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In June of last year, over breakfast at Cannes, the two of us started talking about the deal environment in the marketing economy. Omnicom and IPG were on their way to closing, AI companies were multiplying by the week, and new kinds of buyers were showing up at tables where only holding companies and private equity used to sit. We left that breakfast convinced of the same thing. Over the next 12 to 18 months, the business story of this industry will be a dealmaking story, and no one was covering it that way.ADWEEK Dealroom is what came out of…
Governments have long warned not to pay a hacker’s ransom demands, arguing that doing so only lets criminals profit from their cyberattacks and funds the next one. There’s also another reason: The hackers are unlikely to leave you alone if you pay up once, and many will come back demanding more. In a report published Wednesday, cybersecurity giant Proofpoint said it surveyed 953 companies and found that over one-third of companies that paid a hacker’s ransom were hit with a second extortion demand. The findings underscore the long-held understanding among security researchers and network defenders that it’s impossible to negotiate…
I scroll on my phone, sipping on an overpriced espresso tonic at a San Francisco café. I watch as glassy notifications pop up on my home screen, one after another, distorting the top row of app icons in neat succession. Similar to how the glass in my hand refracts the coffee’s colors, the warping effect of Apple’s Liquid Glass tugs at the edges of whatever’s behind each notification, disappearing a second later.Apple dropped the public beta for iOS 27 in mid-July, with the software’s full release expected in September. The beta version of iOS includes a new slider for adjusting…
OpenAI announced Wednesday that it will spend $750 billion on infrastructure through 2030, some 25% more than it estimated earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported. The renewed blitz comes as its Stargate data center project appears to have stalled. The first salvo in OpenAI’s spending spree will be a $20 billion data center campus in Georgia known as Project Camellia. The development will span 1,400 acres northwest of Savannah and will draw at least 3.2 gigawatts of power from Georgia Power, the region’s utility. The generating capacity is expected to become available between 2028 and 2032. The AI…
Substack has launched a new feature that can show you which of your favorite newsletters are being written using AI. This week, the newsletter and writing platform announced an integration with the AI writing detection software Pangram that will allow users to scan posts, comments, and replies on Substack’s app to see an estimate of how much of the content was written by a human and how much was AI. In the short term, the move might be bad for Substack’s business, as it could expose many of the newsletters on its platform that aren’t entirely written by people. That…
ServiceNow, the U.S. enterprise software company known for automating workflows like IT service management and HR operations, is betting on an Indian banking software specialist to deepen its push into global financial services. The company has invested $40 million in BusinessNext, valuing the 24-year-old Indian firm at $700 million and taking a roughly 5% stake. The deal gives BusinessNext access to ServiceNow’s global sales network as the companies expand their partnership in AI for financial services. ServiceNow’s investment reflects BusinessNext’s growing profile beyond India. The profitable, Noida-based company, which generated about $32 million in revenue in its latest financial year,…
Israeli workplace software maker Monday.com is laying off hundreds of employees as part of a restructuring plan to refocus its investments around AI projects. The company said it is reducing its headcount by 20%, or about 630 staff, to “support a leaner, more focused operating model” as it concentrates on its AI Work Platform. Monday.com earlier this year pivoted hard toward making its AI platform a core offering, redesigning its entire product around the belief that its enterprise customers increasingly want AI agents to work together with their employees. The AI Work Platform currently comprises a no-code app builder, a…
Anthropic leaped to a $47 billion revenue run rate by May, compared to $9 billion in 2025. It’s the kind of growth that Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy says he’s never seen in 25 years of investing, not in the internet wave, not in mobile, not in the first cloud boom. Menlo led Anthropic’s $500M Series D, and Murphy has had a front-row seat as the company went from a pre-revenue, pre-launch bet to one of the most valuable startups out there. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Julie Bort talks with Murphy about backing Anthropic before anyone else would, why a great model was never the point, and what’s driving the fastest-growing startups he’s ever seen. Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple…
