February 19, 2026

The Download: autonomous narco submarines, and virtue signaling chatbots

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. How uncrewed narco subs could transform the Colombian drug trade For decades, handmade narco subs have been some of the cocaine trade’s most elusive and productive workhorses, ferrying multi-ton loads of illicit drugs…

Ola’s Aggarwal sets eyes on AI, semiconductor design

August 1, 2023
Indian entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder of ride-hailing firm Ola and electric vehicle startup Ola Electric, is venturing into fresh terrain as he navigates his businesses towards initial public offerings. He has set up an AI startup that seeks to develop a large language model and is currently scouting two U.S.-headquartered AI startups for a potential […]

Nigeria’s Remedial Health gets QED backing in $12M round

August 1, 2023
Remedial Health, a Nigerian startup digitizing pharmacies and bringing efficiency to the pharmaceutical value chain, has raised $12 million Series A equity-debt funding, to scale operations in the West African country. Fintech VC firm QED Investors co-led the round, banking on embedded financial opportunities like payments, and lending in the pharmaceutical sector. This is QED’s […]

Google Assistant reportedly pivoting to generative AI

July 31, 2023
When Google had its unpleasant realization that it had been complacently spinning its wheels on a form of fake AI for a decade, chances are it started re-aligning itself that day. And it sounds like Assistant itself is now getting a generative facelift, according to an internal email reported by Axios. The email says that […]

Dynatrace acquires cloud-native debugging platform Rookout

July 31, 2023
Observability and security platform Dynatrace today announced that it plans to acquire Rookout, a Tel Aviv-based observability startup that focuses on helping developers troubleshoot and debug their code in production. Publicly traded Dynatrace already offers a comprehensive suite of observability tools, but the addition of Rookout will allow it to expand these services with code-level […]