Reading List

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

Parafin, a startup run by ex-Robinhood staff offering spend management and savings tools as well as loan products, raised a $100M Series C at a $750M valuation (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

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A San Francisco jury convicts tech consultant Nima Momeni of second-degree murder in the fatal stabbing of Cash App founder Bob Lee on April 4, 2023 (New York Times)

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Atlanta-based Slip Robotics, a robot-as-a-service startup whose robots speed up the loading and unloading of truck trailers, raised a $28M Series B led by DCVC (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

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Some tech leaders say they're optimistic that Trump will increase visas to highly skilled foreign workers, despite Trump curbing such programs in his first term (New York Times)

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Google adds support for third-party tools to Gemini Code Assist, letting the service access real-time data and information from outside apps (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

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Sources: OpenAI is working to sever the nonprofit's control while compensating its board, possibly in the billions, and promised investors a two-year schedule (New York Times)

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Grammarly unveils a deal to buy collaborative tools startup Coda and bring on its co-founder and CEO Shishir Mehrotra as CEO; Coda had a $1.4B valuation in 2021 (Paayal Zaveri/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Character.AI rival Talkie, one of the most-downloaded AI apps in the US and made by China's MiniMax, prepares an AI video feature to reignite growth (Juro Osawa/The Information)

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UK-based BVNK, a stablecoin infra startup with ~$40M in annualized revenue, raised a $50M Series B led by Haun Ventures; a source said it values BVNK at ~$750M (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)

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Databricks is raising $10B from a16z, Thrive, others at a $62B valuation, among the largest VC raises in history; documents show Databricks has $2.6B in revenue (Wall Street Journal)

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The US FTC issues long-awaited rules requiring companies to display the full price of hotels, concert tickets, and more up front, rather than hiding "junk fees" (Tony Romm/Washington Post)

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The Irish Data Protection Commission fines Meta €251M over a Facebook breach that affected ~29M users globally and ~3M in the EU and EEA in September 2018 (Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch)

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Interpol says calling online scams "pig butchering", a widely used phrase, is unhelpful as gangs "appear to have" created the phrase to describe victims (Wired)

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A Taiwanese official says the country is in talks with Amazon's Kuiper over satellite internet as its current OneWeb deal does not offer sufficient capacity (Kathrin Hille/Financial Times)

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Taiwanese silicon wafer maker GlobalWafers finalizes $406M in CHIPS Act funding, part of a plan to invest nearly $4B to help build plants in Texas and Missouri (Bloomberg)

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After Trump's win, a look at what the crypto industry could do next, including weakening financial rules that might protect consumers from the next crypto crash (Molly White/Bloomberg)

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Toronto-based Hostaway, which offers vacation rental management tools, raised $365M led by General Atlantic at a $925M valuation, after raising $175M in 2023 (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

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Alibaba agrees to sell its Intime department store business, part of a plan to unify online and offline retailing in 2017, for ~$1B, taking a record $1.3B loss (Bloomberg)

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The European Commission opens a formal DSA investigation into TikTok over concerns foreign actors used it to interfere in the Romanian presidential elections (Edith Hancock/Wall Street Journal)

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Nigeria arrests 792 suspects, including 148 Chinese and 40 Filipino nationals, in a raid on a building believed to be a crypto romance scam call center (Elisha Bala-Gbogbo/Reuters)

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