Tootfinder

Giga, which develops voice-based AI agents for customer support, raised a $61M Series A led by Redpoint with participation from Y Combinator and Nexus (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/11/05/voice-ai-giga-raise-61-million-customer-serv…

Exclusive: Voice AI startup Giga raises $61 million to take on customer service automation
Voice AI has the potential to streamline a lot of businesses' customer service tasks, such as answering routine customer questions or scheduling appointments, without a human agent needing to step in.

So Coupang didn't know it had been breached until one of its customers reported it to them.
This customer, surnamed Park, was informed of the breach by a stranger via email, who showed Park's 15 most recent emails with the retailer.
https://<…

A customer reported a suspicious email to Coupang. Then the platform announced a breach.
A suspicious email with the subject line “Your personal information may have been leaked” pushed Park, a software developer, into a decision he still describes as surreal: he reported it to Coupang.

#Tesla lost its crown as the world’s bestselling electric vehicle maker on Friday
🔸as a customer revolt over Elon Musk’s right-wing politics,
🔸expiring U.S. tax breaks for buyers
🔸and stiff overseas competition
pushed sales down for a second year in a row.
🔥Tesla said that it delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025 -- down 9% from a year earlier.
Chinese rival

Tesla loses title of world's top EV maker to China rival amid customer revolt and stiff competition
Tesla lost its crown as the world’s bestselling electric vehicle maker on Friday as a customer revolt over Elon Musk’s right-wing politics, expiring U.S. tax breaks to buyers and stiff overseas competition pushed sales down for a second year in a row. Tesla said that it delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025, down 9% from a year ago. Chinese rival BYD, which sold 2.26 million vehicles last year, is now the biggest EV maker. For the fourth quarter, sales totaled 418,227, falling short of th…

idk instead of hoping that your Big Tech software vendor—who had many data leaks before and was sued many times for abusing customer data—doesn't steal your data for AI training you could maybe not store your data in a Big Tech cloud

Filing: Workday is cutting ~400 employees, or ~2% of its workforce, primarily in customer-facing roles, saying the move will help it invest in priority areas (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-…

Every day is a big cyber news day, so don't miss today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you should know, including
--Twin brother hackers arrested for US government hacking, data destruction spree,
--GRU cyber ops sanctioned into Skripal poisoning inquiry,
--Defenders scramble to patch React Server Components' critical flaws,
--AI agents match human attackers in smart contract exploits,
--AZ Atty. General sues Temu for customer …

Twin brother hackers arrested for US government hacking, data destruction spree
GRU cyber ops sanctioned into Skripal poisoning inquiry, Defenders scramble to patch React Server Components' critical flaws, AI agents match human attackers in smart contract exploits, AZ Atty. General sues Temu for customer data theft, Threat intel experts recorded DPRK IT recruiters, much more

cloudflare writes “We’ve designed our change propagation to involve blast radius protection. With these protections in place, a highstate failure becomes a signal, rather than a customer-impacting event.”

Thank you #rhel

After sssd upgrade, useradd and usermod fail to flush the sssd cache with "DB version too old for domain implicit_files!". - Red Hat Customer Portal
After sssd upgrade, useradd and usermod fail to flush the sssd cache with "DB version too old for domain implicit_files!". Sample reproducer: # useradd testuser0 # systemctl is-enabled sssd.service # systemctl disable sssd.service # systemctl stop sssd.service # yum update sssd Sample outputs of a sssd upgrade system from sssd-2.3.0-9.el8(RHEL8.3) to sssd-2.5.2-2.el8(RHEL8.5): # useradd testuser1 [sss_cache] [sysdb_domain_cache_connect] (0x0010): DB version too old [0.22], expected [0.23] for d…

TransLink gets green light to deliver more HandyDART trips, longer hours, and easier booking
New Customer-First Plan will bring a refresh of operations to better support customers and caregivers
https://link.etranslink.ca/v/443/61496305…

Christmas shopping on Amazon, it has excitedly told me "Customer who viewed items in your browsing history also viewed" - and then presented with a list of the exact things that I've been looking at.
I'll take that as a compliment.

Customer engagement service MoEngage raised a $100M Series F led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, bringing its total funding to $250M as it ramps up AI investment (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/04/goldm…

Goldman Sachs doubles down on MoEngage in new round to fuel global expansion | TechCrunch
MoEngage already has customers across 75 countries, with North America being its biggest business driver.

OpenAI discloses API customer data breach via Mixpanel vendor hack
Mixpanel reported that the attack “impacted a limited number of our customers” and resulted from a smishing (SMS phishing) campaign that the company detected on November 8.
OpenAI received details of the affected dataset on November 25 after being informed of Mixpanel’s ongoing investigation.
The AI company notes that the exposed information may include:

• Name that was provided to …

OpenAI discloses API customer data breach via Mixpanel vendor hack
OpenAI is notifying some ChatGPT API customers that limited identifying information was exposed following a breach at its third-party analytics provider Mixpanel.

