Contemplations News
This is the latest addition to our website, and its purpose is to help you stay in touch with current news posts. Click on any post to read the full text.
- Government officials and experts say there have been dozens of recorded crypto-related abductions globally over the past year; France saw five in recent months (Wall Street Journal)
- Venture Intelligence: Indian deep tech startups have raised $4.7B since 2014, accounting for just 3.2% of Indian startup funding, signaling a sector-wide crunch (Sayan Chakraborty/Nikkei Asia)
- AI deals that the US struck with the UAE and Saudi Arabia reinforce its AI leadership, but raise security concerns that the US can mitigate through safeguards (SemiAnalysis)
- Nvidia's deals with Saudi Arabia's Humain and the UAE's G42 highlight its strategy to diversify beyond Big Tech customers by partnering with nation states (Financial Times)
- Cohere Health, which uses AI to provide prior authorization for health plans, raised a $90M Series C led by Temasek, taking its total funding to ~$200M (Noah Tong/Fierce Healthcare)
- NYC-based Optimal Dynamics, a provider of AI-powered fleet management software to trucking companies, raised a $40M Series C led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (Marc Vartabedian/Wall Street Journal)
- About 30% of South Korean schools have adopted AI-powered digital textbooks since the country's education ministry began a full-scale rollout in March 2025 (Nikkei Asia)
- Somite AI, which is developing AI foundation models for stem cell therapies, raised a $47M+ Series A led by Khosla Ventures, taking its total funding to ~$60M (Gil Press/Forbes)
- Addepar, which provides wealth management software, raised a $230M Series G co-led by Vitruvian Partners and WestCap at a $3.25B valuation, up from $2B in 2021 (Lawrence White/Reuters)
- London-based Origin, which offers software to help HR teams administer employee benefits, emerges from stealth with a $21M Series A led by Felix Capital (Lucy Adams/Tech.eu)
- A Fireblocks survey of 295 finance executives: 49% say their institutions use stablecoins in payments, 23% are testing them, and 18% are in the planning stages (Ezra Reguerra/Cointelegraph)
- An analysis of YouTube's new weekly ranking of top podcasts in the US by watch time shows many popular and well-established podcasts did not rank in the top 100 (Jessica Testa/New York Times)
- Chinese startups are highlighting their roots instead of downplaying them as they grow overseas, fueled by the success of Chinese social media apps and DeepSeek (Kinling Lo/Rest of World)
- Q&A with Nintendo of America President Doug Bowser on Switch 2 pricing backlash, physical games' importance to its business despite Game-Key cards, and more (Logan Plant/IGN)
- How rapid advances in AI are helping Harvard's Galileo Project and other UFO research efforts process huge amounts of data in real time from multiple sources (Bloomberg)
- A look at EA's attempts to shut down "anti-DEI" mods for The Sims 4, including one that changes LGBT and Black NPCs to straight and white (Alana Yzola/Wired)
- What to expect at Google I/O 2025: an updated Gemini Ultra model, updates for Android 16, Project Astra AI assistant, and Project Mariner AI agents, and more (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
- Jensen Huang says Nvidia's next chip for China will not be from the Hopper series following US restrictions on Hopper H20 chip sales to China (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters)
- Sources: White House and lawmakers are scrutinizing Apple's plan to use Alibaba's AI on iPhones in China, over concerns about data sharing, censorship, and more (Tripp Mickle/New York Times)
- Analysis: China imported a record $30.9B in chipmaking equipment in 2024, including $9.63B from Japan, $9.53B from the Netherlands, and $4.86B from Singapore (Nikkei Asia)