The Cellebrite Russia dissident phone case has a specific date attached to it now: on or around 17 June 2021, Russian authorities used the Israeli forensics firm’s technology to break into the iPhone 12 of opposition politician Andrey Pivovarov while he was in detention, according to Citizen Lab, the digital rights research group based at the University of Toronto. The problem: Cellebrite had announced it was cutting ties with Russian government customers three months earlier. The episode puts a hard question to anyone who has ever trusted a vendor’s cut-off announcement as a meaningful security guarantee. What the Russian Forensic…
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.
ASML China sales are at the centre of an increasingly pointed diplomatic confrontation between the Netherlands and Washington, after Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma flew to the US capital this week to lobby Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress against legislation that could sever the Dutch chipmaking giant from one of its largest markets. The bill in question is the MATCH Act (H.R. 8170), introduced on 2 April 2026 by Congressman Michael Baumgartner of Washington state and cleared by committee on 22 April. It would extend US export controls to cover ASML’s deep ultraviolet (DUV) immersion machines, on…
The Facebook AI companion app announced on Wednesday reimagines the company’s Creator Studio tool as a standalone product, giving video makers and page owners a single place to manage content, analyse performance, and get strategic advice from an integrated AI assistant. The timing is pointed. Facebook faces sustained competition from TikTok and YouTube for the attention of creators, who increasingly decide where to invest their energy based on which platform offers the best tools. By folding those tools into a dedicated app, Meta is trying to make the case that creators do not need to leave Facebook’s ecosystem at all,…
The Zoox robotaxi upgrades announced Wednesday are less about aesthetics than about readiness: the Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company has revised its custom-built, bidirectional robotaxi ahead of what it hopes will be a commercial paid-ride service later this year, contingent on a federal regulatory decision that has yet to land. The Zoox Robotaxi Upgrades in Detail The core architecture of the vehicle stays intact. The cube-shaped, electric robotaxi still carries no steering wheel or driver controls, retains its moonroof and starry night lighting, and its sensor suite of 40 cameras, radars, lidars, and infrared sensors remains unchanged. Four-wheel steering, bidirectional drive,…
AI early-stage investing has never been harder to price, and two of the more candid voices working in the space said as much at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening in El Segundo last week. Carter Reum, co-founder of M13, and Chang Xu, a partner at Basis Set Ventures, spent an hour on stage dissecting how to find defensible companies when the competitive landscape can shift in a week. Reum’s firm, M13, manages $2.5 billion in assets and counts seed or Series A positions in 17 unicorns. A Form D filing for M13 Ventures IV disclosed a $400 million offering in 2023, with…
The Flipkart Minutes quick-commerce network has reached 1,000 micro-fulfilment centres in less than two years, the Walmart-backed e-commerce giant announced on Wednesday, setting out plans to extend that figure to 1,500 by the end of 2026 as India’s fast-delivery sector shifts from a grocery shortcut into a broader shopping platform. The milestone arrives into a market already crowded with well-funded rivals. Blinkit, owned by food-delivery group Eternal, scaled from roughly 383 dark stores in mid-2023 to 2,243 by the fourth quarter of FY26, according to Markhub24, and achieved adjusted EBITDA positivity at the unit level in March 2024. On gross…
Anthropic’s Claude Tag Slack integration, launched on Monday in research preview, does something its predecessors did not: it stays in the room. Rather than responding to individual queries and forgetting them, Claude Tag builds persistent memory across a channel, learns the team’s work over time, and can act of its own accord without waiting to be asked. The Claude Tag Slack Integration and What Sets It Apart Users on Claude Enterprise and Claude Team plans could already direct-message @Claude within Slack or tag it in a channel for on-demand help. Claude Code in Slack handled the narrower job of routing…
The LastPass Klue data breach has exposed customers’ names, phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, and customer support case records, the password manager maker disclosed, after hackers exploited a supply-chain vulnerability at market intelligence firm Klue to reach deep into its go-to-market systems. LastPass said the breach did not touch its own infrastructure. Customers’ password vaults remain intact. But the company confirmed that Klue, described in its disclosure as a third-party market intelligence platform used by its go-to-market teams, integrates directly with its Salesforce and Gong systems, and it was through those integrations that attackers obtained the data. How Stolen…
Tech layoffs citing AI reached their highest monthly level in years during May 2026, even as the companies announcing those cuts posted record revenues and expanding backlogs. The most recent number to land came from Oracle, which disclosed in a June 22 annual regulatory filing that it had reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a decline of 13%. The company stated plainly: ‘The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.’ Tech Layoffs Citing AI: The Numbers Behind the Trend The scale…
Mach Industries’ Series C raised a question that $300 million and a $1.8 billion valuation can obscure but not quite answer: can a three-year-old defence startup running six simultaneous weapons programmes actually deliver on all of them? The Huntington Beach, California company, founded in 2023, closed the round earlier this month, with Infinite Capital and Ribbit Capital leading and Bedrock Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Khosla Ventures participating, according to TechCrunch’s Series C report. The company has now raised roughly $485 million in total. That figure includes a $100 million Series B closed in June 2025 at a $470 million valuation,…