Sources: Amazon, the USPS' top customer with $6B in revenue in 2025, is considering ending its deal at the end of 2026 and expanding its own delivery network (Jacob Bogage/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/04/usps-amazon-delivery/<…

Amazon explores cutting ties with USPS, building its own delivery network
Amazon looks into expanding its nationwide delivery network and giving up its longstanding partnership with the U.S. Postal Service.

Indeed. com "We updated our Privacy Policy to reflect our use of AI in customer calls."
Me *closes account*
#NoAI

While a child can appreciate the privacy-first goals of an app like Ente, features like customer service by mail and collaborative albums are less of a priority.
https://theprivacydad.com/my-teenagers-review-of-entes-privacy-photo-app/

How Social Security has gotten worse under Trump (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/29/trump-social-security-cuts-customer-service/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251230/p5#a251230p5

Paris-based CRM unicorn Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, raised €500M and says it surpassed €200M in ARR in 2025 (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/03/new-unicorn-brevo-raises-583m-to-challenge-crm-giants/

New unicorn Brevo raises $583M to challenge CRM giants | TechCrunch
Brevo, a customer relationship management company headquartered in Paris, is now a unicorn.

Customer: "I need X."
Me: "Here's 3 quick steps I've outlined clearly to get you X in 5min."
Customer: "Call me."
Me: "Do you have a question?"
Customer: "Schedule a meeting."
Me: "What about?"
Customer: "I need to talk to you."
Me: "I'm travelling. Can you elaborate?"
Customer: <silence>
...
Me: <calls customer between mtgs> "Hi. What…

Good on Biffa. Their renewed commitment to customer service means they won't 'action' my email. Instead I can use their portal, only I can't because I'm not an existing customer. But that's okay because I can use their phone line instead, which forever send me through a loop of repeating menus and never puts me through to someone. Well done Biffa, you are beyond parody and clearly don't want any new customers. And I thought Veolia were shit. Well they were, but B…

"Technical communities provide software businesses with an audience, a test bed, and eventually, a customer pool for their products and services, but this only works if the products are good enough to begin with. This insight was clearly defined by Guy Kawasaki, arguably the person who invented the field of Developer Relations, during his tenure as Chief Evangelist at Apple from 1983 to 1987."

Guy Kawasaki
There is a website out there providing an answer to the question "What is Developer Relations?," a question that this author, whose job title is precisely that one, gets a lot. According to this resource, Developer Relations is an umbrella term encompassing three major areas of activity: "Community," "Content," and "Product;" a perfect description of a job role, at least as far as this author is concerned.

Customer Support Specialist (Part-Time): https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/16/customer-support-specialist-parttime.html

Metacurity is back from a Thanksgiving holiday break with an extensive run-down of the critical cybersecurity developments since last Monday, including
--Some ChatGPT customer data was exposed by a breach at vendor Mixpanel,
--Lazarus Group suspected of $30.6m breach of Upbit,
--Korea's shopping platform Coupang hacked by a former insider to access 30m customers' data,
--Lazarus Group and Kimsuky are DPRK's most prolific hackers,
--Korea arrests four …

Some ChatGPT customers' data were exposed by a breach at vendor Mixpanel
Lazarus Group suspected of $30.6m breach of Upbit, Korea's shopping platform Coupang hacked by a former insider to access 30m customers' data, Lazarus Group and Kimsuky are DPRK's most prolific hackers, Korea arrests four for hacking 120K IP cameras, OnSolve CodeRED platform hit by attack, much more

Boss: The customer's can't get enough of the new AI-powered customer support system!
Programmer: We're trying to solve the problem.
Boss: But why?
Programmer: It's based off of a sex bot...
#humor #ai

Privacy Telecom ‘Cape’ Introduces ‘Disappearing Call Logs’ That Delete Every 24 Hours https://www.404media.co/privacy-telecom-cape-introduces-disappearing-call-logs-that-delete-every-24-hours/

deeply amused with the premise of this video
what do you mean "if". _obviously_ the dark web sellers have customer service. how else would it work??

That‘s a lot of money for a company which looses money each time a customer uses their product …
#OpenAI Needs At Least $207 Billion By 2030 Just To Keep Losing Money, HSBC Estimates - Slashdot

Your product is a hoax? Doesn’t matter. Your customer support is a completely inoperable bullshit bot? Doesn’t matter. You’re a con artist? Positive advantage!
Customers? What are customers?! Just a line on a spreadsheet that helps sell the con!
4/

Called a Saab mechanic to ask some questions. Turns out he had a customer wanting to sell his. Although his customer is insane because the car is mechanically totaled and still wants $3000 for a 240K mile vehicle.
The mechanic said it's probably worth $1000 at most, and even then it would be difficult to buy.

