Milan-based Bending Spoons raised €500M+ in debt led by JPMorgan to acquire more software businesses, after raising $155M at a ~$2.6B valuation in February 2024
Mark Bergen / Bloomberg :
Docs and sources: Builder.ai faked business with Bengaluru-based VerSe, which runs the Dailyhunt news app, by “round-tripping” sales worth ~$60M from 2021-2024
www.bloomberg.com/news/article... X: Nikhil Patwardhan / @patwardhannn : 🚨🚨 The Dailyhunt, Josh story seems to be unravelling quickly. Another Peak XV startup, among the most funded ones, seems to be ...
Docs and sources: Builder.ai faked business with Bengaluru-based VerSe, which runs the Dailyhunt news app, by “round-tripping” sales worth ~$60M from 2021-2024
www.bloomberg.com/news/article... X: Nikhil Patwardhan / @patwardhannn : 🚨🚨 The Dailyhunt, Josh story seems to be unravelling quickly. Another Peak XV startup, among the most funded ones, seems to be ...
How YouTube is adapting to the AI era; a VP expects that in five years, every video uploaded to YouTube could be dubbed automatically into every spoken language
The video giant, turning 20, tries to keep the content spigot flowing while appeasing its army of broadcasters and copyright holders. — YouTube's AI will soon dub every video in every language using...
UK filings: Stability AI co-founder and former CEO Emad Mostaque has given up his controlling shares in the startup; Mostaque owned 75%+, per previous filings
The startup's co-founder left in March but remained the largest shareholder — until now — Emad Mostaque, the former chief … X: @mhbergen X: Mark Bergen / @mhbergen : From last night, a little capsto...
A profile of Italian private equity firm Bending Spoons, which has acquired distressed SaaS businesses like WeTransfer and Evernote, and plans to spend billions
Mark Bergen / Bloomberg : X: @bw X: @bw : After buying Evernote, cutting staff and raising prices, Bending Spoons is looking for its next deal https://www.bloomberg.com/...
UK filings: since 2023, Saudi Arabia's PIF has put $750M into Magic Leap, including $160M so far in 2024; Magic Leap says it needs to raise more by next month
Mark Bergen / Bloomberg :
Sources: the Google-Wiz deal failed, in part, due to antitrust fears and CrowdStrike's outage, which increased the potential value of cloud security companies
particularly if top antitrust cops change. That memo may seem definitive, and needed to for employee sanity, but these things are always fluid. Mark Bergen / @mhbergen : ...also there's the “known unk...
Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute releases Falcon 2 11B, an open-source LLM to compete with Llama and Gemini that supports five European languages
Mark Bergen / Bloomberg :
Estonian ride-hailing and scooter rentals startup Bolt Technology secures a €220M credit facility which it believes will help prepare the company for an IPO
Mark Bergen / Bloomberg :