Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Butterfly Effect, the startup behind Manus and an earlier product called Monica, says its annual revenue run rate has hit $90M, with Manus contributing the most (Bloomberg)

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PE firm Advent International agrees to acquire U-blox, a SIX Swiss Exchange-listed wireless and positioning chipmaker, for about $1.3B via public tender offer (Andrea Figueras/Wall Street Journal)

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Canva launches employee stock sale to new and existing investors at a $42B valuation, up 30%+ from $32B in 2024, reports $3.3B+ annualized sales and 240M+ MAUs (Olivia Poh/Bloomberg)

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Sources: US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is exploring government equity stakes in return for CHIPS Act funding from Micron, TSMC, Samsung, and others (Reuters)

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EliseAI, which provides AI tools for healthcare and housing industries, raised a $250M Series E led by a16z, doubling its valuation to $2.2B from August 2024 (Krystal Hu/Reuters)

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Shares of SoftBank plunged as much as 9.2% on Wednesday, as tech stocks in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong fall after US tech stocks dropped overnight (Amala Balakrishner/CNBC)

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The Nasdaq fell 1.4% on August 19, as Nvidia dropped 3.5% and Arm 5%, with AI enthusiasm cooling after a critical report from MIT and a warning from Sam Altman (Financial Times)

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Vantage Data Centers plans to spend $25B+ to build a 1.4 GW data center campus in Shackelford County, Texas, the largest in its global portfolio (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)

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A look at Justin Sun's lawsuit against Bloomberg for publishing his holdings, which he claims he provided confidentially to qualify for its Billionaires Index (Molly White/Citation Needed)

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Firecrawl, which offers an open-source web crawler for developers and AI agents, raised a $14.5M Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

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The White House launches an official TikTok account, with the aim of communicating President Trump's policies (Steve Holland/Reuters)

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US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says Intel must give the government an equity stake in the company in return for CHIPS Act funds; INTC closes up 7% (CNBC)

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Microsoft rolls out a COPILOT function in Excel for users in the Beta Channel, letting them use text prompts to categorize data, summarize feedback, and more (Sean Endicott/Windows Central)

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Alibaba releases Qwen-Image-Edit, the image editing version of Qwen-Image, supporting modifications of Chinese and English text while preserving font and style (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

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Austin-based Aalo Atomics, which is building a modular nuclear reactor and data center, set to finish construction in 2026, raised a $100M Series B led by Valor (Julia Hornstein/Business Insider)

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Federal prosecutors charge an Oregon man with operating the Rapper Bot, one of the most powerful DDoS botnets ever seen, which knocked X offline earlier in 2025 (Robert McMillan/Wall Street Journal)

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Bullish says it has received all $1.15B in capital raised from its IPO in stablecoins, including USDC, USDG, and PYUSD, marking a first for US public markets (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)

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Wyoming launches a stablecoin, FRNT, marking the first time a US state has issued a blockchain-based, fiat-pegged token to be used by retail and enterprises (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

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Source: Pylon, which uses AI to automate B2B customer service, raised $31M led by a16z and Bain Capital at a valuation in the hundreds of millions of dollars (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

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Meta rolls out AI-powered voice translations for creators on Facebook and Instagram globally, supporting English-Spanish translations with lip syncing (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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