Meta shares jumped 10% after reports that the company plans to sell excess AI compute to outside customers, a move that could help offset its planned $145 billion capex buildout while pressuring neocloud rivals CoreWeave and Nebius. TechCrunch has more here.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that SpaceX showed investors a prototype of a slim, handset-like AI device designed to run on its own operating system, use a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, and integrate xAI technology, although the company supposedly said that the project was still at an early-stage. For his part, Elon Musk calls the news “utterly false.” TechCrunch has more here.

A Swedish court ordered Google to pay Klarna-owned PriceRunner about $1.5 billion in antitrust damages for favoring its own shopping service in search results, the largest competition award ever issued by a Swedish court. Google is considering an appeal. Reuters has more here.

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AOL is public again — sort of. Its owner Bending Spoons, the 13-year-old Italian company that has been quietly acquiring beloved but ailing Internet brands for the past decade, went public on the Nasdaq today, opening at an over $18 ​billion valuation, with the stock then popping 40% by market close.

Headquartered in Milan, Bending Spoons applied some of the private equity playbook to a long series of acquisitions — Meetup, Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and many others. But it is not a flip-and-sell scheme: it wants to transform these companies with tech and then hold onto them.

“We want to place ourselves as an operator that takes beloved brands and makes them much better,” its cofounder and chief product officer, Matteo Danieli, told TechCrunch.

The ‘how’ has generated controversy over the years, especially around layoffs. But the company also drove revenue growth, even more so with AI. “In the past year and a half, we’ve witnessed an incredible acceleration in the pace at which we were able to ship new features and create value for users,” Danieli told TechCrunch. 

That may be the right thing to say when investors, public and private, have much more appetite for AI than for aging SaaS businesses. But Bending Spoons has a case: its F-1, the equivalent of S-1 forms for foreign companies, includes a chapter called ‘AI before it was cool’ — a nod to its roots.

Before Bending Spoons, there was Evertale, “a product that would automatically create a diary of your life by leveraging what you would call AI today, and that we called machine learning then,” Danieli said. That startup failed, but it taught lessons to the cofounders and team members who now lead Bending Spoons — Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Luca Querella, and Danieli himself. 

Addi, an eight-year-old Bogotá company that provides credit, payments, and financial services to Colombian consumers and merchants, raised an $85 million Series D round co-led by Citius and BTG Pactual, with GIC, Monashees, and others also digging in. More here.

Aligned, a five-year-old New York and Tel Aviv startup that deploys AI agents to centralize deal materials and coordinate complex B2B sales processes from first call to close, raised a $60 million Series B round led by PeakSpan Capital, with Hetz Ventures, JAL Ventures, and NFX also participating. The company has raised a total of $73.8 million. CTech has more here.

Beeline Medicines, a one-year-old Boston startup that develops precision therapies for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, including lupus treatments licensed from Bristol Myers Squibb, raised a $126 million Series A extension. Prior backers Bain Capital, CPP Investments, and Bristol Myers Squibb invested in the round. The company has raised a total of $426.3 million. BioPharma Dive has more here.

InKind, a 12-year-old Austin company that provides restaurants with upfront capital by buying future dining credits and selling them to diners through a rewards app, raised a $320 million round. Liberty Mutual Investments supplied the financing. More here.

Together AI, a four-year-old San Francisco startup that provides computing infrastructure for companies to train and run open-source AI models at scale, raised an $800 million round at an $8.3 billion post-money valuation. The deal was led by Aramco Ventures, with Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Nvidia, March Capital, Pegatron, and S Ventures also investing. TechCrunch has more here.

TwelveLabs, a five-year-old San Francisco startup that helps media, government, and other organizations search, analyze, and turn large video archives into structured data, raised a $100 million Series B round co-led by NEA and NAVER Ventures, with Amazon, Radical Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, Index Ventures, Quadrille Capital, and Red Bull Ventures also opting in. More here.

Venice AI, a two-year-old New York startup that offers privacy-focused access to more than 200 AI models for text, image, audio, and video generation, raised a $65 million Series A round at a $1 billion valuation led by Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures also taking stakes. TechCrunch has more here.

Wayve, a nine-year-old U.K. startup that develops self-driving software trained from driving data rather than prebuilt maps, launched an $85 million employee tender offer at an $8.5 billion valuation, the same valuation set during its $1.2 billion Series D round in February. It is conducting the sale through the London Stock Exchange's new Private Securities Market, the first major company to test it. TechCrunch has more here.

Oxmiq, a three-year-old startup based in Campbell, CA, that develops chip-design architecture and software to lower the cost of building and running AI applications, raised a $35 million round co-led by Samsung Catalyst Fund and Fudomo, with MediaTek and Pegatron Venture Capital also digging in. The company has raised a total of $60 million. Reuters has more here.

