Geek-Guy.com

Category: Enterprise

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Google hit with $12.6M fine in Indonesia for monopolistic practices in payment system

Indonesia’s antitrust agency KPPU fined Google 202.5 billion Rupiahs, equivalent to $12.6 million, on Wednesday for antitrust violation related to its payment system services for the Google Play Store. The KPPU ordered the search giant to cease the mandatory use of Google Play Billing in the Google Play Store. It also asked Google to let…

Vertice raises $50M for its AI-powered SaaS spend platform

London startup Vertice has made a name for itself over the years in the very crowded world of expense management with a focus on applying AI to optimize a single area where businesses, collectively, are currently sinking hundreds of billions of dollars in IT budgets that are exceeding $5 trillion annually: software and cloud spend.…

Microsoft is no longer OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider

Microsoft was once the exclusive provider of data center infrastructure for OpenAI to train and run its AI models. No longer. As part of Stargate, OpenAI’s massive new AI infrastructure deal with SoftBank, Oracle, and others, Microsoft says it has signed a new agreement with OpenAI that gives it “right of first refusal” on new…

Here are the types of AI companies enterprise VCs want to back in 2025

The AI startup market is sprawling, from companies looking to develop new chips, to those using AI to build robots, to others looking to use AI to create niche solutions for industry-specific workflows. There are a lot of potential areas for venture capitalists to invest in, but there are clearly a few subsectors they are…

FTC says partnerships like Microsoft-OpenAI raise antitrust concerns

The Federal Trade Commission said in a staff report issued Friday that there are potential competitive issues in partnerships between big tech companies and generative AI developers — specifically, Microsoft’s backing of OpenAI and Amazon and Alphabet/Google’s partnerships with Anthropic. “The FTC’s report sheds light on how partnerships by big tech firms can create lock-in,…

Perplexity acquires Read.cv, a social media platform for professionals

Read.cv, a social media platform for professionals that competed with LinkedIn, has been acquired by AI-powered search engine Perplexity. As part of the deal, Read.cv will begin to wind down operations Friday. Users will be able to export their data, including their profiles, posts, and messages, until May 16. “We’ve long admired Perplexity and believe…

Instabase raises $100M to help companies process unstructured document data

Instabase, a company that creates software for extracting processing unstructured data from myriad document types, has raised $100 million in a Series D round of funding. The announcement comes as companies struggle under a deluge of data — data that can unlock key business insights. Indeed, most of the data that companies generate is “unstructured,”…

Nord Security founders launch Nexos.ai to help enterprises take AI projects from pilot to production

A new AI orchestration startup from the founders of Lithuanian unicorn Nord Security is setting out to help enterprises put their AI projects into production, with an initial focus on bringing greater visibility, security and adaptability to large language models (LLMs). Nexos.ai, as the startup is called, is the handiwork of Tomas Okmanas (pictured above)…

Nvidia releases more tools and guardrails to nudge enterprises to adopt AI agents

Nvidia is releasing three new NIM microservices, or small independent services that are part of larger applications, to help enterprises bring additional control and safety measures to their AI agents. One of these new NIM services targets content safety and works to prevent an AI agent from generating harmful or biased outputs. Another works to…

Hindenburg Research, a short seller that targeted tech and EV companies, is closing up shop

When Hindenburg Research posts a blog on its website, it often means a company’s final days are near. Today, that company is Hindenburg Research. Nate Anderson announced Wednesday he has shut down short-selling firm Hindenburg Research, after a seven-year run issuing damning reports about high-profile companies, including many of the technology world’s giants and buzzy…

Google raises the price of Workspace plans, includes its AI features for free

Google announced on Wednesday that all AI features in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet are now available to Workspace customers at no extra charge, though the plan will see a $2 per month increase per user.  This change simplifies access to Workplace AI tools, including email summaries, automated note-taking, chatting with the Gemini bot, and…

Rockfish is helping enterprises leverage synthetic data

For years, Vyas Sekar would call up Muckai Girish, an old friend from undergrad, to talk through potential startup ideas and get Girish’s opinion. The two usually talked through an idea and ended the conversation at that. When Sekar called Girish with an idea involving synthetic data in early 2022, the conversation didn’t just end…

