Author: GT

When Fizz quietly debuted in Saudi Arabia in the middle of March, founder and CEO Teddy Solomon wasn’t expecting the app to catch on like it did. Within 48 hours, the app hit No. 1 overall on the App Store charts, and users in the country have since sent more than 1 million messages. For an anonymous social app that started on college campuses, it was a surprising debut. Solomon and his co-founder, Ashton Cofer, started Fizz in 2022 while they were students at Stanford, before dropping out. After raising $40 million and launching on 700 campuses, the app has…

Lucid Group finished 2025 on an upswing — building twice as many EVs as the previous year and reporting a 55% uptick in sales. Then the first quarter of 2026 arrived. The company, which makes the Air sedan and Gravity SUV, reported Friday that it sold 3,093 vehicles in the first quarter, a 42% drop from the previous quarter and about 0.5% lower than the same period last year. It had built many more, about 5,500 in total. Lucid said the sales dip, and the gap between production and deliveries, is not a demand problem. Instead, the company blames a…

Glen Anderson has been brokering trades in private company shares since 2010, back when the number of institutional investors focused on the late-stage private market could be counted on two hands. Today, he says, there are thousands. As president of the investment bank Rainmaker Securities, whose focus includes private securities markets — it facilitates transactions in roughly 1,000 stocks — Anderson has a front-row seat to one of the most nail-biting moments in the history of the secondary market. And right now, he suggests, the narrative has three main characters: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX. But the storyline is more complicated…

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Nasdaq brought its market open festivities to Apple’s sprawling Silicon Valley headquarters on Tuesday, the eve of the company’s 50th birthday. From a desk inside Apple Park, the ring-shaped campus that Steve Jobs spent his last years helping design, Tim Cook rang the opening bell and, in the process, ushered in the iPhone maker’s second half-century.It was a celebratory occasion, but one arriving at a pivotal point for an iconic American company that faces major challenges today and in the years ahead as the technology industry gets swept up by artificial intelligence. Prior to the AI boom,…

London-based hardware company Nothing is on track to release a pair of smart glasses next year, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources. The glasses will likely feature cameras, microphones, and speakers, and will connect to a smartphone and the cloud to process AI queries, the report said. CEO and co-founder Carl Pei was initially resistant to the idea of smart glasses, but he has since told employees that he wants to focus on a multi-device strategy, expanding the company’s remit beyond its existing smartphone lines and audio gear, Bloomberg said. The company is also planning to release a pair of earbuds…

All good things come to those who wait. The first StrictlyVC of the year is headed to San Francisco in less than a month, on April 30, at the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center. And you won’t want to miss out on another lineup of stellar speakers to punctuate the night’s networking and mingling. AI innovators and founders in search of funding will be particularly well-served by the event’s discussions. Who’s taking the stage You can get a ticket right now, but for those who haven’t been to a StrictlyVC event in the past and already clicked that link, let’s dive…

American toy-making giant Hasbro has confirmed a cyberattack, and the company says it may take “several weeks” before the incident is resolved. The owner of properties including Transformers, Peppa Pig, and Dungeons & Dragons said in a legally required disclosure with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday that it detected an intrusion on March 28, which prompted the company to take down some of its systems. Hasbro said it has implemented and continues to roll out business continuity plans to allow it to “take orders, ship product and conduct other key operations while it resolves this situation.” Parts…

SpaceX, the technology conglomerate founded by Elon Musk, reportedly filed disclosures confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of an initial public offering. SpaceX could seek a valuation of $1.75 trillion, according to Bloomberg, which cited anonymous sources. Under SEC rules, a private company can file its IPO registration statement confidentially 15 days before it begins marketing its shares to public investors, allowing it to receive feedback from the agency in private. The company has also lined up an unusually large number of 21 banks to manage the mega IPO, internally codenamed “Project Apex,” Reuters reported Tuesday. The…

Fidji Simo, chief executive officer of Instacart Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Studio 1.0 interview in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Thursday, March 3, 2022.David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesFidji Simo, OpenAI’s product and business chief, announced several leadership changes on Friday and revealed she is taking a significant medical leave because of a worsening neuroimmune condition.OpenAI hired Simo in May, and her condition, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, or POTS, relapsed a few weeks before she started in the role. She told staffers in a memo on Friday that the past month has been “particularly rough health-wise,” and…

The most advanced silicon chips have accelerated the development of artificial intelligence. Now can AI return the favor? Cognichip is building a deep learning model to work alongside engineers as they design new computer chips. The problem it is trying to solve is one the industry has lived with for decades: Chip design is enormously complex, ruinously expensive, and slow. Advanced chips take three to five years to go from conception to mass production; the design phase alone can take as long as two years before physical layout begins. Consider that the latest line of Nvidia GPUs, Blackwell, contains 104…