Naveen Rao, the former head of AI at Databricks, has raised $475 million in seed capital at a $4.5 billion valuation for his new startup, Unconventional AI. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital and DCVC. The funding is a first installment towards the goal of up to $1 billion for the round, Rao told Bloomberg.
He therefore texted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who apparently confirmed the veracity of those posts, before contacting Boom's engineering team, who unbeknown to Scholl had already created "the outline of a plan to build a power turbine based on our Symphony supersonic engine." "After a few conversations, it became clear: AI didn't just need more turbines - it needed a new and fundamentally better turbine," Scholl wrote.
Since Slack's launch in early 2013, the company has raised more than $320 million in funding-its $160 million round in April boosted the San Francisco company's private valuation to nearly $3 billion. The workplace messaging software has amassed 2 million daily active users since the service officially launched in February 2014-that's almost double the tally from six months ago. And many Slack users stay connected to the service an average of 10 hours daily, Underwood said.
I personally own both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac common stock in good size, Burry wrote in his Substack newsletter, Cassandra Unchained. I appreciate that both stocks trade in the pink sheets, unavailable to many institutional investors and, unlike all the big AI and tech names everyone loves, these are not over-owned. The two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) currently own 62% of all outstanding U.S. home mortgages and back roughly 70% of conforming loans.
When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, Barnes & Noble wasn't pouring billions into machine learning or cloud infrastructure. This doesn't mean that it was easy for these entrepreneurs to change the face of whole industries. It was not. But it was at least possible. Back then, giants could be out-innovated because they were bureaucratic, cautious, and often blind to the potential of what the upstart start-ups were building.
Firestorm Labs has designed a small, mobile factory that the company says can fabricate virtually any model of drone or drone part. Each factory consists of two 20-foot shipping containers, outfitted with industrial-grade HP printers. Set-up requires just two to four people, and the company estimates that each factory can currently churn out about 17small-to-mid-sized drones drones per week. The company also has two of its own drone designs.
Most people think investors possess magical instincts that they can smell profit the way a chef smells burnt food. But after decades across entrepreneurship, property development and deal-making, you'll end up finding out that investment intuition isn't mystical but rather, trained. It's pattern recognition sharpened by the simple habit of paying attention to the right signals and ignoring the noise that distracts everyone else.
Is there any way for another AI coding tool to worm it's way into the hearts of startup founders - and past Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini Code Assist, GitHub CoPilot, the many other AI-wrapped VSCode forks, and vibe-coding phenoms like Replit and Lovable? Amazon wants to try using the tried-and-true method of giving its tool away for free. The cloud giant says it will grant qualified early-stage startups a free year
Harvey on Thursday confirmed it closed a round of funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz, that values the legal AI startup at $8 billion after reports of the funding leaked in October. The startup raised $160 million in the round. This latest capital infusion came just months after it raised a $300 million in a Series E round at a $5 billion valuation in June. And that was just months after raising a Sequoia-led $300 million Series D at a $3 billion valuation in February.
The planned investments are part of a wider $1.5 trillion effort known as the Security and Resilience Initiative (SRI), which was announced by the world's largest bank in October. Days after launch, J.P. Morgan revealed its first investment as part of initiative: a $75 million equity investment in Perpetua Resources, which is aiming to become the first US-based producer of the versatile critical mineral antimony, which has applications in the defense sphere for items like batteries and ammunition.
For what it's worth, the interviewer and host laughed at the idea of prediction markets in Roblox. "I actually think it's a brilliant idea if it can be done in an educational way that's legal. And so, imagine no free Robux, no free prizes, just a game called the Dress to Impress Predictor, where it's not like trying to get kids' money or anything like that. I would be a big fan of it," he explained.
But he chose London for its design and brand-positioning potential, in a move that seems to be paying off. Nothing's growth has accelerated in the last two years, with revenues increasing 150% to over $500 million in 2024. Pei says the company is on track to hit $1 billion in sales for 2025, and has collectively sold seven million of its headphones, earbuds and smartphones since launch.
When I got hired at Meta in 2020, it was life-changing for me as a single mom. It represented safety and stability - a place to work hard at and retire from. So, when I was let go in February in a round of layoffs aimed at "low-performers," it felt like a punch in the gut. Nine months later, my severance and savings have run dry, I'm struggling to find a tech job, and I feel that the low-performer "label" is part of the reason.
Modern software companies no longer run on a single cloud; they're spread across dozens of specialized providers, from AI platforms to data warehouses to edge networks. This fragmentation creates a problem: today's developers grew up building apps in the cloud, but most lack the network engineering skills needed to securely connect all these different services together. The capabilities that tech giants spent years building - private network connections, global infrastructure, and sophisticated traffic routing - remain out of reach for smaller teams.
Lluis Faus will serve as strategic advisor and interim chief content officer. As the former CEO of vLex, which he and his brother founded in 2000, he brings decades of experience in legal research and content innovation to his new role overseeing Clio's content strategy. Ed Walters takes on the position of vice president, legal innovation and strategy. Walters was chief strategy officer at vLex and, before that, cofounder and CEO of Fastcase, which he founded in 1999.
Thanks to the rise of cryptocurrency, it's never been easier to place inscrutable bets with shady grey-market bookies. The kingpin presiding over this dubious corner of the gaming industry is currently Polymarket, a crypto platform which lets users place bets on the outcomes of weather catastrophes, political elections, and economic crises. Aided in large part by Trump administration deregulations, Polymarket has become the go-to for bettors eager to cash in on geopolitical strife.
With a total cash account of $200,000, you can invest $50,000 in four stocks or exchange traded funds (ETFs) and possibly collect $50,000 worth of annual passive income. It's not magic or pure luck. Rather, it's a matter of finding a couple of dividend champion stocks and some high-yield ETFs. To receive $50,000 in annual dividends/distributions from a $200,000 total investment, you'll need an average yield of at least $50,000 / $200,000, or 25%.
If you've chosen a target asset allocation-the mix of stocks, bonds, and cash in your portfolio- you're probably ahead of many investors. But unless you're investing in a set-and-forget investment option like a target-date fund, your portfolio's asset mix will shift as the market fluctuates. In a bull market you might get more equity exposure than you planned, or the reverse if the market declines. Rebalancing involves selling assets that have appreciated the most and using the proceeds to shore up assets that have lagged.
Nevada-based Redwood employees around 1,200 employees, so the cuts affect a few dozen workers. The company, founded in 2017 by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, initially focused on recycling scrap from battery cell production, consumer electronics, and used EV batteries. The company extracts materials like cobalt, nickel, and lithium from those discarded goods and then sells them back to its customers, which includes Panasonic. Redwood has since added cathode production.
