​DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg’s venture fund WndrCo co-led a $15.5 million Series A round for Creatify, an AI video ad platform. Creatify’s AdMax platform uses AI to quickly generate dozens of video advertisements, which are geared toward social media marketing — AdMax analyzes high-performing social video campaigns on apps like TikTok and Instagram to shape […]  

​Microsoft Bing announced today that it is introducing the Bing Video Creator to its app, which uses OpenAI’s Sora model to let users generate videos from text prompts. OpenAI, which has a longstanding partnership with Microsoft, has locked down access to Sora‘s video generation for paying customers only. Its integration in Microsoft Bing represents the […]  

​The surge in data company acquisitions continued Monday with Snowflake’s purchase of Crunchy Data. Cloud data platform Snowflake announced its intent to acquire Crunchy Data, a Postgres database partner, late this afternoon. A source familiar with the matter estimated the deal to be worth around $250 million. The terms weren’t disclosed. Snowflake declined to comment […]  

​The rebooted version of social site Digg aims to bring back the spirit of the old web.  

​A platform for chatting and roleplaying with AI-generated characters, Character.AI announced on Monday that it is rolling out a slate of multimedia features. These features include AvatarFX, Character.AI’s video-generation model, plus Scenes and Streams, which allow users to use these AI tools to create videos using their characters and then share them on a new […]  

​Elon Musk’s brain computer interface startup Neuralink closed a $650 million funding round, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. The Series E fundraise included investors such as ARK Invest, Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital, among others. Neuralink last raised a $280 million Series D funding round in 2023, with an […]  

​Remember Google Glass and the reign of the “glasshole”? Well, Google’s giving face tech another shot with Android XR glasses that look like actual glasses this time.  

​Salesforce has quietly snapped up Moonhub, a startup building AI to vet and hire talent. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. In a post on Moonhub’s website on Monday, the company said that its entire Menlo Park, California-based team will be joining Salesforce, an early investor in Moonhub. “As a customer and investor, Salesforce […]  

​Chime, whose pending IPO is expected to be one of 2025’s blockbuster hits, issued a share price range on Monday of $24 to $26. That a market cap of up to $11.2 billion. At the midrange, the company will raise $800 million for itself and a handful of investors, including European VC powerhouse Cathay Innovation, […]  

​Microsoft’s sustainability goals are imperiled by its push into AI and cloud services.