Techmeme
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Nevada-based identity verification and fraud prevention startup Socure raised $156M at a $5.2B valuation and acquires Austin-based agentic AI startup Fravity (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
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Sources: the Trump administration is weighing sweeping new tariffs on chips and other products like laptops and consoles, despite warnings from tech companies (Politico)
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Plaud unveils Plaud One, a $250 pair of 4G, eSIM-enabled AI earbuds with coverage in 80+ countries and $200 in AI feature credits; Plaud is making 2,000 units (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)
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Japan's Kioxia and Sandisk plan to spend $31B+ in Japan through 2032 to drive chip tech and expand production capacity, including an $11.3B Kitakami plant (Reuters)
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Kalshi partners with Weather Co. to verify climate and weather prediction market settlements; Kalshi says weather vertical trading volume will hit $1.1B in 2026 (Clara Hudson/Wall Street Journal)
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OpenAI launches ads on its ChatGPT Free and Go subscription tiers in India, where it has 100M+ weekly active users, and plans to launch an ad manager next month (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
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Samsung unveils the Galaxy S26 FE, offering an Exynos, not Qualcomm, chipset, 12GB of RAM, a dialed-back camera system from the S26, for $700+, a $50 price jump (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)
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Gambit Security: Russian-speaking ransomware gang Aur0ra used SpaceX's Cursor AI coding assistant to breach at least seven companies between April 8 and May 21 (Raphael Satter/Reuters)
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Australian Federal Police arrest two Western Australia men, aged 21 and 23, believed to be members of TeamPCP, a prolific cybercrime and data extortion group (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)
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Hugging Face unveils Microduck, a $400, 1.7lb, 10-inch-tall bipedal robot developed in part by Pollen Robotics and manufactured by Shenzhen-based Seeed Studio (Bloomberg)
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Sources: Adam Mosseri met with state AG representatives roughly a month ago, saying Meta would appeal any adverse verdict but was willing to make changes (Reuters)
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Sources: Donald Trump Jr. told GOP state AGs at a March event that gambling companies' "vested interest" was misleading states to attack prediction markets (New York Times)
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Meta says its new teen safeguards on Facebook and Instagram are exclusively for US users; the changes will be closely watched by officials outside of the US (Bloomberg)
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Cambridge, MA-based Transfyr emerges from stealth with a $25M seed to use AI to address science's reproducibility crisis and capture labs' "tacit knowledge" (Carl Zimmer/New York Times)
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X launches NFL Gametime, an integrated NFL feed and hub featuring live data, scores, statistics, creator content, and more through to the 2027 Super Bowl (Brian Steinberg/Variety)