The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Ciridae, which is developing AI to streamline back-office operations for real-economy businesses, raised a $20M seed led by Accel, with a16z participating (Jack Kubinec/Fortune) [58d]
Source: Shein is acquiring US DTC brand Everlane from its majority owner, L Catterton, in a $100M deal; Everlane sought funding to clear ~$90M in debt (Lauren Sherman/Puck) [58d]
Analysis: 34 leading AI startups are generating ~$80B in annualized revenue, up 112% from six months ago, with Anthropic and OpenAI capturing 89% of the revenue (The Information) [58d]
Grafana says hackers have accessed its GitHub environment and demanded a ransom to prevent the release of its codebase; Grafana refused to pay (The Hacker News) [58d]
Analysis: mass adoption of smartphones and social media may be a primary driver of declining birthrates globally, in part by reducing in-person socializing (John Burn-Murdoch/Financial Times) [58d]
Publicis agrees to acquire LiveRamp, which allows companies to share and build new data sets and models that can power agentic frameworks, for $2.2B in cash (Alison Weissbrot/Adweek) [58d]
Sources: DayOne, the spinoff of China's largest data center operator GDS Holdings, plans dual IPO in Singapore and NY, seeking to raise $5B at a ~$20B valuation (Owen Walker/Financial Times) [58d]
Sources: Apple's revamped Siri may launch in beta, and will have an option to auto-delete chats; Apple plans to add Suggested Genmoji to iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [58d]
Developers say Chinese AI labs lead US rivals in video generation, as ByteDance and Kuaishou train models on vast short-form video libraries from their own apps (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times) [58d]