Author: GT

CANNES — Ten years ago, Vitalik Buterin and a small band of developers huddled in a drafty Berlin loft strung with dangling lightbulbs, laptops balanced on mismatched chairs and chipped tables. They weren’t corporate titans or venture-backed founders — just idealists working long nights to push a radical idea into reality.From that sparse office, they launched “Frontier,” Ethereum’s first live network. It was bare-bones — no interface, no polish, nothing user-friendly. But it could mine, execute smart contracts, and let developers test decentralized applications. It was the spark that transformed Ethereum from an abstract concept into a living, breathing system.Bitcoin…

Applied AI research company Fundamental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera) announced today that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Prosus with participation from Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison. The company has a curious structure, as it is working on multiple AI applications in different fields. When it raised its seed funding, Fundamental Research Labs was developing bots that could play Minecraft with you. Today, the company has a games team, a prosumer team building apps, a core research team, and a platform team. The startup’s founder, Dr. Robert Yang, a former faculty member…

Weeks after the revelation that Google paid Windsurf $2.4 billion to license its technology, while simultaneously hiring away its CEO and top talent, the deal’s implications are still rattling some founders and startup employees across Silicon Valley. Google’s payment to the startup was effectively split in two equal parts, according to two people familiar with the deal. Investors’ portion was $1.2 billion.  The other half was in the form of compensation packages for approximately 40 Windsurf employees hired by the tech giant with a substantial portion of that $1.2 billion going to the startup’s co-founders, Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen,…

Solar energy is booming across the U.S. and, for the first time, Florida is catching up to industry powerhouses Texas and California.Despite removing climate change from its official state policy in 2024, Florida added more utility-scale solar than California last year, with over 3 gigawatts of new capacity coming online. “This is not a fluke,” said Sylvia Leyva Martinez, senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie. “Florida is now shaping national solar growth.”The surge is being driven by utilities, not rooftop panels. Florida Power & Light alone built over 70% of the state’s new solar last year. A state rule lets developers skip…

Meta is still going all-in on the AI talent war, with Mark Zuckerberg reportedly reaching out to top recruits himself, throwing around jaw-dropping compensation packages that top $1 billion over multiple years. And Meta’s latest target? Mira Murati’s new startup, Thinking Machines Lab. It’s a bold play in an already overheated market. While Zuck eyes new talent, Anthropic is preparing to raise a massive round of its own at a staggering $170 billion valuation, nearly tripling its worth in just months. On paper, it looks like the AI cash floodgates are wide open. But all this endless money raises some…

Nintendo is raising the prices of its original Nintendo Switch game consoles, the company announced on Friday. The price increases, which are taking effect on August 3, are due to “market conditions,” Nintendo says. The company’s reference to “market conditions” likely hints at President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The affected products include the Nintendo Switch — OLED Model, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch Lite, and select Nintendo Switch accessories. Other Nintendo products, including certain Nintendo Switch 2 accessories, select amiibo, and the Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo, will also see price increases. It’s not yet clear what the new prices will be. Currently,…

Google has backed STAN, an Indian social gaming platform that connects gamers with creators, communities, and publishers. Google’s investment comes as part of an $8.5 million equity funding round, which also saw investment from Japanese gaming giants Bandai Namco Entertainment, Square Enix, and Reazon Holdings. Aptos Labs and King River Capital, as well as existing backers General Catalyst and GFR Fund, also participated. Google joined the round via its AI Futures Fund, which launched in May to support startups building with its AI tools. STAN, headquartered in Singapore, is trying to position itself as a gaming community platform to rival…

A jury in federal court in Miami has found Tesla partly to blame for a fatal 2019 crash that involved the use of the company’s Autopilot driver assistance system. The jury assessed punitive damages only against Tesla, CNBC reported. The punitive fines coupled with a compensatory damages puts the total payments to around $242.5 million. Neither the driver of the car nor the Autopilot system braked in time to avoid going through an intersection, where the car struck an SUV and killed a pedestrian. The jury assigned the driver two-thirds of the blame, and attributed one-third to Tesla. (The driver…

Even while the tech industry is still fanning its face over Figma’s hot IPO on Thursday, another significant tech IPO occurred this week: Ambiq Micro. On Wednesday, the chip maker for wearable devices saw its shares climb from the initial price of $24 to over $42 on Friday. There’s one thing both companies have in common: Kleiner Perkins was a major investor. So it’s been a very good week for the venerable venture firm. Just for fun, we’ve calculated the value of Kleiner Perkins’ stake in each company. Kleiner sold 1,346,499 shares of Figma at the IPO price of $33,…

CRV has secured $750 million toward the 55-year-old venture firm’s twentieth flagship fund, it announced on Friday. The new fund is smaller than the $1 billion early-stage fund CRV closed in the fall of 2022. At that time, the firm also announced a $500 million second Select fund, a capital pool for backing late-stage rounds of existing portfolio companies. It’s no surprise that CRV is not raising a late-stage fund as part of its new fundraise. Last year, the firm told The New York Times it was returning $275 million from its $500 million Select fund to investors. The firm…