PITAA

ID verification service IDScan has confirmed that a data breach involved the theft of driver’s licenses from its systems, a week after a report said the identity document checker had been breached during a year-long hack. The company said in a website notice that hackers stole the driver’s licenses from the company’s cloud; the stolen … Read more

Bending Spoons is continuing its trend of buying once-sought-after software companies for pennies on the dollar. This time, the Italian company is buying Miro for $1.36 billion in cash (equity value of $1.79 billion), a mighty dip in valuation for the once-hot workplace collaboration startup that was awarded a price tag of $17.5 billion in … Read more

Pocket FM, an Indian audio storytelling platform, has doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500 million over the past year as it increasingly turns to artificial intelligence to produce its content. AI now powers 93% of Pocket FM’s overall catalog and is used to produce 99% of its new content, co-founder and CEO Rohan … Read more

U.S. venture capitalists once insisted that international startups move stateside before they would write a check. The three 28-year-old founders behind Furo are convinced that their decision to leave Silicon Valley and move back to their home country of Germany has paid off in both VC dollars and business growth. The startup, which developed software … Read more

A new report released Thursday by Anthropic alleged persistent distillation attacks by China-based AI companies, which have escalated in recent months as competition in the space has intensified. “Over the last several months, unauthorized labs have developed increasingly sophisticated methods to circumvent our defenses and harvest the capabilities of US frontier models,” the report reads. … Read more

Let’s just get this out of the way: Mark Wahlberg is as A-list as it gets. He broke out in 1997’s “Boogie Nights,” and in the nearly three decades since, he’s built one of the highest-wattage careers in Hollywood: two Academy Award nominations, a Golden Globe nod for “The Fighter,” multiple Emmy nominations as a … Read more

Collaborative Fund, the 15-year-old, New York-based generalist venture firm that has roughly $1 billion under management and which made early bets on Lyft, Reddit, Sweetgreen, and Olipop, among others, is taking a stake in the soccer club D.C. United and its stadium, Audi Field. It’s the latest — and smallest — firm to try something … Read more

Founder, CEO, and tireless Nvidia hype man Jensen Huang told attendees at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology conference on Thursday why his company’s AI domination — and revenues — will continue its record-breaking growth streak through the end of next year. He can see the future. There’s been endless hand-wringing over whether Nvidia’s party … Read more

Demand for OpenAI’s newest and most powerful model, Astra, has led the company to temporarily pause subscriptions for its $200-per-month Pro plan, citing strain on its infrastructure. The move was announced on X by OpenAI’s product leader, Thibault (Tibo) Sottiaux, who leads core products like Codex and ChatGPT at the AI lab. He said that … Read more