The Ins and Outs of Final Salary Pensions
How do you envision your golden years? For many, it means traveling or just relaxing on sun-kissed beaches, free of the daily grind. Financial security, however, is crucial to a…
The Download: how to melt rocks, and what you need to know about AI
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. This startup wants to use beams of energy to drill geothermal wells Geothermal startup Quaise certainly has an unconventional approach when it comes to destroying rocks: it uses a new form of drilling…
Sequoia backs Coana to help companies prioritise vulnerabilities using ‘code aware’ software analysi
Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) juggernaut Sequoia is backing a fledgling Danish startup to build a next-gen software composition analysis (SCA) tool, one that promises to help companies filter through the noise and identify vulnerabilities that are a genuine threat. For context, most software contains at least some open source components, many of which are […]
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This town’s mining battle reveals the contentious path to a cleaner future
Minnesota’s Highway 210 threads through the tiny towns of Aitkin County, a poor and sparsely populated stretch of forests, lakes, and wetlands that reaches just into the northeastern corner of the state. A short drive off the highway, due south past the Tamarack Church, delivers you to Jackson’s Hole, the last remaining business in the…
Why does AI being good at math matter?
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last week the AI world was buzzing over a new paper in Nature from Google DeepMind, in which the lab managed to create an AI system that can solve complex geometry problems.…
Open source vector database startup Qdrant raises $28M
Qdrant, the company behind the eponymous open source vector database, has raised $28 million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital. Founded in 2021, Berlin-based Qdrant is seeking to capitalize on the burgeoning AI revolution, targeting developers with an open source vector search engine and database — an integral part of […]
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Byju’s seeks new funding at less than $2 billion valuation, a 90% drop
Byju’s, once valued at $22 billion, is willing to cut its valuation to below $2 billion as it hunts for new funding, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, once India’s most valuable, is looking to raise $100 million to $300 million in new funding and edtech group’s chief executive Byju […]
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Telegram is rolling out ‘view-once’ voice and video messages
Telegram is rolling out a bunch of upgrades as part of its January feature drop including “view-once” video and audio messages, the ability to pause recording while sending a video or an audio message, and new read-time controls. The app introduced “view-once” photos and videos in one-on-one chat in September 2023. Now, the company is […]
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Germany’s Instagrid, which uses software to supercharge portable batteries, raises $95M
Energy supply is one of the bigger issues impacting how technology will evolve over time — a challenge that might be feel closer to home when you consider the batteries of objects like mobile phones or electric vehicles but is definitely not constrained just to consumer tech. A startup called Instagrid is using software to […]
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Business travel management platform TravelPerk raises $105M
TravelPerk, a business travel management platform targeted at SMEs, has raised $105 million in a fresh equity-based round of financing led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. Existing investors including Kinnevik and Felix Capital also participated in the round. The funding gives TravelPerk a valuation of $1.4 billion, just a fraction over the $1.3 billion valuation […]
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Apple will pay artists more to have a spatial audio version on Apple Music
Apple will pay additional royalties starting this month to artists if they have a spatial audio version on Apple Music, according to multiple reports. The company will pay up to 10% additional royalty if an artist has all their songs in spatial audio, per a report by 9to5Mac. The extra money doesn’t depend on users […]
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