A new report on the French tech ecosystem by Alexandre Dewez, a partner at venture firm 20VC, paints a picture of a startup scene that is growing more dependent on a handful of AI companies while the rest of the market stalls. French startups raised €6.7 billion across 411 funding rounds in 2025, a 5% decline in […]

ContourGlobal, the independent power producer backed by KKR, has inaugurated a nearly $500 million solar-and-storage facility in Chile’s Atacama desert that stores daytime solar energy and delivers it after sundown. The Victor Jara hybrid plant combines 231 megawatt-peak of photovoltaic capacity with 1.3 gigawatt-hours of battery storage, capable of delivering 200 megawatts of power for […]

Jay Shetty, the former Hindu monk turned self-help podcaster, has signed a deal to bring the video version of his show On Purpose exclusively to Spotify and Netflix. The arrangement is worth as much as $100 million over multiple years, according to people familiar with the deal cited by Bloomberg. That figure puts Shetty in […]

Cognition AI has raised more than $1 billion in new funding at a $26 billion valuation, more than doubling its worth since a September round that valued the company at $10.2 billion. The round was co-led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with participation from Ribbit Capital, Atreides Management, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. […]

Dutch financial crime investigators have seized 800 servers and arrested two men in a crackdown on hosting companies that provided infrastructure for Russian state-sponsored cyberattacks across Europe. The Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) raided two data centres last week and shut down servers operated by WorkTitans and MIRhosting, two companies suspected of violating […]

Meta is selling subscriptions to its AI chatbot for the first time, introducing two paid tiers that put it in direct competition with OpenAI and Google for consumer AI revenue. Meta One Plus costs $7.99 per month and Meta One Premium costs $19.99 per month. Both tiers give users expanded access to image generation, video […]

Talkdesk has launched proactive AI agents designed specifically for retail and financial services, moving the company from a platform that handles inbound customer queries to one that initiates outbound engagement autonomously. The new agents sit within Talkdesk’s Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform and can be configured, tested, and deployed using templatised multi-agent workflows. The pitch […]

As enterprises race to embed generative AI into daily operations, security teams are confronting a new category of threats that traditional monitoring systems were never designed to handle. From AI-powered workflow automation to code generation and document analysis, enterprise AI platforms are rapidly becoming operational infrastructure. But with that shift comes a growing concern: organizations […]

NATO has signed strategic cybersecurity partnerships with Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and ESET, formalising what the alliance describes as non-commercial agreements to strengthen collective resilience in cyberspace. The partnerships were announced on 27 May at the International Conference on Cyber Conflict (CyCon) in Tallinn, Estonia, the annual gathering organised by NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of […]

ElevenLabs has struck a deal with Stan Lee Universe to add Stan Lee’s voice and likeness to its platform, making the late Marvel co-creator the latest deceased cultural icon to be digitally resurrected by AI. The partnership puts Lee’s voice on the ElevenLabs Iconic Marketplace for commercial licensing and on the Eleven Reader app, where fans […]