When Joe Kinvi joined Touchtech Payments in 2017 as head of finance, the Irish startup couldn’t afford his full salary. So he negotiated for stock to make up the difference. Eighteen months later, Stripe acquired the company, and that equity converted into Stripe shares, enough to let Kinvi leave his job, bootstrap a side project, […]
AI labs like OpenAI claim that their so-called “reasoning” AI models, which can “think” through problems step by step, are more capable than their non-reasoning counterparts in specific domains, such as physics. But while this generally appears to be the case, reasoning models are also much more expensive to benchmark, making it difficult to independently […]
As the job market continues to get more competitive, it’s taking months for new grads to land employment, with many settling for roles that don’t align with their goals. To address this problem, Drafted, a new startup emerging from stealth, has built a jobs platform for students and early-career professionals, a subset of people who […]
How do you get talented engineers to work for a startup in a mundane field at a time when more exciting companies are paying well and hiring aggressively? Here’s an answer from one insurance startup out of Poland called Ominimo: make pay competitive, yes, but more importantly, give those engineers the license to apply their […]
It would appear the environment and society remain relevant, whatever you might hear in some other quarters. At least, that’s one conclusion to be drawn from the news that European specialist VC Revent has closed a €100 million ($109 million) Fund II to invest in “planetary and societal health” startups. Launched out of Berlin in […]
The number of “operator VCs” — former founders turned VCs — in Europe in recent years. This is common in the U.S., where the majority of VCs are former founders. The reverse is true in Europe, where most come from banking or finance. Recent examples in Europe include Wise founder Taavet Hinrikus, Glovo founder Oscar […]
Billionaire Elon Musk might’ve just been countersued by OpenAI. But that isn’t stopping his AI company, xAI, from making its flagship Grok 3 model available via an API. It has been several months since xAI unveiled Grok 3, the company’s answer to models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini. Grok 3 can analyze images and respond to questions, […]
Nissan said it will use self-driving software developed by Wayve to beef up its advanced driver assistance system starting in 2027, a landmark deal for the buzzy UK startup that has raised more than $1.3 billion from Nvidia, Microsoft, SoftBank Group, and Uber. Nissan will integrate Wayve’s software as well as sensors, including lidar from an undisclosed […]
As Sequoia Capital’s first defense tech investment, Mach Industries is an industry darling, raising over $80 million since its founding in 2023. Its founder, Ethan Thornton, now 21, began Mach as a teenage MIT student before dropping out to focus full-time on his startup. But a few months before landing a seed investment from Sequoia […]
Just a few weeks after OpenAI said it would adopt rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to the systems where data resides, Google is following suit. In a post on X on Wednesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis announced that Google will add support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, to its Gemini […]