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DoorDash brings command-line ordering to developers
Startups & Technology

DoorDash brings command-line ordering to developers

Developers can now automate their lunch orders through a terminal interface thanks to the new dd-cli tool. DoorDash launched the limited beta for macOS users in the U.S. and Canada, allowing AI agents to search for local deals, browse store menus, and process checkouts directly from a command line.

Stardust Period Tracker Caught Sharing Sensitive Health Data
Startups & Technology

Stardust Period Tracker Caught Sharing Sensitive Health Data

“Your data is private. Period,” claims the period-tracking app Stardust, yet recent research from Mozilla tells a different story. Investigators discovered the platform transmits sensitive user information—including reproductive goals and specific health symptoms—to a third-party analytics firm, contradicting the company’s long-standing promises of absolute privacy and end-to-end encryption.

Sheryl Sandberg Backs AI Vehicle Inspection Startup Self Inspection
Startups & Technology

Sheryl Sandberg Backs AI Vehicle Inspection Startup Self Inspection

A decade after leaving Meta, Sheryl Sandberg is betting $10 million on the digitization of car maintenance. Her family office, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, led the latest funding round for San Diego-based Self Inspection, a startup aiming to replace manual body damage assessments with smartphone-powered AI analysis.

Andrew Dai Secures $300M Valuation for Elorian
Startups & Technology

Andrew Dai Secures $300M Valuation for Elorian

Former Google DeepMind researcher Andrew Dai has secured a $55 million seed round for his new venture, Elorian, at a $300 million valuation. The startup aims to push the boundaries of visual reasoning, seeking to bridge the gap between current language-heavy models and the next generation of visual AGI.

Why AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun Rejects the AGI Label
Startups & Technology

Why AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun Rejects the AGI Label

While the broader AI industry pivots from the term AGI to superintelligence, AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun is discarding both. LeBrun contends that these labels lack meaningful definitions, preferring to focus his startup’s efforts on building world models capable of navigating the complexities of physical environments rather than chasing abstract hype.

Moonshot AI to challenge frontier models with massive Kimi K3 release
Startups & Technology

Moonshot AI to challenge frontier models with massive Kimi K3 release

With a parameter count reaching up to 3 trillion, Beijing-based Moonshot AI is preparing to launch Kimi K3, a model designed to match the performance of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8. This release marks a significant escalation in the race between closed-source industry leaders and the rapidly advancing open-weight ecosystem.

Apple Intelligence gains regulatory clearance for Chinese market
Startups & Technology

Apple Intelligence gains regulatory clearance for Chinese market

China’s Cyberspace Administration has granted Apple the regulatory green light to deploy its generative AI services, ending a period of uncertainty for the company’s software rollout. The move follows strategic agreements with domestic tech giants Alibaba and Baidu to integrate local language models into Apple’s operating systems.

Aina Secures $5.5M to Move Beyond Passive AI Recording
Startups & Technology

Aina Secures $5.5M to Move Beyond Passive AI Recording

Apoorv Shankar, the former hardware vice president at Ultrahuman, has secured $5.5 million in seed funding for Aina, a startup shifting the focus of AI hardware from passive data collection to active agency. The round, led by Redstart Labs and 360 ONE, aims to bridge the gap between human input and complex digital workflows.

Meta to Alert Parents Over Teen AI Chats Involving Self-Harm
Startups & Technology

Meta to Alert Parents Over Teen AI Chats Involving Self-Harm

Meta is introducing automated parental notifications when teenagers discuss suicide or self-harm with the company’s AI chatbot. The move signals a shift in how the tech giant handles crisis intervention, balancing user privacy against mounting pressure from regulators and families concerned about the safety of minors interacting with generative AI.

OnePlus Exits North American and European Markets
Startups & Technology

OnePlus Exits North American and European Markets

After thirteen years of global expansion, OnePlus is pulling its product lineup from North America and Europe. The manufacturer confirmed it will cease new hardware launches in these regions, marking a sharp pivot for the brand as it retreats to its home market in China amid broader industry instability.

