Techmeme
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Venture funding of fintech startups grew 22.7% YoY in H1 2026 to $28.6B globally, but deal count fell 25.7% and funding fell 17.3% vs. H2 2025's $34.6B funding (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
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Coinbase's Jesse Pollak says Jordan Fish, aka "Cobie", will now lead the Base app team after acknowledging some of Base's bets on social features fell short (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)
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SpaceX shares fell for a fourth-straight session on Wednesday, briefly dropping below their $135 IPO price for the first time before closing at $135.27 (Samantha Subin/CNBC)
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Apple publishes a policy for upcoming Maps ads, says home services ads are banned, medical services ads will be "evaluated on a case-by-case basis", and more (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
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OpenAI details GPT-Red, an internal automated red-teaming model that scales prompt injection vulnerability discovery so it can fix bugs before wider deployment (OpenAI)
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Uber and Waymo are engaged in a DC lobbying battle over AV legislation, with Uber supporting a hybrid human-robotaxi model and Waymo pushing for pure robotaxis (Liam Denning/Bloomberg)
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Dave Brown, AWS SVP of Compute, AI, and Platform, is leaving the company after 19 years for a new job; he is a member of the S-team that advises CEO Andy Jassy (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)
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Apple raises its AppleCare+ prices for Macs and iPads by $0.50 per month and $5 per year; the increases are exclusively for new sign-ups (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
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Thinking Machines Lab debuts Inkling, an open-weight MoE model with 975B total and 41B active parameters, trained to be broad rather than optimized for one area (Thinking Machines Lab)
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Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman's $1.5B AI implementation company, announced in May, launches with the name "Ode with Anthropic" and 100 engineers (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
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Lumin Digital, which provides cloud-based digital banking software to banks and credit unions, raised more than $115M at a $1.6B post-money valuation (Ryan Lawler/Axios)
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OpenAI employees donated a combined $215K+ to Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC seeking stricter AI rules and opposing Greg Brockman-backed Leading the Future (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)
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OpenAI launches Codex Micro, a $230 desktop keypad built in collaboration with keyboard maker Work Louder, with backlit keys, a rotary knob, and a tiny joystick (Megan Morrone/Axios)
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Sources: ASML has discussed raising prices for its EUV systems with TSMC and plans to charge 10% more for its DUV systems; TSMC is resisting ASML's price plans (Qianer Liu/The Information)
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Source: OnePlus will begin to cease operations in the US and Europe as early as this week and Realme will exit China as part of a restructuring by parent Oppo (Bloomberg)