San Francisco’s Mission district isn’t known for corporate offices, but it’s now home to two of the world’s most well funded AI startups. Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, recently moved into a new office in the Mission: the same building that served as OpenAI’s headquarters for sev...

Peak XV, the largest India and Southeast Asia-focused venture firm, is reducing the size of some of its funds and lowering fees as it seeks to become “deeply aligned” with its limited partners. The firm, which raised $2.85 billion funds in mid-2022, informed its backers on Tuesday evening that it w...

WordPress.org has lifted its ban on hosting provider WP Engine until October 1, after putting a block on it earlier this week. The block prevented several sites from updating their plug-ins and themes and exposing them to potential security risk. WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, who has been in...

Reset your clocks: Meta has been hit with yet another privacy penalty in Europe. On Friday Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced a reprimand and a €91 million fine — around $101.5M at current exchange rates — after concluding a multi-year investigation into a 2019 security breach by ...

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet network is expected to hit a new customer milestone this week, company President Gwynne Shotwell told Texas legislators on Tuesday.  “This week, by the way, we will pass 4 million customers for Starlink, which is quite exciting,” she said while testifying before...

A company that claims its tech can “revolutionize” emergency calls has raised $27 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company, Prepared, enables 911 dispatchers to get a caller’s real-time GPS location if their phone supports it. Via Prepared, dispatchers can also receive an...

OpenAI’s chief research officer, Bob McGrew, and a research VP, Barret Zoph, have left the company hours after OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announced she would be departing. CEO Sam Altman revealed the two latest resignations in a post on X Wednesday evening, along with leadership transition plans. “Mira...

A new Financial Times profile of Mayayoshi Son opens with SoftBank CEO seeming to hit bottom, staring at his “ugly” face on Zoom and telling himself, “I have done nothing I can be proud of.” The scene is presented as the prelude to a hoped-for a comeback, with Son largely disappearing from the publ...

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” Mullenweg criticized the company — which has been commercializing the open source WordPress project since 2010 — for profiteering without giving m...

Palmer Luckey, the Hawaiian-shirt wearing founder who sold Oculus VR for $2 billion before co-founding the military tech company Anduril, is back in the headset business — in a sense. Anduril has teamed up with Microsoft to embed its software into the Integrated Visual Augmentation System headset d...

Fal.ai, a dev-focused platform for AI-generated audio, video, and images, today revealed that it’s raised $23 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Black Forest Labs co-founder Robin Rombach, and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. It’s a two-round deal. $14 million o...

23andMe, the personal genomics company, went public in early 2021 via a merger with a blank check company that valued it at $3.5 billion. Then its fortunes began to sink. Fading interest in DNA kits – 23andMe’s main product –  was one driver. So was news last year that hackers stole ancestry data o...