The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources: Amazon is in talks to acquire Globalstar to bolster its low Earth orbit satellite business; Apple's 20% stake in Globalstar is a complicating factor (Financial Times) [30d]
Solana-based DeFi platform Drift warns users about an "active attack" on its protocol; Arkham data said over $250M had moved from Drift to an interim wallet (Helene Braun/CoinDesk) [30d]
Cognichip, which is building an AI model for chip design, raised a $60M Series A led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from new board member Lip-Bu Tan (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [30d]
Sources: the FBI has declared a recent China-linked hack of a system, which contained pen register and trap and trace surveillance returns, a "major incident" (John Sakellariadis/Politico) [30d]
Franklin Templeton agrees to acquire CoinFund spinoff 250 Digital to form Franklin Crypto, which will offer strategies designed for institutional investors (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal) [30d]
Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan Liaw pleads not guilty to US federal charges of helping smuggle billions of dollars' worth of Nvidia-powered servers to China (Bob Van Voris/Bloomberg) [30d]
Raspberry Pi raises prices by $11.25 to $150 citing memory prices, after hikes in December and February, and unveils a 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 model for $83.75 (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge) [30d]
Sona, which uses AI to help companies with scheduling, HR, payroll, and other workflows, raised a $45M Series B led by N47, bringing its total funding to $100M+ (Chris Metinko/Axios) [30d]
Sources: Paradigm, a major investor in Kalshi, is building its own prediction markets trading terminal that will cater to professional traders and market makers (Ben Weiss/Fortune) [30d]
Sources: OpenRouter is in talks to raise $120M led by CapitalG at a $1.3B post-money valuation; it now has $50M+ in annualized revenue, up from $10M+ in Oct. (The Information) [30d]
Sources: SpaceX has filed confidentially for an IPO, putting it on track for a June listing; it could reportedly seek a valuation of $1.75T+ and raise ~$75B (Bloomberg) [30d]
Source: AWS' operation in Bahrain was damaged after an Iranian strike; Bahrain earlier said the civil defence force was "extinguishing a fire in a facility" (Financial Times) [30d]
SEC filing: Hasbro confirms a cyberattack and says it may take "several weeks" before the incident is resolved, after detecting an intrusion on March 28 (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) [30d]
Secondary share marketplaces say OpenAI shares have fallen out of favor, in some cases becoming difficult to unload, as investors pivot quickly to Anthropic (Hema Parmar/Bloomberg) [30d]
Anthropic's Claude Code leak reveals its "Kairos" updates, including letting Claude work in the background and using a "dream mode" to consolidate its memories (The Information) [30d]
US kid safety groups say they didn't know OpenAI had entirely funded the Parents & Kids Safe AI Coalition to promote CA legislation until after it was announced (Emily Shugerman/The San Francisco ...) [30d]
Sources: Amazon's "sponsored prompts" for its Rufus AI assistant are yielding significantly lower traffic than traditional ads, but are more cost-effective (Catherine Perloff/The Information) [30d]
Intel agrees to pay $14.2B to repurchase Apollo's 49% stake in the Fab 34 joint venture in Leixlip, Ireland, and plans to issue $6.5B in new debt to fund it (Ian King/Bloomberg) [30d]
India says foreign investment gains made before 2017 are exempt from its General Anti-Avoidance Rules, after a court required Tiger to pay $1.6B on a 2018 sale (Reuters) [30d]
Anthropic is racing to contain the fallout after accidentally leaking Claude Code source code, issuing copyright takedown requests to remove 8,000+ copies (Sam Schechner/Wall Street Journal) [30d]
Global VC investment hit a record $297B in Q1 2026, up 150% YoY, with AI startups capturing 81% of the funding; just four companies raised 64% of the total (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News) [30d]
Austin-based Coder, which helps developers build and run code from local devices to the cloud, raised a $90M Series C led by KKR, after raising $35M in 2024 (Julia Hornstein/The Information) [30d]
How a small German state's bid to replace Microsoft with open-source alternatives like Linux and Kamailio faces issues, as the EU pushes "digital sovereignty" (Laura Pitel/Financial Times) [30d]
Sources: amid the Iran war, Asian bankers say rising power prices and energy security are becoming a bigger consideration in data center financing decisions (Bloomberg) [30d]
As Apple turns 50, a look at how a management course in postwar Japan paved the way for Steve Jobs' obsession with quality and its dominance in the iPhone era (Patrick McGee/Financial Times) [31d]
Microsoft says it is on track to invest $5.5B in cloud and AI infrastructure in Singapore through 2029, after announcing plans to invest $1B+ in Thailand (Kimberley Kao/Wall Street Journal) [31d]
Malta is opposing EU plans to centralize crypto supervision under ESMA, seeing it as a politically motivated assault on its success in attracting crypto firms (Laura Noonan/Bloomberg) [31d]
South Korean trade data: chip shipments hit a record-high value of $32.83B in March 2026, up 151.4% YoY, pushing total exports to a record $86.13B, up 48.3% YoY (Steven Borowiec/Nikkei Asia) [31d]
The jury verdicts against Meta and YouTube recognized some platform design features as defective, distinct from what Section 230 was created to protect (Casey Newton/Platformer) [31d]
A profile of Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority Chairman Bilal Bin Saqib, who has used crypto diplomacy to help Pakistan win over President Trump (Faseeh Mangi/Bloomberg) [31d]
An interview with Galen Buckwalter, a BCI recipient in a Caltech brain implant study, on his recent ability to use the implant to produce musical tones (Emily Mullin/Wired) [31d]
Analysis: half of Asia's 10 most volatile stocks are recent AI IPOs, including China's Moore Threads and MiniMax, driven by thin institutional ownership (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg) [31d]
OpenAI says it is generating $2B in monthly revenue, with enterprise accounting for 40%+ of it, and is on track to reach parity with consumer by the end of 2026 (OpenAI) [31d]
A suspected system failure caused a number of Baidu robotaxis to stop across Wuhan, trapping passengers and reportedly causing traffic disruptions and crashes (Zeyi Yang/Wired) [31d]
Grab, in partnership with WeRide, launches a robotaxi service in Singapore, becoming Southeast Asia's first ride-hailing provider to offer a driverless service (Bloomberg) [31d]
The European Union's main institutions have banned staff from using fully AI-generated videos and images in official communications (Pieter Haeck/Politico) [31d]
Perplexity faces a proposed class action lawsuit alleging it shared users' personal data with Meta and Google even in Incognito mode, violating CA privacy laws (Robert Burnson/Bloomberg) [31d]
Apple says it will push out rare "backported" patches for iOS 18 to protect users from DarkSword, a hack that silently takes over iPhones running the older OS (Andy Greenberg/Wired) [31d]
Mercor confirmed it was affected by a recent supply chain attack involving LiteLLM; hacker group Lapsus$ claims it accessed and stole Mercor's data (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [31d]
Kestra, an open-source workflow orchestration startup, raised a $25M Series A led by RTP Global, as Kestra looks to expand its go-to-market strategy (Chris Metinko/Axios) [31d]
Depthfirst, which aims to build a "general security intelligence" for finding and fixing company vulnerabilities, raised an $80M Series B at a $580M valuation (Thomas Brewster/Forbes) [31d]
Source: Google plans to release a screenless Fitbit band later this year; it will include basic features and require a paid subscription for more functionality (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg) [31d]