Author: GT

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of stories to share from this week, like the greatest hits from Nvidia GTC; the NASA astronauts finally came home; Rippling’s lawsuit; and Google bought Wiz. Let’s get to it! Google finally does it: Google made its biggest acquisition in its history this week when it confirmed that it was buying Wiz for $32 billion. Google says it will position Wiz as a “multicloud” offering, meaning Wiz will not be a Google-only shop. Last year, Google offered Wiz $23 billion for its business. Guess it pays to say no sometimes.  Speaking…

Charlie Javice’s high-profile fraud trial has become a showcase of embarrassing missteps on both sides, with eyebrow-raising details about how JPMorgan Chase was allegedly deceived into buying her startup, Frank, for $175 million when it had just 300,000 customers instead of four million. Per a new WSJ article, one pivotal moment came when former Frank engineer Patrick Vovor testified that he refused Javice’s request to create fake user data just one week before the sale, recalling she said to him: “Don’t worry. I don’t want to end up in an orange jumpsuit.” When Vovor declined, Javice allegedly turned to a…

Google has reported the results of an experiment it ran which removed news from search results for 1% of users for 2.5 months in eight* markets in Europe — claiming the results show that news is essentially worthless to Google’s ad business. The search giant conducted the test because European copyright law requires it to pay news publishers for reusing snippets of their content. But how much is displaying news worth? Google argues that publishers “vastly overestimate” the value of their journalism to its business; per its report of the tests, the actual value “could not be statistically‬‭ distinguished from…

Operation Zero, a company that acquires and sells zero-days exclusively to the Russian government and local Russian companies, announced on Thursday that it’s looking for exploits for the popular messaging app Telegram, and is willing to offer up to $4 million for them. The exploit broker is offering up to $500,000 for a “one-click” remote code execution (RCE) exploit; up to $1.5 million for a zero-click RCE exploit; and up to $4 million for a “full chain” of exploits, presumably referring to a series of bugs that allow hackers to go from accessing a target’s Telegram account to their whole…

Commercial services tech hasn’t historically been considered “sexy,” but the need for innovation in the space is enormous. That need has translated into a large fundraise for a company focused on streamlining commercial contracting processes. On Friday, BuildOps, which develops software for commercial services contractors, announced that it has raised $127 million in a Series C round led by Meritech Capital that values the company at $1 billion post-money.  That valuation is “more than double” the valuation BuildOps reached in its last financing — a $50 million Series B round announced in May of 2023 and a follow-on “top up”…

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is looking to reset its relationship with the crypto industry, even before a permanent chair is confirmed by Congress. The latest effort was Friday’s roundtable, hosted at the SEC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. and featuring a dozen attorneys representing different views and positions within the crypto industry. You’re reading State of Crypto, a CoinDesk newsletter looking at the intersection of cryptocurrency and government. Click here to sign up for future editions. The SEC’s reset began when Acting Chair Mark Uyeda launched a crypto task force and oversaw his agency withdraw Staff Accounting Bulletin 121,…

It was on, then off, and welp, now it’s on again — and this time for a lot more money. Yep, the Equity podcast dug into Google’s $32 billion acquisition of cloud security startup Wiz. There was a lot to unpack: the why, the how, what it means. And of course, there was the “who wins” part. Sequoia takes home the VC prize for total payout. But another plucky VC out of Israel called Cyberstarts had the largest percentage win. Tune in to find out just how much, plus the crew’s other insights on the deal and the breakup fee…

Norwegian robotics startup 1X plans to start early tests of its humanoid robot, Neo Gamma, in “a few hundred to a few thousand” homes by the end of 2025, according to the company’s CEO, Bernt Børnich. “Neo Gamma is going into homes this year,” Børnich told TechCrunch in an interview at Nvidia GTC 2025. “We want to invite early adopters in this year to help us develop this system. We want it to live and learn among people, and to do that, we need people to take Neo into their home and help us teach it how to behave.” In…

Changes to the crypto market have been happening at warp speed in 2025. We’re only two months into the second presidency of Donald Trump, and we’ve already seen a scaling back of the Security and Exchange Commission’s crypto oversight power, the creation of a Strategic Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) Reserve, and a proliferation of executive orders related to digital assets. That’s just the start. There’s more that could be coming during the next 12 months. Here’s a brief overview of three key developments to watch and what they could mean for your crypto portfolio. Let’s start with the one development that’s…

In recent years, Meta has introduced many AI features and capabilities to its apps, even going so far as experimenting with AI-generated characters complete with unique profiles and personalities, before scrapping them after they were deemed creepy and unnecessary. In yet another move that may not be received well among users, Meta wants to use AI to facilitate interactions between friends by helping them write comments on Instagram. X user Jonah Manzano, who often tests new social media features, spotted a “Write with Meta AI” prompt on Instagram that allows people to get AI-generated suggestions for comments to users’ posts.…