Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: The exclusivity period for OpenAI's $3B offer to acquire coding startup Windsurf, entered into in May, has expired — The exclusivity period on OpenAI's $3 billion offer to acquire coding startup Windsurf has expired, an OpenAI spokesperson told Fortune. — The expiration of the exclusivity …
Leo Schwartz / Fortune: Agora, which offers a white-labeling service to let other companies launch their own, self-branded versions of its stablecoin, AUSD, raised a $50M Series A — Agora cofounders Joe McGrady, Nick Van Eck, and Drake Evans — COURTESY OF AGORA — On Thursday, Agora became the latest stablecoin company …
Jordan Blum / Fortune: How Trump's One Big, Beautiful Bill, which was approved by Congress, could cost the US the AI race by handicapping efforts to meet data center power demands — America is facing an energy imperative: Grow power from all sources or face potential failure. — That's failure in the race …
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: Synthesia says it has over 65K customers and serves more than 70% of the Fortune 100, with its AI avatars mainly used for training and internal communications — Constructing an avatar of myself is even weirder than I expected. — It's a choreographed experience that made me feel …
Beatrice Nolan / Fortune: London-based Metaview, which builds AI tools to automate hiring, like via interview notetaking and job description generation, raised a $35M Series B led by GV — Recruiting, which is heavy on admin, is ripe for disruption when it comes to developing AI tools.
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: Observability and site reliability startup Traversal emerges from stealth with $48M in seed and Series A funding led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins — Left to right: Traversal's Raaz Dwivedi, Anish Agarwal, Ahmed Lone, and Raj Agrawal. — Traversal — They met at 10 p.m. each weeknight, after class at Columbia University.
Leo Schwartz / Fortune: NYC-based Tennr, which uses AI document parsing and workflow automation to cut patient waiting times, raised a $101M Series C led by IVP at a $605M valuation — Tennr founders from left: Trey Holterman (co-founder/CEO), Tyler Johnson (co-founder/CTO), Diego Baugh (co-founder/Chief Product Officer)
Ben Weiss / Fortune: London-based Noah, which is developing API-focused stablecoin infrastructure to enable real-time cross-border payments, raised a $22M seed led by LocalGlobe — Noah cofounders Thijn Lamers (left) and Shah Ramezani — The story of a stereotypical startup founder has a familiar arc …
Fortune: Thread AI, which offers a composable infrastructure platform to help enterprises design, deploy, and scale AI workflows, raised a $20M Series A led by Greycroft — - In communcation. When Angela McNeal and Mayada Gonimah led the modeling and AI/machine learning products group together at Palantir, they had a lot in common.
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: NYC-based Empathy, which runs an online platform providing on-demand tools and guidance for bereaving families, raised a $72M Series C led by Adams Street — Ron Gura, cofounder and CEO of Empathy. — Empathy — Ron Gura doesn't use the word “death” every day. — Recommended Video
Jessica Mathews / Fortune: Tesla is set to launch its robotaxi service in Austin in June, but city officials say they are still awaiting important information regarding safety protocols — As soon as one week from today, the first driverless Tesla robotaxis could begin zipping passengers through the streets of Austin …
Jason Del Rey / Fortune: General Medicine, an online storefront for medical care founded by PillPack founders TJ Parker and Elliot Cohen, launches with $32M in funding led by Matrix — General Medicine's founding team has disrupted health care once. They're trying again. — Courtesy of General Medicine
Leo Schwartz / Fortune: OpenFX, which is building a near-instant payments and settlement network for cross-border transactions, emerges from stealth with $23M in funding led by Accel — OpenFX founder Prabhakar Reddy. — Courtesy of OpenFX — Outside of AI, there's no hotter sector than stablecoins.
Jessica Mathews / Fortune: The Trump administration's plan to cut the budget of the NSF, considered key to US tech leadership, by about 57% to $3.9B is alarming the startup and VC sector — From NASA to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump's reform agenda has thrown numerous federal agencies under …
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: Reducto, which helps companies convert complex documents into inputs for LLMs, raised a $24.5M Series A led by Benchmark, following a $8.4M seed in October 2024 — Reducto cofounders Adit Abraham and Raunak Chowdhuri. — Reducto — I've long been fond of Arthur C. Clarke's famous third law …
Leo Schwartz / Fortune: Nous, which plans to launch an AI training system on Solana using people's idle computing power, raised a $50M Series A, a source says at a $1B token valuation — Training AI models requires a massive amount of computing power. — The crypto industry has been fighting to get a piece …
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: Chainguard, which helps companies secure software supply chains, raised a $356M Series D led by Kleiner and IVP at a $3.5B valuation, up from $1.12B in 2024 — Dan Lorenc, CEO and cofounder of Chainguard. — Chainguard — Seated at his desk in his Rhode Island home, Dan Lorenc is surrounded by things he's built.
