Lyft said late Thursday its gross bookings rose 23% in the second quarter to $5.5 billion, beating the 18% to 21% growth the company forecast in May, as its European taxi business and a record share of rides booked through partnerships lifted the average value of each trip. But it forecast a slowdown in bookings growth to 15% to 19% in the third quarter. Revenue for the three months ended in

Salesforce on Wednesday told state government agencies in Washington and California that it plans to permanently layoff 133 employees at the start of October Some 74 employees will be cut in San Francisco, California, the company’s headquarters, while 59 will be laid off in Bellevue and Seattle, Washington. The cuts, which represent a small sliver of Salesforce’s roughly 80,000 employees,

Airbnb said late Thursday that revenue for the three months ended in June rose 17% from the year-ago quarter to $3.6 billion, topping its guidance of 14% to 16%, as the short-term rental company reported higher demand across regions. Net income climbed 27% to $816 million. Shares jumped 9% late Thursday. Airbnb now expects full-year revenue to grow “at least mid teens,” up from “low to mid

Welcome back!Software companies have been at pains to flaunt the success of their AI products, as they seek to dispel investor fears that AI apps are threatening their existence. Two reports this week show that developing popular AI products is only half the challenge.Canva, the design software ...

OpenAI moved to dismiss Apple’s trade-secret suit, calling the case “rotten to its core.” In a court filing Wednesday, the AI startup said that Apple in its lawsuit never identifies the specific trade secrets that it accuses former employees of bringing with them to OpenAI. Instead, OpenAI said that Apple’s complaint alleges those trade secrets encompass broad categories like “hardware

Atlassian shares soared as much as 38% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the enterprise software company reported its first quarterly operating profit in more than two years. Atlassian CEO and cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes said he planned to start buying as much as $250 million in shares, signaling his confidence in the stock which has fallen 32% since the start of the year. The

Alphabet, the parent of Google, has raised as much as $25 billion in a new debt sale after attracting more than $115 billion of interest by offering what is known as a new-issue concession, or higher yields than some of its existing bonds, according to Bloomberg. The sale comes as the world’s largest tech companies burn through free cash flow to build the infrastructure and computing power

Executives at Canva, the design software app with more than 200 million users, had high hopes for a rollout of AI tools that marked the biggest product launch in the startup’s 13-year history. Instead, the privately held company has dealt with a series of stumbles related to AI. First, the ...

AI data centers need boatloads of power, a need that’s set off a flood of investment into startups harnessing nuclear or solar energy to run the servers. Now one startup is raising money to power AI from a different source: the ocean. Panthalassa, a 10-year old startup making technology that ...

Pinterest tapped David Brinker to serve as global head of content, the latest shakeup in a string of executive changes this year. Brinker’s appointment follows last month’s news that Pinterest chief content officer Malik Ducard was leaving the company. Brinker will report to Lee Brown, who took over as global business officer earlier this year after longtime chief revenue officer Bill Watkins

Nvidia is weighing a radical step to deal with a shortage of advanced high-bandwidth memory chips: using less of it than planned in its next-generation graphics processing unit, the Rubin Ultra. Over the past few weeks, Nvidia has been testing at least three versions of the Rubin Ultra GPU, some ...

Stripe recently entered exclusive talks to buy OpenRouter in a cash-and-stock deal that would value the startup for close to $10 billion, according to people with knowledge of the discussion. This step means OpenRouter has effectively taken itself off the market while the companies negotiate price and other details to finalize a transaction. Terms of the deal could still change or it could

SoftBank said it borrowed $10 billion against its OpenAI shareholding on Wednesday, a month after it put another $10 billion more into OpenAI, the latest sign of the financial high-wire that the Japanese investment giant is walking with its OpenAI foray. SoftBank has invested $20 billion of a planned $30 billion second investment in OpenAI following an earlier $34 billion investment. It is due

There’s no question that some of the companies OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has invested in—like chipmaker Cerebras and nuclear fusion firm Helion Energy—have benefitted from doing business with the firm Altman leads. However, just because Altman is an investor in a startup doesn’t mean that OpenAI ...

An Anthropic meeting with investors and advisers earlier this year landed amid a historic run of corporate success. But public perception of AI was abysmal. One director suggested Anthropic use its new clout to go on a charm offensive like those Microsoft, Facebook and other tech giants engaged ...

Warner Bros. Discovery, whose future ownership is up in the air following a legal challenge to its acquisition by Paramount Skydance, reported an 11% drop in revenues for the second quarter and lower profits. While WBD’s streaming operation, which includes HBO Max, increased revenues 10% to $3.08 billion, and also boosted profits, that couldn’t offset a sharp drop in revenue and profits at

Chinese AI developer DeepSeek has resumed its second funding round, which was paused for more than a week following a leak of the transcript of a confidential call between CEO Liang Wenfeng and investors, according to a person with direct knowledge of the talks. Earlier this week, DeepSeek shared a new term sheet for the funding round with investors to restart the discussions, according to the

A flood of June-quarter earnings updates—from the likes of Uber, DoorDash, Shopify and Disney—was interrupted on Thursday by Google’s announcement that its AI guru, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, had been elevated to chair of the AI unit and chief scientist of Google’s parent company, ...

Former Alibaba star researcher Junyang Lin announced that he had started a new AI company, confirming The Information’s earlier reports. Lin, who left Alibaba in March, said in a post on X that his Shanghai-based startup, Pragmatik Labs, is focusing on “next-generation agents across digital and physical worlds.” Lin also said Chinese venture capital firms Gaorong Ventures and HongShan led

In 2023, Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen and Chris Zhu, the co-founders of AI chip startup Etched, were still Harvard University students living in a dorm room. That was when Uberti first met with partners from Sequoia Capital. The venture firm was among the first Etched pitched that year when ...