GoKawiil
Tech News
Instinct, founded last year by 23-year-old Noah Shinn under parent company Spear Street Technology, has closed a $250 million Series B round led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. The deal pushes the young startup's total funding to $350 million and its valuation to $2.5 billion, driven by buzz around its AI assistant that manages users' schedules, purchases and subscriptions through texts and calls.
Amazon has announced it will close Mechanical Turk (MTurk), its long-running marketplace connecting businesses with a distributed workforce for microtasks, effective September 30. The platform allowed companies to outsource work like data validation, content moderation, and survey collection to human workers worldwide, tasks often too subjective or complex for automation.
Stripe has acquired Clerky, an online legal services platform used by startups and their attorneys to handle routine formation and financing paperwork. Clerky says it will keep its existing team and focus after joining Stripe, continuing to serve the same startup and attorney customer base. The company reports its startups account for 23% of Silicon Valley seed and pre-seed financings and have collectively raised over $140 billion in venture capital.
Startup Instinct is raising funds at a $2.5 billion valuation for its AI assistant that manages email and other tasks, generating buzz across Silicon Valley. However, some early testers have flagged concerns about how the tool handles personal data and privacy.
Julia Collins, who became the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn company after Zume Pizza hit a $1 billion valuation in 2018, later left to launch Planet FWD, a platform helping brands track and cut their carbon footprint. In an interview, she reflected on her entrepreneurial upbringing, her early career as the first hire at food chain Mexicue, and her approach to leadership across the more than $500 million she has raised in venture capital.
AI-driven search tools such as Google's AI Overviews and conversational assistants like ChatGPT are increasingly pulling data from customer reviews to decide which businesses to recommend. This means the volume, recency and quality of a business's reviews are being read and weighted by algorithms, not just prospective customers. A thin or neglected review profile can make a business effectively invisible to these AI systems.
A once-celebrated AI startup founder who drew massive investor enthusiasm and sky-high valuations has seen the company's worth collapse by billions, according to new reporting. The report traces how early hype around the founder's technology claims outpaced scrutiny of the underlying business, culminating in a dramatic financial unraveling.
JDK 28 has integrated JEP 401, a Project Valhalla milestone, as a preview feature that introduces value classes to the JVM. The author explains that these classes drop object identity, letting the JVM flatten and scalarize data in memory rather than always using pointer-based references, which can boost performance in many cases.
A nationwide survey of 1,000 Americans presented at the 2025 Joint Statistical Meetings found that a quarter of respondents reported no understanding of statistics, while 37% said their familiarity was limited. Only about a quarter said they had learned some statistics in school, yet nine in ten said they would rely on statistics more often if they understood the concepts better.
Robotics startup Generalist has raised nearly $200 million more in an extension of its Series B round led by 8VC, pushing its valuation to $3 billion and total round funding to $600 million. The company, founded in 2024 by ex-Google DeepMind and Boston Dynamics engineers, builds AI foundation models meant to control multiple types of robots, with its Gen 1.5 model reportedly learning new tasks from short video clips.
A report compiles 13 approaches organizations are using to align artificial intelligence deployment with corporate values, emphasizing judgment, trust, and guardrails rather than unchecked adoption. The piece frames AI as a powerful but unpredictable force, urging leaders to think carefully about intent before implementation.
A franchise consultant who has advised over 1,000 candidates says validation calls with existing franchise owners are a frequently skipped but essential step in the discovery process. These calls happen after reviewing the Franchise Disclosure Document but before Discovery Day or signing, and are meant to confirm claims made by the franchisor directly with people already running the business.