LinkedIn adds free AI tools for job hunters and recruiters

If you’ve ever applied or thought of applying for a job via LinkedIn, you’ll know that the experience can be immediately disheartening: Openings that look interesting typically can see hundreds or thousands of applications in a matter of hours — data that LinkedIn, a social network for the world of work, proudly exposes in its…

Microsoft’s newest Copilot plan for business is pay-as-you-go

Microsoft is launching a pay-as-you-go plan for corporate customers that bundles together several, but not all, of the company’s existing AI-powered productivity features for Microsoft 365. The new plan, Copilot Chat — not to be confused with Microsoft’s Copilot Business Chat or GitHub Copilot Chat — is underpinned by OpenAI’s GPT-4o AI model and lets…

Synthesia snaps up $180M at a $2.1B valuation for its B2B AI video platform

As the world continues to work through how to handle the explosion of deepfake content online, it seems that not all AI-created videos are stirring controversy. Synthesia, a London startup building products around highly realistic AI avatar technology, says it’s a big hit with enterprises, with some 60,000 of them — 1 million users —…

Intel spins off its corporate venture arm, Intel Capital, into a standalone fund

Intel says that it plans to spin off its corporate venture arm, Intel Capital, into a standalone fund, with Intel as an “anchor investor.” In a press release on Tuesday, Intel said that the move will “[enable] greater autonomy” and “the flexibility to attract external capital.” Intel expects Intel Capital to begin operating independently in…

Biden administration opens up federal land to AI data centers

With less than a week left in office, President Joe Biden is not done leaving his mark on the AI industry. President Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday that will allow private sector AI companies to lease federal sites owned by the Department of Defense and Department of Energy in order to build AI…

Apple joins consortium to help develop next-gen AI data center tech

Apple has joined a consortium creating next-gen technology to link together chips in AI data centers. The consortium, the Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium, is developing a standard called UALink, which connects the AI accelerator chips found within a growing number of server farms. As of Tuesday, Apple is a member of the consortium’s board, along…

With $30 million in new funding, SEEQC thinks chips are key to building useful quantum computing

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may have said that “very useful quantum computers” are probably still 20 years away, but his company is also hedging its bets beyond classical chips with investments and partnerships in that very space. Now one of the companies that Nvidia partners with in quantum development is announcing funding. SEEQC, a quantum…

Thoras helps companies reach reliability without overspending on cloud costs

For years, twin sisters Nilo Rahmani and Jen Rahmani swapped stories — and commiserated — over the pain points they were facing in their respective engineering jobs. Nilo told TechCrunch that a frequent topic of conversation was about frustrations over the reliability platforms they were using at work. When they noticed the reliability landscape starting…

Microsoft forms new internal dev-focused AI org

Microsoft has created a new engineering org aimed at accelerating AI infrastructure and software development within the company. According to Bloomberg, Jay Parikh, previously VP and global head of engineering at Meta, will lead the new division. He’ll report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and oversee groups including the company’s AI platform and developer teams.…

Clearwater agrees to buy investment management platform Enfusion for $1.5B

Clearwater Analytics, a company developing accounting, compliance, and risk reporting tools for asset managers, said on Monday it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire investment management platform Enfusion for $1.5 billion. Clearwater, which says it has obtained an $800 million loan to fund the transaction, along with a $200 million revolving line of…

Open source licenses: Everything you need to know

Open source makes the technology world go ’round, forming as much as 90% of the modern software stack via frameworks; libraries; databases; operating systems; and countless standalone applications. The benefits of open source software are well understood, promising greater control and transparency. However, there’s a perennial struggle between the open source and proprietary realms, leading…

Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project. While community criticism of WordPress’s governance isn’t new, the latest brouhaha kicked off back in September when Mullenweg publicly chastised WP…

