Reading List

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

Lidar manufacturer Luminar files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and says it reached a deal to sell its semiconductor subsidiary to Quantum Computing Inc. for $110M (Reshmi Basu/Bloomberg)

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Mexico-based fintech Plata raised up to $500M in a financing deal arranged by Nomura Securities International, as it moves toward becoming a full-fledged bank (Prakhar Srivastava/Reuters)

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Google is shutting down its dark web monitoring tool, launched in 2024 to alert users when their personal info is detected on the dark web, on February 16, 2026 (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

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NY-based Octane, which offers "instant" financing for large recreational and lifestyle purchases, raised a $100M Series F at a post-money valuation of $1.3B (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

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Nvidia announces it has acquired SchedMD, the developer of Slurm, an open-source workload management system for HPC and AI (Arsheeya Bajwa/Reuters)

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The Trump administration launches US Tech Force to recruit ~1,000 staffers from Apple, Meta, xAI, and others for two-year stints to modernize the government (Natalie Alms/Nextgov/FCW)

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Source: Dragoneer raised $4.3B for its seventh VC fund and now has over $30B in AUM; it raised $3.8B for its sixth private fund in 2022 (Dan Primack/Axios)

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Thrive Holdings announces it has hired Palantir CIO Jim Siders to serve as CEO of Shield Technology Partners, a newly created business focused on IT services (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

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LG smart TV owners say a webOS update pinned Microsoft Copilot to the home screen, with no apparent way to remove the app; LG unveiled an AI TV strategy at CES (Luke James/Tom's Hardware)

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Internal docs: Meta earned $18B+ in annual ad sales from China in 2024, making up 10%+ of its global revenue, with $3B+ linked to fraudulent ads, like for scams (Reuters)

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Lightspeed raised $9B+ across six AI funds, including $3.3B to back breakout hits like Anthropic, xAI, and Mistral; Lightspeed has backed 165 AI startups (Erin Griffith/New York Times)

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Nvidia launches Nemotron 3, a family of AI models using a hybrid mixture-of-experts architecture and the Mamba-Transformer design, in 30B, 100B, and ~500B sizes (Emilia David/VentureBeat)

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Memo: Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos lay out Netflix's WBD offer, moving to quell concerns about job losses and the end of theater releases, after Paramount's bid (Rose Henderson/Bloomberg)

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Berlin-based Mirelo, whose AI models can interpret videos to add synced sound effects, raised a $41M seed led by Index Ventures and a16z, after a $3M pre-seed (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

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Tech whistleblowers like Yaël Eisenstat say coming forward has unexpectedly derailed their lives and careers; Meta is in litigation with Sarah Wynn-Williams (Naomi Nix/Washington Post)

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AI drug discovery startup Chai Discovery raised a $130M Series B led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst at a $1.3B valuation, taking its total funding to $225M (Caroline Hyde/Bloomberg)

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Teneo survey of 350+ public-company CEOs: 68% plan to spend more on AI in 2026 than in 2025, <50% of AI projects generated more returns than they cost, and more (Ben Glickman/Wall Street Journal)

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Analysis: Tata, Infosys, and Cognizant are set to bear the brunt of Trump's $100K H-1B fee; from 2020 to 2024, 93% of Infosys' H-1B hires would have had to pay (Bloomberg)

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Sources: the UK government wants Apple, Google, and others to block explicit images at the OS level by default to protect kids and have adults verify their ages (Financial Times)

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AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon's rivalry is moving beyond ads, with explicit customer poaching efforts and lawsuits; AT&T blocked T-Mobile's Easy Switch tool twice (Patience Haggin/Wall Street Journal)

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