The Venice AI Series A marks an unusual milestone: a privacy-first AI platform, two years old and already profitable, closing its first outside equity raise at a $1 billion valuation. The $65 million round was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others participating. Venice offers access to more than 200 AI models, hosting open-source versions on its own data centres and routing queries to closed-source models from providers including OpenAI and Anthropic. User inputs are encrypted and decrypted on the client side, routed through an external proxy, and, according to Venice AI’s official…
Author: Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable.
The Vinton Cerf Google retirement, confirmed at an academic conference last week, brings to a close one of technology’s longest-running careers. Cerf, 81-year-old architect of the protocols that made the modern internet possible, will leave his role as vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google after more than two decades at the company. The announcement came not from a corporate press release but from a conference room. Dave Patterson, the UC Berkeley professor best known for co-developing RISC processor architecture, introduced Cerf during a video-linked appearance at the Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute. ‘Vint… has been…
The Clicks Communicator hands-on video released this week offers the clearest look yet at a device that London-based startup Clicks Technology believes can carve out a market the big manufacturers long abandoned: the physical keyboard smartphone. Priced at $499 at retail, with an early-bird reservation price of $399 available now, the Communicator runs Android 17 with 5G connectivity, according to the company’s official product page. That puts it squarely in the premium tier, not the nostalgia novelty category. What the Clicks Communicator Hands-On Reveals The new video presents pre-production hardware and internal software as a preview ahead of a planned…
Tesla Cybercab production testing has reached a new phase: a two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel and no pedals is now running on public streets in Austin, Texas. A safety monitor occupies the right passenger seat, as shown in a video posted to X, and the car in question is a production version of the vehicle Tesla first unveiled roughly two years ago. The timing carries weight. Tesla had already been putting prototype Cybercabs, fitted with steering wheels and pedals, through their paces across five U.S. states: California, Texas, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts. That prototype fleet numbered approximately ten…
The OKX AI marketplace opened to developers on Tuesday, giving AI agents a place to hire one another, settle payments in stablecoins, and accumulate portable on-chain reputations. The launch follows a closed beta with 50 early service providers and marks OKX’s most ambitious push yet beyond crypto trading. The platform is structured as two interlocking venues. In the agent marketplace, builders list their AI agents and earn income from the services those agents perform. In the task marketplace, agents post work and recruit other agents to complete it. The two sides of the platform are designed to be self-reinforcing: as…
A new study tracking AI adoption and hiring across more than 21,000 U.S. firms suggests the relationship between artificial intelligence spending and employment is considerably more conditional than either side of the debate tends to admit. Through May 2026, companies had announced close to 90,000 job cuts tied to AI, and projections from some quarters put the share of U.S. jobs at risk over the next five years at up to 15%. The picture from firm-level data, however, is harder to summarise than either a jobs apocalypse or a tech-fuelled hiring boom. What AI Adoption and Hiring Data Actually Show…
The California–Anthropic Claude deal makes the AI assistant the first such tool available to every state agency, city, and county in California, at half the standard price, putting Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration squarely at odds with a federal government that has formally declared Anthropic a security threat. Chris Given, California’s chief information officer and Department of Technology director, told Politico that the Pentagon’s ‘supply-chain risk’ designation of Anthropic ‘just didn’t come up’ during negotiations. That designation, issued by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, is the first ever applied to an American company, according to Lawfare. Claude Comes to City Hall at…
Rocket Lab’s acquisition of Iridium, announced on 29 June 2026, values the satellite operator at $8 billion, with shareholders receiving $54 per share in a deal structured as half cash and half Rocket Lab stock. The transaction, which has not yet closed, caps a remarkable run of deal-making by the launch company and positions it as a vertically integrated operator capable of designing, building, launching, and running its own satellite constellations. Rocket Lab and Iridium signed the Agreement and Plan of Merger on 28 June 2026, according to Rocket Lab’s 8-K filing with the SEC. The structure is a two-step…
California’s loud streaming ads law came into force on 1 July, closing a regulatory gap that had left streaming platforms exempt from the volume rules Congress imposed on broadcast and cable television more than a decade ago. SB 576 prohibits streaming services from airing advertisements louder than the video content they accompany. The standard it sets is specific: compliance must be consistent with the Federal Communications Commission’s regulations under the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, known as the CALM Act (Public Law 111-311), which has governed broadcast stations and cable operators since 2010. Streaming platforms, as Governor Gavin Newsom noted…
Ian Bogost’s Small Stuff begins, in a sense, with a gear stick. Bogost’s 2022 piece for The Atlantic on the decline of the manual transmission generated a response so large that it puzzled even its author. That response, and a year of thinking about why it landed the way it did, became the engine for his forthcoming book, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life, due from Atria Books on 7 July 2026. The premise is both simple and slippery. Manual transmissions once accounted for 15 percent of new and used car sales in the United States…