Applied Computing secures $20 million to automate industrial plant AI
Startups & Technology

Applied Computing secures $20 million to automate industrial plant AI

London-based startup Applied Computing has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by engineering giant KBR to scale its industrial AI platform. The company aims to solve the industry-wide data fragmentation problem that currently leaves energy operators utilizing less than 8% of their available facility sensor information.

Lululemon Backs French Nylon Recycler Syntetica in $30M Round
Startups & Technology

Lululemon Backs French Nylon Recycler Syntetica in $30M Round

Nylon 6 and 6,6 have long been considered the intractable problem of textile waste, but French startup Syntetica believes it has found a chemical solution. The company just secured $30 million in Series A funding, backed by Lululemon, to scale a process that turns discarded apparel into reusable industrial pellets.

Greylock deliberately caps new fund at $1.5B to preserve hands-on model
Startups & Technology

Greylock deliberately caps new fund at $1.5B to preserve hands-on model

While competitors race to amass record-breaking capital, the 61-year-old Silicon Valley firm Greylock Ventures has intentionally capped its 18th fund at $1.5 billion. Partner Saam Motamedi admits the firm could have raised significantly more, but opted for restraint to maintain the high-touch support that defines its investment strategy.

Microsoft Pivots Sales Strategy to Disparage AI Rivals
Startups & Technology

Microsoft Pivots Sales Strategy to Disparage AI Rivals

Microsoft is sharpening its competitive edge, instructing its sales force to actively disparage products from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. During a recent internal strategy session, executives emphasized a shift toward proprietary models, marking a departure from the company’s long-standing reliance on its most prominent AI partners.

NTSB: Tesla driver hit accelerator fully before fatal house crash
Startups & Technology

NTSB: Tesla driver hit accelerator fully before fatal house crash

A 44-year-old driver pressed his Tesla's accelerator to 100% just before slamming into a Katy, Texas, home, according to a National Transportation Safety Board report. The high-speed collision killed 76-year-old resident Martha Avila, confirming that the vehicle's Full Self-Driving software was overridden by the driver's manual input.

SpaceX Stock Flirts With IPO Price Ahead of Starship Test
Startups & Technology

SpaceX Stock Flirts With IPO Price Ahead of Starship Test

SpaceX shares finished Wednesday at $135.27, narrowly clinging to the company's $135 IPO price. The stock spent much of the session trading below its debut value, marking a stark reversal from the post-launch highs that briefly saw the aerospace firm’s valuation rival tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft.

Neko Health Secures $700 Million to Expand Diagnostic Scanning
Startups & Technology

Neko Health Secures $700 Million to Expand Diagnostic Scanning

A $700 million Series C funding round has propelled Neko Health, the diagnostic startup co-founded by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, toward a major international expansion. This fresh capital infusion arrives just months after the company secured $260 million in January, signaling aggressive investor appetite for its proprietary body-scanning and blood-analysis technology.

OpenAI Enters Hardware Market With $230 Codex Keyboard
Startups & Technology

OpenAI Enters Hardware Market With $230 Codex Keyboard

OpenAI has officially stepped into the hardware arena with the launch of the Codex Micro, a $230 custom keyboard designed to serve as a physical command center for its AI coding agents. Developed alongside Work Louder, the device features specialized keys for monitoring agent status and adjusting real-time computational reasoning levels.

Microsoft Patches Remote Code Execution Flaw in Age of Empires II
Startups & Technology

Microsoft Patches Remote Code Execution Flaw in Age of Empires II

A custom game invite was all it took for an attacker to seize control of a victim's machine. Microsoft addressed the critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-50663, as part of a record-breaking patch cycle fueled by AI-assisted bug detection across its ecosystem of software and legacy titles.

Apple Maps Ads Set Strict Boundaries for Local Business
Startups & Technology

Apple Maps Ads Set Strict Boundaries for Local Business

Apple has quietly unveiled its advertising policy for Maps, opting for a curated model that explicitly bans home services—a core pillar of Google’s local ad business. By restricting categories like plumbing and electrical work, the iPhone maker is signaling a shift toward physical, visitor-centric storefronts rather than broad service-based lead generation.

