Daniel Cancel / Bloomberg:
Brazil-based Cayena, which operates a marketplace to connect suppliers and buyers in the wholesale food industry, raised a $55M Series B led by Bicycle Capital — The Brazilian startup helps streamline transactions between suppliers and buyers in the wholesale food industry.
Email: Linda Yaccarino announces X is launching a “video tab” feature and an X-exclusive women’s soccer reality show, The Offseason, produced by Alexis Ohanian (Kylie Robison/The Verge)
Kylie Robison / The Verge:
Email: Linda Yaccarino announces X is launching a “video tab” feature and an X-exclusive women’s soccer reality show, The Offseason, produced by Alexis Ohanian — In a late Friday email, X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced the launch of a new “video tab” feature …
Functional Finance, which offers financial operations software for managing general agents, insurers, and wholesalers, raised a $20M Series A led by Walkabout (Avi Ben-Hutta/Coverager)
Avi Ben-Hutta / Coverager:
Functional Finance, which offers financial operations software for managing general agents, insurers, and wholesalers, raised a $20M Series A led by Walkabout — Functional Finance, a software platform “revolutionizing financial operations” for managing general agents, insurance companies …
Akur8, which uses AI to automate the generation of insurance pricing models, raised a $120M Series C led by One Peak, bringing its total raised to $180M (FinTech Global)
FinTech Global:
Akur8, which uses AI to automate the generation of insurance pricing models, raised a $120M Series C led by One Peak, bringing its total raised to $180M — Akur8, the machine learning-powered insurance pricing and reserving platform, has announced the closure of a $120m Series C funding round.
The judge overseeing the Google ad trial calls Google’s testimony that it faces “fierce competition” from the likes of Microsoft and Meta “highly questionable” (Leah Nylen/Bloomberg)
Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
The judge overseeing the Google ad trial calls Google’s testimony that it faces “fierce competition” from the likes of Microsoft and Meta “highly questionable” — – Search giant starts defense in antitrust ad tech lawsuit — Justice Department alleges company monopolized several markets
Sources: Black Forest Labs, whose Flux.1 model powers Grok’s image generator, is raising $100M at a $1B valuation; it came out of stealth with $31M in August (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Sources: Black Forest Labs, whose Flux.1 model powers Grok’s image generator, is raising $100M at a $1B valuation; it came out of stealth with $31M in August — While OpenAI pursues yet another monster fundraise, it is not stealing all the oxygen in the room: AI startups building promising …
OpenAI’s o1 models are dramatically better at reasoning than previous LLMs, but they struggle with spatial reasoning and are far from human-level intelligence (Timothy B Lee/Understanding AI)
Timothy B Lee / Understanding AI:
OpenAI’s o1 models are dramatically better at reasoning than previous LLMs, but they struggle with spatial reasoning and are far from human-level intelligence — It’s not easy to stump OpenAI’s new o1 models. … You might remember around Thanksgiving last year when news broke about Q* …
Filing: the US SEC says it intends to seek sanctions against Elon Musk for failing to appear for scheduled testimony for a probe into his $44B Twitter takeover (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)
Jonathan Stempel / Reuters:
Filing: the US SEC says it intends to seek sanctions against Elon Musk for failing to appear for scheduled testimony for a probe into his $44B Twitter takeover — The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Friday it intends to seek sanctions against Elon Musk after he failed to appear …
Twitch changes how it enforces its community guidelines: strikes for some offenses will depreciate over time, users will get more info about strikes, and more (Ash Parrish/The Verge)
Ash Parrish / The Verge:
Twitch changes how it enforces its community guidelines: strikes for some offenses will depreciate over time, users will get more info about strikes, and more — Twitch is changing the way it enforces its community guidelines. In an announcement posted on its website …
Sources: Qualcomm made a takeover approach to Intel in recent days; Intel stock jumps 7%+ (Wall Street Journal)
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Qualcomm made a takeover approach to Intel in recent days; Intel stock jumps 7%+ — A deal for Intel would be massive and come at a time when the chipmaker is sputtering.