As social media has evolved from a place to connect with friends into large-scale entertainment platforms, a startup called Yope is quietly building what it believes will be the future of online connection: social networking with no algorithms, no ads, and no public content. Yope’s app, now backed by a $12.3 million round led by Northzone, is taking on tech giants like Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram by building a social platform centered on what it refers to as “micro communities” — or small groups where friends and family interact in private, sharing photos, videos, messages, and soon, playing games.…
Travis Kalanick’s robotics company, Atoms, has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz will join the company’s board following the investment. Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and others participated in the round. Perhaps most notably, Uber also joined the funding round, re-connecting Kalanick with the company he founded — and the same company that pushed him out as CEO in 2017 following complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace. Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company created atop the project Kalanick has been working on since he resigned from Uber, a ghost kitchen…
A day after Snap tentatively settled with the plaintiff in a social media addiction lawsuit, leaving Meta as the only remaining defendant, the case has been dropped. In a statement, Meta said the plaintiff chose to drop his case against Meta without receiving any payment. TikTok and Google’s YouTube had previously reached settlement agreements with the plaintiff. (Snap on Tuesday confirmed a tentative agreement had been reached.) The bellwether jury trial had been set to begin next week in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles. The plaintiff, a Florida teenager known by the initials “R.K.C.,” had sued the…
The numbers$119.8 billion: Alphabet’s Q2 revenue, up 24% year-over-year (YoY), and outpacing analyst projections of $116.9 billion. $94.5 billion: Revenues from Google Services, which includes advertising, subscriptions, digital content, and hardware, up 15% YoY.$24.8 billion: Google Cloud revenue, up 82% YoY thanks to its enterprise AI solutions and enterprise AI infrastructure businesses, and above analyst estimates of $22.46 billion.34%: Alphabet’s operating margin, up 2%.$9.11: Earnings per share, representing a 294% increase over the same period last year.22 billion: Number of API tokens processed per minute by Gemini.950 million: Monthly active users of the Gemini app.
On Wednesday, IBM officially reported earnings and the news was as bad as everyone knew it would be. While the 115-year-old company still generates boatloads of cash — $17.2 billion in revenue, $9.9 billion in gross profit, nearly 58% margins, and $2.2 billion in net earnings for the quarter — its results fell well short of Wall Street’s expectations. It was such a bad miss that IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and the board took an unprecedented step of warning investors ahead of time that the earnings “was worse than our expectations,” offering everyone a sneak peek. He published a “letter…
This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.The Daily Upside, a growing portfolio of financial newsletter products, is entering a new phase of its business, according to founder Patrick Trousdale.As part of the evolution, Trousdale, who founded the newsletter in 2019, is stepping back from day-to-day operations, a shift that began last summer. He plans to stay involved as an advisor and is starting a new, adjacent project in the advisor-media space, though he declined to offer further…
Tesla is no longer planning to reach “volume production” of three of its newest products — the Cybercab, the Tesla Semi, and its Megapack 3 commercial energy-storage solution — in 2026, according to a second-quarter shareholder letter published Wednesday. The company also removed language from its first-quarter letter about its Optimus robot reaching “volume production.” The company said Wednesday that it’s trying to increase battery production, specifically around the company’s 4680 cell, in order to start building the Cybercab and Tesla Semi at scale. It did not offer a reason for pushing back volume production of the new Megapack, but…
Does LED therapy really work? There’s plenty of scientific evidence in its favor, but will that translate to actual, visible results you can see in the mirror? Members of WIRED’s Reviews team have spent the past year and a half testing all the popular masks, hats, and helmets to see for ourselves which devices are worth your money. Luckily, some of our favorites are on rare discount during Nordstrom’s annual Anniversary Sale, which runs through August 9.For more in-depth information on our tests, check out our guide to the Best Red Light Therapy Masks and Best Red Light Therapy for…