Reading List

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

Source: Databricks obtained $1.8B in fresh debt and now has over $7B in debt ahead of a potential IPO; it raised $4B+ in December at a $134B valuation (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

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Source: Binance considers reintroducing stock tokens after removing them in 2021; OKX, Kraken, Bitget, and others are expanding their tokenized stock offerings (Yueqi Yang/The Information)

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Source: smart ring maker Oura plans a tender offer for early investors at a 25% discount to its $11B valuation from Series E, aiming to stay private longer (Bloomberg)

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Meta says it is temporarily pausing teens' access to its AI characters globally across all its apps as it develops a new version of AI characters (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Mews, which makes AI-powered hospitality management software, raised a $300M Series D led by EQT Growth at a $2.5B valuation (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

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Cubby, which makes software for self-storage operators, raised a $63M Series A led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

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Source: by the end of 2025, Claude Code's ARR had grown by at least another $100M from the $1B announced in November, making up 12% of Anthropic's total ARR (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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Sources: Ledger is working with banks on a US IPO that could value the French cryptocurrency company at more than $4B; it was valued at $1.5B in 2023 (Financial Times)

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Booz Allen Hamilton commits $400M to a16z's newest set of funds, for which a16z raised $15B+ in January; this is Booz Allen's first LP stake in any VC fund (Lucinda Shen/Axios)

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R&D firm Merkle, which sold Farcaster, says it plans to repay VCs the $180M they invested in the social media project, and says Farcaster is not shutting down (Suvashree Ghosh/Bloomberg)

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Sources: China has told Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance that they can prepare orders for Nvidia's H200 chips, suggesting Beijing is close to approving imports (Bloomberg)

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How Chinese tech companies navigate geopolitical tensions: TikTok and Manus adopted a "China shedding" strategy, while Shein and Meituan seek non-US growth (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times)

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Sources: UBS plans to make cryptocurrency investing available for some private banking clients in Switzerland, starting with bitcoin and ether (Bloomberg)

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Google invests an undisclosed sum in Sakana AI, valued at $2.6B in November 2025, to boost Gemini's presence in Japan; Sakana AI gains access to Google's LLMs (Min-Jeong Lee/Bloomberg)

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Malaysia lifted its temporary ban on Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot after xAI added safety measures; Grok remains subject to continuous monitoring by authorities (Anisah Shukry/Bloomberg)

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Anthropic details how it had to redesign its take-home test for hiring performance engineers as Claude kept defeating it, and releases the original test (Anthropic)

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Sources: Revolut scrapped plans to buy a US lender and will instead apply for a US banking license, betting Trump's lighter touch on approvals will be faster (Financial Times)

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How Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are testing AI models by having them play Pokémon Blue on Twitch to track a model's ability to reason and make decisions (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

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Bengaluru-based digital payments startup Juspay raised $50M, in a mix of primary and secondary investments, from WestBridge Capital at a $1.2B valuation (The Economic Times)

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Sam Altman says OpenAI added more than $1B in annual recurring revenue in the past month "just from our API business" (Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider)

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