European AI startups raised $8B in 2024
In just a few days, France will host the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, with heads of state flocking to Paris to meet global tech leaders. They'll most likely announce some big investments and diplomatic agreements focused on safety or the environmental impact of artificial intelligence
Hitachi Ventures raises $400M fund to invest in everything from fusion to AI
Hitachi Ventures secured $400 million for a fourth fund, the firm exclusively told technewss.
The size of the new fund is a vote of confidence in a range of deep tech verticals. The corporate VC's sprawling portfolio mimics that of its limited partner's, including energy, manufacturing, b
Google wants Search to be more like an AI assistant in 2025
Google Search is in the midst of a “journey” around AI, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the company’s earnings call on Tuesday. The start of that journey was AI overviews, a controversial and monumental shift in how Google delivers information to billions of Search users.
Bu
Krafton leads Cashfree’s $53M funding at $700M valuation
Cashfree, an Indian payments startup that facilitates and processes more than $80 billion for its customers each year, has raised $53 million in a new round of funding as it gears up to deepen its presence in some international markets.
Krafton, maker of sleeper hit titles such as PUBG and BGMI, l
Brightpick's new warehouse robot can reach 20-foot-high shelves
Brightpick, a maker of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), on Tuesday announced a lofty addition to its current line. The appropriately named Giraffe system is notable for its large, retractable platform capable of reaching up to 20 feet (6 meters) in height to pick items from warehouse shelves. It
Alphabet praises DeepSeek, but it’s massively ramping up its AI spending
Booming AI budgets seemed at risk last week when DeepSeek crashed Nvidia's stock based on speculation that its cheaper AI models would lower demand for AI chips and data centers.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has certainly noticed the Chinese AI company, praising its work as
Two space startups have merged to create the next generation of telescopes
On a clear spring evening in Michigan, the stars aligned — just not in the way Upfront Ventures partner Nick Kim expected.
He'd just led a $9.5 million seed round for OurSky, a software platform for space observational data, and was eager to see what its telescope partner PlaneWave Instrumen
Snap says TikTok uncertainty benefited its business
During Snap’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Evan Spiegel said that the uncertainty surrounding TikTok’s future has positively affected its business.
“We’re not trying to draw too many conclusions from some of the engagement lift we saw when [TikTok] went dark for
AMD pulls up the release of its next-gen data center GPUs
AMD says that it plans to launch its next major data center GPUs, the AMD Instinct MI350 series, sooner than originally announced.
During the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call Tuesday, AMD CEO Lisa Su said AMD plans to sample the MI350 with “lead customers” this quarter and “
Miist, founded by a 25-year-old, wants people to vape their way out of smoking addiction and migraines
As a university student, Dalton Signor was troubled by how many people around him smoked or vaped, including his grandmother and 14-year-old sister.
Signor (pictured center) felt that existing smoking-cessation medicines, whether patches, gums, or lozenges, are not very effective because they take
Spyware maker Paragon confirms US government is a customer
Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions confirmed to technewss that it sells its products to the U.S. government and other unspecified allied countries.
Paragon’s executive chairman John Fleming said in a statement to technewss on Tuesday that “Paragon licenses its technology to a select
Okta competitor SailPoint races toward $11.5B IPO
Cybersecurity company SailPoint is hoping to go public — again. This time, the company plans to sell $1 billion worth of stock and hit an $11.5 billion valuation in its planned IPO.
That's how the math works out for a proposed offering it announced Tuesday of 47.5 million shares, at between
Figure drops OpenAI in favor of in-house models
Figure AI, a robotics company working to bring a general-purpose humanoid robot into commercial and residential use, announced Tuesday on X that it is exiting a deal with OpenAI. The Bay Area-based outfit has instead opted to focus on in-house AI owing to a “major breakthrough.” In convers
Hugging Face researchers aim to build an ‘open’ version of OpenAI’s deep research tool
A group of developers at AI dev platform Hugging Face, including Thomas Wolf, the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, say they’ve built an “open” version of OpenAI’s deep research tool.
Deep research, which OpenAI unveiled during an event Sunday, crawls the web