xAI Cofounder Igor Babuschkin In Talks To Raise Up To $1 Billion For A New AI Startup www.forbes.com/sites/rashis...

xAI Cofounder Igor Babuschkin In Talks To Raise Up To $1 Billion For A New AI Startup

He’s the latest superstar AI researcher to take advantage of the wave of investment dollars going into so-called ‘neolabs,’ which have no product or revenue.

forbes.com

The #10 consumer AI app isn't a coding tool; it’s an erotic chatbot for women. Riding off the romantasy wave, the 3 guys who run Janitor AI serve 100M monthly visitors (80% women) -- for 130k a month. Inside the R-rated Roblox: www.forbes.com/sites/annato...

Three Dudes Run The Biggest AI Romantic Fantasy Site For Women

Three Dudes Run The Biggest AI Romantic Fantasy Site For Women

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The company’s mascot, a brown and white corgi named Trudy, is often underfoot. The pet is collectively owned by employees, who feed, walk and bathe her with the help of an AI bot on WhatsApp that reminds employees to carry out the tasks www.forbes.com/sites/richar...

This AI Insurance Company With An All-Night Cafe And Cheeky Corgi Is Now A Unicorn

Named after the company-owned dog, Corgi embodies the sometimes-absurd San Francisco startup scene. And it just raised $160 million at a $1.3 billion valuation.

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ASML makes the indispensable tools that produce semiconductors. But what everyone really wants is the Lego version www.wsj.com/lifestyle/as... "The collectibles are exclusively available to staff. They are limited to one set per person—and the policy is now strictly enforced" Boo

The $400 Million Machine That Spawned the World’s Most Coveted Toy

ASML makes the indispensable tools that produce semiconductors. But what everyone really wants is the Lego version built by one of its engineers.

wsj.com

Forget Palantir. Meet ‘Poulantir”. It seems to be a running joke among Mistral’s 700-strong staff that the company’s future leans on challenging Palantir.

A workplace lawsuit has opened the lid on the little-known ownership structure of Insight Partners, an investor in OpenAI and Anthropic: It is now partially owned by the government of Abu Dhabi. Read for more details. With @iainmartin.bsky.social for @forbes.com: www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

How Abu Dhabi Quietly Bought A Stake In $90 Billion VC Insight Partners

A workplace lawsuit has opened the lid on the little-known ownership structure of Insight Partners, an investor in OpenAI and Anthropic: It is now partially owned by the government of Abu Dhabi.

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AI labs are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy email, Slack and Jira threads from dead startups as feedstock for ‘reinforcement learning gyms,’ which specialize in using defunct company data to build simulated work environments www.forbes.com/sites/annato... via @annatonger.bsky.social

AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails

AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails

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Your 2021 Slack vent-session could be helping a future AI agent learn to "act professional." My latest @forbes.com story dives into how AI labs are clamoring to buy email, Slack and Jira data from defunct companies, to use as fuel for training AI. www.forbes.com/sites/annato...

AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails

AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails

forbes.com

A workplace lawsuit has opened the lid on the little-known ownership structure of Insight Partners, an investor in OpenAI and Anthropic: It is now partially owned by the government of Abu Dhabi www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

How Abu Dhabi Quietly Bought A Stake In $90 Billion VC Insight Partners

A workplace lawsuit has opened the lid on the little-known ownership structure of Insight Partners, an investor in OpenAI and Anthropic: It is now partially owned by the government of Abu Dhabi.

forbes.com

A little thread on why independence matters in journalism. Together with @investigate-europe.eu, the Guardian has been investigating the dangerous illegal casinos trade. 🧵

NEW: @iainmartin.bsky.social and I looked into Silicon Valley tech firm Applied Intuition and plans by its billionaire cofounders to lead in the race to automate everything that moves #autonomousvehicles #AI www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

Applied Intuition's Plan To Bring Self-Driving Tech To Everything That Moves

Applied Intuition’s cofounders are building software that can drive everything from planes to tanks to automobiles. But to expand beyond its $800 million business selling tech for cars, they will have...

forbes.com

Against the expressed wishes of the FAA, CBP had used the Pentagon’s highly classified laser-weapon system to shoot down what it thought was a handful of Mexican cartel drones on the southern border. The aerial objects were likely party balloons www.wsj.com/politics/nat...

A Laser Weapon Targeted Suspected Drones. It Hit Party Balloons Instead.

CBP fired the laser thinking it was aiming at cartel drones, leading the FAA to close the airspace over El Paso—and causing an uproar in Washington.

wsj.com

Jeffrey #Epstein had access to tech billionaires like Thiel and Musk. But he walked away from deals with major startups—including Spotify & SpaceX—that could have netted him hundreds of millions in total. Deep dive from @iainmartin.bsky.social + me for @forbes.com: www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Secretive Silicon Valley Investments

Thanks to his relationships to tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Epstein had access to a number of lucrative tech investments. But he walked away from several deals with major startups...

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Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Secretive Silicon Valley Investments www.forbes.com/sites/iainma... Did Epstein’s relationship with Peter Thiel cost him a potential $500m+ windfall from Spotify’s massive IPO?

