Natalie Lung / Bloomberg:
Uber agrees to acquire Berlin-based chauffeur booking app Blacklane for an undisclosed sum to bolster its Uber Elite service, set to close by the end of 2026  —  Uber Technologies Inc. has acquired the chauffeur booking app Blacklane, the company's latest move to court a high-end clientele.

Jared Spataro / Microsoft 365 Blog:
Microsoft rolls out Copilot Cowork to its Frontier program for early-stage testing, including a new Researcher Critique tool using Anthropic and OpenAI models  —  Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI for work.  It's built on a multi-model advantage—bringing the best AI innovation from across …

Lucas Ropek / TechCrunch:
AI chip startup Rebellions raised $400M in a pre-IPO round at a $2.34B valuation, bringing its total funding to $850M, with $650M in the past six months  —  Fresh off a successful Series C funding round in November, the South Korean fabless AI chip startup Rebellions has raised an additional $400 million.

Kate Park / TechCrunch:
New York-based Qodo, which offers AI agents for code review, testing, and governance, raised a $70M Series B led by Qumra, taking its total funding to $120M  —  As AI coding tools generate billions of lines of code each month, a new bottleneck is emerging: ensuring that software works as intended.

Natalie Lung / Bloomberg:
OpenAI's ChatGPT app store now has 300+ app integrations six months after its launch, but faces sluggish adoption due to limited functionality for many apps  —  Six months in, ChatGPT's third-party apps offer limited functionality and have been frustrating for developers.