Reading List

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

Memo: TikTok CEO Shou Chew hailed the establishment of the TikTok USDS JV as "great news", and said the app is used by 200M US users and 7.5M US businesses (Dan Whateley/Business Insider)

Techmeme

Intel's stock, riding high for months after the US government took a 10% stake, crashed 17% on Jan. 23, after the company flagged continued operational issues (Wall Street Journal)

Techmeme

Sources: Grab's planned acquisition of GoTo has hit a snag over Indonesian carrier Telkomsel's unwillingness to sell its ~2% stake in GoTo at current valuations (Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Google acquires Common Sense Machines, which offers AI models that create 3D assets from 2D images; the startup was founded in 2020 and last valued at $15M (The Information)

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TikTok users in the US were presented with a new privacy policy; the changes were part of the app's ownership transition and now allow precise location tracking (Reece Rogers/Wired)

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Court filing: SEC drops a case against Gemini Trust, founded by the Winklevoss twins, major Trump donors; the case stemmed from Gemini Earn's implosion (New York Times)

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Google Photos' latest generative AI-powered feature, "Me Meme", lets users create memes from their own images, launching first in the US (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Source: Greenoaks, one of Brex's top investors, will return twice its investment after Capital One's Brex acquisition for $5.15B in a half-cash, half-stock deal (The Information)

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Solos Technology sues Meta and EssilorLuxottica, alleging they willfully violated several patents that cover "core technologies in the field of smart eyewear" (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

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Sources: the US DOJ opened a criminal probe and sent out grand-jury subpoenas in recent weeks over allegations that Deel recruited a spy inside rival Rippling (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: China deepens its probe into Meta's Manus acquisition in December to investigate cross-border currency flows, tax accounting, and overseas investments (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Richard Socher's Recursive is in talks to raise hundreds of millions at a $4B pre-money valuation to build self-improving superintelligent AI (Bloomberg)

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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)

Techmeme