Author: GT

Cooling towers at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown, Pennsylvania, Oct. 30, 2024.Danielle DeVries | CNBCNuclear power will receive most of the money from the Energy Department’s loan office as the Trump administration pushes to quickly break ground on new reactors, Secretary Chris Wright said on Monday.”We have significant lending authority at the loan program office,” the Secretary of Energy said at a conference hosted by the American Nuclear Society in Washington D.C. “By far the biggest use of those dollars will be for nuclear power plants — to get those first plants built.”President Trump signed an…

For more than a decade, makers of government spyware have defended themselves from criticism by saying that their surveillance technology is intended to be used only against serious criminals and terrorists, and only in limited cases.   The evidence gathered from dozens, if not hundreds of documented instances of spyware abuse all over the world, however, shows that neither of those arguments are true.   Journalists, human rights activists, and politicians have repeatedly been targeted in both repressive regimes and democratic countries. The latest example is a political consultant who works for left-wing politicians in Italy, who came out as the most…

The United States is facing a shortage of TNT, a high explosive that is essential to the manufacturing of commercial explosives products, like cast boosters, which are commonly used in the mining and construction industries, according to the Institute of Makers of Explosives, or IME.”Everything from your cellphone to your laptop to the roads you drive on to work, the homes you live in, just about everything you use on a daily basis started from commercial explosives,” said IME President Clark Mica.The United States has depended on foreign suppliers of TNT since the mid-1980s, when the last domestic TNT facility…

A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar electric vehicle sits parked at an EVgo charging station in Los Angeles, California, on May 15, 2024.Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty ImagesWaymo has tapped Google executive Steve Fieler as its new chief financial officer, the self-driving company announced on Monday.The new CFO comes as the Alphabet-owned company has been bringing its robotaxi service to more markets in the past year, with plans for further expansion in 2026. Fieler’s appointment also comes as Waymo looks toward its next phase, which could include seeking additional outside investment.”Steve’s extensive experience will be instrumental in guiding us…

Autonomous vehicles are having a moment, and it’s making it a lot easier for smaller companies to raise money. Vay, a German startup offering remote-controlled rental cars, will get $60 million in cash from Singaporean tech heavyweight Grab, the company announced on Monday. The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval and expected to close by the end of the year, may be followed by “an additional $350M as joint milestones are achieved within the first year,” Vay CEO Thomas von der Ohe wrote on LinkedIn. The Berlin-based startup uses its technology and human operators to remotely drive rental cars…

Isaiah Taylor, CEO, Valar Atomics speaks onstage during the Reindustrialize Conference 2025 on July 16, 2025 in Detroit, Michigan.Tasos Katopodis | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty ImagesAdvanced nuclear reactor developer Valar Atomics raised $130 million in its latest funding round with backing from Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey and Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, the startup said Monday.The fundraising was led by venture capital firms Snowpoint Ventures, Day One Ventures and Dream Ventures. Lockheed Martin board member and former AT&T executive John Donovan also participated. Valar’s total fundraising now totals more than $150 million, according to the company.Doug Philippone,…

Lenskart shares recovered after a soft start to finish slightly above the offer price on Monday, following the Indian eyewear retailer’s ₹72.8 billion ($821 million) IPO that sold out within hours but stirred debate over its valuation. The stock opened at ₹395, below the IPO price of ₹402, and fell as much as 11% to ₹356.10 during the session before recovering to close at ₹404.55. The closing price valued Lenskart at about ₹702 billion (around $8 billion). The IPO was heavily oversubscribed with bids coming in at about 28 times the shares available, led primarily by institutional investors. Lenskart’s pitch…

After helping several enterprises document how work actually happens, Scribe has raised $75 million at a $1.3 billion post-money valuation to roll out Scribe Optimize, a platform that maps workflows across the enterprise to reveal where automation and AI will actually yield returns — instead of becoming another sunk cost. The all-equity Series C round was led by StepStone, with participation from existing investors Amplify Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Tiger Global, Morado Ventures, and New York Life Ventures. The new funding comes over a year after Scribe raised its $25 million Series B, capital the five-year-old startup has largely not needed…

Ofer Shacham is CEO of Majestic Labs.Tal GivonyThree former Meta and Google silicon executives on Monday announced they’ve raised a total of $100 million to build technology they say will reduce cloud companies’ spend on data center buildouts.Called Majestic Labs, the startup’s co-founders are Ofer Shacham, Sha Rabii and Masumi Reynders, all of whom spent years working together leading silicon products at Meta and Google. Majestic’s patent-pending silicon design architecture includes 1,000 times the memory of a typical enterprise-grade server, the co-founders told CNBC.Majestic develops its entire chip system, much like Nvidia, but each of the startup’s servers may replace…

Although LLM-powered AI agents are a fairly new phenomenon, one of the areas where they’ve been most popular so far is in sales. 1Mind, a startup co-founded by Amanda Kahlow, has been quietly shipping its sales agent, named Mindy, for about a year.   On Monday, the startup announced a $30 million Series A round led by Battery Ventures. This brings 1Mind’s total raise to $40 million, the company says.  Kahlow is well known in the sales and marketing tech world as the founder and former CEO of 6Sense. It was launched in 2013 as a lead-generation tool that tracked signals across social media and other sites to identify potential customers. She left in 2020. While the sales agent market is already crowded, 1Mind, and…