April 2025

Meet the companies racing to build quantum chips

April 28, 2025
Quantum computing has long been announced as “just around the corner,” but several companies are now determined to make this a commercial reality, with the promise of solving complex problems beyond classical computers’ reach. The problems in question are wide-ranging, from medicine and cybersecurity to materials science and chemistry. But first, there are very practical […]

IBM pledges to spend $150B in the US over the next few years

April 28, 2025
Enterprise tech giant IBM says that it plans to invest $150 billion in the U.S. over the next five years, which will include a “more than” $30 billion investment in mainframe and quantum computing research. The goal is to fuel the economy and “accelerate [IBM’s] role as the global leader in computing,” the company said in a press release Monday. […]

AI animation startup Cheehoo lands $10M funding from Greycroft

April 28, 2025
Creating animation is a time-consuming process, requiring multiple steps including storyboarding, rendering, composition, and lighting to craft a single scene. If a director wants to experiment with a different take for a scene, an animation team has to go back and tweak things before the scene can be finalized. Cheehoo, a startup founded by a […]

Volution doubles-down on booming UK fintech with new $100M fund

April 28, 2025
The UK fintech sector is on a bit of roll. Allica Bank – a London-based fintech – recently announced it had doubled its profits in 2024, bringing in £29.9 million, while Neobank Revolut announced a £1bn profit in 2024. Companies of this nature continue to spring out of London, a city which has become a fintech global […]

The Download: China’s manufacturers’ viral moment, and how AI is changing creativity

April 28, 2025
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Why Chinese manufacturers are going viral on TikTok Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside…

Lightrun grabs $70M using AI to debug code in production

April 28, 2025
AI-based coding has exploded in popularity on the promise that it will make developers’ jobs faster and easier. But it’s also resulted in something else: a vast increase in lines of code, and thus the likelihood of bugs resulting in crashes or other mishaps. Today, an Israeli startup called Lightrun — which has built an […]

OmniRetail shakes up Africa’s B2B e-commerce market with $20M Series A

April 28, 2025
When Deepankar Rustagi last raised money for OmniRetail in 2022, excitement was high for African startups addressing the supply chain and operational challenges in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector. At one point, these startups received more capital than all sectors, except fintech. Recently, though, the industry’s enthusiasm and venture capital’s interest have faded, as […]