Data center operator DataBank nets $250M equity investment

The data center market is booming, driven by AI demand. Just last week, OpenAI said that it plans to team up with backers including SoftBank to spend at least $100 billion on data center infrastructure in the U.S. Microsoft aims to put around $80 billion toward AI infrastructure this year, and riva

Ex-Autodesk execs snag $46M to build the next gen of architecture design

Talk to many architects, and they’ll likely tell you that Autodesk’s software, including AutoCAD and Revit, has been indispensable to their work for decades. But despite their widespread use, Autodesk’s former co-CEO and chief product officer Amar Hanspal says that the architectu

International police coalition takes down two prolific cybercrime and hacking forums

An international coalition of law enforcement agencies took down two hacking forums that had more than 10 million users, according to Europol, one of the agencies involved in the operation.  On Thursday, Europol and Germany's police the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) announced the seizures of Cr

Amazon hikes prices for its Music Unlimited subscriptions

Amazon is the latest company to announce a price hike for its music streaming subscriptions. The company revealed this week that the price of an Amazon Music Unlimited Individual plan for Prime members is going from $9.99 per month to $10.99. As for subscribers without a Prime membership, the pric

Little Umbrella's next Jackbox-style game pits you and your friends against an AI game show host 

Web-based party games are making a comeback, now with the infusion of generative AI. Among the startups joining the trend, the current forecast looks good for one startup, Little Umbrella, which leverages AI for its social party games.  The company announced on Thursday its $2 million seed fu

Microsoft's Copilot-focused Surface Pro and Laptop PCs ship with Snapdragon and Intel options

At an event in New York City on Thursday, Microsoft unveiled two additions to the Surface line of PCs. The new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop both arrive with Copilot+ PC certification. Announced in May 2024, the program aims to identify business-focused devices that are designed specifically for t

Backline automatically remediates security vulnerabilities

Backline, a new security startup that uses AI agents to automatically remediate security vulnerabilities, is coming out of stealth with a $9 million seed round led by StageOne Ventures. This is the third startup by Maor Goldberg, the company’s co-founder and CEO. He previously co-founded Whi

QED seeds $9.9M in Cedar Money, a stablecoin payment platform

The newest generation of startups aiming to solve cross-border payments are focusing on stablecoins — cryptocurrency coins often pegged to actual currencies or other commodities to help them keep stable prices — to build solutions that work faster and often cheaper than classic financia

Ai2 says its new AI model beats one of DeepSeek’s best

Move over, DeepSeek. There’s a new AI champion in town — and they’re American. On Thursday, Ai2, a nonprofit AI research institute based in Seattle, released a model that it claims outperforms DeepSeek V3, one of Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s leading systems.

Savant Labs is an automation platform for business analysts

Savant Labs launched its automation platform for data analysts in 2023. The company, which competes with the likes of Alteryx, on Thursday said it had raised $18.5 million in a Series A round led by Dell Technologies Capital. Unlike some other low-code/no-code tools, Savant’s focus is squar

Data analytics startup Athenic AI wants to be an enterprise’s central nervous system

Jared Zhao originally got interested in data analytics during his time at UC Berkeley because he was drawn to how it could turn raw data into a story. Zhao founded his first data analytics startup Polyture in 2021. But advancements in generative AI just a year later made Zhao realize what Polyture

US blood donation giant warns of disruption after ransomware attack

New York Blood Center (NYBC), one of the largest nonprofit blood centers in the United States, says it is experiencing service disruptions after being hit by a ransomware attack.  NYBC said in a statement on Wednesday that the organization detected suspicious activity on its IT systems on Jan

SuperOps bags $25M to use AI to better help managed service providers

SuperOps, an Indian startup offering tools to help IT service providers and internal system administrators at enterprises, has raised $25 million in a Series C round that values it at $200 million post-money, as it plans to double down on AI. For enterprises with remote teams, IT teams often strug

India lauds Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, plans to host its models on local servers

India’s IT minister on Thursday praised DeepSeek‘s progress and said the country will host the Chinese AI lab’s large language models on domestic servers, in a rare opening for Chinese technology in India. “You have seen what DeepSeek has done — $5.5 million and a very, v