The push by Chinese automakers into humanoid robots has a new price tag on it: $900 million, raised in a single round by Dogotix, the robotics subsidiary of electric-vehicle maker Xpeng, at a post-money valuation of more than $6.3 billion. The round’s structure tells its own story. According to Xpeng’s official newsroom, the $900 million Series A breaks down as $600 million from external investors, $200 million from Xpeng itself, and $100 million from company executives, including founder He Xiaopeng and co-president Brian Gu. The lead investor is IDG Capital, with Gaorong Ventures, Tencent, and Alibaba also participating. Xpeng described…
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 Ninth Circuit prediction markets ruling, filed on 28 August 2026, hands state gambling regulators a sweeping victory over federal oversight, and, by creating a direct conflict with a Third Circuit decision from April, makes a Supreme Court showdown look almost inevitable. A unanimous three-judge panel rejected requests for injunctive relief from KalshiEX, Crypto.com, and Robinhood Derivatives, concluding that sports-related event contracts are sports bets regulated by the states, not swaps under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The Ninth Circuit opinion in KalshiEX LLC v. Assad (No. 25-7516) was authored by Circuit Judge Ryan D. Nelson,…
The Apple TV price hike took effect on 28 August 2026, lifting the monthly subscription from $12.99 to $14.99 and the annual plan from $99 to $119. It is, by Variety’s count, the fourth time Apple has raised the price in four years. When Apple TV launched in 2019 at $4.99 per month, the company positioned it as the affordable alternative to Netflix and Disney+. The monthly fee has now tripled from that launch price, a 200% increase, and has risen 50% in the past two years alone, according to TidBITS. Existing subscribers will receive roughly one month’s notice before…
The Any LUV1 electric motorcycle carries up to 120 litres of cargo, hits 100 km/h, and is asking a straightforward question of European city dwellers: why does owning a car still feel like the only sensible option? Any, a Belgian startup, unveiled its first vehicle at Milan Design Week in May, and the prototype attracted enough attention to generate more than 600 reservations in its first 100 days. Each reservation costs €49 (around $57), credited against the purchase price and fully refundable. The LUV1’s base price is set at €7,000 (about $8,150), positioning it below mainstream cars and roughly in…
The StrictlyVC New York event lands on Thursday, 10 September, when TechCrunch’s boutique evening series returns to Manhattan’s West Village for the first time in two years. The lineup spans venture capital’s thorniest debates, the business of professional sport, and the question a growing number of founders are wrestling with: what gets rebuilt when AI takes something away? Keith Rabois on Capital, OpenAI, and the StrictlyVC New York Event The evening opens with Keith Rabois, the investor who recently relocated from Silicon Valley to the East Coast. Rabois has backed Ramp four times and invested repeatedly in State Affairs, an…
The ATF ransomware major incident designation arrived swiftly: senior Department of Justice officials formally classified a cyberattack on the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as a ‘major incident’ under federal guidelines, a legally defined threshold that triggers mandatory notification to Congress within seven days. The Russia-linked Qilin ransomware gang has since claimed responsibility on its public leak site, though it has not offered any evidence to back the assertion. According to the ATF’s official press release, the bureau immediately terminated connections to the affected environment upon discovering the incident and launched incident-response and forensic activities. The ATF…
The CivilGrid Series A closed at $26 million, and it was born from a three-day standstill on a PG&E job site that cost $60,000 and left engineers with an unmarked pipe and no idea who owned it. Josh Mackanic, who spent a decade at Pacific Gas and Electric managing more than $500 million in business, according to Engineering News-Record, kept running into the same structural failure: the underground is, for most of the people who build through it, essentially invisible.Mackanic founded CivilGrid in 2020 to fix that. The San Francisco company aggregates utility asset data, property ownership records, and environmental…
The reported Nvidia Hugging Face acquisition has moved beyond rumour and into the realm of near-certainty, with The Information citing a source familiar with the matter to report an agreed price of $12.9 billion. Business Insider, which broke news of the takeover interest at the weekend, added a note of caution: talks valuing the company at more than $13 billion had not yet produced a signed agreement and could still fall apart. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face responded to requests for comment, though Nvidia’s silence carries its own weight: the company has a history of moving quickly to correct reports…
The Instinct AI assistant has closed a $250 million Series B round that brings its total funding to $350 million and its valuation to $2.5 billion, an ascent that has unfolded over months and left the startup’s privacy practices under scrutiny as fast as its funding. The round was co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, with Kleiner Perkins joining alongside earlier backers Conviction Partners and Greenoaks, according to Yahoo Finance. The speed of the raise is striking by any measure: TechFundingNews reports the company’s valuation climbed from $50 million to $2.5 billion within a matter of months. Behind the funding…
Las Vegas Sands shares are trading at a forward earnings multiple of 14 times, barely above a 10-year low, while one-month implied volatility sits at roughly 28% against a five-year average of around 39%. For options trader Mike Khouw of Tidal Financial Group, that combination of a cheap stock and cheap options is the setup worth watching. The thesis starts with the valuation. LVS trades on a 14x forward multiple, near the bottom of its own historical range and just above the 10-year floor of 13x. That multiple, Khouw argues, reflects only the existing Macau and Singapore businesses, with no…
