Author: GT

Roughly one in three adults in the U.S. regularly gets insufficient sleep, driving demand for tools that can monitor, analyze, and enhance rest. Eight Sleep, founded in 2014, offers AI-powered sleep tech products that promise to transform your bed into a preventive health device. The New York-based startup announced Tuesday that it raised a fresh $100 million round from investors such as HSG, Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, and athletes including Ferrari F1 driver Charles Leclerc, and Zak Brown, who is the CEO of McLaren F1. With this round, Eight Sleep has raised roughly $260 million total, PitchBook…

Spotify is introducing a new feature that allows subscribers to create more professional, personalized playlists. On Tuesday, the company launched a custom transitions feature that lets you either automatically add transitions between a playlist’s tracks or customize your own using preset options like fade, rise, or blend, along with other options. To use the feature, open any playlist and select “Mix” from the toolbar to begin editing. While customizing the track with different transition styles, you can also adjust settings for things like volume, EQ, and effects, and use the waveform and beat data to find the best spot in…

Firecrawl’s co-founder and CEO Caleb Peffer knew the exact moment he found the investor to lead his Series A.  He was in a coffee meeting with Nexus Venture Partner’s Abhishek Sharma at the Blue Bottle in San Francisco’s South Park (a favorite VC haunt). While describing the future of the company, he was gesturing so animatedly that his chair tipped over.  “I actually fell out of my chair. And Abhishek, as a great investor does, caught the chair and me as I was falling,” Peffer described with a laugh. That felt like a symbol for how the founder/investor relationship is…

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday accused India of profiteering from cheap Russian oil imports during the war in Ukraine, describing the practice as “arbitrage” and condemning it as unacceptable.”They are just profiteering. They are reselling,” Bessent told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in an interview. “This is what I would call the Indian arbitrage — buying cheap Russian oil, reselling it as product.””They’ve made $16 billion in excess profits — some of the richest families in India,” Bessent said.India buys Russian oil at a discount due to sanctions, refines it into gasoline and diesel, and then sells the product back to…

Figure Technology, a 7-year-old blockchain-based lending company, on Monday filed for an IPO of its Class A common stock on Nasdaq, saying in its IPO paperwork that its revenue rose 22.4% to $191 million in the six months ended June 30, and that it reported a profit of $29 million in the same period, compared with a loss of $13 million a year earlier. The filing offers a chance at vindication for Figure co-founder Mike Cagney, who previously built SoFi before leaving the personal finance platform in 2017 following sexual harassment allegations. SoFi went public in 2021 via a special…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, pictured, speaks with SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son at an event in Tokyo on Feb. 3, 2025.Tomohiro Ohsumi | Getty Images News | Getty ImagesGPT-5 just launched. GPT-6 is already on the way.That’s the message OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivered to reporters in San Francisco last week, offering a rare glimpse into the company’s evolving product road map, as well as its missteps.Altman didn’t give a release date for his company’s next artificial intelligence model, but he made clear that GPT-6 will be different and that it will arrive faster than the gap between GPT-4 and…

Japanese conglomerate SoftBank has agreed to make a $2 billion investment in Intel in a deal described as a commitment to advanced technology and semiconductors in the United States. The agreement, in which SoftBank will buy Intel common stock, was announced Monday after markets closed. SoftBank will pay $23 per share of Intel common stock. Shares of Intel, which closed at $23.66, popped more than 5% in after-hours trading. SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son said in a statement that the “strategic investment reflects our belief that advanced semiconductor manufacturing and supply will further expand in the United States,…

Anxiety is growing among Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) in security operation centres, particularly around Chinese AI giant DeepSeek.AI was heralded as a new dawn for business efficiency and innovation, but for the people on the front lines of corporate defence, it’s casting some very long and dark shadows.Four in five (81%) UK CISOs believe the Chinese AI chatbot requires urgent regulation from the government. They fear that without swift intervention, the tool could become the catalyst for a full-scale national cyber crisis. This isn’t speculative unease; it’s a direct response to a technology whose data handling practices and potential for…

Key PointsThe U.S. government on Monday announced the U.K. would drop its demand for Apple to provide a “back door” to user data.The move represents a triumph for the iPhone maker and, more broadly, for end-to-end encryption.Tech companies say that building an encryption “back door” would not only undermine user privacy, but also expose them to possible cyberattacks.Apple clinched a major win Monday after the U.S. government announced that the U.K. had agreed to drop its demand for the company to provide a “back door” granting officials access to users’ encrypted data. The iPhone maker won’t be alone to rejoice…

OpenAI today launched a new, cheaper ChatGPT paid subscription plan in India called ChatGPT GO, priced at ₹399 per month ($4.60), which is more affordable than the ₹1,999 (about $23) per month Plus Plan. The company had turned on local currency pricing for all its plans a few days ago, and with this launch, it will also allow users to pay through UPI (Unified Payment Interface), India’s payment framework. Nick Turley, VP at OpenAI and head of ChatGPT, said that this plan will increase the message, image generation, and file uploads by 10 times over the free tier. The ChatGPT…