The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Bending Spoons, which owns Vimeo and AOL, closed up 40% in its US market debut on Wednesday at a $25.7B valuation, after raising $1.68B in its IPO (Bloomberg) [10d]
• Higharc, which uses AI to assist house builders in design and construction, raised a $95M Series C led by Insight Partners, bringing its total funding to $170M+ (Lauren Ohnesorge/Triangle Business ...) [10d]
• Lime's shares closed up 4% in its Nasdaq debut on Wednesday, valuing the company at ~$1.7B, after Lime and existing stockholders raised ~$174M in its US IPO (Reuters) [10d]
• Sources: Apple is working on new iPad Pros and an entry-level 14" MacBook Pro with a new design in line with the upcoming touch-screen laptops for H1 2027 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [10d]
• Alibaba and its US payment processor AUS agree to pay $600M to resolve DOJ allegations that they failed to prevent illegal sales of drugs and other products (Reuters) [10d]
• Sources: SoftBank has reopened talks for a $10B loan backed by its OpenAI stake and is offering to guarantee repayment if OpenAI collateral proves insufficient (Echo Wang/Reuters) [10d]
• Alex Karp calls US reliance on AI labs for military tech "effing insane", pans AI fees for businesses, and touts Palantir's Nvidia Nemotron deal for US agencies (Ty Roush/Forbes) [10d]
• Sources: SpaceX showed investors a handset-like device prototype with AI tech from xAI, a proprietary OS, a Snapdragon chip, and a design slimmer than an iPhone (Wall Street Journal) [10d]
• Sources: Microsoft has been working on a disc-to-digital feature for Xbox One and Xbox Series X that will let users digitize their physical game collections (Tom Warren/The Verge) [10d]
• Venice AI, which offers access to 200+ AI models while allowing users to retain their privacy, raised a $65M Series A led by Dragonfly at a $1B valuation (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch) [10d]
• Meta names Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz as its first-ever chief data officer, to manage AI analytics across the company; Denise Moreno is named CMO (Sara Fischer/Axios) [10d]
• Uber dismissed two leaders at its AI data labeling business as part of a broader leadership transition at the unit, which it says is "seeing strong momentum" (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [10d]
• B2B sales workspace startup Aligned raised a $60M Series B led by PeakSpan Capital, taking its total funding to $73.8M, and says it has 1,000+ customers (Chris Metinko/Axios) [10d]
• Oxmiq, which aims to combine GPUs, CPUs, and a tensor engine into a single block of IP that it can license, raised $35M led by Samsung Catalyst Fund and Fudomo (Max A. Cherney/Reuters) [10d]
• Abu Dhabi-based MGX raised a $49B AI-focused fund, exceeding its $45B target, and plans to spend as much as $10B annually over the next few years (Dinesh Nair/Bloomberg) [11d]
• Letter: the US says Anthropic "agreed to proactively detect and address security risks" of Fable 5 and Mythos 5; a source says Anthropic developed a "safeguard" (Financial Times) [11d]
• Sony says it is closing the virtual PlayStation 3 store in select markets in 2026 ahead of global store closures for the PS3 and PS Vita in July 2027 (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) [11d]
• Sources: Meta is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business that will sell access to AI computing power and models, to compete with AWS and Azure (Bloomberg) [11d]
• A researcher says a vulnerability in Apple's Hide My Email tool lets anyone discover a real email address; first reported in June 2025, Apple is yet to fix it (Joseph Cox/404 Media) [11d]
• Taiwanese authorities detain two Super Micro staff and an Albatron manager after a raid of Super Micro's local offices this week over Nvidia shipments to China (Bloomberg) [11d]
• Sony says all new PlayStation games from both first- and third-party developers will be sold in digital formats from January 2028, ending physical game discs (Stephen Totilo/Game File) [11d]
• Stockholm's Patent and Market Court orders Google to pay nearly $2B to Klarna's PriceRunner in a dispute over abuse of power in the shopping comparison market (Bloomberg) [11d]
• Twelve Labs, which is building AI models to make video searchable and understandable, raised a $100M Series B co-led by NEA and Naver, and signs an AWS deal (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg) [11d]