Startups are staying private longer leaving employees, who typically take a portion of their compensation as stock they can’t sell, with little hope of early liquidity. An increasing number of late-stage startups are recognizing this and offering tender offers to employees. These are transactions that allow employees (and, often, early investors) to sell a portion…
Anthropic’s public listing, which is expected this year at a valuation of as much as $2 trillion, is bound to be a windfall for both early-stage and later-stage investors. But even at the company’s latest private market valuation of $965 billion, the stakes held by many of those VCs and early backers already total billions….
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) announced on Thursday that it would receive $85 million from the U.S. government to develop advanced chips for the fusion power industry. Fusion power startups have been racing to complete their first demonstration devices, with CFS aiming to turn on its Sparc reactor sometime next year. But building one reactor is…
Daytona Platforms announced on Friday that it had raised a $60 million Series B round at a $1 billion valuation led by FirstMark Growth. The company says it has now raised a total of $91 million. The New York-based startup has attracted not just FirstMark (which also led its $24 million Series A in February),…
Medical lab testing giant Quest Diagnostics has confirmed a cyberattack and data breach affecting an as-yet unspecified amount of sensitive patient information stored in its systems, according to a legally required disclosure with U.S. regulators. Quest said in an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it learned of a cyberattack on…
Concerns have swirled over the access that consumers are increasingly entrusting to AI agents. Now, security services are trying to catch up. Password manager 1Password on Thursday launched a new tool by which users can allow agents to log into their personal accounts on their behalf, without the agent ever having access to a user’s…
In this tutorial, we implement OmniParseBench, Datalab’s open benchmark for document parsers, which grades a parser’s output with 16,288 small pass-or-fail tests across 2,937 pages, from scanned forms and handwriting to arXiv math and dense tables. Rather than trust the leaderboard, we rebuild it from the verdicts Datalab released for 27 parsers, after feeding the…
The AI era has changed how fast startups can grow. Startups can grow so fast that they hit high annual recurring revenue (ARR) numbers, only to crash and burn a few months later. At this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt, Lovable go-to-market lead Luke Arno, Ben Broca of the AI platform Polsia, and Theory Ventures’ Tomasz Tunguz…
You.com has launched Inference Router, a managed API for running open-weight models in production. The You.com Inference Router is an OpenAI-compatible service that routes requests across 12 live models. It bundles a 99.9% minimum uptime SLA and zero data retention (ZDR). It adds 100% US hosting and server-side web search. It is pay-as-you-go, with no…
Google Cloud has announced Agent Compute Engine, a compute service built specifically for AI agents. Google Agent Compute Engine gives each agent its own hardware-isolated microVM. The sandbox holds zero credentials. The service already powers Gemini as an agent for work tasks. Google unveiled it this week at AGNTCon + MCPCon. Customer preview is targeted…
