More than 100 Forterra autonomous vehicles in Ukraine have completed over 1,100 missions across nine months of live combat operations, the company disclosed this week, marking what it describes as the largest deployment of autonomous ground vehicles in conflict by any US defence-technology firm. The numbers are specific enough to make the point. Forterra’s gas-powered Lancer ATVs, built on a Polaris platform and fitted with a custom sensor and compute stack, have driven more than 2,500 miles, moved 777,440 pounds of cargo, and completed 52 casualty evacuations since arriving in Ukraine last October. What Forterra’s Lancer Vehicles Are Actually Doing…
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 Netflix binge model, built to defeat linear television, is increasingly running up against a different kind of competitor, and the numbers are starting to show it. A Bloomberg report citing internal Netflix data found that viewers are abandoning popular shows before the second season arrives, pointing to a structural problem that runs deeper than any single cancellation or scheduling delay. Streaming Has Already Won the Old War When Netflix dropped the first season of House of Cards in February 2013, it did something genuinely new. It handed viewers an entire season at once, untethered from broadcast schedules and advertising…
The Xbox restructuring layoffs announced on 7 July 2026 are the most visible sign yet that Microsoft’s gaming division has arrived at a genuine inflection point, not merely another round of belt-tightening. Of the 4,800 roles cut across Microsoft that day, representing roughly 2.1% of its global workforce, 1,600 belonged to Xbox. A Business Sharma Called ‘Not Healthy’ Asha Sharma, chief executive of Xbox, called the move ‘the most significant restructure in Xbox history’ in an email to staff. Her diagnosis was blunt: ‘Our business today is not healthy. We are operating at margins that are 3–10x lower than comparable…
The Even Realities funding round that closed this month places the three-year-old Shenzhen startup firmly in unicorn territory: $150 million raised in a pre-Series B, led by Meituan and existing backer Tencent, at a $1 billion valuation. The bet at the centre of it is a deliberate step away from the camera-first direction that Meta and Snap are sprinting toward. Even Realities was founded in 2023 by ex-Apple engineers. CEO Will Wang, who spent two years at Apple before leaving in 2018 contributing to both the Apple Watch and iPhone, co-founded the company alongside Dan Hu and Li Wang. Two…
The Agility Robotics SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI will, if it clears shareholder approval and SEC review, make the Salem, Oregon-based company the first pure-play humanoid robotics business to trade on a major North American exchange, under the ticker AGLT. The deal values Agility at around $2.5 billion and is expected to raise more than $620 million in gross proceeds. The capital structure has two components. Churchill XI’s trust account holds approximately $420 million, assuming no redemptions. A separate PIPE of approximately $200 million in domesticated SPAC common stock, priced at $10.00 per share and led by Foxconn,…
Uber’s European expansion pause, confirmed to the Financial Times, has shelved five of the seven market launches the company announced just months ago, raising questions about whether the pullback is about operational discipline or deal-making strategy. Back in February, Uber unveiled plans to enter seven European markets in 2026: Austria, Greece, Norway, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, and Romania. According to Reuters, those launches were projected to generate an additional $1 billion in gross bookings over three years. Five of those markets are now on hold. Austria, Norway, and Greece are among those paused. Uber offered a publicly tidy explanation.…
The Amazon Mechanical Turk closure process begins on 30 July 2026, when the platform will stop accepting new customers, according to an official announcement on the service’s website. Existing users may carry on as normal, but Amazon Web Services has confirmed it will introduce no new features, a posture the company describes as the result of ‘careful consideration.’ AWS has formally classified Mechanical Turk as a service ‘moving to maintenance,’ a category distinct from the more terminal ‘sunset’ designation it applies to services with fixed end-of-operations dates. The platform is not dead yet, but it is no longer being built.…
The market for desk gadgets for productivity has quietly grown into something worth paying attention to, particularly as the boundary between home office and professional workspace has become more permanent for millions of workers. The proposition is simple enough: the right tools, placed within arm’s reach, can reduce friction, sharpen focus, and make an eight-hour day feel marginally less like an endurance event. Here are five products that make a reasonable case for a spot on your desk. Odistar Desktop Vacuum Cleaner: Clean Desk, Clear Mind At $13, the Odistar desktop vacuum is the least glamorous item on this list…
A 65-second commercial imagining the Google Workspace Declaration of Independence process has become one of the more talked-about pieces of tech advertising this summer, for reasons that cut both ways. The ad, part of Google’s broader campaign marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, depicts Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and their contemporaries drafting the nation’s founding document with the help of Google Docs, Gemini, and a calendar full of remote meetings. Google Workspace and the Declaration of Independence Ad The premise, pitched with the tagline ‘Group project, but make it 1776,’ is deliberately playful. Jefferson is shown mid-draft when Franklin…
The Midjourney Hollywood studios discovery dispute has taken a sharper turn, with the AI image-generation startup filing a motion to strip away limits on what Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. must disclose about their own artificial intelligence activity. The three studios collectively sued Midjourney for alleged copyright infringement, with Georgetown Law’s Tech Institute noting that Disney, Universal, and DreamWorks Animation filed a 110-page complaint on 11 June 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Warner Bros. followed with its own action, and on 4 November 2025 the two cases were consolidated by the court. The…
