A cohort of people who built fortunes in the last technology cycle are making a quieter, stranger move: tech founders return to AI not as investors or advisers, but as working practitioners, willingly trading executive titles for the deliberately flat label of ‘member of technical staff.’ The pattern is gathering pace. Tom Blomfield, who co-founded Monzo in 2015 and served as its chief executive until 2020 before leaving the company the following year, then spent time as a general partner at Y Combinator from April 2023, announced this week that he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s…
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 Apple trade secrets lawsuit filed against OpenAI last Friday is many things at once: a 41-page catalogue of alleged corporate espionage, a legal salvo aimed at a company building the iPhone’s most credible rival, and, in places, an almost comic record of how carelessly some of the alleged misconduct was conducted.The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, names OpenAI Foundation, OpenAI Group PBC, and io Products as corporate defendants, alongside two individual former Apple employees. Its scope stretches from a text message that reads ‘LOL, I found out I can access the…
SpaceX Starship flight clearance has been granted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), opening the path for a second V3 launch attempt as soon as Thursday, 16 July, roughly seven weeks after a booster failure derailed the system’s debut outing in May. The timing matters. SpaceX listed on Nasdaq on 12 June, raising nearly $86 billion and entering the ranks of the ten most valuable companies in the world. The next Starship test is therefore the first the company will conduct as a publicly traded entity, putting its much-discussed ‘fly, fail, fix’ development philosophy squarely in front of shareholders for…
The federal pressure on the autonomous vehicle industry hardened last week, and the NHTSA AV first-responder ultimatum issued by the agency’s administrator on 8 July 2026 is the clearest sign yet that Washington is losing patience with the sector’s excuses. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) also published a sweeping new regulatory agenda that could reshape the legal framework for driverless vehicles entirely. The NHTSA AV First-Responder Directive NHTSA administrator Jonathan Morrison sent a letter to every autonomous vehicle developer listed in the Department of Transportation’s Standing General Order, telling them flatly that vehicles unable to safely interact with…
The Yosemite oncology fund is moving faster than its founder expected. Reed Jobs, who launched the San Francisco-based venture firm in 2023, sat down with TechCrunch to take stock of a sector that has shifted dramatically beneath his feet: a historic pharmaceutical patent cliff, an acquisitive big-pharma market flush with post-pandemic cash, and AI accelerating drug discovery at a pace that has surprised even insiders. The backdrop matters. Yosemite has grown to a team of 17 and roughly 25 companies across two funds. Its second fund held a $200 million first close, targeting $350 million, according to Venture Capital Journal.…
The Even G2 smart glasses arrive at a peculiar moment: a freshly minted unicorn’s flagship product that is genuinely well-built and frustratingly half-formed at the same time. Priced at $599, they sit in a small and crowded category of display-first wearables that beam text into your line of sight without a camera in sight. Even Realities, the three-year-old Shenzhen-based startup that makes them, raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round led by Meituan and existing backer Tencent, pushing the company’s valuation to $1 billion, according to TechCrunch. Founder and CEO Will Wang has described the company’s philosophy as display-first…
A job posting quietly published on OpenAI’s careers page lays out the contours of a ChatGPT family product strategy that the company has not formally announced: a dedicated product manager role in San Francisco, tasked with building experiences for families, caregivers, and older adults across its products. The posting describes ‘a high-impact role with the opportunity to improve daily life for millions of people.’ It specifies that the team’s work ‘brings together product, policy, safety, research, and operations to keep improving how ChatGPT supports teens and families,’ suggesting this is not a skunkworks experiment but a cross-functional commitment. A Demographic…
The CISA GitHub credentials leak that rattled the US cybersecurity community in May 2026 was not just an embarrassing data exposure: it was a window into an agency that, by its own admission, had no clear process for handling exactly this kind of crisis. A contractor’s employee had uploaded 844 MB of plaintext passwords, Amazon Web Services tokens, and Entra ID SAML certificates to a public GitHub repository named ‘Private-CISA’, where they sat exposed since at least November 2025. The repository’s administrator had explicitly disabled GitHub’s default secret-scanning protections, according to Guillaume Valadon of cybersecurity firm GitGuardian. The credentials covered…
A new court filing in the Fizz Sidechat investor leak dispute names Jerry Lu, a partner at venture capital firm Maveron, alleging he attended a meeting with Fizz under the pretence of evaluating an investment, then passed the startup’s confidential information directly to its rival. The allegation lands in a lawsuit that has been running since 2023, when Fizz originally sued Sidechat over a range of alleged abuses: disrupting campus launches, spreading false rumours about a data breach, filing spam reports against Fizz’s Instagram account, and paying students to delete the app. The original complaint demanded a jury trial, damages,…
The Oratomic Series A funding round of $300 million is built on a single audacious claim: that a genuinely useful quantum computer needs far fewer qubits than the field has long assumed, and that a Pasadena startup founded by Caltech physicists has the science to prove it. The round was co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Khosla Ventures. Bezos Expeditions, Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Lowercarbon Capital, and Bain Capital also participated, alongside Formation 8, Nebular, quantum computing researchers David and Scott Aaronson, and a roster of others that stretches to include Infleqtion, Genius Ventures, and Global Frontier Investments,…
