Author: Jason

Britain’s competition authority, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), said Wednesday that Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI doesn’t qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the U.K.’s Enterprise Act 2002, the country’s anticompetitive practices law. “Overall, taking into account all of the available evidence […] the CMA does not believe that Microsoft currently controls OpenAI’s… Read more

Foreign exchange fluctuations can make or break a business that trades across borders, but keeping up and responding to the FX market can be tricky if you’re anything smaller than the world’s largest enterprises. Today, a startup called Grain is emerging from stealth with a product that it says will let finance teams at companies… Read more

Here’s a blast from the past: Digg, one of the web’s early news aggregators, is now back under the ownership of its original founder Kevin Rose. Notably, he’s being joined as co-owner by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian (both pictured above). Digg and Reddit were once fierce rivals in the online social news aggregation space, launching… Read more

The SoftBank-backed chipmaker has signed an agreement with the Malaysian government to bolster the country’s chip design ecosystem. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Read more

Apple is challenging a U.K. Government data access order in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the Financial Times reports. The order targeted iCloud backups that are protected by end-to-end encryption. Last month, press leaks revealed the existence of the January order asking Apple to build a backdoor in iCloud’s encrypted backups. U.K. officials are exercising… Read more

Darwinbox, an Indian startup building a SaaS platform for hiring, onboarding and employee administration, has raised $140 million to take on the likes of Rippling and Deel as it seeks to expand internationally, especially in the U.S. The funding is being co-led by KKR and Partners Group, and is a mix of primary and secondary… Read more

A U.K. startup, originating from founder Jacob Nathan’s high school science project on using enzymes to break down plastic waste, has secured an oversubscribed $18.3 million in Series A funding. Founded in 2019 in London, Epoch Biodesign now a 30+ strong multidisciplinary team of chemists, biologists and software engineers. It will be using the new… Read more

Nvidia-backed data center company CoreWeave has acquired AI developer platform Weights & Biases for an undisclosed sum. According to The Information, CoreWeave spent $1.7 billion on the transaction. Weights & Biases was valued at $1.25 billion in 2023, and it recently filed for an IPO. Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt, and Shawn Lewis founded Weights & Biases… Read more

EcoDataCenter, a Swedish company that builds eco-friendly data centers used by major compute providers to handle their AI traffic, has raised nearly half a billion dollars — $478 million (€450 million) to be exact — in anticipation of more demand.  The equity funding, which is coming from a group of unnamed institutional investors, will be… Read more

Last October, Meta dipped its toe into the world of facial recognition — an area where it has had a tricky track record — with an international test of two new tools: one to stop scams based on likenesses of famous people, and a second facial recognition feature to help people get back into compromised… Read more