Earlier this week, Meta landed in hot water for using an experimental, unreleased version of its Llama 4 Maverick model to achieve a high score on a crowdsourced benchmark, LM Arena. The incident prompted the maintainers of LM Arena to apologize, change their policies, and score the unmodified, vanilla Maverick. Turns out, it’s not very […]

Thirteen years ago, Forerunner Ventures began helping to usher in a new era of consumer startups, including Warby Parker, Bonobos, and Glossier. None has gone through a traditional IPO process. Warby Parker was taken public through a special purpose acquisition vehicle. Bonobos was acquired by Walmart. Glossier is still privately held, along with many other […]

A few years ago, Chef Robotics was hurting. But founder Rajat Bhageria turned it around by doing something that early-stage founders fear to do.

Digital payments platform Stripe invites customers to join its management team meetings on a bi-weekly basis so it can get “candid feedback,” according to co-founder Patrick Collison. In an April 8 post on X, the fintech giant’s CEO said the company has a customer join for the first 30 minutes of the meeting, which is […]

A growing number of Tesla owners are putting their used vehicles up for sale, as consumers react to Elon Musk’s political activities and the global protests they have fueled. In March, the number of used Tesla vehicles listed for sale on Autotrader.com skyrocketed, Sherwood News reported, citing data from Autotrader parent company Cox Automotive. The […]

EV startup Lucid Motors has emerged as a surprise winner in the bankruptcy auction for electric trucking company Nikola’s Arizona factory and other assets, according a late Thursday night court filing. Lucid committed around $30 million in cash and non-cash considerations in exchange for the factory, Nikola’s lease on its Phoenix headquarters, and “certain machinery, […]

Mark your calendar — StrictlyVC London is just around the corner on 13 May. Designed for founders, entrepreneurs, and investors, this exclusive gathering promises deep VC insight and high-value connections. We’re thrilled to welcome our first pair of confirmed speakers: Nazo Moosa, managing director of Paladin Capital Group, and Sonali De Rycker, partner of Accel […]

Just a few weeks after OpenAI said it would adopt rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to the systems where data resides, Google is following suit. In a post on X on Wednesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said Google would add support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, to its Gemini models […]

As Sequoia Capital’s first defense tech investment, Mach Industries is an industry darling, raising over $80 million since its founding in 2023. Its founder, Ethan Thornton, now 21, began Mach as a teenage MIT student before dropping out to focus full-time on his startup. But a few months before landing a seed investment from Sequoia […]

Nissan said it will use self-driving software developed by Wayve to beef up its advanced driver assistance system starting in 2027, a landmark deal for the buzzy UK startup that has raised more than $1.3 billion from Nvidia, Microsoft, SoftBank Group, and Uber.  Nissan will integrate Wayve’s software as well as sensors, including lidar from an undisclosed […]