Thinking Machines Challenges AI Giants with Open-Weight Inkling Model
Startups & Technology

Thinking Machines Challenges AI Giants with Open-Weight Inkling Model

Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has released Inkling, its first open-weight AI model. By allowing companies to download and customize the system, the firm is mounting a direct challenge to the one-size-fits-all approach championed by industry leaders like OpenAI and Google.

SpaceX shares dip below IPO price ahead of Starship test
Startups & Technology

SpaceX shares dip below IPO price ahead of Starship test

SpaceX shares slipped below the $135 mark on Wednesday, testing investor confidence just one month after the company’s massive $86 billion public debut. The drop marks a sharp retreat from the stock's post-IPO peak, which briefly pushed the aerospace giant’s valuation into the same tier as tech titans like Microsoft and Amazon.

OnePlus scales back Western operations amid global smartphone slump
Startups & Technology

OnePlus scales back Western operations amid global smartphone slump

OnePlus is reportedly shuttering its U.S. and European operations this week, signaling a sharp retreat as parent company Oppo grapples with cooling consumer demand. The move marks a significant shift for the brand, which rose to prominence in 2013 by targeting tech enthusiasts with affordable Android devices.

Google’s Arkansas Solar Bet Highlights Energy Divide in AI Sector
Startups & Technology

Google’s Arkansas Solar Bet Highlights Energy Divide in AI Sector

A mere 40 miles separates Google’s massive new solar-plus-battery project from the controversial, unpermitted natural gas turbines powering xAI’s data centers. While Google is staking its future on a 1.8-gigawatt renewable facility to offset its climate footprint, the industry remains deeply split on how to fuel the AI boom.

Suno Hack Reveals Massive Unauthorized Scraping of YouTube Audio
Startups & Technology

Suno Hack Reveals Massive Unauthorized Scraping of YouTube Audio

A security breach at Suno has exposed internal source code suggesting the AI music generator systematically scraped decades of audio from YouTube Music, Deezer, and various podcast feeds. The hacker, who bypassed employee credentials in a supply chain attack, claims the data was used to train the company's proprietary models.

Whatnot acquires machine learning startup Shaped to fuel live commerce
Startups & Technology

Whatnot acquires machine learning startup Shaped to fuel live commerce

To solve the volatility of live-streamed auctions where inventory shifts by the second, Whatnot has acquired Shaped, a machine learning firm specializing in real-time discovery. The deal brings a team of AI researchers to the platform, aiming to transform how millions of buyers navigate an ever-changing digital marketplace.

Microsoft Deploys Record 570 Security Patches Driven by AI Scanning
Startups & Technology

Microsoft Deploys Record 570 Security Patches Driven by AI Scanning

Microsoft issued a historic 570 security patches this week, a surge the company attributes to artificial intelligence tools capable of unearthing long-dormant code vulnerabilities. This massive release addresses critical flaws across Windows and Office, including two zero-day exploits currently being targeted by malicious actors in real-world attacks.

Apple Intelligence gains regulatory clearance for Chinese market debut
Startups & Technology

Apple Intelligence gains regulatory clearance for Chinese market debut

The Cyberspace Administration of China has granted approval for Apple Intelligence, clearing the path for the iPhone maker to deploy generative AI features across its ecosystem. The rollout relies on a strategic partnership with Alibaba, which will integrate its Qwen model into iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS.

Stripe and Advent mount $53.4 billion bid for PayPal
Startups & Technology

Stripe and Advent mount $53.4 billion bid for PayPal

Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have launched a joint $53.4 billion takeover bid for PayPal, according to reports. The proposal, backed by $50 billion in committed bank financing, would split ownership of the payments giant equally between the two firms should the acquisition proceed.

Spotify Extends Parental Controls to Free Tier Accounts
Startups & Technology

Spotify Extends Parental Controls to Free Tier Accounts

Parents in the U.S., U.K., Australia, France, Germany, and the Netherlands can now manage their children’s Spotify experience without a paid subscription. The streaming platform is opening its Managed Account feature to free-tier users, allowing for content restrictions and independent listening profiles that keep kids' habits separate from the main account.