Google’s X spins out Heritable Agriculture, a startup using AI to improve crop yield

Google’s X “moonshot factory” this week announced its latest graduate. Heritable Agriculture is a data- and machine learning-driven startup aiming to improve how crops are grown.  As the firm noted in an announcement post published Tuesday, plants are incr…Read More

Here are the apps battling to be become the ‘TikTok for Bluesky’

TikTok’s potential U.S. ban has sparked a flurry of development within the open social web community. Several new applications are being built that could one day serve as a TikTok replacement for those who favor the open source, decentralized social network Bluesky and the tec…Read More

AI startup Perplexity sued for alleged trademark infringement

Perplexity, the venture-backed startup building AI-powered search products, has been sued in federal court for allegedly violating another company’s trademark. In a complaint filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, attorneys representing a…Read More

Threads adds a ‘media’ tab and the ability to tag people in photos

Meta’s newer social network Threads announced on Thursday that it’s introducing a dedicated “media” tab for both photos and videos, only days after its rivals, including X (formerly Twitter) and the startup Bluesky, did the same for videos. In addition, Meta will also now all…Read More

Ireland and Italy send data watchdog requests to DeepSeek: ‘The data of millions of Italians is at risk’

The jury is still out on whether the Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek is a game changer or part of an elaborate plan by its hedge fund parent company to short Nvidia and other tech stocks. Whichever it might be (maybe both?), DeepSeek and its lar…Read More

Quibim raises $50M to develop AI models for medical imaging

Quibim, a Spanish startup that’s developing foundational AI models for medical imaging spanning oncology, immunology, neurology, and metabolic disorders, has raised $50 million in a Series A round of funding. The cash injection comes as AI makes ever deeper inroads into healthcare,…Read More

Grok 3 seemingly went live for some users

The next flagship AI model from Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, might be nearing release. Over the weekend, several users on X, including reverse engineer Alexey Shabanov, reported gaining access to Grok 3, the successor to xAI’s current model, Grok 2, via X’s Grok chatbot app. Before their access was…Read More

2025 will likely be another brutal year of failed startups, data suggests

More startups shut down in 2024 than the year prior and a high volume of startup failures will continue, data from multiple sources.
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Wall Street banks plan sale of X debt at a discount

Bankers are reportedly gearing up to offload debt used to fund Elon Musk’s social network, for which he paid $44 million in 2022 including $13 billion in financing. Morgan Stanley is leading the charge, hoping to sell senior debt at between 90 and 95 cents on the dollar, reports the WSJ.  As n…Read More

Flip, the TikTok Shop rival, launches a creator fund that grants up to $100M of equity

Flip is a social commerce app that lets shoppers become creators. They can share honest reviews and earn cash based on engagement on the platform. As Flip competes with TikTok Shop and other platforms in a highly competitive market, it has introduced a new…Read More

Passbolt raises $8M for its open source password manager for teams

Password managers have become commonplace at this point. But businesses often have different needs than consumers. Teams, after all, often have to share credentials to access resources, all while IT and security teams need ways to control who has access to them. Passbolt, which is…Read More