Acti, a Singapore startup founded this year that is building a smartphone keyboard that lets users trigger AI actions like translations and meeting links inside everyday apps, raised a $5.3 million seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Dawnguard, a one-year-old Amsterdam startup that helps engineering and security teams design secure cloud systems, generate infrastructure code, and keep deployments aligned with approved architecture, raised a $3.3 million pre-seed round. Investors included Curiosity VC and eCAPITAL as well as previous investor BNVT Capital. The company has raised a total of $6.3+ million. More here.

Digiclean, a two-year-old startup based in Borås, Sweden, that monitors chemical baths in factory cleaning machines and automates dosing to reduce waste, downtime, and manual sampling, raised a $2.5 million seed round co-led by Unconventional Ventures and Almi Invest GreenTech, with S-E Bankens Utvecklingsstiftelse, Impact Shakers, and Feminvest Ventures also chipping in. ArcticStartup has more here.

Hypefy AI, a five-year-old startup based in Zagreb, Croatia, that automates influencer campaign operations for brands and agencies, from creator discovery and outreach to contracts, reporting, and payments, raised a $7.2 million Series A round led by AYMO Ventures, with previous investors Interactive Venture Partners, Oktogon Ventures, and Euroventures also digging in. The Recursive has more here.

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Ashton Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures, the 11-year-old firm he co-founded with Guy Oseary, to launch a new VC firm with former NFX partner Morgan Beller focused on early-stage AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech startups. TechCrunch has more here.

Global-e is acquiring Passport, a nine-year-old San Francisco cross-border e-commerce logistics startup, for $350 million upfront and up to $75 million more, adding standard shipping, returns, customs brokerage, and non-merchant-of-record services to its global retail platform. The company raised a total of $54 million from investors including TCV, M13, Flexport, FJ Labs, Resolute Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, RiverPark Ventures, Pure Imagination, Republic, and Supernode Ventures. More here.

Bending Spoons shares closed nearly 40% higher in their Nasdaq debut, giving the Milan company behind AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and Brightcove a $25.7 billion market value. Reuters has more here.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp called the AI industry “effing insane” in a CNBC interview, accusing leading model companies of overcharging customers, harvesting their data, and leaving CEOs privately “livid.” He said Palantir’s Nvidia partnership is meant to help the U.S. government use AI more securely, while warning that outsourcing military and national-security decisions to Silicon Valley’s “consensus view” would be dangerous. CNBC has more here.

President Trump earned about $1.4 billion from crypto ventures last year while many buyers of his family’s tokens lost money, with blockchain analytics firm Nansen estimating that roughly two-thirds of Trump memecoin investors and 85% of secondary-market World Liberty token buyers are currently underwater. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

Business Insider profiles Tom Brown, Anthropic’s 39-year-old co-founder and chief compute officer, whose role securing chips and cloud capacity has expanded into diplomacy after he helped negotiate the Trump administration’s rollback of export restrictions on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. More here.

Former a16z Bio + Health head Vijay Pande says investors should “root for the crash” in AI because a bubble burst would clear out inflated valuations, discipline feverish data-center spending, and leave behind the infrastructure and habits needed for a more durable AI economy. Business Insider has more here.

JPMorgan says the AI trade is flashing a dot-com-era warning, with chip and memory stocks soaring while major AI spenders like Microsoft and Meta lag, echoing the 1999 split between infrastructure suppliers and the companies pouring capital into the buildout. Business Insider has more here.

Anthropic, Google, and Meta are hiring computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers to study whether advanced AI models could become conscious or deserve moral consideration, even as many brain researchers remain skeptical that today’s chatbots experience anything at all. The Washington Post has more here.

Apple’s “Hide My Email” feature has a year-old vulnerability that can expose users’ real Apple ID email addresses, according to 404 Media, whose test found the flaw still worked despite Apple telling the researcher it had been addressed. More here.

Meta is capping its on-device voice-amplification feature, Conversation Focus, at three hours a month (about six minutes a day) — unless you pay $19.99/month for Meta One Premium. The Verge has more here.

Bangkok’s Wattana Panich has kept the same beef broth simmering since 1974, with three generations of one family tending the 52-year-old “mother stock” that anchors its signature beef noodle soup.

The definitive movies about America.

UBTech Robotics just launched the U1, a consumer humanoid robot for home companionship in China, with silicone skin, 88 servo joints, and locally run “emotional AI.” Prices run from about $17,650 to $146,000.

Yoto’s screen-light children’s audio player lets kids play songs and audiobooks by inserting physical cards into a rubber-encased box, using simple knobs and pixel art instead of apps, touchscreens, or algorithmic recommendations.

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