Weeks after the revelation that Google paid Windsurf $2.4 billion to license its technology, while simultaneously hiring away its CEO and top talent, the deal’s implications are still rattling some founders and startup employees across Silicon Valley. Google’s payment to the startup was effectively split in two equal parts, according to two people familiar with…
In 2023, co-founders Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani sold their expense management startup Expensya to Swedish procurement software firm Medius in what is widely considered to be one of the largest acquisitions of an African startup. Some sources say the sum was just over $120 million, although deal terms were not disclosed. Success achieved, both…
The rebooted version of social site Digg aims to bring back the spirit of the old web at a time when AI-generated content is threatening to overwhelm traditional social media platforms, drowning out the voices of real people. This presents an opportunity to build a social site for the AI era, where the people who…
A new AI orchestration startup from the founders of Lithuanian unicorn Nord Security is setting out to help enterprises put their AI projects into production, with an initial focus on bringing greater visibility, security and adaptability to large language models (LLMs). Nexos.ai, as the startup is called, is the handiwork of Tomas Okmanas (pictured above)…
When Brynn Putnam sold her last company, Mirror, to Lululemon for $500 million at the start of the pandemic, it looked to this editor like she’d sold the smart fitness company too soon. Instead, the timing proved brilliant. The home fitness craze crashed nearly as abruptly as it peaked during that first year of lockdowns….
San Francisco’s AI startup boom is so big, even international founders who don’t run AI startups are relocating there to help their companies grow, according to several founders who recently moved. This is largely because the tech talent and investor money is still overwhelmingly concentrated there, according to new data that VC firm SignalFire exclusively…
Microsoft is facing a full regulatory probe in the U.K. after the tech giant hired the core team behind Inflection AI, a U.S.-based OpenAI rival in which Microsoft had previously invested. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) today announced that it’s launching a “phase 1” merger inquiry, which kicks off a 40-working day investigative period where…
Adept, a startup developing AI-powered “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its tech to Amazon and the startup’s co-founders and portions of its team have joined the ecommerce giant. Geekwire’s Taylor Soper first reported the news. According to Soper, Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan will join Amazon, along with Adept…
Among all the young AI startups being ruthlessly pursued by VCs these days, GPTZero has already grown into profitability in its first year and a half of life, generating millions in revenue. Founded by 24-year-old Edward Tian and 26-year-old Alex Cui, who’ve been friends since high school, GPTZero offers a detection tool that helps identify…