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: Assort Health, which is developing voice AI agents for healthcare to manage patient phone calls, raised a $22M Series A co-led by First Round and Chemistry — Assort Health cofounders Jeff Liu and Jon Wang. — Assort Health — Jon Wang and Jeff Liu met dozens of prospective cofounders—until they met each other.
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: Revel, which builds software for controlling critical hardware like rockets, emerges from stealth with $30M in funding, including a ~$23M Series A led by Thrive — Revel founder Scott Morton. — Revel — Scott Morton's heart rate spiked at the same time, every time.
Ben Weiss / Fortune: Coinbase faces pump-and-dump accusations after its subsidiary Base launched a “content coin” on Zora; Coinbase clarifies that Base will never sell the tokens — Jesse Pollak is the creator of Base, a new blockchain from Coinbase. — Winni Wintermeyer for Fortune
Fortune: A profile of Bo Hines, a 29-year-old official in the Trump administration who has become the main liaison between the White House and the crypto industry — Since his appointment, Bo Hines has become a mini-celebrity in the crypto world—with CEOs, billionaire investors, and lobbyists vying for face time.
Catherine McGrath / Fortune: Bermuda-based Meanwhile, which offers life insurance to US citizens with BTC holdings, raised a $40M Series A led by Framework and Fulgur at a $190M valuation — Zac Townsend, co-founder and CEO of crypto insurance company Meanwhile, believes there is a pool of crypto enthusiasts who want to pay …
Ben Weiss / Fortune: Internal memo: the US DOJ disbands the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Unit, established by Biden in 2021, as the agency is “not a digital assets regulator” — The U.S. Department of Justice notified staff on Monday evening that the agency was disbanding a unit dedicated to crypto-related investigations.
Fortune: Analysts say Microsoft, whose shares fell the least among top tech companies, is shielded from the worst tariff impacts due to Azure and a broad enterprise base — As Microsoft celebrates its 50th anniversary Friday with a Seattle event spotlighting its latest AI developments …
Sharon Goldman / Fortune: Dyna Robotics, which is building AI-powered robots to help businesses automate repetitive tasks like chopping food, emerged from stealth with a $23.5M seed — When Instacart acquired Lindon Gao's self-checkout shopping startup, Caper AI, for $350 million in 2021, it marked a big win …
Catherine McGrath / Fortune: NYC-based Rain, which issues credit cards that let customers settle payments in stablecoins, raised $24.5M led by Norwest, taking its total funding to $30.5M — Rain, which issues credit cards that let customers settle payments in stablecoins, has raised $24.5 million in a funding round led …
Fortune: Sources describe the collapse of fintech middleman Synapse that left ~$200M in customer money frozen, with entities blaming each other for shoddy recordkeeping — In 2022, after her family had a series of health scares, Kayla Morris sold her house. She cleared $280,000, representing 15 years of her life savings.
Craig Barrett / Fortune: A former CEO and chair of Intel says the company shouldn't be broken up since its foundry unit now has the tech and manufacturing know-how to compete with TSMC — Four former Intel board members have written two opinion pieces for Fortune arguing that the only solution to Intel's problems …
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: Metronome, which offers APIs to help SaaS companies charge customers based on usage, raised a $50M Series C led by NEA, bringing its total funding to $128M — Metronomes have been keeping time for hundreds of years, rhythmically clicking back and forth at exact intervals.
Sharon Goldman / Fortune: Harvey, which builds generative AI tools for law firms, raised a $300M Series D led by Sequoia at a $3B valuation; CEO Winston Weinberg says ARR surpassed $50M — Harvey, a San Francisco AI startup focused on the legal industry, has raised $300 million in a funding round led by Sequoia …
Catherine McGrath / Fortune: White House crypto czar David Sacks says NFTs and memecoins are neither securities nor commodities, but collectibles that people buy to “commemorate something” — Non-fungible tokens and memecoins are neither securities nor commodities, according to White House crypto czar David Sacks.
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: Eve, which makes AI tools for law firms, raised a $47M Series A led by a16z, and says its revenue has grown by 5x over the past eight months — For about a year, I've been hearing that lawyers are using AI in droves. But it wasn't until I talked to Jennifer Gore last week that I started to understand what that meant in practice.
Jason Del Rey / Fortune: A profile of AWS CEO Matt Garman, including his first few months on the job, what his stewardship means for the business, and his opportunities and challenges — Matt Garman joined Amazon Web Services as an intern nearly two decades ago. But his appearance earlier this month …
Kali Hays / Fortune: Sources: David Sacks' role as WH AI and crypto czar will be limited to an adviser role, overseen by Michael Kratsios, partly because he won't divest from Craft — David Sacks may already be getting a taste of how difficult it can be to get things done in Washington D.C.
