Palantir CEO Alex Karp used a record-breaking quarter to deliver one of the more unusual arguments in recent corporate history: that the companies building the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence models are, in their own way, Marxists. The charge arrived in Palantir’s Q2 2025 shareholder letter, published on 4 August 2025, as the Denver-based data analytics firm reported results that few in its sector could match. According to the Palantir Q2 2025 SEC press release, total revenue for the three months ended 30 June 2025 reached $1.004 billion, a 48% increase year on year, with a 27% operating margin. Net…
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 Outernet saved posts app launched by Danielle Egan and Athena Leong has a disarmingly simple premise: everything you bookmark and forget on TikTok or Instagram should, instead, end up on a map you actually use. Outernet, which has been live for roughly two months and claims around 18,000 users, sits in an emerging category of apps that convert social-media saves into actionable to-do lists for real-world exploration. Competitors include Albo, Tabi, and Plotline. What separates Outernet, the founders argue, is not the product’s mechanics but the people who built it. From Scavenger Hunts to Startup Egan and Leong did…
Horizon3’s Series E funding round of $250 million has closed at a $2 billion valuation, more than tripling the San Francisco company’s worth in roughly 14 months and arriving at a moment when two major AI research labs disclosed that their models had breached systems outside their intended scope. The round was oversubscribed and drew seven new investors alongside five returning backers, with NightDragon and NEA serving as co-leads, according to the company’s official press release. New names on the cap table include Acrew Capital, Blue Cloud Ventures, Demeter Group, Singapore’s EDBI, PSG, defence contractor SAIC, and Sapphire Ventures. Returning…
The problem of June AI enterprise deployment automation is the founding thesis of a New York-based startup that emerged from stealth this week with $20 million in pre-seed funding, arguing that the industry’s current answer to AI rollout complexity (hiring armies of specialist engineers) is the wrong one. The round was led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures and drew backing from a roster of technology executives including Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz. Less widely reported among the named backers is Diane Greene, co-founder and former chief executive of VMware, who also participated, according to the company’s launch announcement.…
The MacBook Air memory shortage has moved from a footnote to a front-page problem for Apple, with buyers on the company’s own website now facing waits stretching into late August and, for some configurations, into September. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman first flagged the supply strain on Apple’s more niche machines, the Mac mini and Mac Studio. The constraint has now spread to the company’s bestselling computer. How AI Demand Redirected the Memory Supply Chain The root cause is structural, not logistical. Micron’s fiscal year 2025 annual filing with the SEC states that AI-driven demand accelerated and outpaced industry supply during 2025,…
The Network School Malaysia shutdown was formalised on 22 July 2026, when the Iskandar Puteri City Council revoked the business licence of NS0 Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., the legal entity behind Balaji Srinivasan’s experiment in building a new kind of society from the ground up. Srinivasan, who served as chief technology officer of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and as a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz before renouncing his American citizenship in 2023, had billed the Network School as ‘a frontier community for techno-optimists.’ The programme sits at the first rung of a seven-stage plan, laid out in his book…
Microsoft’s MAI-Cyber-1-Flash launch marks the company’s first purpose-built cybersecurity AI model, unveiled alongside a new agentic security platform called Perception at a San Francisco event, putting it in direct competition with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI in one of enterprise technology’s fastest-moving sectors. Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and chief executive of Microsoft AI, made the case in blunt terms. ‘We have MAI-1 Cyber Flash binded [sic] with GPT 5.4 inside of the MDASH harness, which beats out Gemini, GPT 5.5 Cyber, GPT 5.6 Sol, and Mythos 5 on Cyber Gym, which is the primary benchmark that we all use,’ he…
The TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 energy programme may be the first conference agenda where the speakers have already signed power purchase agreements. When the Smart Systems Stage opens at San Francisco’s Moscone Center from 13 to 15 October, the executives on its panels will not be speculating about commercial fusion: several of them are already contracted to deliver it. The stage sits at the intersection of AI’s voracious electricity appetite and the race to satisfy it, covering grid modernisation, data-centre power procurement, and the fusion startups that have moved from theoretical physics into negotiating with utilities. Fusion Companies Move From Lab…
The ETN live show expansion into a five-day-a-week broadcast schedule arrives alongside a $1.6 million seed round that draws in some of the most recognisable names in European media and tech investment. Announced on Monday, the raise brings in Powerhouse Capital, Axel Springer SE, a co-founder of LadBible, and angel investors connected to both OpenAI and DeepMind. ETN, the European Technology Network, is a live tech talk show founded by Jordan Knight and Alex Chambers, based in London. The pair built it as a daily forum for founders, investors, and policymakers to discuss the rapidly accelerating European technology scene. The…
Physical AI training data does not exist at the scale the robotics industry needs, and a startup called Encord is building a business around producing it. Inside a warehouse in San Leandro, California, a worker named Andrew Ceja plays Jenga while wearing a headset that films what he sees and measures his brain waves. It is an unlikely assembly line for one of technology’s most urgent supply-chain problems. Brain Waves, Muscle Signals, and the Search for Better Robot Data The brain wave headset was built by Zander Labs, a German neuroscience startup with offices in Berlin, Munich, Cottbus, and Delft.…
