All posts tagged: In Brief

Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery to become Skydance

Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery to become Skydance

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery will operate as Skydance once their merger closes, Paramount CEO David Ellison announced Friday. Skydance is the name of Ellison’s original film production company. The roughly $110 billion deal is expected to close October 6. It will combine two major Hollywood studios, Paramount+ and HBO Max, and networks including CBS, CNN, MTV, TBS, Comedy Central, and Food Network. Skydance will also control franchises such as “The Lord of the Rings,” “Game of Thrones,” the DC Universe, and “Yellowstone.” The merger followed a drawn-out corporate battle. Netflix had agreed to acquire Warner Bros.’ streaming and studio businesses before the broader Paramount deal moved forward. Twelve states challenged the deal, arguing it could reduce competition and harm consumers and workers, but a judge approved a settlement with the state attorneys general this week. Ellison said the Paramount and Warner Bros. brands will remain central. “We never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one,” he wrote on X. The new name, he said, gives the company “an identity …

Valor, Atreides, and Sequoia back AI startup Flow Engineering at 0M valuation

Valor, Atreides, and Sequoia back AI startup Flow Engineering at $750M valuation

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Flow Engineering, a startup that offers AI tools for hardware design, has raised a $50 million Series B round at a $750 million valuation from some big-name investors, the company announced on Wednesday. The round was co-led by Antonio Gracias of Valar Equity Partners (best known for its investments in Elon Musk’s companies, particularly SpaceX) and Gavin Baker of Atreides Management (a hedge fund that has also backed Musk’s companies and others like AI chipmaker Cerebras). Sequoia Capital, which led Flow’s Series A round last October, also participated, as did former Sequoia partner Roelof Botha, who invested as an individual investor. Botha has joined Flow’s board, too. Three-year-old, San Francisco-based Flow is tackling the difficulties of hardware design by offering AI agents that automatically align CAD drawings with product requirements, simulation results, and other testing. It names Anduril, Rivian, Joby Aviation, General Motors PPU (a joint venture between General Motors and TWG Motorsports), RV Tech (a Rivian and Volkswagen joint venture), Stoke Space, and others, as customers. Source link

Ahead of US IPO, British AI neocloud Nscale secures .36B in convertible financing

Ahead of US IPO, British AI neocloud Nscale secures $3.36B in convertible financing

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Nscale, a British neocloud, has secured $3.36 billion in financing ahead of its IPO later this year, the company announced on Friday. Structured as a convertible note, the massive funding round underscores the staggering capital required to build out AI data centers. Led by hedge fund Third Point, the new investment includes $2.36 billion available to the company immediately and an additional $1 billion coming from existing investor Nvidia, which Nscale will receive in mid-November. The notes will convert into equity shares once the IPO is completed. Nscale, which filed its IPO paperwork last week, is expected to be valued at $35 billion on the NYSE, Financial Times reported, and is seeking to raise $3 billion in the offering, according to Bloomberg. Since it was spun out of Australian cryptocurrency mining company Arkon Energy two years ago, Nscale has amassed over $103 billion worth of contracts, according to its IPO filing. The company is currently developing several large data center campuses, including in Norway and West Virginia.    Source link

Automattic names interim CFO after exec departures

Automattic names interim CFO after exec departures

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Automattic has a new interim chief financial officer: Jeremy Klaperman, the CFO of the company’s WordPress VIP Enterprise business unit. The news, shared internally on Friday, follows last week’s attempted ouster of Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, which ultimately resulted in the departure of the board members who voted him out and other executives, including then-CFO Mark Davies. Davies was briefly interim CEO before Mullenweg retook the position. In a Slack post, Mullenweg shared that Klaperman had previously acted as Automattic CFO when Davies had been on sabbatical. He noted that the board — whose new members have yet to be announced — will still need to evaluate internal and external candidates for the position before a final decision is made. In addition, Mullenweg said in the post that a candidate to become the company’s chief legal officer had also just verbally accepted the position, replacing Chief Legal Officer Andy Missan, who has also since left the company alongside Davies. TechCrunch recently reported that Davies and Missan had signed reciprocal severance deals during Mullenweg’s 33-hour leave …

Y Combinator insurance tech alum Angle Health hits .7B valuation

Y Combinator insurance tech alum Angle Health hits $2.7B valuation

Published by Miika Tikkanen

These days, it’s rare to hear of a startup founded in 2019, or one not focused on AI agents, raising a hefty Series C. But health insurance startup Angle Health announced Friday that it raised a $200 million Series C, alongside a $400 million tender offer, at a $2.7 billion valuation. The round was led by Vitruvian Partners with participation from Town Hall Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Portage Ventures, PruVen Capital, and Y Combinator. The tender offer allows employees to cash out some of their shares, the company told TechCrunch. It expects the round to close later this month. Angle Health, a winter 2020 YC alum, helps small businesses obtain and manage what’s known as “level-funded health plans.” These are plans that land between fully insured and self-funded plans. In fully insured plans, the carrier takes all the risks; such plans are more expensive but costs are predictable. With self-funded plans, the company covers the expenses and costs can be unpredictable. With level-funded plans, businesses make predictable payments to carriers, are insured against higher-than-expected costs, and …

