Technology

Kalshi hits $5B valuation days after rival Polymarket gets $2B NYSE backing at $8B

Kalshi hits $5B valuation days after rival Polymarket gets $2B NYSE backing at $8B

Kalshi, a prediction market that allows people to bet on future events, announced that it raised over $300 million at a $5 billion valuation. The company’s value has increased 2.5x since its last fundraise just three months ago, when it was valued at $2 billion. The fresh capital came from Kalshi’s existing investor, Sequoia Capital, with new investor Andreessen Horowitz co-leading the round. Paradigm Ventures, CapitalG, and Coinbase Ventures also participated. Kalshi also revealed that consumers in 140 countries can now make bets on its platform. The prediction market is seeing a dramatic surge in activity: Kalshi is set to reach…
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Why Deloitte is betting big on AI despite a $10M refund

Why Deloitte is betting big on AI despite a $10M refund

AI companies are making their much-anticipated enterprise plays, but the results are wildly inconsistent. Just this week, Deloitte announced it’s rolling out Anthropic’s Claude to all 500,000 employees. On the very same day, the Australian government forced Deloitte to refund a contract because their AI-generated report was riddled with fake citations. It’s a perfect snapshot of where we are: companies racing to adopt AI tools before they’ve figured out how to use them responsibly.  On this episode of Equity, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into the messy reality of AI in the workplace, plus funding news and…
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Best iPad apps for unleashing and exploring your creativity

Best iPad apps for unleashing and exploring your creativity

There are a number of iPad apps that can help you explore and express your creativity. Although the iPad started off as a simple device that could be used to stream content or browse the web on the go, Apple has essentially turned its iPads into powerful machines that can be used to do things like create digital art and edit videos. We’ve compiled a list of some of the best iPad apps for creativity that are available on the App Store.  Before we get into the list, it’s worth noting that although Adobe’s creative apps are often top choices…
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Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to advise Microsoft and Anthropic 

Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to advise Microsoft and Anthropic 

Rishi Sunak, who served as the United Kingdom’s prime minister from 2022 to 2024, has taken on senior advisory roles as Microsoft and Anthropic, The Guardian reports.   Letters from the Parliament’s office of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba) disclosing Sunak’s appointments revealed concerns that the ex-Conservative PM’s privileged information could “grant Microsoft an unfair advantage.”   Sunak has some history with Microsoft, which has several active contracts with British government departments. In 2023, he unveiled a £2.5 billion deal with Microsoft to invest in new data centers and training in the U.K.. Acoba also noted that “there is a reasonable concern that your appointment could be…
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Discord data breach affects at least 70,000 users

Discord data breach affects at least 70,000 users

Discord disclosed on Wednesday that around 70,000 users may have had sensitive data — like their government ID photos — exposed after hackers breached a third-party vendor that the platform uses for age-related appeals. A Discord user would make an “age-related appeal” if the platform suspects they may be underage, or if they live somewhere that requires identity verification for platform access. In those cases, users are asked to send a selfie holding their government ID and Discord username to the platform’s Trust & Safety team. Discord said it has contacted affected users, whose exposed data may also include their…
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Reflection AI raises $2B to be America’s open frontier AI lab, challenging DeepSeek

Reflection AI raises $2B to be America’s open frontier AI lab, challenging DeepSeek

Reflection AI, a startup founded just last year by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, a whopping 15x leap from its $545 million valuation just seven months ago. The company, which originally focused on autonomous coding agents, is now positioning itself as both an open source alternative to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Western equivalent to Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek. The startup was launched in March 2024 by Misha Laskin, who led reward modeling for DeepMind’s Gemini project, and Ioannis Antonoglou, who co-created AlphaGo, the AI system…
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While OpenAI races to build AI data centers, Nadella reminds us that Microsoft already has them

While OpenAI races to build AI data centers, Nadella reminds us that Microsoft already has them

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday tweeted a video of his company’s first deployed massive AI system — or AI “factory” as Nvidia likes to call them. He promised this is the “first of many” such Nvidia AI factories that will be deployed across Microsoft Azure’s global data centers to run OpenAI workloads. Each system is a cluster of more than 4,600 Nvidia GB300 rack computers sporting the much-in-demand Blackwell Ultra GPU chip and connected via Nvidia’s super-fast networking tech called InfiniBand. (Besides AI chips, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also had the foresight to corner the market on InfiniBand when…
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Flipkart’s Super.money quietly partners with troubled Juspay as it expands its reach

Flipkart’s Super.money quietly partners with troubled Juspay as it expands its reach

Super.money, a financial service platform spun off last year by Walmart-owned Flipkart, has quietly partnered with payments infrastructure firm Juspay as it expands into direct-to-consumer (D2C) checkout and targets $100 million in annual revenue by 2026. The partnership comes as Juspay works to rebuild momentum after facing pushback from major payment companies earlier this year — a dispute that complicated its fundraising efforts. Last week, Super.money launched its D2C checkout product, Super.money Breeze, which promises merchants a one-click checkout experience and aims to speed up online purchases by removing one-time passwords and repeated logins. The company did not disclose any…
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Andreessen Horowitz denies report of India office, calls it ‘fake news’

Andreessen Horowitz denies report of India office, calls it ‘fake news’

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has pushed back on local media reports suggesting it plans to open an office in India, with a general partner calling the coverage “entirely fake news.” Earlier on Thursday, Indian media outlets reported that a16z was preparing to establish a physical presence in the country by setting up an office in Bengaluru. The reports, which cited unnamed sources, also said the firm was in the process of hiring a local partner. However, Anish Acharya, a Bay Area-based general partner at a16z who has spent the last six years with the firm, dismissed the reports.…
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Stoke Space’s $510M round shows the future of launch belongs to defense

Stoke Space’s $510M round shows the future of launch belongs to defense

Stoke Space announced a massive capital raise on Wednesday that might seem, at first glance, like just another bet on the commercial launch market. The details tell a different story. Led by billionaire Thomas Tull’s U.S. Innovative Technology (USIT), a fund that explicitly invests in technologies tied to national security, the $510 million Series D round underscores a larger shift in the launch industry. The old assumption was the winners of launch would be the companies that capture the lion’s share of commercial payloads. While there is still demand on the commercial side from private constellation developers and for emerging…
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