Thursday, December 11, 2025

Israeli startup Port, which offers a proprietary developer portal competitor to Spotify's open-source Backstage, raised a $100M Series C at an $800M valuation (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

Julie Bort / TechCrunch:
Israeli startup Port, which offers a proprietary developer portal competitor to Spotify's open-source Backstage, raised a $100M Series C at an $800M valuation  —  Spotify may be synonymous with music streaming, but it's also got a wildly popular developer-tool side-hustle called “Backstage.”



Harness, which uses AI to automate code testing, verification, security, and governance, raised a $240M Series E led by Goldman Sachs at a $5.5B valuation (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Harness, which uses AI to automate code testing, verification, security, and governance, raised a $240M Series E led by Goldman Sachs at a $5.5B valuation  —  AI DevOps tool Harness, founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, is on track to exceed $250 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, Bansal tells TechCrunch.



An Ai2 research scientist argues that AGI, as commonly conceived, will not emerge because it ignores, among other things, the physical realities of computation (Tim Dettmers)

Tim Dettmers:
An Ai2 research scientist argues that AGI, as commonly conceived, will not emerge because it ignores, among other things, the physical realities of computation  —  If you are reading this, you probably have strong opinions about AGI, superintelligence, and the future of AI.



Sunday, December 7, 2025

Sources: Ted Sarandos met with President Trump in November, and both agreed WBD should go to the highest bidder; Sarandos argued that Netflix wasn't a monopoly (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Sources: Ted Sarandos met with President Trump in November, and both agreed WBD should go to the highest bidder; Sarandos argued that Netflix wasn't a monopoly  —  Netflix Inc. co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos ventured to the White House in mid-November for a meeting with President Donald Trump.



Essential AI, whose CEO co-wrote Google's Attention Is All You Need paper, unveils Rnj-1, an 8B-parameter open model with SWE-bench performance close to GPT-4o (Ashish Vaswani/Essential AI)

Ashish Vaswani / Essential AI:
Essential AI, whose CEO co-wrote Google's Attention Is All You Need paper, unveils Rnj-1, an 8B-parameter open model with SWE-bench performance close to GPT-4o  —  The long-term advancement and equitable diffusion of AI technologies crucially depend on their development in the Open.



Nikita Bier accuses the European Commission of trying to deceptively amplify the reach of its post about the €120M fine on X; X terminates the EC's ad account (Bjarke Smith-Meyer/Politico)

Bjarke Smith-Meyer / Politico:
Nikita Bier accuses the European Commission of trying to deceptively amplify the reach of its post about the €120M fine on X; X terminates the EC's ad account  —  Nikita Bier, X's head of product, accused the EU executive of trying to amplify its own social media post about the fine on X by trying …



Lemurian Labs, which aims to develop hardware-agnostic portability software for AI workloads, raised a $28M Series A co-led by Pebblebed Ventures and Hexagon (Sally Ward-Foxton/EE Times)

Sally Ward-Foxton / EE Times:
Lemurian Labs, which aims to develop hardware-agnostic portability software for AI workloads, raised a $28M Series A co-led by Pebblebed Ventures and Hexagon  —  AI software startup Lemurian Labs has pivoted away from AI hardware, having raised a $28-million series A to build its AI software stack.



PE firm Everstone combines India's Wingify, which helps A/B test sites, and France's AB Tasty, which improves e-commerce UX; Everstone bought Wingify for $200M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch : PE firm Everstone combines India's Wingify, which helps A/B test sites, and France's AB Tasty, which...