Contemplations News
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- Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Results (Alphabet)
- Lunar Energy, which develops software that syncs batteries across homes into "virtual power plants" and began deploying its own batteries in 2025, raised $232M (Coco Liu/Bloomberg)
- Google teases the Pixel 10a in a new 15-second video, revealing a completely flat dual-camera system on the back, and says preorders begin on February 18 (Abner Li/9to5Google)
- Microsoft integrates Claude and Codex AI coding agents directly into GitHub, GitHub Mobile, and Visual Studio Code, for Copilot Pro Plus and Enterprise users (Tom Warren/The Verge)
- Microsoft says cybersecurity head Charlie Bell will move into a position focused on engineering quality; Hayete Gallot will return from Google to run security (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
- Roblox launches a "4D generation" feature in open beta, letting creators generate interactive objects with individual moving parts rather than static 3D models (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)
- EnFi, which makes AI agents that analyze and make decisions on credit applications, raised a $15M Series A led by Fintop, bringing its total funding to $22.5M (Tatiana Bautzer/Reuters)
- AI chipmaker Cerebras raised a ~$1B Series H led by Tiger Global at a $23B valuation, up from $8.1B in September 2025; Benchmark, Fidelity, and AMD invested too (Ian King/Bloomberg)
- Uber promotes Balaji Krishnamurthy, its former VP of strategic finance and investor relations, to be its CFO, replacing Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)
- Mistral debuts Voxtral Transcribe 2, a family of speech-to-text models with speaker diarization and ultra-low latency, under the Apache 2.0 open-weight license (Sabrina Ortiz/The Deep View)
- Adobe ramped up its ads in 2025, spending $1.4B amid AI competition and Wall Street skepticism, a significantly higher share of sales than other tech companies (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)
- Sources: Amazon and OpenAI are discussing a deal that could require OpenAI to dedicate its researchers and engineers to developing customized models for Amazon (The Information)
- AI voice startup ElevenLabs raised a $500M Series D led by Sequoia at an $11B valuation, taking its total funding to nearly $800M, and reports $330M in 2025 ARR (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)
- Amazon rolls out Alexa+ to all Prime members in the US via any Alexa-enabled device, Alexa.com, and the Alexa app, and launches a free tier for non-Prime users (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge)
- Bedrock, which aims to automate heavy construction equipment like excavators, raised $270M led by CapitalG and the Valor Atreides AI Fund at a $1.75B valuation (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)
- Resolve AI, which offers AI agents to monitor source code, databases, and infrastructure to address outages, raised $125M led by Lightspeed at a $1B valuation (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)
- Egypt plans to ban Roblox in a bid to curb kids' exposure to potentially harmful online material; the Middle East's most populous nation joins Qatar and Turkey (Bloomberg)
- TRM Labs, which helps law enforcement and companies track crypto and blockchains, raised a $70M Series C led by Blockchain Capital at a $1B valuation (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)
- US Senators introduce the bipartisan SCAM Act, a bill requiring social media platforms to verify advertiser identities via government-issued ID or legal docs (Jeff Horwitz/Reuters)
- Uber says it plans to expand its robotaxi services to Hong Kong, Madrid, Houston, and Zurich in 2026; Hong Kong will be Uber's first autonomous market in Asia (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)