Bending Spoons is buying Airtable for $1.285bn: “We’re committed for the long run”
Bending Spoons is buying Airtable for $1.285bn: “We’re committed for the long run”

Bending Spoons has agreed to buy Airtable for $1.285bn. Its chief executive is selling the deal as a long-term bet. “Airtable is a pioneering brand reshaping how teams organize data and manage critical workflows,” said Luca Ferrari, the Italian company…

Yellow.ai is going public to buy the call centres it wants to replace with AI
Yellow.ai is going public to buy the call centres it wants to replace with AI

Most AI companies want to sell software to call centres. Yellow.ai wants to buy the call centres. The enterprise-AI firm has agreed to go public through a merger with a blank-cheque company. It plans to spend much of the money acquiring the outsourcing…

Nscale owns the power and the data centres. For ~$1.65bn, it just bought the software too.
Nscale owns the power and the data centres. For ~$1.65bn, it just bought the software too.

Nscale, the London AI-cloud company that owns its own power and data centres, is buying its way up the stack. It has agreed to acquire Anyscale, the startup behind the widely used Ray software. Bloomberg reported the deal at about $1.65bn. Nscale annou…

Procore’s AI could read the blueprints. For $845M, it just bought eyes on the site.
Procore’s AI could read the blueprints. For $845M, it just bought eyes on the site.

Procore’s AI can read a construction project’s paperwork. Now it is paying $845m to give that AI eyes on the actual site. The construction-software company said it will buy DroneDeploy, a reality-capture and robotics firm, for about $845m in cash, Proc…

IBM just bought a quantum bet it doesn’t build. Days later, the payoff hit Nature.
IBM just bought a quantum bet it doesn’t build. Days later, the payoff hit Nature.

Six days ago, IBM agreed to buy a quantum-computing lab that builds a kind of qubit IBM does not. This week, the lab showed the world why. HRL Laboratories published a result in Nature on Wednesday: a silicon quantum processor that, in effect, runs its…

AI agents don’t log in like people. That problem just sold for $1bn.
AI agents don’t log in like people. That problem just sold for $1bn.

Every AI agent a company switches on needs an identity to log in and reach data. Enterprises now run millions of them, with almost no way to keep track. That gap just sold for $1bn. The data-security firm Cyera has agreed to buy Oasis Security for arou…

BuzzFeed bet on AI to save it. It just cut another third of its staff.
BuzzFeed bet on AI to save it. It just cut another third of its staff.

BuzzFeed bet on AI to rescue itself. This week it laid off another third of its staff. The bet, it turns out, was never the thing that could save it. The company cut about 180 jobs on Monday, roughly a third of its remaining workforce, the New York Tim…

PayPal turned down $53bn, and pointed to a beat and a $70 target
PayPal turned down $53bn, and pointed to a beat and a $70 target

PayPal finally addressed the $53bn offer sitting on its table. Its answer was: not at that price. The company gave its first public response on Tuesday’s Q2 earnings call, alongside a beat. Chief executive Enrique Lores would not comment on Stripe and …

The Italian state just backed €500m for the company that owns AOL
The Italian state just backed €500m for the company that owns AOL

Bending Spoons has agreed a €500m loan facility guaranteed by the Italian state. The guarantee comes from SACE, Italy’s export credit agency, which is wholly owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. HSBC Continental Europe, Intesa Sanpaolo and BPE…

Friendsurance invented peer-to-peer insurance. It just sold for its paperwork.
Friendsurance invented peer-to-peer insurance. It just sold for its paperwork.

Cover Genius has acquired Friendsurance, the Berlin company that invented peer-to-peer insurance. The deal took effect immediately, and neither side disclosed a price. Friendsurance built its name on a simple idea. Small groups of policyholders pool to…