VCs say AI companies need proprietary data to stand out from the pack

AI companies across the globe raised more than $100 billion in venture capital dollars in 2024, according to Crunchbase data, an increase of more than 80% compared to 2023. It encompasses nearly a third of the total VC dollars invested in 2024. That’s a lot of money funneling into a lot of AI companies. The…

EU approves $35B Synopsys and Ansys merger, subject to divestment conditions

The European Commission (EC) has given the greenlight for Synopsys to acquire Ansys, though the companies must divest some half-a-dozen products as part of the proposed remedies. Chip design software maker Synopsys revealed last January its plans to acquire Ansys, a simulation software developer that helps engineers model and analyze the physical behavior of products, such as chips,…

Overhaul raises another $55M to help companies like Dyson and Microsoft fight supply chain theft

Businesses dependent on the physical supply chain — the network of facilities and transportation systems used to move materials from one location to another — chain face a number of challenges, from staff shortages to increasing customer expectations. The pressures aren’t easing up. According to a survey from Prologis, a real estate investment trust, two-thirds…

Gumloop, founded in a bedroom in Vancouver, lets users automate tasks with drag-and-drop modules

Developers Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal think that AI has the potential to automate lots of business-relevant tasks, but that many of the AI-powered automation tools on the market today are unreliable and costly. Part of the problem is that users expect too much of AI, Brodeur-Urbas told TechCrunch — for instance, they assume that…

Google folds more teams into DeepMind to ‘accelerate the research to developer pipeline’

As it looks to accelerate the pace of its AI development, Google is further streamlining the teams building its AI services, platforms, and tools. On Thursday, Logan Kilpatrick, who leads product for Google’s AI Studio developer platform, said in a post on X that Google’s AI Studio team and the team developing the API for…

AWS says it’ll invest ‘at least’ $11B to expand data center infrastructure in Georgia

On Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, said that it plans to invest “at least” $11 billion in Georgia to expand its infrastructure to support various cloud computing and AI technologies. AWS estimates that its investment will create roughly 550 jobs in the state. “AWS is proud to expand our operations in…

HR software startup OnPay was inspired by the founder’s family payroll business

In 2007, Jesse Burgess joined his family’s payroll business. He quickly noticed that the business’ six payroll clerks were getting bogged down by repetitive, monotonous tasks — and so he sought to streamline those tasks by creating workflow automation tools. Several years later, Burgess sensed an opportunity to bring the tools he developed for his…

Nvidia releases its own brand of world models

Nvidia is getting into world models — AI models that take inspiration from the mental models of the world that humans develop naturally.  At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced that it is making openly available a family of world models that can predict and generate “physics-aware” videos. Nvidia’s calling this family…

Qualcomm brings its Snapdragon X chips to mid-range Windows laptops and desktops

Qualcomm is making a move for the mid-range PC market with a new system-on-chip. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Qualcomm unveiled Snapdragon X, the latest chip in its Snapdragon X Series of PC processors. The company claims that the chip, built on a 4nm fabrication process, delivers up to “multi-day” battery life…

Intel shows off its latest chip lineup at CES 2025

Fresh off of its worst year since going public in 1971, Intel is announcing new chips at CES 2025 that it hopes will turn its fortunes around. The product announcement is Intel’s largest since the company’s board of directors forced out CEO Pat Gelsinger. That’s not the only reason stakes are high. Intel’s 13th- and…

IT tech services firm WWT acquires Canadian IT provider Softchoice in all-cash deal

One last mega-deal closed out an eventful 2024. On Tuesday, World Wide Technology (WWT), a tech services company based in St. Louis, announced it has agreed to acquire Canadian IT provider Softchoice in a deal that values the latter at C$1.8 billion (~$1.25 billion). The deal, which is all-cash, was unanimously approved by Softchoice’s board,…

From AI agents to enterprise budgets, 20 VCs share their predictions on enterprise tech in 2025

While AI is lauded by some as the biggest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution, enterprises — arguably the tech’s biggest potential customer base — have been slow to adopt AI. While some investors predicted that 2024 would be the year we’d start to see more AI adoption by enterprises, that didn’t play out as…

