Sara Fischer / Axios:
Yahoo strikes a deal to sell TechCrunch to media investment firm Regent, which acquired PCWorld publisher Foundry earlier this week — Yahoo on Friday said it has struck a deal to sell TechCrunch, the 20-year-old tech journalism site, to Regent, a media investment firm.
Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch:
BuildOps, which develops software for commercial services contractors, raised a $127M Series C led by Meritech Capital at a $1B post-money valuation — Commercial services tech hasn’t historically been considered “sexy,” but the need for innovation in the space is enormous.
Paris Martineau / The Information:
Source: US Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham plan to introduce a bipartisan bill with wide support that would make Section 230 expire on January 1, 2027 — In June 1995, two young congressmen reached across the aisle to introduce legislation that would become the defining legal protection …
The Cloudflare Blog:
Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to confuse and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and bots that ignore “no crawl” directives — Today, we’re excited to announce AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down …
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
Report: North Korea is launching a new cybersecurity research unit called Research Center 227 focused on AI-based hacking and stealing digital assets — The North Korean government is reportedly establishing a new hacking group within the intelligence agency Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB).
Kimberley Kao / Wall Street Journal:
Chinese food delivery giant Meituan reports Q4 revenue up 20% to $12.21B, vs. $12.1B est., net profit up 180% YoY to $858M, even as it faces stiff competition — Meituan has been facing stiff competition in its home market — Chinese food-delivery giant Meituan reported a near tripling …
Ashley Capoot / CNBC:
Micron Q2: revenue up 38% YoY to $8.05B vs. $7.89B est., net income up 99% to $1.58B, says data center revenue tripled, offers better-than-expected Q3 guidance — Micron shares popped 6% in extended trading Thursday after the company reported second-quarter results that beat analysts’ estimates …
Financial Times:
A profile of Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport, who served in Israel’s elite cyber intelligence unit 8200; sources say Wiz was on track to surpass $1B of ARR in 2025 — Cybersecurity start-up’s fast-moving CEO agrees higher sale price after turning down Alphabet’s $23bn offer last summer
Gary Rivlin / Bloomberg:
A book excerpt from AI Valley details the 2024 mass defection of staff at Inflection AI, which seemed to be thriving but faced scaling challenges, to Microsoft — An excerpt from AI Valley tells the story of why the staff at Inflection AI, which seemed to be thriving, defected en masse to Microsoft in 2024.
Alex Reisner / The Atlantic:
A look at LibGen, one of the largest online pirate libraries, with 7.5M+ books and 81M+ research papers, allegedly used by Meta and OpenAI to train AI models — Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI. Search through them here. — When employees at meta started developing …
