Byju’s founder says his edtech startup, once worth $22B, is now ‘worth zero’
Byju Raveendran, the founder of the embattled edtech group Byju’s, acknowledged on Thursday afternoon that he made mistakes, mistimed the market, overestimated growth potential and that his startup, once valued at $22 billion, is now effectively worth “zero.” Speaking to a group of journalists, Raveendran said the company’s aggressive acquisition
Read moreThe surprising way OpenAI could reportedly get out of its pact with Microsoft
The New York Times on Thursday published a look at the “fraying” relationship between OpenAI and its investor, partner, and, increasingly, rival, Microsoft, reporting their five-year romance has cooled owing to financial pressure on OpenAI, the amount of computing power Microsoft is providing OpenAI, and disagreements between the two about
Read moreFormer watch trader is now building the AWS of grid storage, Terralyr
The startup's technology is a twist on the virtual power plant concept, in which batteries are aggregated and portions of the whole are sold off to various customers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Read moreFormer watch trader is now building the AWS of grid storage, Terralayr
The startup's technology is a twist on the virtual power plant concept, in which batteries are aggregated and portions of the whole are sold off to various customers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Read moreAmazon indicates employees can quit if they don’t like its return-to-office mandate
AWS CEO Matt Garman has harsh words for remote workers: return to the office or quit. The Amazon executive recently told employees who don’t like the new five-day in-person work policy that, “there are other companies around,” presumably companies they can work for remotely, Reuters reported on Thursday. Amazon’s top
Read moreAutomattic offered employees another chance to quit — this time with nine months’ severance
Days after 159 people accepted Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg’s offer of a six-month severance package to employees who wanted to leave, the company floated a new offer late on October 16 of a nine-month severance package to anybody who quit immediately. Employees had four hours to decide whether they wanted
Read moreGeneral Catalyst reportedly to back Saudi Arabian startup
Despite Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights abuses, some investors are warming up to investing in the country’s startups. General Catalyst is planning to invest in Lean Technology, a Saudi Arabia-based fintech startup, the firm’s first investment in the Middle Eastern nation, the Information reported. Other Saudi Arabian startups that
Read moreStripe in talks to acquire Bridge for $1 billion
Stripe is in talks to acquire stablecoin platform Bridge for a whopping $1 billion, according to Forbes. The talks are reportedly in advanced stages, although nothing has been finalized. Bridge, cofounded by Coinbase alumni Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, has built an API that helps companies accept stablecoins. The pair
Read moreActivision says it’s fixed an anti-cheat hack in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone
Image: Activision Activision says it has “disabled a workaround to a detection system” in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone that led to legitimate players getting banned by the Ricochet anti-cheat system. The company says the problem “impacted a small number of legitimate player accounts,” and all accounts
Read moreElon Musk’s X is changing its privacy policy to allow third parties to train AI on your posts
On Wednesday, social network X (formerly Twitter) updated its Privacy Policy to indicate that it would allow third-party “collaborators” to train their AI models on X data, unless users opt out. While X owner Elon Musk trained xAI’s Grok AI chatbot on X user data, leading to an investigation by
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