Swiggy swaggers towards the public markets: Indian food-delivery company Swiggy has shareholder approval to sell $1.25 billion worth of shares in its upcoming IPO. Only $450 million of that total will go to the company itself, but Swiggy’s listing will be a big event for Indian tech companies regardless. Read More
Xaira raises $1 billion to use AI to make new drugs: Drugs – legal or otherwise – are big business. That’s why it’s not shocking that Xaria has managed to raise lots of money to come up with new drugs. The startup has managed to raise so much because it is apparently going start developing drugs that were impossible to make without recent breakthroughs in AI. The company better deliver or a lot of investors are going to be irked. Read More
Drones are going solarpunk: Former YC startup Radical has an adventurous business model: It wants to build solar-powered drone that hangs out really high up in the sky and does stuff for us. Yes, that does sound like that old Facebook drone-internet effort! Indeed, but the tech has advanced far, the startup says, which makes the concept viable. Read More
How low can streaming prices go? That’s the question in India, where JioCinema is offering up big-name titles for as little as a cent per day. It’s wild, and puts lots of pressure on rival streaming services to compete on pricing. There are similar dynamics at play between Apple Music and Spotify in certain markets, so this is going to be interesting to watch. Read More
Anduril wants to make autonomous fighter jets: Startups have one major advantage over incumbents: they can move so fast that they can shake up massive industries. Such is the case with Anduril and its new unmanned fighter jet program. The startup is moving fast and taking big contracts from stodgy old companies that appear more likely to eat off regulatory capture than innovating. Read More
More people use Threads than anyone thought: I have a Threads account, but I do not use it. Why? Because I am bone-grafted to Twitter. But it turns out that I am more of an outlier than I thought: Meta’s Threads boasts 150 million monthly active users today, up from 130 million in February. That’s fast growth for a relatively new social platform. Read More
TikTok drops rewards feature after pressure in the EU: No matter which side of the Atlantic it is on, TikTok is having a Bad Time. Over in the EU, the social platform has dropped a feature from its TikTok Lite service that rewarded users for liking and interacting with videos after officials in the bloc opened an investigation citing concerns that it may pose mental health risks for young people. TikTok Lite is aimed at folks on older phones and slower networks. Read More
Meta’s business model is not popular in Europe: How much data can you use in your advertising services? What type of data? Those questions are bedeviling Meta and its various social media services in the EU, which generates a material chunk of the company’s revenues. Read More