UK antitrust watchdog launches review of IBM’s HashiCorp takeover

The Competition and Markets Authority, the U.K.’s antitrust watchdog, has opened an investigation into whether IBM’s planned acquisition of cloud software vendor HashiCorp would affect competition. The CMA said Monday it was inviting comment on the merger from interested parties by January 16. The regulator set a provisional February 25 deadline to decide whether to…

Permira’s Brian Ruder talks AI, Squarespace acquisition, and the value of co-leadership

It has been a busy year in the private equity realm, with countless big-money acquisitions unfolding. The take-private space specifically has seen some sizable transactions, with private equity firms spearheading more than a dozen billion-dollar deals for public tech companies. London-headquartered Permira was a key protagonist, joining Blackstone to acquire European online classifieds group Adevinta…

Elon Musk’s xAI lands $6B in new cash to fuel AI ambitions

Updated December 25, 12:21 p.m. Pacific: Added details of xAI’s valuation and Kingdom Holdings’ contribution. xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion in a Series C financing round. The company announced this week that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia,…

Elon Musk’s xAI lands $6B in new cash to fuel AI ambitions

xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. Investors gave a minimum of $77,593, per the filing (97 participated, but the document doesn’t reveal their identities). xAI later announced (confirming some earlier reporting) that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Kingdom Holdings,…

Coralogix acquires AI observability platform Aporia

Coralogix, the well-funded observability platform, on Monday announced that it has acquired Aporia, a startup that focuses on giving businesses tools to observe and secure their AI workloads, as well as set guardrails for them to avoid hallucinations or unintended disclosures. As part of this acquisition, Coralogix will launch a dedicated AI research center, Coralogix…

British university spinoff Mindgard protects companies from AI threats

AI creates a dilemma for companies: Don’t implement it yet, and you might miss out on productivity gains and other potential benefits; but do it wrong, and you might expose your business and clients to unmitigated risks. This is where a new wave of “security for AI” startups come in, with the premise that these…

Boon raises $20.5M to build agentic AI tools for fleets

Logistics is the name of the game during the holiday season: Companies that can seal the deal and get people and things to the places they need to be, on time, rake it in this time of year.  But behind that demand lies a huge amount of inefficiency and fragmentation. Are logistics businesses ready for…

A bad experience with an accounting firm spurred this founder to start Aiwyn

Accounting firms are struggling to adopt high-tech solutions. That’s according to a survey earlier this year from Rightsworks, which found that, while 88% of firms believe tech has had a positive impact on their efficiency, 60% are suffering from disconnected systems, inconsistent processes, and a lack of standardized workflows. Startups like Aiwyn are trying to…

Perplexity acquires Carbon to connect AI search to your work files

Perplexity acquired a small Seattle-based startup called Carbon which specializes in connecting AI systems to external data sources, the companies announced on Wednesday. CEO Aravind Srinivasan says this will allow Perplexity to search through your files and work messages in Notion, Google Docs, Slack, and other enterprise applications sometime in early 2025. Carbon specializes in…

Microsoft bought nearly 500,000 Nvidia Hopper chips this year

Microsoft bought more than twice as many Nvidia Hopper chips this year than any of its biggest rivals. The tech giant bought 485,000 Nvidia Hopper chips across 2024 according to reporting from the Financial Times, which cited data from tech consultancy Omdia. To compare, Meta bought 224,000 of the same, flagship Nvidia chip this year.…

GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot

Microsoft-owned GitHub today announced a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free…

Salesforce plans to hire 2,000 people to sell its AI products

Cloud software giant Salesforce looks to hire thousands of new sales people to sell its AI tools to customers. The company plans to hire 2,000 new sales representatives, according to CNBC, which cited remarks from CEO Marc Benioff at a company event Tuesday. This doubles the hiring plans that Benioff told Bloomberg last month. Benioff…

Google joins $90M investment into Cassava to bolster Africa’s digital infrastructure

With cloud spend continuing to surge, tech companies are scrambling to meet demand for the necessary infrastructure, with the growing need for AI compute only adding fuel to the fire. By way of example, Microsoft and BlackRock have created a $30 billion fund to support new data centers and energy infrastructure for the burgeoning AI…

