An interview with Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz, who expects a 2025 profit of $170M to $200M, about the company's $300M round that pushed its valuation above Rippling's (Matt Durot/Forbes)
X plans a Handle Marketplace for Premium+ and Business subscribers to search for and request inactive usernames; rare handles can cost from $2,500 to $1M+ (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)
A look at the Crylock ransomware scheme, orchestrated by a Russian couple who targeted as many as 400,000 victims and earned over €64M in BTC over eight years (Financial Times)
OpenAI's Broadcom deal shows how the AI startup is diversifying its chip suppliers, including Nvidia chips for training and Broadcom chips for inference (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)
A profile of Anton Pavlovsky, CEO of Kyiv-based Headway Inc, which develops gamified educational apps and has 160M users across its five-product portfolio (Martina Di Licosa/Forbes)
US military has adopted an aggressive push to embrace AI; the top US Army commander in South Korea says "Chat and I" have become "really close lately" (Business Insider)
Shares of bitcoin mining companies pivoting to AI and HPC infrastructure have soared in 2025, with a fund tracking mining firms up 150% year-to-date (Sidhartha Shukla/Bloomberg)
WhatsApp updates its Business API terms to ban general-purpose chatbots starting January 15, 2026, affecting WhatsApp assistants of OpenAI, Perplexity, others (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
Astra Nova, which develops no-code tools that enable creators to launch blockchain-based entertainment experiences, raised $48.3M (CoinDesk)
Q&A with Andrej Karpathy on AGI still being a decade away, why reinforcement learning is terrible, superintelligence, his AI education startup Eureka, and more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast)
Sources: Revolut is nearing the completion of a $3B fundraising round that values the company at $75B, up from $45B in a 2024 secondary share sale (Bloomberg)
Email: Ron Conway, a close friend of Marc Benioff for 25+ years, stepped down from the Salesforce Foundation board, citing Benioff's comments supporting Trump (Heather Knight/New York Times)
Apple and NBCUniversal announce an Apple TV and Peacock Premium bundle for $14.99 per month, a 30% discount over the individual subscriptions (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
Coinbase launches Coinbase Business, a stablecoin payment platform to let businesses send and receive USDC; Coinbase shares USDC yield revenue 50/50 with Circle (Ian Allison/CoinDesk)
Sources: Anthropic is on track to meet an internal goal of $9B in annual revenue run rate by the end of 2025 and is targeting $20B to $26B for 2026 (Reuters)