TECH NEWS

Photon held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents

The AI startup Photon is so sure that agents will eventually come to replace mobile apps that it held a funeral for the latter — yes, a real funeral in a church, with speeches and everything. Photon, which helps developers build agents that work over iMessage and WhatsApp, now has $4.5 million in seed funding to develop its products. The raise comes after the company signed up over 40,000 developers grew its revenue 10x in just four months, it says.

Photon co-founder and CEO Daniel Tian said the “app funeral,” held in San Francisco on September 17, was also a developer day for the startup, featuring panels from Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI. It also included an actual coffin for app icons.

The move to host an app funeral was obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but Tian believes the app era is coming to an end. “Honestly, it’s going to take...

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Nvidia-backed GMI Cloud raises $668m as contracted revenue tops $600m

GMI Cloud, a Mountain View company that rents out Nvidia GPU servers, has raised $668m in new financing, the company said on Wednesday. That is $223m of Series B equity and a $445m credit facility. The Taiwanese bank CTBC led the credit facility. ARCHIV, a new San Francisco firm that

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MI5 says over 100 UK academics worked on projects funded by China’s spies

MI5 has told UK universities to review any work with the China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI). It says the institute funds research for China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). More than 100 UK-linked academics have worked on its projects, according to MI5. MI5 published the warning on Wednesday

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Google DeepMind’s watermarked AI proteins still work in the lab

Google DeepMind has brought its SynthID watermarking technology to synthetic biology. The new tool, SynthID Bio, hides a signature in the amino acid sequence or predicted 3D structure of a protein. The lab announced it on Wednesday in a blog post and a paper in Nature. Google DeepMind says a

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Xbox is not for sale, CEO Asha Sharma tells The New York Times

Asha Sharma was asked whether her endgame at Xbox was divestiture, Zachary Small reported for The New York Times. The question came in a profile of Microsoft’s gaming chief published on Wednesday. “Xbox is not for sale,” Sharma said. “We will do whatever it takes to set the company

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Nvidia-backed GMI Cloud raises $668m as contracted revenue tops $600m

MI5 says over 100 UK academics worked on projects funded by China’s spies

Google DeepMind’s watermarked AI proteins still work in the lab

Xbox is not for sale, CEO Asha Sharma tells The New York Times