegations against a winner (Ella Creamer/The Guardian)

Claude Guillemot, co-founder of Ubisoft and chairman of gaming hardware company Guillemot Corporation, died at 69 after a plane crash in France (Angela Cullen/Bloomberg)

An interview with Smartbird CEO Nadia Carlsten about the shoe company Allbirds becoming an AI infrastructure company, plans to deploy compute clusters, and more (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

A look at Russia's push to develop homegrown AI talent, as the country is hampered by scarce access to AI hardware and a brain drain of top technical talent (Nikita Ostrovsky/Time)

Q&A with Signal's Meredith Whittaker on why online child safety efforts risk mass surveillance, leaving the markets that demand weakening of encryption, more (Mishal Husain/Bloomberg)

Sources: the UK government is expected to consult as early as this month on rules to make public service news more prominent on social media and video platforms (Financial Times)

Sources: PC makers, including HP, are in talks with their supply-chain partners about using CXMT's memory chips in products bound for Asia as DRAM prices soar (Wall Street Journal)

Paris-based Kyber, which develops a low-latency remote device control SDK and is founded by VLC lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf, raised $5M led by Lightspeed (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

Sources: Bain Capital stands to make $15B+ in profits on its 2018 Kioxia buyout, a ~20x return, as Kioxia's stock has surged 5,000%+ since its December 2024 IPO (Financial Times)

An interview with Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki on his early decision not to prioritize ad revenue, whether every mega platform becomes an everything app, and more (Tyler Cowen/Conversations with Tyler)

Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis says the phonemaker won't launch a new phone this year in its budget-focused CMF Phone series due to surging memory prices (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)