SoftBank plans to list its payment platform PayPay on the U.S. stock market, aiming for a valuation of up to $10 billion. Highlights:
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SoftBank's decision to take PayPay public reflects a broader strategy to monetize assets and fuel its AI investment initiatives. By retaining control post-IPO, SoftBank ensures continued influence over Japan's leading payment platform. The anticipated $10 billion valuation underscores the platform's market dominance and growth potential. (cincodias.elpais.com)
Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and 30th employee, is leaving after 27 years to found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation using AI to automate scientific research - taking co-founders Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le (Google Brain), and Oriol Vinyals (DeepMind) with him. Google is a founding investor and cloud partner, supplying compute for at least the first year, with Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures co-leading the seed. In the same announcement, Demis Hassabis steps down as DeepMind CEO to become chairman and Alphabet chief scientist, with Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over Gemini model development. Alphabet stock fell about 4%.
Anthropic has reportedly signed a $10 billion, six-year compute deal with Volta, an AI cloud startup founded only earlier this year, per Bloomberg. Volta is partnering with crypto-mining firm Bitdeer to develop the data centre - located in Norway, delivering 133 megawatts, and running Nvidia's Vera Rubin architecture - and is a member of Nvidia's Cloud Partner programme. It caps an aggressive capacity spree that also includes recent compute deals with SpaceX and Amazon, as Anthropic races rivals for the scarcest input in the industry.
Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash (about $2.25B equity value including net cash) - its first acquisition since a July Nasdaq IPO at an $18 billion valuation. The reset is stark: Airtable raised over $1.4 billion and peaked above $11 billion in 2021, with secondaries reportedly at $4 billion earlier this year, even though ARR grew 20%+ year-over-year to roughly $480 million and it serves 500,000+ organisations including 80% of the Fortune 100. Bending Spoons - owner of Evernote, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and Vimeo - typically buys at a discount, trims staff, and optimises for profit.