Author: GT

Sequoia-backed fintech platform Aspora, which lets the Indian diaspora send money back to India, is launching a new feature for users to pay bills. This means non-resident Indians (NRIs) can pay utility bills or recharge their mobile prepaid plans for their family. The startup said that until now, users had to either transfer the money to their Indian accounts or ask someone to handle the bills for them. The other option for them was to use their foreign cards and try and pay bills while facing high charges and payment failures. Aspora has hooked up to the Bharat Bill Payment…

Swedish automaker Volvo has canceled a five-year-old contract with Luminar, the latest escalation in an increasingly ugly brawl between the lidar sensor company and its biggest customer. The fight is happening during an existential moment for Luminar. The company recently defaulted on several of its loans. While it’s working with those lenders on a resolution, Luminar has warned investors it may have to declare bankruptcy. To stave that off, Luminar recently laid off 25% of its staff and is trying to sell itself — or parts of itself — to potential buyers. One of them is Luminar founder Austin Russell,…

Networking giant Cisco has acquired EzDubs, a Y Combinator-backed consumer startup that provides real-time translation services. Cisco announced the acquisition over the weekend, but the company didn’t disclose the size of the deal. EzDubs was founded by Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, Amrutavarsh Kinagi, and Kareem Nassar in 2023. Notably, Nassar had previously worked at Cisco’s Speech AI group before co-founding the startup. The company raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Venture Highway, which was founded by Neeraj Arora, who was previously WhatsApp’s chief business officer. Other investors in EzDubs include Replit CEO Amjad Masad; Replit President Michele Catasta; Qasar Younis,…

On Monday, a new Model Context Protocol security startup called Runlayer launched out of stealth with $11 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois and Felicis.  It was created by third-time founder Andrew Berman (previous companies: baby-monitor maker Nanit and an AI video conferencing tool, Vowel, that sold to Zapier in 2024). In the four months since Runlayer launched its product in stealth, it has signed dozens of customers, including eight unicorns or public companies like Gusto, dbt Labs, Instacart, and Opendoor, it says. It also nabbed David Soria Parra, the lead creator of MCP, as an angel and…

Chip Somodevilla | Getty ImagesIn Google’s IPO prospectus 21 years ago, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin gave a flattering nod to Warren Buffett, suggesting in their letter to prospective investors that the billionaire investor was a big influence.They titled their founders’ letter, “‘An owner’s manual’ for Google’s shareholders,” and indicated that there was a footnote worth reading.”Much of this was inspired by Warren Buffett’s essays in his annual reports and his ‘An Owner’s Manual’ to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders,” the footnote said.More than two decades later, Buffett is showing that the admiration goes both ways. Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s holding company,…

Three years ago, Luminal co-founder Joe Fioti was working on chip design at Intel when he came to a realization. While he was working on making the best chips he could, the more important bottleneck was in software. “You can make the best hardware on earth, but if it’s hard for developers to use, they’re just not going to use it,” he told me. Now, he’s started a company that focuses entirely on that problem. On Monday, Luminal announced $5.3 million in seed funding, in a round led by Felicis Ventures with angel investment from Paul Graham, Guillermo Rauch, and…

Igor Golovnov | Lightrocket | Getty ImagesData center stocks took a major hit on Monday after Morgan Stanley downgraded seven hardware companies, including Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.The bank double-downgraded Dell from overweight to underweight and downgraded HPE from overweight to equal weight.Dell and HPE closed down 8% and 7%, respectively.HP Inc, Asustek and Pegatron were also downgraded from equal weight to underweight, while Gigabyte and Lenovo were lowered from equal weight to overweight. All companies saw shares dip as much as 6%.Morgan Stanley analysts wrote that computer makers are in the midst of an unprecedented pricing “supercycle,” as hyperscalers…

Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos seems to be getting his hands dirty once again: The billionaire is partly backing a new AI startup called Project Prometheus that has raised $6.2 billion in funding, and will take on duties as co-chief executive of the new venture, The New York Times reported, citing several sources familiar with the project. Bezos will share the position with Vik Bajaj, who previously led and co-founded Google’s life sciences division. Bajaj also co-founded Verily, a biotech startup owned by Alphabet, and is the co-founder of Foresite Labs, an AI-focused affiliate of investment firm Foresite Capital, though the…

If you pay attention to what the biggest tech companies are saying about AI demand, you’ll notice a common thread: they’re running short of compute capacity. That means the large language models underpinning AI products today need even more data centers to be trained and for inferencing, and therefore, they need more power. Against that backdrop, energy efficiency has suddenly become a critical priority for semiconductor manufacturers. PowerLattice, a startup founded by veteran electrical engineers from Qualcomm, NUVIA, and Intel in 2023, claims to have developed a groundbreaking approach that reduces the power needs of computer chips by more than…

DoorDash disclosed a data breach that exposed the personal information of an unspecified number of users, which included names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses. Despite the fact that hackers stole phone numbers and physical addresses, DoorDash said that “no sensitive information was accessed by the unauthorized third party and we have no indication the data has been misused for fraud or identity theft at this time.” DoorDash said in the post that the breach impacted a mix of customers, delivery workers, and merchants. The company did not respond to a request for comment, which included a question on…