The Dixon Vivo joint venture received formal government approval on 8 July 2026, with the two companies signing the joint venture and shareholders’ agreements on 9 and 10 July, clearing the way for a partnership that has been more than eighteen months in the making. The deal, structured as a 51/49 venture with Dixon Technologies holding the majority stake, may do more than expand Noida-based Dixon’s order book: it could define how Chinese smartphone brands navigate India’s increasingly exacting investment regime. A Deal Eighteen Months in the Making The term sheet between Dixon and Vivo Mobile India was signed on…
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 Gradium Nvidia seed round has closed at $100 million after the Paris-based voice AI startup reopened its financing to new investors, with Nvidia among those joining the cap table. The fresh capital will fund a new Bay Area office as the company pushes into the territory where its fiercest competitors are headquartered. Voice AI at Scale, Without the Pause Gradium’s core proposition is audio models that generate voice with ultra-low latency, eliminating the hesitation that has long made AI agent conversations feel stilted. The company describes its ambition as becoming ‘the technical backbone of global voice technology by eliminating…
A Cash App fraud settlement worth $45 million has been secured by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from 46 states, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, over what regulators described as years of deceptive practices and inadequate consumer protections on Block’s mobile payments platform. Block denied wrongdoing. The company, which operates Cash App, did not respond to requests for comment. Unbanked Users Left Exposed The states’ case centred on a specific vulnerability: Cash App had actively marketed itself to unbanked and underbanked consumers, encouraging direct deposits of paychecks and government benefits into the platform, according to the…
The Truecaller India regulatory dispute broke into the open this week when chief executive Rishit Jhunjhunwala took to X to accuse the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) of preventing his company from protecting consumers in its single most important market. The regulator, it turns out, may be preparing to fight back with considerably heavier weapons. A Framework Meant to Curb Spam Is Producing the Opposite Effect, Truecaller Says The conflict centres on two number series that India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) formally introduced on 30 May 2024 to clean up the country’s commercial communications landscape. Under that framework, the…
Google Photos Video Remix, a new tool powered by the company’s Gemini Omni model, is rolling out now to paid subscribers across 15 countries, letting users apply cinematic relighting, background swaps, and artistic styles to video clips without touching dedicated editing software. Google announced the feature on Wednesday as part of its continuing effort to fold generative AI tools into consumer apps. The move extends an existing capability. According to Droid-Life, Video Remix builds directly on the Remix feature already available for photos in Google Photos, carrying that same transformation logic across to video. The Create tab in the app…
Vermilion Cliffs Ventures Fund II has closed at $25 million, giving Ashley Smith fresh capital to back technical founders building in AI infrastructure, security, and developer tools from her base in New York. Smith founded the firm in 2023 after a career in marketing at companies including Twilio, Facebook, GitHub, and GitLab. She runs it as a solo general partner, a structure that remains uncommon in venture capital and rarer still for women. The raise took roughly four months, with much of the capital coming from existing investors who backed her debut fund. Vermilion Cliffs Ventures Fund II: The Mechanics…
The ZML inference server LLMD has arrived as a free product, promising to run open-source large language models at full speed across a sprawling range of chips: Nvidia, AMD, Google’s TPU, Apple Metal, and Intel Arc. The Paris-based startup, founded by Steeve Morin and endorsed by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, is aiming squarely at one of enterprise AI’s most persistent frustrations: the software lock-in that forces companies to build for one chip vendor and stay there. What the ZML Inference Server Actually Does Inference, the process of handling live prompts once a model is trained, has quietly overtaken training…
Startup Battlefield Australia applications will close on 20 July after TechCrunch granted one final extension, citing overwhelming interest from founders across the region. There will be no further reprieve. Eight startups will take the stage on 19 August 2026 at Stripe Tour Sydney. The top three finishers receive up to $15,000 in Stripe fee credits. The grand prize carries something harder to put a number on: automatic entry into Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, which runs at San Francisco’s Moscone West on October 13 to 15, with the Startup Battlefield 200 winner taking home a $100,000 equity-free prize.…
The Netflix publisher video deals launching on 3 August will place short-form content from BuzzFeed Studios, Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, People, Tastemade, and a cluster of Penske Media PMX brands directly on the platform’s homepage, giving YouTube-style formats a foothold inside the world’s largest subscription streamer. The rollout covers subscribers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Videos will range from two to three minutes for the briefest clips to well past 20 minutes for longer-form series, according to the publisher partners. For Netflix, the logic is straightforward. Its existing ‘Clips’ feature was designed…
X’s new video editor features are the platform’s latest attempt to persuade creators to post original work rather than recycle content that has already gone viral elsewhere. The social network announced the in-app tools this week, framing them as part of a broader push to rebuild a credible creator ecosystem, though the obstacles in the way are considerably larger than any single product update. What the X Video Editor Features Include The editor arrives with a practical toolkit. The Verge reports that it includes trimming tools, automatic caption generation, multilingual caption overlays with customisable styles, and green-screen functionality that draws…