Kali Hays / Fortune: Stability AI CEO Prem Akkaraju says the startup, now focused on its API and licensing, has seen “triple digit growth” and has “a clean balance sheet, no debt” — Stability AI's CEO said the company' was back in growth mode after a rough period, with business …
Sharon Goldman / Fortune: David Sacks, who called OpenAI a “piranha for-profit company”, becoming AI czar comes at a delicate moment for OpenAI as it transitions to a for-profit — Sam Altman may be playing Santa with OpenAI's “12 days of shipmas” - a series of splashy product releases that kicked off Thursday …
Leo Schwartz / Fortune: Real estate broker and reality TV personality Ryan Serhant raised $45M for his app S.MPLE, which lets real estate brokers automate parts of their sales process — Ryan Serhant isn't your typical startup founder. That became obvious when a Netflix crew filmed our interview …
Sharon Goldman / Fortune: How Mark Zuckerberg made Llama a cornerstone of AI ambitions at Meta, whose smartphone-era services and products have been constrained by Apple and Google — Zuckerberg has pushed Meta to build Llama into all its products and services, including its Orion augmented reality glasses now in prototype stage.
Jason Del Rey / Fortune: Memo: Amazon employees find there is too much of a delay between asking the new LLM-based Alexa a question and getting a response or seeing it complete a task — Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. — Amazon's race to create an AI-based successor to its voice assistant Alexa has hit more snags …
Amanda Gerut / Fortune: Streams Charts: Election Day livestreams generated ~84M hours of watch time, with 80.6% on YouTube, where Fox News had 1.14M peak viewers, beating other outlets — A man seen watching the broadcasting of the U.S. election results at the restaurant in Bangkok.
Kali Hays / Fortune: Sources: many OpenAI staff were taken aback by a proposed ChatGPT logo with a simple, large black “O”, which struck some as ominous and lacking in creativity — A black ring can represent many things - simplicity, a new phase, a void. Whatever its meaning …
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: Denver-based Hotel Engine, a hotel booking and management service, now called Engine, raised a $140M Series C at a $2.1B valuation, up from $1.3B in late 2021 — Elia Wallen never expected this. — Wallen started Hotel Engine as a subsidiary of corporate housing company Travelers Haven in 2015 …
Kali Hays / Fortune: Sources: Sam Altman told OpenAI's staff that the company plans to move away from being controlled by a nonprofit sometime in 2025 — Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images — Sam Altman told OpenAI's staff in a recent company-wide meeting that the startup's complex …
Michal Lev-Ram / Fortune: A profile of, and interview with, Sequoia's Roelof Botha on increasing Sequoia's focus on AI investments, staying politically neutral, and more — At the crown of Roelof Botha's otherwise perfectly coiffed, light-brown head of hair, there's a small patch that's gone completely white.
Leo Schwartz / Fortune: A look at the rise and fall of Jump Crypto and former President Kanav Kariya, and Jump's involvement in some of crypto's biggest scandals, like FTX's collapse — The Zoom meeting at Jump Crypto was always running. And in May 2021, a scrum of employees was on the screen, discussing a mounting crisis.
Leo Schwartz / Fortune: The US SEC drops its investigation into Paxos over its BUSD stablecoin, after sending Paxos a Wells notice in February 2023 — As the crypto industry continues its calls for regulatory clarity, a glaring question has been whether stablecoins, typically digital assets pegged to and backed by the U.S. dollar …
Alexandra Sternlicht / Fortune: An overview of “looksmaxxing” apps that rate teen boys' faces and are criticized for worsening the youth mental health crisis; UMAX has over 7M downloads — After Dillon Latham's girlfriend dumped him during their junior year of high school, the then-17-year-old decided to invest in his appearance.
Luisa Beltran / Fortune: Chime buys enterprise employee rewards company Salt Labs, sources say in a deal worth up to $173M; Salt Labs had raised $18M and was valued at $80M in December — Jason Lee, the entrepreneur who cofounded the payroll service DailyPay, is selling his latest startup, Salt Labs, to neobank Chime Financial.
Sharon Goldman / Fortune: Sources detail Amazon's struggles to build a new generative AI-powered Alexa, including privacy concerns keeping Alexa's teams from using Anthropic's Claude — “Alexa, let's chat.” — With that phrase, David Limp, at the time Amazon's head of devices and services, showed off …
Leo Schwartz / Fortune: Monad Labs, which is building a Layer 1 blockchain to rival Ethereum and Solana, raised $225M led by Paradigm and plans to launch its mainnet by the end of 2024 — With crypto markets roaring back, different blockchains are jockeying to become the solution that hoovers up demand in the next wave …