The cloud was supposed to make geography irrelevant. Microsoft’s latest round of job cuts in China shows how quickly that promise is coming apart. Microsoft is laying off hundreds of staff at its Azure cloud unit in China, according to affected employees who spoke to the South China Morning Post. Two sources put the number […]

AI is running out of power, and out of places to put it, on Earth. A Los Angeles startup wants to solve both problems by leaving the planet. Orbital, a space-infrastructure company building AI data centres in low Earth orbit, has raised a $5mn oversubscribed pre-seed round led by a16z speedrun, with a long list […]

France built its own encrypted messenger so civil servants would not have to trust WhatsApp or Telegram. Now that messenger has been breached, and the government and the attacker cannot agree on how much was taken. France’s National Cybersecurity Agency, ANSSI, detected a compromise of Tchap on 7 June, and the Digital Affairs Directorate (DINUM), […]

America wants to build robots, not just import them. A New York startup has just raised $200mn to do exactly that. Standard Bots has closed a $200mn round that values the company at $1bn, minting a fresh robotics unicorn. The financing was led by General Catalyst and RoboStrategy, a fund dedicated to robotics, and marks […]

Most startups raise money because they need it. NinjaOne has just raised more than $400m to make the opposite point. The Austin-based IT-operations company said on Tuesday that a fresh round of Series C extensions has more than doubled its valuation to $12.3bn, up from the $5bn it was worth only 16 months ago. The […]

Enterprise HRIS buying guides tend to recommend the same five names. That shortlist hasn’t changed in a decade, and most of those platforms were built for a workforce model that no longer exists. Remote-first teams, distributed payroll across multiple countries, AI-driven workforce planning, and employee experience expectations from a generation raised on consumer apps have all reshaped […]

Building an electric air taxi is less about one dramatic first flight than about doing it over and over until regulators are convinced. Vertical Aerospace has just put a second aircraft in the air to help it get there faster. The Bristol-based company said on Tuesday that its newest full-scale prototype completed its maiden piloted […]

The NHS does not lack for AI pitches. What it has lacked is one that keeps patient data inside the country. A British software firm says it now has it. OneAdvanced, the Birmingham-based SaaS company whose software touches more than 40 million NHS patients a year, has launched what it bills as the UK’s first […]

China wants to win the AI race on its own hardware. A new plan shows just how much it is willing to spend, and how far it will go to cut American chips out of the picture. Beijing is drafting a blueprint to spend around 2 trillion yuan ($295bn) over the next five years building […]

Six months ago, ICEYE was worth €2.4bn. Today it is worth more than €10bn. Few numbers capture Europe’s defence-tech boom as bluntly as that. The Finnish satellite company has raised €450mn in a Series F round led by General Atlantic, valuing it at over €10bn ($11.5bn), a fourfold jump since December. Counting a secondary sale […]