~techmeme | Bookmarks (1051)

Manish Singh / India Dispatch: Analysis: Meesho accounts for about 37% of India's e-commerce orders, but only 8%-9% of the sector's total value due to the small average transaction size  —  A $4.5 sari reveals the ruthless arithmetic behind Meesho's assault on India's e-commerce hierarchy

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: While Apple's iPhone manufacturing in India matches China in quality, making the extraordinarily complex 20th anniversary iPhones outside China remains doubtful  —  Apple has begun breaking up its AI and machine learning organization by moving pieces to other parts of the company.

Wall Street Journal: Architect Partners: crypto firms have struck 88 M&A and SPAC deals worth $8.2B so far in 2025, nearly 3x the $2.75B transaction value across 188 deals in 2024  —  Companies seek to capitalize on lighter regulation, growing mainstream interest  —  President Trump's embrace of digital currencies …

Wall Street Journal: Sources: Huawei has approached some clients about testing the technical feasibility of the Ascend 910D, its newest AI chip that it hopes will beat Nvidia's H100  —  Superpower rivalry over semiconductors heats up despite Washington's attempts to block Beijing

Matt Levine / Bloomberg: A look at the rise of “pure play” bitcoin companies like Twenty One, as the stock market is paying far more for crypto exposure than the crypto market itself is  —  Twenty One, Trumpcoin dinner, KKR empathy, carry on co-investments and quantitative analysis of hockey.  —  Project Mystery

Prachi Verma / The Economic Times: India faces a shortage of agentic AI professionals, with executives estimating fewer than 100K in the country while demand is projected to hit ~200K by 2026  —  India is grappling with a critical shortage of agentic AI professionals as demand surges, driven by the shift towards sophisticated AI agents capable …

Furquan Ameen / Rest of World: Experts say that India is behind China in deep tech innovation due to its historical focus on services, lower R&D investment, and a brain drain of AI talent  —  India's government urges the private sector to take the lead in tech innovation, while industry experts say it's complicated.

Financial Times: Trump's tariffs could slow robot adoption in the US, as demand weakens and supplies of components from China, like magnets and precision bearings, are disrupted  —  Depressed buyers and global supply chains could delay the adoption of futuristic technology  —  Elon Musk, facing disarray …

Ryan Naraine / SecurityWeek: Tel Aviv-based Sentra, whose cloud data security software now includes controls aimed at keeping AI prompts free from restricted data, raised a $50M Series B  —  Sentra has now raised north of $100 million for controls technology to keep sensitive data out of misconfigured AI workflows.

Wall Street Journal: Docs and sources detail the opaque market for shares of Elon Musk's private companies; Valor recently offered investors $1B worth of shares in SpaceX and xAI  —  Lucrative stock deals have allowed SpaceX to avoid public scrutiny even as it has grown into one of the largest companies in the U.S.

Devon Pendleton / Bloomberg: A profile of Saudi billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed, who, along with his investment firm Kingdom Holding, is the second-biggest shareholder in XAI Holdings  —  The flamboyant Saudi billionaire investor is back in the spotlight, emboldened by Donald Trump's return to the White House.

Asa Fitch / Wall Street Journal: IBM has booked $6B in sales around generative AI and Red Hat's revenue has about doubled since IBM bought it, fueling a ~2x jump in IBM's stock since April 2020  —  ‘Big Blue’ has clawed back into investor favor, but needs to show staying power in AI to cement its comeback

Bloomberg: NetEase has lost at least three senior executives in recent months, as CEO William Ding pulls back on investments and cuts jobs in a bid to boost profits  —  Simon Zhu, NetEase's president for global investments and partnerships, said he was leaving the Chinese video-game company in a social media post on Friday.

Nnaemeka Onyekachi / Nairametrics: A Nigerian tribunal upholds a $220M fine imposed on Meta in July 2024 for discriminatory and exploitative practices against Nigerian consumers  —  Nigeria's Competition and Consumer Protection Tribunal on Friday ordered WhatsApp and Meta Platforms Incorporated to pay a $220 million penalty …

Yogita Khatri / The Block: Symbiotic, which is building a “universal staking” platform after starting as a restaking protocol on Ethereum, raised a $29M Series A led by Pantera Capital  —  - Symbiotic has raised $29 million to expand from restaking into a broader “universal staking” platform.

Margi Murphy / Bloomberg: A US DOJ official says Tyler Buchanan, a 23-year-old from Scotland, and an alleged Scattered Spider cybercrime group member, was extradited from Spain to the US  —  Powerbeats Pro 2 Review: Best Workout Earbuds Still Lag on Audio Quality  —  Beats' newest exercise headphones are improved, but they face stiffer competition than ever.

Stuart Dredge / Music Ally: Etsy agrees to sell Reverb, an online musical instruments marketplace that it acquired for $275M in 2019, to investors Creator Partners and Servco  —  - Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email

Svea Herbst-Bayliss / Reuters: Autodesk adds Jeff Epstein and Christie Simons to its board and settles the proxy fight with Starboard Value, which has criticized Autodesk for underperformance  —  Autodesk (ADSK.O) said on Thursday it will add two newcomers to its board and settle one of the year's most high-profile proxy fights …

Pete Koomen: Many AI features, like Gmail's AI assistant, feel useless because they don't allow users to edit system prompts, constraining the AI models they're built with  —  I noticed something interesting the other day: I enjoy using AI to build software more than I enjoy using most AI applications—software built with AI.

Bloomberg: Sources: XAI Holdings, the newly combined entity housing xAI and X, is in talks to raise roughly $20B, or possibly more, valuing the company at more than $120B  —  Elon Musk's XAI Holdings is in talks with investors to raise roughly $20 billion in funding for his newly combined artificial intelligence startup …

Dario Amodei: Interpretability, or understanding how AI models work, can help mitigate many AI risks, such as misalignment and misuse, that stem from AI systems' opacity  —  In the decade that I have been working on AI, I've watched it grow from a tiny academic field to arguably the most important economic and geopolitical issue in the world.

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 …

Chris Welch / The Verge: Google says it will end support for 1st- and 2nd-gen Nest thermostats on October 25, and won't launch new models in Europe due to its “unique” heating systems  —  The company is also pulling Nest thermostats out of Europe entirely, citing “unique” heating challenges.

Gabe Kaminsky / The Free Press: Leaked letter: interim US Attorney for DC Ed Martin accused Wikipedia of allowing foreign manipulation and propaganda, threatening its tax-exempt status  —  In a letter obtained by The Free Press, Trump appointee Ed Martin accuses the Wikimedia Foundation of violating the law.