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Resolve AI, a startup developing Autonomous Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), a tool to automatically maintain software systems, has raised a Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to three people familiar with the deal. The maximum valuation for the new round is $1 billion, the people said. However, the company’s actual blend valuation was lower due to the multiple transient structure. In this setup, investors bought some shares at a $1 billion valuation, but acquired the rest (possibly a larger percentage of the round) at a lower price. This novel investment approach is popular with some of the hottest…
Building in a regulated industry adds a huge hurdle to the already difficult journey of building a startup. And this week on Build Mode, Startup Battlefield editor Isabel Johannessen speaks with two founders who are trying to make progress in an industry ripe for disruption, despite regulatory issues that may have deterred many others. In this episode, we talk about life and death and how regulatory approvals don’t have to stifle innovation, but they do extend timelines and require careful planning from the beginning. Isabel joins Gabriel Sanchez, CEO and co-founder of Enspectra Health, for the first time. The company…
Cursor, an AI coding assistant, announced it has acquired Graphite, a startup that uses AI to review and debug code. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Axios reported that Cursor paid “well above” Graphite’s final valuation of $290 million. This valuation was set when the five-year-old company raised $52 million in Series B funding earlier this year. This partnership makes strategic sense. The code output generated by AI is buggy, requiring engineers to spend a lot of time fixing it. While Cursor offers AI-powered code reviews through its Bugbot product, Graphite’s specialized toolset provides a unique feature called…
The Delaware Supreme Court has reinstated Elon Musk’s $56 billion Tesla compensation package from 2018, overturning a ruling last year by the state’s Treasury Court, according to an opinion released Friday. In a unanimous decision, the Delaware Supreme Court justices said that canceling Musk’s package “denies him compensation for six years of his time and effort.” Considering Tesla’s current stock price, which hit an all-time high this week, the revived package would be worth about $140 billion, according to Bloomberg. The state Supreme Court’s decision is likely to end a years-long battle that left a very bad taste in Musk’s…
Anonymous messaging app NGL announced Friday that it has been acquired by Mode Mobile, a smartphone points company that makes money by bombarding users with ads. NGL quickly climbed the App Store charts after its release in late 2021, joining a group of similar apps popular with teens that allow users to send and receive anonymous questions and messages. However, most of its existence has been mired in controversy. Anonymous messaging apps are problematic because they can encourage bullying among teenagers. Snapchat banned third-party apps like NGL, LMK, Sendit, and YOLO from its platform in 2022 after a parent sued…
Cisco said Wednesday that a group of hackers backed by the Chinese government is exploiting vulnerabilities to target enterprise customers using its most popular products. Cisco has not said how many customers have already been hacked or may be running vulnerable systems. Security researchers now say there are hundreds of Cisco customers who could be hacked. Piotr Kijevsky, CEO of the Shadow Server Foundation, a nonprofit organization that scans and monitors the internet for hacking activity, told TechCrunch that the scale of the exposure “looks like it’s in the hundreds, not thousands or tens of thousands.” Kijewski said the foundation…
Renowned AI scientist Yann LeCun admitted Thursday that he has launched a new startup, the worst-kept secret in the tech world, but said he has no intention of running the new company as CEO. His startup is called Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) and has hired Alex LeBrun, co-founder and CEO of medical transcription AI startup Darling Nabla, as its CEO. Mr. Nabla revealed Mr. LeBlanc’s new job in a press release, and Mr. LeCun confirmed it in a short post on LinkedIn. “Yes, AMI Labs is my new startup. I’m the executive chairman. And Alex LeBrun is transitioning from CEO…
When you listen to a podcast, you probably don’t have the Netflix app open, at least for now. If Netflix has its way, that may change. In addition to its recent deal with Spotify, the streamer also signed deals this week with iHeartMedia and Barstool Sports, giving it exclusive video rights to some shows. The company is also rumored to be in talks with SiriusXM. Podcasters see this as an aggressive move aimed primarily at YouTube. And the data provides a compelling argument. According to YouTube, viewers will listen to more than 700 million hours of podcasts each month on…
December 19, 2025Ravi LakshmananCyber security/cloud security A group believed to be affiliated with Russia is believed to be behind a phishing campaign that uses device code authentication workflows to steal victims’ Microsoft 365 credentials and conduct account takeover attacks. This activity, which has been ongoing since September 2025, is tracked by Proofpoint under the name UNK_AcademicFlare. This attack involves attacks on organizations within the government, think tanks, higher education, and transportation sectors in the United States and Europe using compromised email addresses belonging to government and military organizations. “Typically, these compromised email addresses are used for innocuous activities and rapport…
Celeste Amadon and Asher Allen were working on an app that uses AI to book restaurant reservations for dates when they came up with a bigger idea: encouraging people to meet up in person. And now it’s gaining attention among investors. The two created a voice-powered AI onboarding system for apps that lets users learn more about users without having to fill out forms. What they found: People like to talk, which is why app onboarding sessions are an average of 26 minutes longer. Thus, San Francisco-based dating startup Known was born. “We think this is the first time we’ve…