Ever since Hong Kong legalized cryptocurrency trading last June, blockchain projects from the West have been paying more attention to the Asian financial hub.
Aptos, the a16z-backed blockchain network developed by a group of former Meta employees, is one of them.
Started by some of the original creators of Meta’s abandoned crypto payment project Diem, Aptos is set to host a DeFi event in Hong Kong this April.
When asked when users in Hong Kong will get access to Aptos-based DeFi services, the founder said he cannot speculate on regulation.
“I do think Hong Kong regulators are moving things in the right direction and forward and providing clarity for entrepreneurs to build.
Payments infrastructure giant Stripe said today it has inked deals with investors to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a tender offer at a $65 billion valuation.
Notably, the valuation represents a 30% increase compared to what Stripe was valued at last March when it raised $6.5 billion in Series I funding at a $50 billion valuation.
But it is also still lower than the $95 billion valuation achieved in March of 2021.
A Stripe IPO has been long anticipated and was widely expected to happen in 2024.
But with this deal, it appears that an initial public offering may not take place until next year.
Bumble, a once-powerful force in online dating, is facing a reckoning.
CEO Lidiane Jones announced that 37% of Bumble’s workforce, or about 350 employees, would be let go, and that Bumble would embark on an app overhaul targeted at reviving growth.
And many of the capabilities introduced in Bumble’s apps in the past 18 months haven’t resonated with the user base, Jones said during the call.
Jones, who joined from Slack in January, appointed four new C-suite executives at Bumble in the last week alone.
Dating apps generally — including Match Group’s — have seen declining revenue from users reluctant to fork over cash for premium add-ons.
Sony is laying off around 900 employees in its PlayStation division, the company announced on Tuesday.
The cuts will impact 8% of the division’s global workforce, as Sony becomes the latest company to announce major cuts in recent weeks and months.
The layoffs come two weeks after Sony cut its sales forecast for the PlayStation 5 after warning of decreasing demand.
Sony isn’t the only company in the gaming business to announce recent job cuts.
Last month, Microsoft laid off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees and Unity laid off 25% of its workforce.
Glean wants to beat ChatGPT at its own game — in the enterpriseGenAI has its issues.
Enter Glean, whose software connects to enterprise first- and third-party databases to field plain-English requests (e.g.
In 2019, Jain — along with a small founding team — built Glean as an AI-powered search app geared toward enterprise customers.
But Jain asserts that Glean is “secure” and “private” — at least to the extent a cloud-based GenAI platform can be.
“Glean [can recommend the] documents users might need for their day-to-day work by learning from past work patterns,” Jain said.
Today, KKR added to that growing total when it announced it was going to acquire Broadcom’s end user computing business for $4 billion.
These pieces include VMware Workspace One and VMware Horizon, two remote desktop applications that had been part of the VMware family of products.
Almost immediately, Broadcom began slashing costs, starting with laying off over 2000 VMware employees, just a week after the deal was official.
KKR managing director Bradley Brown still sees a lot of room for growth moving forward to build out the EUC (end user computing) division into a vibrant stand-alone business.
One interesting aspect of this deal is that KKR intends to implement an employee ownership program, giving employees a chance to own equity in the new company alongside KKR.
Over the weekend, someone posted a cache of files and documents apparently stolen from the Chinese government hacking contractor, I-Soon.
This leak gives cybersecurity researchers and rival governments an unprecedented chance to look behind the curtain of Chinese government hacking operations facilitated by private contractors.
Since then, observers of Chinese hacking operations have feverishly poured over the files.
Also, an IP address found in the I-Soon leak hosted a phishing site that the digital rights organization Citizen Lab saw used against Tibetans in a hacking campaign in 2019.
Cary highlighted the documents and chats that show how much — or how little — I-Soon employees are paid.
Despite record growth in the solar industry last year, software startup Aurora Solar has laid off 20% of its staff of about 500 people, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The company, which provides software to help solar installers manage their sales, project design and installation process, has missed its growth targets for the past year, a source said.
It’s possible that Aurora Solar hit stiffer headwinds than expected in California, where changes in net metering led to homeowners getting paid about 75% less for power sold back to utilities.
With net metering rates slashed, the state has decided to offer richer incentives for solar installations that include batteries.
While Aurora Solar says its software is used by 90% of the top 100 solar installers, it also has more than 7,000 customers, many of which likely fall in the long tail of the distribution, those that say they’re under the most pressure.
Despite record growth in the solar industry last year, software startup Aurora Solar has laid off 20% of its staff of about 1,000 people, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The company, which provides software to help solar installers manage their sales, project design and installation process, has missed its growth targets for the past year, a source said.
It’s possible that Aurora Solar hit stiffer headwinds than expected in California, where changes in net metering led to homeowners getting paid about 75% less for power sold back to utilities.
With net metering rates slashed, the state has decided to offer richer incentives for solar installations that include batteries.
While Aurora Solar says its software is used by 90% of the top 100 solar installers, it also has more than 7,000 customers, many of which likely fall in the long tail of the distribution, those that say they’re under the most pressure.
Three months after completing its $68.7 billion acquisition of gaming company Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees in its gaming divisions.
This amounts to about 8.6% of 22,000 Microsoft employees in gaming.
Blizzard president Mike Ybarra also announced he will step down, now that the acquisition is finalized.
According to game developer and consultant Rami Ismail, about 5,600 gaming employees have been laid off so far in 2024.
Thats more than half of all gaming layoffs from 2023.