Kimi-maker Moonshot AI targets B in annual revenue

Kimi-maker Moonshot AI targets $2B in annual revenue

Published by Miika Tikkanen

One of China’s most prominent AI labs, Moonshot AI, believes it can turn its popular open-weight model into serious sales growth. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that the lab is targeting $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, double the company’s reported revenue run rate for August. It’s an aggressive goal that reflects the success of the company’s K3 model since its release this summer. While K3’s usage figures have declined slightly in recent months, OpenRouter data currently shows as many as 300 billion tokens being generated each day by K3 models on the system. Moonshot’s projected revenue is still dwarfed by that of OpenAI and Anthropic, which recent reports put at $40 billion and $65 billion, respectively. Because Moonshot’s model weights are freely available, the company has far lower margins than its closed-weight competitors. The rising projections show there’s still money to be made from open-weight AI models, even if they’re not as lucrative as closed-weight frontier models. Still, Moonshot’s model development practices remain controversial — if not downright illegal. Earlier …

AI compute provider Nscale is looking for .5B in pre-IPO financing

AI compute provider Nscale is looking for $3.5B in pre-IPO financing

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Nscale, a British AI infrastructure company founded just two years ago, has said it may go public as early as later this month. Ahead of that expected IPO, the company is reportedly in talks to raise an additional $3.5 billion. Bloomberg reported Friday that the company is looking to sell $1.5 billion in convertible notes — a type of loan that can later convert into company stock — to a group of investors, while also seeking an additional $2 billion in financing from Nvidia. Nvidia also participated in the firm’s Series B funding round in March, a $1.1 billion raise led by investment fund Aker. Nscale hailed its round as “the largest Series B in European history.” The company’s Series A round, in December of 2024, raised $155 million. TechCrunch reached out to Nscale and Nvidia for comment. AI infrastructure startups have seen immense growth amid the current era of AI enthusiasm, wherein compute has become a competitive currency. Nscale recently signed a large deal with Anthropic worth approximately $45 billion. Earlier this week, reports …

AfterQuery reportedly becomes Y Combinator’s fastest-ever unicorn, now valued at .2B

AfterQuery reportedly becomes Y Combinator’s fastest-ever unicorn, now valued at $3.2B

Published by Miika Tikkanen

AI training-data startup AfterQuery has reportedly raised a round that valued it at $3.2 billion. This just five months after announcing its $30 million Series A at a $300 million valuation in April. That’s more than a 10x increase in less than half a year and, according to Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer, the fastest that any startup has gone from launch to unicorn status in the accelerator’s history. AfterQuery’s founders, today 22 and 23 years old, attended Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 cohort, just 18 months ago. In April, the San Francisco startup said it had reached an annualized revenue run rate of $100 million and that it was working with many of the biggest labs. It has named companies such as Nvidia, Legora, and the Korean AI lab Motif Technologies as customers. AfterQuery is among the new crop of startups following in the footsteps of Mercor and Scale that employ knowledge professionals like doctors, lawyers, and other specialists to do model training. However, rather than ensuring that models answer questions accurately, AfterQuery trains models and …

Rillet raises 0M Series C at B valuation — 2 years after emerging from stealth

Rillet raises $100M Series C at $1B valuation — 2 years after emerging from stealth

Published by Miika Tikkanen

AI accounting startup Rillet announced a $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation on Tuesday, led by Iconiq. Returning investors included Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. Rillet, which emerged from stealth in 2024, is quickly becoming one of the hottest AI startups in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) industry.  The company’s platform deploys AI to help finance professionals manage a company’s books. It says it can, for instance, automatically and continuously pull data from sources like Salesforce or Brex. Rillet touts more than 600 companies as customers and says it has doubled its ARR in the past three months. Nicolas Kopp, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said on X that this latest round came together in “less than 48 hours.” The company wasn’t planning to raise, he said, but interest grew because so much had happened since its last round, like an alliance with EY and the jump in ARR and customers.   “A year ago, we backed a bold vision for Rillet: that the general ledger could become more than a system of record …

TikTok explores peer-to-peer payments via DMs, report says

TikTok explores peer-to-peer payments via DMs, report says

Published by Miika Tikkanen

TikTok is developing a feature that would allow users to send each other money via direct messages, according to a new report from Bloomberg. If rolled out, the feature would use the social media service’s TikTok Pay offering, which is already available in Southeast Asia for TikTok Shop purchases. References to the potential feature were found in code hidden within the current version of TikTok’s U.S. iPhone app, according to the report. The code indicates that recipients would be able to “tap to accept” payments, while senders could include messages with their payments, similar to Venmo. TikTok told Bloomberg that the feature is not being tested, which suggests that it’s in early development. Given that the feature is still under development, it’s unknown when or if TikTok plans to widely release peer-to-peer payments. TikTok did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time TikTok has tried to push further into financial services. Reuters reported earlier this year that TikTok had applied to Brazil’s central bank for …