Days after a rival Chinese lab shook Silicon Valley, Alibaba has fired back. The company previewed Qwen3.8, its most powerful model yet, and made a bold claim: it trails only one model on Earth. Alibaba unveiled the model at the World Artificial Intell…
Founders eagerly bought into the promise of autonomous agents over the past year, and software usage skyrocketed across the industry as teams rushed to adopt the latest tools. Despite this massive investment in new technology, sales pipelines remained …
AI agents can now book travel, write code and spend money on your behalf. That power is also the problem. A new startup called Runta has raised $20 million to keep those agents from doing damage. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the round, which values R…
A French startup has raised $30 million to tackle one of fashion’s hardest waste problems. Syntetica recycles nylon, and it can process two grades at once that the industry has long struggled to pull apart, its founder told TechCrunch. The Ecotechnolog…
Fora, a platform that lets ordinary people become travel agents and gives travellers a way to find them, has raised a $60m Series D at a $1bn valuation led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures. It has 15,000+ advisors (97% new to the profession) who have…
Volkswagen’s autonomous mobility subsidiary Moia has begun offering rides in self-driving ID Buzz vans to preregistered residents in Hamburg, marking the first time a major European automaker has launched an autonomous passenger service on its home con…
S&P downgraded Oracle to BBB- on July 9, placing the company one notch above junk status, as a $250 billion data-centre expansion plan burns through cash faster than revenue can replace it. Oracle is now the second-largest non-financial debt issuer…
GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen dismissed the decline of physical video game sales as “totally, totally irrelevant” to the company’s business in an interview on Bloomberg TV on Thursday. Cohen was responding to Sony’s announcement earlier this month that it wi…
Visa launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform on Thursday, a new infrastructure product that lets banks and payment processors issue, manage, and settle stablecoin transactions through Visa’s network. The platform launches with native support for Open USD…
Verizon is cutting about 3,000 employees from its corporate-owned retail stores and transferring 274 locations to independent operators, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. The changes take effect on August 16 and will leave the largest US mobile carrier w…