Meteomatics eyes U.S. expansion for its enterprise-focused weather forecasting tools

January 29, 2025

Martin Fengler knows a lot about the weather. Fengler got his Ph.D. in mathematics, focused on numerical weather prediction, before working for Meteomedia AG, a network of weather stations in Switzerland and Germany. But while he knew a lot about weather forecasting from the prediction side, he realized the gaps that remained on the consumption […]

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DeepSeek’s AI avoids answering 85% of prompts on ‘sensitive topics’ related to China

January 29, 2025

AI chatbot DeepSeek has taken the world by storm, topping app store charts and sending Silicon Valley and Wall Street into meltdown. An offshoot of Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, DeepSeek’s cost-to-performance ratio makes for impressive reading compared to incumbents such as OpenAI. However, reports have increasingly documented some of the things the AI chatbot is […]

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Microsoft probing whether DeepSeek improperly used OpenAI APIs

January 29, 2025

Just a few hours after David Sacks claimed DeepSeek used OpenAI’s models to train its own models, Bloomberg Law reports that Microsoft is investigating DeepSeek’s use of OpenAI’s application programming interface (API). According to security researchers working for Microsoft, the Chinese company behind the R1 reasoning model may have exfiltrated a large amount of data […]

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Formance raises $21M to build the AWS for fintech infrastructure

January 29, 2025

If you talk to a fintech entrepreneur about their business, chances are they’ll end up talking about ledger issues at some point. A ledger is a record of money movements that serves as the source of truth for financial assets, but when a company starts having multiple bank accounts, payment processors and funds spread across […]

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Three reasons Meta will struggle with community fact-checking

January 29, 2025
Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will cut back on its content moderation efforts and eliminate fact-checking in the US in favor of the more “democratic” approach that X (formerly Twitter) calls Community Notes, rolling back protections that he claimed had been developed only in response to media and government pressure. The move…

This fintech has a fix for the biggest cross-border payments issues in Francophone Africa

January 29, 2025

Until a few years ago, it used to be difficult to make payments across borders almost anywhere in the world. But it’s still a big problem in Africa, where fragmented, disconnected systems, high fees, and poor infrastructure make it tough for businesses and individuals to move money quickly and affordably. The majority of people and […]

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Shared scooter startup Voi reports its first profitable year as it explores an IPO

January 29, 2025

Swedish shared micromobility giant Voi had its first profitable year in 2024, according to preliminary unaudited results the company shared exclusively with TechCrunch.  Voi, which offers shared e-scooters and e-bikes across more than 100 markets in Europe, recorded €132.8 million ($138 million) in net revenue in 2024. On an adjusted basis, Voi earned €17.2 million […]

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DeepSeek reaches No. 1 on US Play Store

January 29, 2025

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s Android app has taken the No. 1 spot on the Google Play Store, days after the chatbot app clinched the top spot on the App Store.

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Naboo secures $21M for its concierge-style corporate event booking platform

January 29, 2025

If you’ve ever tried to book a venue for a company event, you’ll know how onerous a task it can be. You have to contact multiple vendors, wait for quotes, evaluate them, see if you can get a good deal, and then get all that approved. So it makes sense that depending on the size […]

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SoftBank to invest $500M in robotics startup SkildAI

January 29, 2025

SoftBank is negotiating a $500 million investment in Skild AI, a software company building a foundational model for robotics at a $4 billion valuation, Bloomberg and Financial Times reported. The two-year-old company raised its previous funding round of $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation last July from investors including Jeff Bezos, Lightspeed Venture Partners, […]

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