TravelPerk raises $200M as valuation nearly doubles to $2.7B

Barcelona-based business travel management platform TravelPerk has raised $200 million at a hefty $2.7 billion valuation — almost double the $1.4 billion valuation at its previous fundraise last year. Alongside the raise, TravelPerk also announced it has acquired Swiss startup Yokoy to bring native expenses management into the fray. With the travel and tourism industry … Read more

KuCoin to Pay Nearly $300M Fine After Pleading Guilty to DOJ Charges

KuCoin has pled guilty to one count of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and has agreed to pay penalties of over $297 million, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said in a release on Monday. “KuCoin avoided implementing required anti-money laundering policies designed to identify criminal actors and … Read more

From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet

Big players, including Microsoft, with Copilot, Google, with Gemini, and OpenAI, with GPT-4o, are making AI chatbot technology previously restricted to test labs more accessible to the general public. How do these large language model (LLM) programs work? OpenAI’s GPT-3 told us that AI uses “a series of autocomplete-like programs to learn language” and that … Read more

DeepSeek: all the news about the startup that’s shaking up AI stocks

DeepSeek is shaking up the AI industry with cost-efficient large-language models it claims can perform just as well as rivals from giants like OpenAI and Meta. The Chinese startup says its flagship R1 reasoning model is capable of achieving “performance comparable” to OpenAI’s o1 equivalent, while the newly-released Janus Pro multimodal AI model can supposedly … Read more

Trump’s first 100 days: all the news impacting the tech industry

President Donald Trump kicked off the first day of his presidency by signing a flurry of executive actions, including halting enforcement of the TikTok ban and rolling back the Biden administration’s artificial intelligence order. Having already run the country once before, Trump entered the presidency with the goal of hitting the ground running, having already … Read more

Google Maps will soon rename Gulf of Mexico to ‘Gulf of America’

Google will rename the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Denali mountain in Google Maps once a federal mapping database reflects changes ordered by the Trump Administration, the company announced Monday. Google is complying with an executive order issued last week by President Donald Trump that changed the names of several American landmarks. The executive order … Read more

Trump says he’ll put tariffs on imported chips ‘in the near future’

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Without going into detail about what might happen to the $52 billion in subsidies from the CHIPS Act under his administration, Donald Trump said tariffs on foreign computer chips, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals are coming “in the near future.” He also namechecked DeepSeek’s AI releases, saying, “…coming up … Read more

Reid Hoffman’s Manas AI raises $24.6M, a fraction of other AI drug discovery startups

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Siddhartha Mukherjee, cancer researcher and author of the book “The Emperor of All Maladies,” have co-founded an AI-powered drug discovery startup, Manas AI. The company, which will initially focus on breast cancer, prostate cancer, and lymphoma, has raised $24.6 million in seed funding from Hoffman, General Catalyst, and Greylock. Manas … Read more

Thinking of AI Agents? You Need A Conductor!

If you’re drowning in the hype around agentic AI or being hammered by a salesperson from yet another AI startup about why you need their flavor of automation, take a breather and think about this instead: who is going to wrangle these little fiends you’re about to unleash upon your business? I’ll give you a hint, … Read more

How to Create an Amazon EC2 Instance With Remote Root User Access and Configuring an Usage Alerting

Introduction In this article, an Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instance will be created using the Amazon Linux 2023 AMI operating system image, the root user will be configured to access the remote virtual server via SSH, and a free tier usage alert will be configured. Prerequisites Before you start, you need to install and configure the … Read more