Azerbaijan wants to become a tech hub as its startups raised $2.6m last year

Every petrostate eventually discovers that the oil will not last forever, and Azerbaijan has reached the stage of the story where the government starts talking about technology. Hydrocarbons once made [...]

Electric air taxis are drawing billions. E-scooters showed what comes next

Urban mobility startups burned through billions before cities forced a reckoning. Air taxis are following the same funding logic at a greater scale [...]

Riviera Partners acquires AI startup recruiter Lateral Labs as the talent war reshapes executive search

Riviera Partners, the Insight Partners-backed executive search firm that has placed technology leaders at companies including Uber, Snowflake, Figma, and Discord, is acquiring Lateral Labs, a recruiti [...]

Liquid AI's smallest model yet LFM2.5-230M beats models 4X its size at data extraction, can run 'anywhere'

Liquid AI, founded by former MIT computer scientists, today released its smallest AI language model yet, LFM2.5-230M, and enterprises would do well to consider it for their uses in data extraction and [...]

A Chinese AI startup is about to hit $1bn in sales while giving its best models away for free

One of China’s leading AI startups is closing in on a milestone the rest of the industry keeps missing. Z.ai, the company behind the GLM models, is set to become the first independent Chinese AI fir [...]

Meta reportedly wants to start a cloud computing business to compete with AWS, Azure and others

Facebook's parent company could be launching a new Meta Compute business to sell excess capacity to other hyperscalers and startups. [...]

Skello raises €200M and its founders end up owning more of the company

Most big funding rounds shrink the founders’ slice. Skello’s just grew it. The profitable French HR startup has raised €200m to go shopping across Europe. Paris-based Skello has raised €200m l [...]

Axos buys AI fintech Arc Technologies to bolt modern software onto a bank

Axos is buying Arc Technologies, an AI-native fintech that banks tech startups, and bolting its software onto a chartered bank. Axos Financial, a US digital bank with about $29bn in assets, has agreed [...]

Norm Ai raises $120M at a $1.2B valuation to build AI-native law

Most AI legal startups sell software to law firms. Norm Ai built its own firm instead, and investors just valued the bet at $1.2 billion. Norm Ai has raised $120 million in a Series C round that value [...]