Friday, January 31, 2025

Israel-based Anchor, a platform for automated invoice management and collection, raised a $20M Series A, and plans to expand in the US and double its workforce (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Meir Orbach / CTech:
Israel-based Anchor, a platform for automated invoice management and collection, raised a $20M Series A, and plans to expand in the US and double its workforce  —  The company, which saw 500% growth in 2024, plans to expand in the U.S. and double its workforce.  —  Anchor  —  Funding  —  Fintech



A close look at DeepSeek, which is estimated to have access to ~50K Hopper GPUs, a total server capex of ~$1.3B, and a GPU spend of $500M+ over its history (Dylan Patel/SemiAnalysis)

Dylan Patel / SemiAnalysis:
A close look at DeepSeek, which is estimated to have access to ~50K Hopper GPUs, a total server capex of ~$1.3B, and a GPU spend of $500M+ over its history  —  The DeepSeek Narrative Takes the World by Storm  —  DeepSeek took the world by storm.  For the last week, DeepSeek has been the only topic …



Adobe Chief Strategy Officer Scott Belsky leaves the company to join A24 film studio as a partner; he co-founded Behance, which Adobe acquired for $150M in 2012 (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Todd Spangler / Variety:
Adobe Chief Strategy Officer Scott Belsky leaves the company to join A24 film studio as a partner; he co-founded Behance, which Adobe acquired for $150M in 2012  —  Belsky is an entrepreneur, author and creator who in 2006 founded Behance, an online platform that is used by more than 50 million professionals …



Tuesday, January 28, 2025

DeepSeek says it used Nvidia H800 chips, available in China until October 2023, to train R1, suggesting future models could be hampered by US export controls (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg:
DeepSeek says it used Nvidia H800 chips, available in China until October 2023, to train R1, suggesting future models could be hampered by US export controls  —  - Nvidia calls R1 an ‘excellent’ advance that meets US limits  — Trump says release should be a ‘wake-up call’ for US companies



EU appeals hearing: Google accuses the EC of making "grave errors" in its Android investigation that led to a record €4.3B fine; EU lawyers defended the case (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
EU appeals hearing: Google accuses the EC of making “grave errors” in its Android investigation that led to a record €4.3B fine; EU lawyers defended the case  —  - EU's top court weighs in on bloc's biggest ever antitrust fine  — Lower-tier court earlier cut fine down to €4.1 billion



SAP reports Q4 cloud revenue up 27% YoY to €4.71B, above €4.68B est., driven by AI demand, names a suite of new executives, and plans to simplify its strategy (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

Christina Kyriasoglou / Bloomberg:
SAP reports Q4 cloud revenue up 27% YoY to €4.71B, above €4.68B est., driven by AI demand, names a suite of new executives, and plans to simplify its strategy  —  - Cloud revenue grew 27% last quarter from a year earlier  — The company named new marketing, technology leadership



Monday, January 27, 2025

How DeepSeek outpaced OpenAI at 3% of the cost: open-source approach, pure reinforcement learning, not supervised fine-tuning, and building on DeepSeek-R1-Zero (Matt Marshall/VentureBeat)

Matt Marshall / VentureBeat:
How DeepSeek outpaced OpenAI at 3% of the cost: open-source approach, pure reinforcement learning, not supervised fine-tuning, and building on DeepSeek-R1-Zero  —  DeepSeek R1's Monday release has sent shockwaves through the AI community, disrupting assumptions about what's required to achieve cutting-edge AI performance.



A look at the surveillance tech that could power Trump's immigration crackdown; a review of 15K+ contracts shows ICE and USCIS spent $7.8B on tech since 2020 (New York Times)

New York Times:
A look at the surveillance tech that could power Trump's immigration crackdown; a review of 15K+ contracts shows ICE and USCIS spent $7.8B on tech since 2020  —  Border enforcement agencies have spent billions assembling surveillance tools to track and find people.



US tech stocks fell sharply pre-market over DeepSeek concerns, with NVDA down 8%+ and META and MSFT down 3%; ASML fell 9%+; Japanese chip companies also dropped (Financial Times)

Financial Times:
US tech stocks fell sharply pre-market over DeepSeek concerns, with NVDA down 8%+ and META and MSFT down 3%; ASML fell 9%+; Japanese chip companies also dropped  —  Start-up's model raises questions about need for huge western hardware investment  —  Tech stocks fell sharply on Monday …



India announces a new $1.15B Fund of Funds for startups with an "expanded scope" compared to previous initiatives, and extends tax benefits for startups (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

Manish Singh / TechCrunch : India announces a new $1.15B Fund of Funds for startups with an “expanded scope” compared to previous initiat...