The Outer Biosciences skin AI platform feeds on something no large language model can scrape from the internet: living human tissue, kept functional outside the body for up to a month, generating biological data that simply did not exist before. The company emerged from near-total public silence this week, and the details it is sharing are worth pausing on. Michael Polansky, the startup’s chief executive, is better known in tabloid pages as the partner of Lady Gaga than in biotech circles. That is about to change. Polansky co-founded Outer Biosciences alongside chief scientist Kyung-Jin Jang, chief technology officer Chris Hinojosa,…
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.
Ray Dalio’s debt crisis warning landed on Friday with the force of a diagnosis: the United States, he wrote, is approaching an inflection point, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s newly expanded bond buyback programme is one more signal of how close the edge may be. Dalio, the 77-year-old founder of Bridgewater Associates, published his assessment in a post on his Substack, framing Bessent’s move not as a stabilising measure but as evidence that the U.S. fiscal position is deteriorating faster than Washington acknowledges. ‘I am confident that the government’s financial condition is at an inflection point,’ he wrote. ‘If this…
The Kalshi bitcoin year-end forecast tells a story of cautious stasis: traders on the prediction market platform see the cryptocurrency finishing 2026 at around $75,000, barely a haircut from where it was trading this week after a rally of more than 20%. Bitcoin climbed to levels not seen since May, last changing hands above $77,000. Yet the collective wisdom of Kalshi’s market put the year-end price at roughly the same place, based on an average of contracts asking traders to bet on which $5,000 price range bitcoin will occupy at midnight on 1 January 2027. The rally itself had already…
The Oura sleep tracking lawsuit, filed 20 August 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, arrives at an awkward moment for the Finnish wearable maker: weeks after it filed to go public at an $11 billion valuation, it now faces a proposed class action alleging that the core feature it sells on is fundamentally misleading. The case, captioned Surber v. Oura Inc. et al. (case number 3:26-cv-08686), names both Oura Inc. and Oura Health Oy as defendants. It was brought by Clarkson Law Firm on behalf of named plaintiff Madison Surber, who purchased an Oura…
Nevada robotaxi permits covering up to 8,000 vehicles were approved on 20 August by the Nevada Transportation Authority (NTA), setting the stage for the most concentrated autonomous vehicle competition any American city has yet seen, right in the middle of Las Vegas. Tesla’s permit allows up to 5,000 robotaxis. Waymo received authorisation for up to 1,000 autonomous vehicles. A third permit, for 1,000 robotaxis, went to Aviari Services, a subsidiary of Uber, according to the Las Vegas Sun. Aviari will operate through partnerships with Hyundai subsidiary Motional and Zoox. Zoox also holds a separate, pre-existing permit for 100 robotaxis. From…
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) first Innovation Advisory Committee (IAC) session put CFTC prediction markets regulation at the centre of a three-hour debate on Thursday, as exchanges, platforms, and regulators clashed over self-certification, insider trading, and contracts that let traders bet on words spoken from a podium. The committee, whose agenda was divided into formal sessions on crypto, artificial intelligence, and prediction markets, was convened by CFTC Chairman Michael Selig, currently the only sitting commissioner on the agency’s typically five-member board. Walt Lukken serves as the IAC’s chair. According to Better Markets, the committee has 35 members in total,…
The Linkdaze smart calendar launched last December with a straightforward pitch: one touchscreen on the wall to replace the chaos of five different family schedules. As back-to-school season collides with autumn routines, the device is finding its moment. What the Linkdaze Smart Calendar Actually Does The hardware comes in two sizes: a 10.1-inch model and a 15.6-inch model. The smaller unit carries 32GB of onboard storage and a 1,280×800 IPS HD touchscreen, weighing 1.2 pounds, according to the Amazon product listing. The larger screen steps up to 64GB of storage, per Linkdaze’s own site. Calendar compatibility is the core proposition.…
The Apollo Atomics seed round, totalling $26 million including $5 million in debt financing, is not funding a new type of reactor. It is funding a new type of steam generator, and the distinction matters more than it might first appear. Founded in 2025 as a spinout from MIT and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Apollo Atomics was built on a premise its founders believe the wider nuclear industry has missed: the reactor core is not the main obstacle to cheaper nuclear power. The steam generator is. Rethinking the Steam Generator, Not the Reactor ‘We focus on the largest component, the…
The Binance Agent OS launch, announced on 20 August 2026, puts autonomous AI directly in charge of real money for the first time on the world’s largest crypto exchange, which counts more than 300 million registered users. The platform lets developers connect AI applications to Binance’s financial infrastructure so that agents can analyse markets and execute trades on behalf of users, without a human confirming each order. Binance frames Agent OS not as a standalone product but as the first release within ‘Binance Intelligence,’ its broader AI product suite, according to the company’s official announcement. Alongside the platform itself, Binance…
The Stripe OpenRouter acquisition has attracted attention for an unlikely reason: a leaked investor letter in which Stripe’s founders invoke the singularity, that well-worn concept of humans and machines fusing into something new. Patrick and John Collison wrote that they had decided ‘January 1 marked the beginning of the singularity’ and had been ‘operating on that basis.’ The letter was published by journalist Eric Newcomer and verified by TechCrunch. Patrick Collison himself acknowledged the term was tongue-in-cheek when using it at his company’s conference in April. Strip away the science-fiction framing and a more grounded strategic logic emerges. The deal,…