Code Assist, Google’s enterprise-focused coding assistant, gets third-party tools

Google on Tuesday announced support for third-party tools in Gemini Code Assist, its enterprise-focused AI code completion service. Code Assist launched in April as a rebrand of a similar service Google offered under its now-defunct Duet AI branding. Available through plug-ins for popular dev environments like VS Code and JetBrains, Code Assist is powered by Google’s Gemini…

Databricks raises $10B as it barrels toward an IPO

Databricks, the data analytics platform, has raised $10 billion in a funding round that values the company at $62 billion (up from $43 billion). Backers include Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, GIC, and Iconiq Growth. The round is one of the largest venture rounds in history, and will drive future future mergers and acquisitions,…

Nuon helps companies deploy their software into their customers’ cloud accounts

Jon Morehouse launched PowerTools in 2019 to help companies ship static sites and serverless apps to their cloud accounts on providers like AWS and Azure. When a customer asked him if they could use PowerTools to deploy their software into one of their customer’s cloud accounts, Morehouse was skeptical. Morehouse told TechCrunch that after that…

Pineapple on pizza is delicious — and if you disagree, you can’t log in to WordPress.org

There are few matters in life that divide a room more than the prudence of putting pineapple on pizza. But if you’re of the persuasion that tropical fruit has no place on a pie, you’ll have to swallow a bitter pill — if you want to access the WordPress.org developer portal and forum, at least.…

BlackBerry sells Cylance for $160M, a fraction of the $1.4B it paid in 2018

Arctic Wolf has acquired Cylance, BlackBerry’s beleaguered cybersecurity business, for $160 million — a significant write-down from the $1.4 billion BlackBerry paid to acquire the company in 2018. Under the terms of the deal, which is expected to close in BlackBerry’s fiscal Q4, BlackBerry will sell its Cylance assets to Arctic Wolf for $160 million…

Prequel is building a community-driven approach to finding software bugs

Cybersecurity practitioners take a community-driven approach to solving problems. Security researchers share the vulnerabilities they find with the broader cybersecurity community, which allows companies to patch up their security holes before something catastrophic happens. Prequel is looking to bring that same approach to software. The startup is building a database of software failure patterns or…

Google names new India chief

Google has appointed Preeti Lobana to lead its India business, filling a key position that had been vacant since Sanjay Gupta’s promotion to Asia-Pacific president in July. Lobana, who was vice president of advertising technology at Google, takes over as the company pushes its AI products in India amid intensifying competition in the digital market.…

Open source companies that go proprietary: A timeline

Open source might be the building blocks of the modern software stack, but companies building businesses off the back of open source software face a perennial struggle between keeping their community happy and ensuring that third parties don’t abuse the permissions afforded by the license. Many companies have launched with lofty open source ambitions, only…

Databricks is on track to raise a record $9.5+ billion round at $60B valuation

Databricks is close to finalizing a $9.5 billion round at a $60 billion valuation, including a secondary sale for employees that could climb even higher before it closes, Reuters reports. Just 17 days ago, Reuters reported that the deal was at $8 billion and a $55 billion valuation. Thrive Capital is leading the deal with…

Liquid AI just raised $250M to develop a more efficient type of AI model

Liquid AI, an AI startup co-founded by robotics luminary Daniela Rus, has raised $250 million in a Series A led by AMD. Per Bloomberg, the round values Liquid AI at over $2 billion. Liquid AI aims to build general-purpose AI systems powered by a relatively new type of AI model called a liquid neural network. Liquid…

OpenAI blames its massive ChatGPT outage on a ‘new telemetry service’

OpenAI is blaming one of the longest outages in its history on a “new telemetry service” gone awry. On Wednesday, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT; its video generator, Sora; and its developer-facing API experienced major disruptions starting at around 3 p.m. Pacific. OpenAI acknowledged the problem soon after — and began working on a fix.…

WordPress Appliance - Powered by TurnKey Linux