Anthropic adds “thinking summaries” to both Claude 4 models and is making its Claude Code agentic command-line tool generally available
Yesterday at Anthropic's first “Code with Claude” … Databricks : Introducing new Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 models on Databricks Kahekashan / The Hans India : Anthropic Launches Claude 4 Sonnet and Op...
A look at Rakuten's troubled MVNO, which has about 2.5% marketshare in Japan; Rakuten has posted 13 straight quarters of operating loss totaling roughly $5.5B
Anton Bridge / Reuters :
After losing billions on mobile bets, Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten raised ~$1.9B for mobile and plans to sell stakes of its banking and securities units
Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten Group Inc. sold 250 billion yen ($1.9 billion) of bonds on Friday, giving the company …
Rakuten founder Hiroshi Mikitani, whose mobile business is bleeding cash, defends his reputation with investors ahead of a planned IPO of Rakuten's online bank
Financial Times : Tweets: @leemakiyama , @gearoidreidy , @ugalani , @sugiuraeri , @leemakiyama , and @gearoidreidy Tweets: Hosuk Lee-Makiyama / @leemakiyama : Rather excessive takedown by FT on Rakut...
SmartBank, which offers a prepaid card and finance app in Japan, has raised a $20M Series A, bringing its total funding to $30M
Shota Horii, his twin brother Yuta Horii and Jun Taketani co-founded SmartBank in 2019 after selling their previous startup Fablic, a Japanese online secondhand marketplace, to Rakuten in 2016.
QuEra Computing, which is building a commercially accessible cloud-based quantum device, emerges from stealth with $17M from Rakuten and others
QuEra Computing, a Boston-based quantum computer developer, is coming out of stealth mode today with $17 million in funding from Rakuten, Day One Ventures and Frontiers Capital.
Rakuten says it plans to raise $2.2B to help it compete with US rivals, by issuing new shares to Walmart, Tencent, and Japan Post
Sam Shead / CNBC :
Rakuten: Amazon's share of US e-commerce fell to 38.5% in June from 42.1% in January; Target's share grew from 2.2% to 3.5% and Walmart's from 4.2% to 5%
it's overwhelmed and unable to keep up. Now, it's losing business to competitors (Target, Walmart) that have nationwide brick & mortar fulfillment centers called “stores."https://www.washingtonpost.co...
Rakuten confirms it is shutting its US online retail store, originally known as Buy.com, over the next two months; Rakuten bought Buy.com for $250M in 2010
Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch :
AST & Science raises $110M Series B led by Rakuten and Vodafone to build a broadband network via a constellation of satellites that link directly to smartphones
Caleb Henry / SpaceNews.com :