Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

PE firm Everstone combines India's Wingify, which helps A/B test sites, and France's AB Tasty, which improves e-commerce UX; Everstone bought Wingify for $200M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Techmeme

French accounting software startup Pennylane raised $204M led by TCV, a source says at a ~$4.25B valuation, with participation from Blackstone, DST, and others (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

A look at South Korea's Independent AI Foundation Model competition, which aims to find the best homegrown AI models, in a bid to compete with the US and China (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Sources: ByteDance boosts its cloud via more sales hires and lower prices; IDC: ByteDance had 13% of China's AI cloud market in H1 2025, behind Alibaba's 23% (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

Techmeme

Pune-based supply chain robotics startup Unbox Robotics raised a $28M Series B in a mix of primary and secondary capital, after raising $15M in earlier rounds (Anjali Jain/Inc42)

Techmeme

xAI faces a growing outcry from global regulators over Grok's generation of nonconsensual explicit photos, but has faced little regulatory action in the US (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Anthropic details the "Assistant Axis", a pattern of neural activity in language models that governs their default identity and helpful behavior (Anthropic)

Techmeme

The UK Treasury committee says the government and Bank of England's "wait-and-see approach" to AI risks in the financial sector poses "serious harm" to the UK (Kalyeena Makortoff/The Guardian)

Techmeme

Cursor's recent experiment involved running hundreds of AI agents for nearly a week to build a web browser, writing 1M+ lines of code across 1,000 files (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

Techmeme

The UK launches a consultation on whether to ban under-16s from using social media, alongside restrictions on addictive app features like infinite scrolling (Kiran Stacey/The Guardian)

Techmeme

Q&A with Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan on the use of AI in game development, the gaming community's pushback against AI, partnering with Grok, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

Techmeme

Anthropic's Claude Cowork launch revives investor fears about disruption that weighed on SaaS stocks in 2025; Morgan Stanley's SaaS index is down 15% YTD (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

The UK government plans to take a £25M stake in Octopus Energy's tech spin-off Kraken, last valued at $8.65B, in an effort to encourage Kraken to list in London (Financial Times)

Techmeme

Sources: Seoul-based AI chip designer FuriosaAI seeks to raise a $300M to $500M Series D to fund mass production of its second-gen RNGD chip and eyes a 2027 IPO (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

The UK Gambling Commission says Meta is letting illegal gambling sites advertise on Facebook and Instagram, calling its ad library a "window into criminality" (Olivia Solon/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

OpenAI executive Chris Lehane says the startup is "on track" to unveil its first device in H2 2026; reports suggest it won't have a screen and may be a wearable (Axios)

Techmeme

Taiwanese media: Asus Chair Jonney Shih says the company won't release any new smartphones in 2026, which may signal the brand's exit from the Android market (James Peckham/PCMag)

Techmeme

Sources: internal Google data shows Gemini API calls surged from ~35B in March 2025 to ~85B in August 2025; Google says Gemini Enterprise has hit 8M subscribers (Erin Woo/The Information)

Techmeme

The NYSE plans to use its tech that matches buyers and sellers, plus blockchain networks, to facilitate the real-time trading of tokenized securities in 2026 (Katherine Doherty/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

How a16z found success with 2024's $1.25B AI infrastructure fund, focusing on early funding and the largest investments at ~$60M, as it expands the fund to $3B (Bloomberg)

Techmeme