Epstein Built Deep Ties To Silicon Valley. But His Tech Investment Record Was Lackluster

Thanks to his relationships to tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Epstein had access to a number of lucrative tech investments. But he walked away from several deals with major startups...

forbes.com

A Former Russian Jewelry Magnate’s Humanoid Robot Startup Is In Talks To Raise $200 Million www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

How Jeffrey Epstein Helped His Publicist Masha Bucher Become A Big-Time Venture Capitalist www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

How Jeffrey Epstein Helped His Publicist Become A Big-Time Venture Capitalist

Masha Bucher is one of the more high profile female VCs in Silicon Valley. New emails released from the Department of Justice reveal a deep, years long relationship with convicted sex trafficker Jeffr...

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Granola is the AI note-taker app that has clicked (crunched?) for VCs, and startups. Now the London-based startup is raising on a billion dollar plus valuation www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

VCs’ Favorite Note-Taking App Granola In Talks To Hit $1 Billion Valuation

The London-based AI startup aims to raise a new round of at least $100 million led by Index Ventures, making the popular note-taking app the latest AI unicorn.

forbes.com

Since AI note-taker Granola launched in 2024 its quickly become a fixture for VCs and increasingly startup founders and operators. Now it's in talks with investors to raise at a valuation of over $1 billion www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

Michal Strnad’s wealth surged to $37 billion, or roughly 10% of the Czech economy, after shares in the defense tycoon’s armaments company jumped in their trading debut. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Defense Tycoon Strnad’s Wealth Soars to $37 Billion After IPO

Michal Strnad’s wealth surged to $37 billion, or roughly 10% of the Czech economy, after shares in the defense tycoon’s armaments company jumped in their trading debut.

bloomberg.com

"AI is already everywhere. The last thing I want is it literally staring me in the face eye to soulless eye." www.vice.com/en/article/n... Vice on Napster's (nee Infinite Reality) new product

Napster Is (Sort of) Back With Something They Call a Hologram

The future is a strange place, especially when it features a walk-in cameo from Napster selling... AI heads? Holograms?

vice.com

PyTorch Lightning's developer merges with "neocloud" Voltage Park to create an “AI cloud” with a $2.5B valuation, managing 35,000+ Nvidia GPUs across six data centers www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

AI Startup Merges With A Billionaire-Backed Data Center Operator In $2.5 Billion Deal

The startup behind open source tool PyTorch Lightning has merged with compute provider Voltage Park to create a “full stack AI cloud” to serve corporates and startups like Cursor.

forbes.com

“There’s so much AI slop out there...it has become really important to understand what people want,” says Alfred Wahlforss who just raised $69m for AI consumer research startup Listen Labs “We help you talk to real people.” www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

This $500 Million AI Startup Runs Customer Interviews For Microsoft And Sweetgreen

The San Francisco-based company, which has run more than 1 million customer interviews with its automated AI tools to help major companies figure out what their users want, has now raised $69 million.

forbes.com

Checkr, which got its start running criminal record checks on Uber drivers and gig workers, has seen its revenues jump 14% to $800 million as companies try to spot a flood of AI-generated CVs and faked financial documents. www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

AI Fraud Has Exploded. Background-Check Startup Checkr Is Cashing In.

San Francisco-based Checkr has seen its revenues jump 14% to $800 million as companies try to spot a flood of AI-generated CVs and faked financial documents.

forbes.com

The startup behind popular Github project vLLM is out fundraising, as venture capitalists hunt for companies building tech that can make AI systems run more efficiently. www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

Lovable just raised at a $6.6 billion valuation. That makes it's 26-year-old cofounder, Fabian Hedin, one of Europe's youngest ever self-made billionaires (another Swedish AI whiz holds the lead) www.forbes.com/sites/alicia...

“The White House is sidestepping the law to bless a structure that leaves TikTok’s core technology in China,” said Jim Secreto, a former US Treasury official involved in overseeing TikTok. “What was announced looks more like a franchise arrangement than a true divestiture.”

French healthtech Doctolib, worth $6.4B and once that country’s highest valued startup, is in talks for a secondary investment in the hundreds of millions. For @forbes.com w/ @iainmartin.bsky.social www.forbes.com/sites/amyfel...

When startup BillionToOne went public last month its largest shareholder was a little-known fund Hummingbird, who had led a $15m round in 2019. Now that stake is worth $745m. And other outlier bets on Lovable, Kraken & Peak Games have driven 10x returns. www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...

Hummingbird’s VCs Look To Invest In Founders With Childhood Trauma

Partners Barend Van den Brande and Firat Ileri at low-profile London fund Hummingbird both won spots on the Midas List Europe for tearing up the venture rulebook and backing “outlier” founders.

forbes.com

"The IEA does not publicly disclose its donors and this is the first time that its historic funding sources have been revealed in detail – exposing the financial interests that helped the group to become an influential force in British politics." www.desmog.com/2025/12/10/t...

The Institute of Economic Affairs Banked £640,000 from Oil Giants and Murdoch

The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) – the anti-state, anti-climate pressure group – received more than £640,000 from fossil fuel companies and Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate between 1957 and ...

desmog.com

"Between '10 and '24, China's power production increased by more than the rest of the world combined. Last year, China generated more than twice as much electricity as the U.S. Some Chinese data centers are now paying less than half what American ones pay for electricity" www.wsj.com/tech/china-a...

China’s AI Power Play: Cheap Electricity From World’s Biggest Grid

Government push for power supremacy transforms Inner Mongolia. Tech leaders worry about a U.S.-China “electron gap.”

wsj.com