Reading List

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

Salt Lake City-based Zanskar, which uses AI to find overlooked geothermal fields to boost US electricity supply, raised $115M, taking its total funding to $180M (Benoît Morenne/Wall Street Journal)

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Sensor Tower: consumers spent $85B on apps globally in 2025, up 21% YoY, and, in a first, more money went on non-game mobile apps than on games, driven by GenAI (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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The BBC confirms a "strategic partnership" with YouTube to produce exclusive content, including news and YouTube channels aimed at children and young adults (Alex Ritman/Variety)

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Ukrainian-founded language learning marketplace Preply raised a $150M Series D led by WestCap at a $1.2B valuation; the startup has a 150-person office in Kyiv (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

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Lightning AI merges with data center operator Voltage Park to create an "AI cloud" with a $2.5B valuation, managing 35,000+ Nvidia GPUs across six data centers (Iain Martin/Forbes)

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Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth: Superintelligence Labs delivered its first high-profile AI models internally in January, after just six months, which are "very good" (Jeffrey Dastin/Reuters)

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Israeli startup DataRails, which offers financial planning and analytics tools, raised a $70M Series C led by One Peak at an estimated $600M to $700M valuation (Globes)

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Chinese AI startup Zhipu says it is limiting GLM Coding Plan access after strong demand, taking only 20% of its current daily new subscriptions from January 23 (Bloomberg)

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GlobalWafers Chair Doris Hsu says the Taiwanese silicon wafer maker is preparing for phase two of its Texas plant, after unveiling plans to invest an extra $4B (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters)

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Berlin-based Cloover, which makes software to help install solar, home batteries, and heat pumps, raised $22M from Lowercarbon and others and $1.2B in debt (Coco Liu/Bloomberg)

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How Ukraine and Russia both rely on the same Chinese drone suppliers, whose tech is vital to the war; China officially bans sensitive drone tech exports to both (Financial Times)

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US colleges like Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech are using AI to streamline admissions; Virginia Tech says AI that scores essay questions saved ~8,000 hours (Francesca Maglione/Bloomberg)

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Sources: OpenAI begins offering its chatbot ads to dozens of advertisers, initially charging per ad view, not per ad click, and asks them for <$1M commitments (The Information)

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As Taiwanese chipmakers push localization to secure supply chains, suppliers to the steel, plastics, and display industries are moving into Taiwan's chip sector (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

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A programmer estimates his typical day of coding with Claude Code is equivalent to running the dishwasher an extra time, much more energy than a "median query" (Simon P. Couch)

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Galaxy Digital plans to launch a hedge fund in Q1 2026 investing up to 30% in crypto tokens and the rest in financial stocks; sources say it has raised $100M (Nikou Asgari/Financial Times)

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Bengaluru-based Amagi, an ad tools provider for broadcast and streaming TV, fell below its listing price in its India market debut after raising $196M in an IPO (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo says the slump in software company valuations over threat of AI-driven disruption is creating a "huge buying opportunity" (Financial Times)

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Payments using facial recognition are growing in South Korea as the tech improves; South Korean fintech app Toss has scaled its "Facepay" service to 1M+ users (Nami Matsuura/Nikkei Asia)

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The Gates Foundation and OpenAI plan to invest $50M to use AI to ease the impact of chronic staff shortages in 1,000 primary health clinics in Africa by 2028 (Financial Times)

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