The IBM mainframe business decline at the heart of Big Blue’s second-quarter earnings wiped out roughly $67 billion in stock market value in a single session, according to The Wall Street Journal, triggering one of the most bruising days in the company’s 115-year history. The quarter’s headline numbers were, on their own terms, respectable. IBM posted $17.2 billion in revenue, $9,977 million in GAAP gross profit, and a GAAP gross margin of 58.8%, up 1.1 points year on year, according to Arvind Krishna’s letter to IBM investors. Net earnings came in at $2.2 billion. None of that was the problem.…
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 PRIMA retinal implant has received a CE mark from European regulators, clearing the path for Science Corporation to begin commercial sales of a device that restores functional central vision in patients blinded by age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The authorisation, issued by the notified body DEKRA under the EU Medical Device Regulation, covers commercial availability across 30 European countries.Max Hodak, Science Corporation’s founder and CEO, offered a particular piece of evidence for what the technology can do. ‘One of our patients in France finished a 300-page novel a little while ago, and sent us the book,’ he said. ‘We have…
A new survey of nearly a thousand organisations has put the ransomware re-extortion risk in stark relief: pay a criminal gang once, and the odds of a second demand are disturbingly high. Cybersecurity company Proofpoint surveyed 953 full-time security professionals across 20 industries and 12 countries between March and April 2026, and found that more than one-third of organisations that paid a ransom were subsequently hit with a second extortion demand. The headline figure is striking enough. The context behind it is worse. More than half (54%) of all organisations affected by ransomware paid up, despite years of law enforcement…
Glow endpoint security has stepped out of stealth with $180 million in funding and a $1.2 billion valuation, making it one of the handful of cybersecurity startups to achieve unicorn status before disclosing a single revenue figure. The Palo Alto company closed an all-equity Series A backed by Sequoia Capital, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, and Redpoint Ventures, with Index Ventures, Swish Ventures, Lux Capital, Operator Collective, and Holly Ventures also participating. One Israeli financial outlet, Calcalist Tech, described the raise as a $100 million Series B that brought cumulative funding to $180 million across three earlier rounds; Glow’s own press release characterises…
The Synthesia Roleplay Sessions launch marks a calculated pivot for a British startup that has spent years selling enterprises on the idea that AI avatars could replace expensive video production. Now it is betting that what companies actually want is proof their training worked. On Wednesday, Synthesia, founded in 2017 by CEO Victor Riparbelli and co-founders Steffen Tjerrild, Professor Matt Niessner, and Professor Lourdes Agapito, unveiled Roleplay Sessions: an interactive product in which employees practise high-stakes conversations with an AI avatar that responds, pushes back, and scores performance against a rubric. Target use cases include sales pitches, performance reviews, and…
The rumour of an Anthropic Physical Intelligence acquisition spread across AI Twitter last weekend faster than either company could contain it, and for good reason: even after Physical Intelligence’s chief executive pushed back, reporting from The Information confirmed the two companies had genuinely held acquisition talks this spring. The denial itself became part of the story. According to The Information, CEO Karol Hausman told employees via Slack that the reports were untrue, accompanying the message with a gif of a character from The Office shaking her head no. Lachy Groom, Physical Intelligence’s co-founder, did not respond to a request for…
The Apple Upgrade program, a lease-to-own scheme for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches powered by buy-now-pay-later financer Klarna, is set to launch on 28 July, according to a Bloomberg report published Tuesday, giving consumers a way to spread hardware costs across multiple years at a moment when Apple has already begun raising prices. The timing is deliberate. Apple has been contending with an industry-wide shortage of memory chips, a supply crunch that manufacturers have taken to calling “RAMageddon,” driven largely by AI companies consuming memory at a pace that has squeezed supply for consumer electronics. Lease payments, spread across…
The Light Flip phone price of $299 is, by the company’s own admission, the whole argument. For a decade, Light has sold the idea of a simpler life through simpler hardware. Pricing has always been the thing that almost killed that pitch. Kaiwei Tang co-created the original Motorola Razr more than 20 years ago. He has spent the past 10 years building Light, the startup behind the minimalist Light Phone series. His new device is a flip phone, which he acknowledges surprised even him. ‘We’ve been interviewing young people that use flip phones for a few years,’ Tang told TechCrunch.…
Gritt solar construction robots emerged from stealth this week with a $26 million Series A round, betting that AI-controlled machinery can solve one of the clean-energy transition’s least glamorous bottlenecks: finding enough hands to actually install the panels. The San Francisco-based startup, according to FinSMEs, was founded by two Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticists, CEO Puneet Puri and CTO Vishal Dugar. The Series A was led by Obvious Ventures, with Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investment also participating. The round brings Gritt’s cumulative fundraising to either $34 million, as the company has stated, or $32.4 million, as Robotics & Automation News…
The Anthropic copyright settlement worth $1.5 billion has cleared its final legal hurdle, with Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California signing off on Monday, formally closing a lawsuit that exposed one of the AI industry’s least flattering habits: training on books lifted from piracy sites. The case, formally captioned Bartz v. Anthropic, was originally filed in 2024 by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of using unauthorised copies of their books while developing its Claude AI models. Judge William Alsup granted preliminary approval in September 2025…
