Venture funding remains stable in France thanks to AI startups

January 14, 2025

Alex Dewez, a partner at 20VC, just released its highly anticipated State of the French tech ecosystem report. This is a nice followup to Atomico’s State of European Tech report, with a more granular view on French startups in particular. As a reminder, the bottom line of Atomico’s report is that European startups raised $45 […]

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What’s next for nuclear power

January 14, 2025
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. While nuclear reactors have been generating power around the world for over 70 years, the current moment is one of potentially radical transformation for the technology. As…

UK’s CMA slaps Google Search and its 90%+ market share with an antitrust investigation

January 14, 2025

The Competition and Markets Authority — the U.K.’s antitrust watchdog — is wasting no time in lodging its first official investigation of 2025 under its new rules that came into effect this month. It’s looking into the market dominance of Google in Search, including the new work it’s doing in AI search as well as […]

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Here’s our forecast for AI this year

January 14, 2025
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In December, our small but mighty AI reporting team was asked by our editors to make a prediction: What’s coming next for AI?  In 2024, AI contributed both to Nobel Prize–winning…

Bioptimus raises $41M to develop a ‘GPT for biology’

January 14, 2025

A fledgling French AI startup has raised $41 million to develop a foundational AI model for biology. Just as OpenAI’s ChatGPT has taken the world by storm for a super-smart generative AI tool capable of natural language conversation in text form, Bioptimus is taking that basic concept but training its model specifically for downstream biological […]

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LemFi moves remittances further into Asia and Europe with $53M in new funding

January 14, 2025

For many emerging market economies, remittances have become a lifeline. Inflows surpassed $669 billion in 2023, according to World Bank research, and they now represent significant portions of GDP in these countries, often outpacing foreign direct investment as the primary source of foreign exchange.  Traditional banks and agents maintain a firm grip on the remittance […]

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How Barcelona became an unlikely hub for spyware startups

January 14, 2025

Barcelona’s mix of affordable cost of living and quality of life has helped create a vibrant startup community — and become a hotbed for the creation of surveillance technologies.

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China is reportedly open to Elon Musk acquiring TikTok US

January 14, 2025

Chinese government officials have reportedly discussed a scenario where ByteDance sells TikTok’s United States arm to Elon Musk, should the Supreme Court uphold the law banning the app on January 19th. Bloomberg reports that China would strongly prefer for TikTok to stay under ByteDance’s ownership, but says government officials have considered a sale to Musk […]

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China reportedly considers selling TikTok US to Elon Musk

January 14, 2025

Chinese government officials have reportedly discussed a scenario where ByteDance sells TikTok’s United States arm to Elon Musk, should the Supreme Court uphold the law banning the app on January 19th. Bloomberg reports that China would strongly prefer for TikTok to stay under ByteDance’s ownership, but says government officials have considered a sale to Musk […]

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As TikTok faces a US shutdown, here are some alternative apps to check out

January 13, 2025

TikTok has warned of a looming shutdown in just six days, as the Supreme Court is currently weighing the law that would ban the app. So we thought it’s time to take a look at other platforms that may be able to fill the TikTok-shaped hole in our lives.  The law gives TikTok parent company […]

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