The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Sources: PayPal is separating Venmo into its own standalone unit and is looking to recruit a digital banking executive to run the new Venmo segment (Hugh Son/CNBC) [28m]
• SpaceX's draft IPO filing: from 2023 to 2025, Starlink's individual subscribers rose from 2.3M to 8.9M, revenue grew from $3.9B to $11.4B, and ARPU fell 18% (The Information) [1h]
• Pursuit, which uses AI to scan public data to help companies find and win government contracts, raised a $22M seed led by OpenGov co-founder Mike Rosengarten (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) [2h]
• OpenLight, which designs custom application-specific photonic chips, raised $50M in a Series A extension, after raising $34M in August 2025 (Charlotte Trueman/DatacenterDynamics) [2h]
• Sources: Apple plans a new Siri camera mode in iOS 27 by moving Visual Intelligence, currently tied to the Camera Control button, into the camera app (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [2h]
• Motorola unveils its 2026 foldables lineup, including its first book-style model, which costs $1,900; prices for clamshell models have gone up by up to $200 (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [3h]
• Scout AI, which is building an AI model to operate and command military assets like autonomous ATVs, raised a $100M Series A co-led by Align and Draper (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [3h]
• Seven families of victims in the Tumbler Ridge shooting in Canada sue OpenAI, accusing it of failing to warn authorities about the suspect's ChatGPT activity (Clare Duffy/CNN) [4h]
• Aidoc, which provides AI medical imaging software to flag incidental findings on CT scans and X-rays, raised a $150M Series E, taking its total funding to $520M (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) [4h]
• Uber partners with Expedia to launch a hotel booking integration in its app in the US, and plans to add Expedia's Vrbo brand later in 2026 (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [4h]
• SpaceX IPO filing: Elon Musk can only be removed as CEO via a vote by holders of Class B super-voting shares, which he will control post-IPO, a rare provision (Reuters) [4h]
• Crypto payments company MoonPay acquires Israeli crypto security startup Sodot, sources say in a $100M all-stock deal, to launch a unit focused on institutions (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg) [6h]
• Brookfield-backed Compass drops plans to develop 800+ acres in Virginia's 2,100-acre Digital Gateway data center corridor, sources say due to local opposition (Dawn Lim/Bloomberg) [6h]
• Divine, a Vine reboot financed by Jack Dorsey-backed nonprofit and Other Stuff and built by an early Twitter staffer, launches with ~500K restored Vine videos (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [6h]
• Google celebrates 20 years of Translate with a new AI pronunciation practice tool for Android users in the US and India; Translate gets 1B+ queries per month (Macy Meyer/CNET) [6h]
• Rogo, which uses AI to help lighten junior bankers' workloads, raised a $160M Series D led by Kleiner Perkins at a $2B valuation, up from $750M in January (Todd Gillespie/Bloomberg) [7h]
• Sources: OpenAI has, in practice, abandoned its Stargate JV in favor of large bilateral deals; execs say its guiding principle remains to "build more compute" (Financial Times) [8h]
• Hightouch, which uses AI to help marketers create and manage campaigns, raised $150M led by Goldman Sachs and Bain at a $2.75B valuation, up from $1.2B in 2025 (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal) [8h]
• Mayo Clinic researchers detail an AI system called Redmod that identified pancreatic cancer on routine CT scans an average of 475 days before clinical diagnosis (Jason Gale/Bloomberg) [8h]
• A working paper uses an LLM to analyze political discourse on X, finding that anger is the dominant emotion expressed by US users, especially those over 65 (Tim Harford/Financial Times) [8h]
• How Chinese regulators killed Manus by blocking Meta's $2B takeover in a 54-character decree, creating an uncertain era for the country's expanding AI industry (Bloomberg) [8h]
• Cognizant agrees to acquire Astreya, which helps manage data center infrastructure, AI lab environments, and enterprise networks, for ~$600M, set to close in Q2 (Reuters) [8h]
• Indonesia sentences eFishery founder Gibran Huzaifah to nine years in prison, concluding a $300M scandal that destroyed one of Southeast Asia's top startups (Bloomberg) [9h]
• Cash-rich AI startups fuel a boom in Manhattan's commercial real-estate market; many offices have more vacant desks than workers, as startups prepare to scale (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal) [9h]
• Knight Frank: Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies have leased 1M+ square feet of London office space since the start of 2025, or ~7% of all lettings (Natasha Voase/Bloomberg) [9h]
• Samsung's Lee family dynasty reached a combined ~$45.5B net worth in March, up from ~$20.1B in 2025, amid the AI boom; they are now Asia's third-richest family (Bloomberg) [9h]
• YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says YouTube TV is getting "fully customizable" multiview, letting users pin up to four live streams, after a limited rollout in 2023 (Jay Peters/The Verge) [9h]
• Source: China's leverage against Meta in the Manus deal could include 10%+ of its global revenue from Chinese ads and Goertek in Meta AI glasses' supply chain (Financial Times) [10h]
• Bengaluru-based stock trading platform Sahi raised a $33M Series B led by Accel at a $200M valuation to expand into margin trade funding, commodities, and more (The Economic Times) [10h]
• The European Commission issues preliminary DSA findings against Meta, saying Instagram and Facebook fail to prevent under-13 users from accessing the services (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg) [11h]
• Poll: 31% of US adults expect driverless cars to be common within five years, up from 19% in 2018, and 19% say they would own or lease one, the same as in 2018 (Mary Page James/Gallup) [11h]