Ryan Weeks / The Block: Ripple acquires Swiss custody startup Metaco for $250M in cash and stock and plans to keep the brand and CEO Adrien Treccani — David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images — Crypto payments firm Ripple shelled out $250 million for Swiss custody startup Metaco. Lees verder op Tech Meme
Catherine Shu / TechCrunch: Bolttech, a B2B2C startup that offers “embedded” insurance products, raised a $196M Series B led by Japan’s Tokio Marine at a $1.6B valuation — Embedded insurtech is still hot, as the $196 million in funding landed by bolttech proves. The company, which started in Singapore … Lees verder op Tech Meme
Douglas MacMillan / Washington Post: An investigation finds some US public housing agencies use surveillance cameras with facial recognition and AI to evict residents, sometimes for minor breaches — Surveillance cameras purchased with federal crime-fighting grants are being used to punish and evict public housing residents … Lees verder op Tech Meme
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Entrepreneur Dean Drako raised $100M for video surveillance startup Eagle Eye and $92M for smart lock startup Brivo from Japanese security giant SECOM — Eagle Eye Networks and Brivo, two players in the world of physical cloud security — respectively video surveillance and access control systems … Lees verder op Tech Meme
Anna Tong / Reuters: A poll of 4,415 US adults finds 61% believe AI could threaten civilization and 66%+ are concerned over negative effects; 70% of Trump voters were concerned — The swift growth of artificial intelligence technology could put the future of humanity at risk, according to most Americans surveyed … Lees verder op Tech Meme
Brian Heater / TechCrunch: Zürich-based ANYbotics, which develops autonomous legged robots for industrial inspection, raised a $50M Series B led by Walden Catalyst and NGP Capital — ANYbotics this week announced a $50 million Series B. The round, led by Walden Catalyst and NGP Capital, comes as the firm is pushing … Lees verder op Tech Meme
Jennifer Elias / CNBC: Internal document: Google trained PaLM 2 on 3.6T tokens and 340B parameters, compared to 780B tokens and 540B parameters for the original PaLM in 2022 — – Google’s PaLM 2 large language model is using nearly five times the amount of text data for training as its predecessor LLM, CNBC has learned. Lees verder op Tech Meme
Jing Yang / Wall Street Journal: Sources: Shein raised $2B at a $66B valuation, down from ~$100B in 2022, co-led by Sequoia, General Atlantic, and Mubadala; Shein generated $23B in 2022 revenue — Online retailer made $800 million net profit in 2022 and is targeting 40% growth, but faces geopolitical headwinds and rising competition Lees verder op Tech Meme
Zheping Huang / Bloomberg: Tencent reports Q1 revenue up 11% YoY to ~$21.4B, above estimates and the fastest growth in over a year, and net income up 10% YoY to ~$3.6B, below estimates — Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s earnings missed estimates despite the fastest pace of revenue growth in more than a year … Lees verder op Tech Meme
Brian Heater / TechCrunch: Zürich-based ANYbotics, which develops autonomous legged robots for industrial inspection, raised a $50M Series B led by Walden Catalyst and NGP Capital — ANYbotics this week announced a $50 million Series B. The round, led by Walden Catalyst and NGP Capital, comes as the firm is pushing … Lees verder op Tech Meme