TECH NEWS
Federal safety regulators have given Zoox a temporary exemption that will allow the Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle technology company to charge customers for rides in its custom-built robotaxi. The exemption from certain federal motor vehicle safety standards, which was announced Thursday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, was one of
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ICICI Prudential Life Insurance’s sustained investment in technology and automation along with other cost optimisation initiatives has played a central role in bringing down its cost-to-premium ratio for the savings line of business to 13.6% in Q1-FY2027. It has reduced by 50 basis point over the previous year,
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Jess Weatherbed is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews. Spotify has introduced a new Running Mode feature that makes it easier to curate playlists around your workout goals, music tastes, and desired beats per
TECH NEWS
Mark Zuckerberg thinks almost everyone will soon have an AI that works for them. On Meta’s second-quarter earnings call on 29 July, he predicted that within five years “billions of people” will each have “a personal agent that understands your goals,” handling their finances, health, relationships, and homes. It
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For three years, the AI race has been a race for faster chips. Eliyan just became a $1bn company by pointing out that the chips are now too fast for their own wires. The Santa Clara startup said it closed an oversubscribed $145m Series C at a $1bn valuation, making
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Frank Pallone is demanding emissions data and a site visit over the gas turbines powering xAI’s Colossus supercomputers, near mostly Black communities in Tennessee and Mississippi. The top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee is demanding that Elon Musk account for the pollution from xAI’s data
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Six days ago, IBM agreed to buy a quantum-computing lab that builds a kind of qubit IBM does not. This week, the lab showed the world why. HRL Laboratories published a result in Nature on Wednesday: a silicon quantum processor that, in effect, runs itself. The Malibu research house is
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Highland Europe has closed a €1.1 billion fund, its sixth, giving the growth-stage investor fresh capital to keep backing European technology companies as they scale. The firm announced Fund VI on 30 July, alongside the promotion of two investors to partner, and after a year in which it says
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Procore’s AI can read a construction project’s paperwork. Now it is paying $845m to give that AI eyes on the actual site. The construction-software company said it will buy DroneDeploy, a reality-capture and robotics firm, for about $845m in cash, Procore announced. DroneDeploy’s drones, ground robots and
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Enterprises are handing more of their work to AI agents. Onyx Security just raised $113m to make sure a human can still say no. The Israeli startup’s Series B, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, values it at about $640m, Calcalist reported. That is a several-fold jump, and it lands
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The race to build an AI “foundation model of the cell” has a fuel problem. The biological data needed to train one is scarce, messy and inconsistent. Relation Therapeutics thinks the answer is to manufacture that data itself, and GSK is paying up to $110m to help. The London startup
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Disney’s new chief executive wants to rebuild its streaming service into something bigger than a place to watch films. Josh D’Amaro, who took over from Bob Iger in March, is exploring turning Disney+ into a “super app” that would fold streaming together with theme-park tickets, cruise bookings, games,