Thanks, customer support #AI chatbot. So f**king helpful.
Bot: “Contact our support team”
Me: “How do I do that?”
Bot: “I can’t help you.”
(I want to scream so badly)
#chatbot #tech #CustomerSupportNightmare #CustomerSupport

Not really newsworthy, but this announcement from Leaseweb feels a bit 20th century:
[...] an upcoming update to the Customer Portal Secret Management page. We have introduced a new feature that restricts the use of certain special characters in key names for improved security.
Allowed special characters: ,_ . / - ? & =
(Alphanumeric characters remain fully supported.)
Examples:
* Allowed: Key&123
* Not allowed: Key@123
* Not allowed: Key#123

Customer feedback re DB Lounge Essen being permanently shut down: "Fuck you! Sch..."

Today's the 2nd day I'm wearing my black-yellow Engelbert-Strauss e.s.motion 2020 to work - in an office.
It's also the 2nd day of people making derogatory comments like "Are you going to a construction site?" and "You can't go to a customer like this, they'll think you've come to fix your bath." and "At least noone will run you over, reflecting like that."
You already banned me from wearing my kilt in summer! They are comfort…

Ahhh, fucking FedEx!
> "Delivery exception: Customer not available or business closed"
We are open, all doors are unlocked... I assure you, the Customer is definitely here, unlike our package that you failed to deliver.

Today, I called a home appliance customer service (Danby). Only two choices and then I could speak to a real person. It's a #Festivus miracle!

Favorites keep winning in Week 11 of "customer-friendly" NFL season https://www.espn.com/espn/betting/story/_/id/46988571/nfl-betting-week-11-favorites-overs-unders-odds-rams-seahawks-cfb

Cyber troubles never end for KT in Korea.
An internet installation technician working as a subcontractor for KT has been accused of leaking customer personal information to another mobile phone retailer.
https://www.chosun.com/english/industry-en/2025/1…

Exclusive: KT Subcontractor Leaks Customer Data, Company Avoids Responsibility
Exclusive: KT Subcontractor Leaks Customer Data, Company Avoids Responsibility Leaked information led to contract cancellations; experts say KT must supervise subcontractors despite outsourcing

testing @… since 2 days now intensively. i am still @… customer. ONE THING i really like:
FOLDERS :-)

Boots.com is using a service that's blocking my ISPs (CGNAT) IP - it's got a phone call to contact their customer care centre and asks you to quote the 38 digit incident ID.
Like that's going to work to a customer service person by phone.

RE: https://mas.to/@carnage4life/115587666837745216
Sometimes I wonder if these semi-regular Grok quirks are nothing but a ploy to get more people to play with (t)his toy and thereby drive up user/customer stats & valuation... equally likely is that he rea…

Starlink says it has reached 9M "active customers" across 155 countries, territories, and other markets, up from 8M on November 5 (Polly Thompson/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-customer-number…

Elon Musk's Starlink is adding 20,000 new users a day as it hits 9 million customers
Customer numbers for SpaceX's Starlink internet have surged by 1 million in the past six weeks, the company said on X.

Goodbye #Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar
https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/developers/best-practices/goodbye-microservices…

Check out today's Metacurity for a ton of critical infosec developments you might have missed over the weekend, including
--Cyberattack on a critical third-party vendor could expose top banks' customer data,
--An insider shared internal CrowdStrike screenshots on Telegram,
--Hackers stole Salesforce-stored data from 200 companies,
--DOGE has purportedly disbanded,
--Harvard is the latest Ivy to get hacked,
--AI models can sabotage coding projects, …

Cyberattack on a critical third-party vendor could expose top banks' customer data
An insider shared internal CrowdStrike screenshots on Telegram, Hackers stole Salesforce-stored data from 200+ companies, DOGE has purportedly disbanded, Harvard is the latest Ivy to get hacked, AI models can sabotage coding projects, Singapore raids scam-connected firm, much more

I’m obsessed.
All I think about is #content, customer acquisition and #community.
I’m helping #business

Recently while shopping:
Salesperson: "Good day"
Customer: "I'd like xyz"
Salesperson: "Good day anyway."
Me trying not to laugh.. just treat service staff as humans. It's not THAT hard.

So i've been trying to move away from an American domain registrar (name.com)
My first try is with WHC (Web Hosting Canada)... so far i'm really really not impressed. Customer support is just awful.
Glad i just tried to transfer a single domain and not all of them.. will have to keep looking for alternatives
#buycanadian

Decagon, which offers AI-powered customer service agents, raised a $250M Series D led by Coatue and Index Ventures at a $4.5B valuation, up from $1.5B in June (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026…

I spent Friday trying to hack into a customer box in India. They need support but have "secured" the system beyond the reach of the access mechanisms they have offered. None of the 4 different VPN’s we operate for their US operations can reach the box directly, so I must RDP into a domain controller in Mumbai, which they replaced without telling us. After finally getting to the box, none of the dozen passwords they’ve provided over the years work.
Definitely billable hours. <…

You can get a full liquor license in SF with no customer bathroom? Kinda weird. The new Taco Bell Cantina has none.

hello Good day my name is CatSalad Zzz Manager at E-P. We’re currently hiring across various departments, and I’m responsible for recruiting passionate, skilled individuals to join us in shaping the future of sustainable napping and we have 5 positions currently open which are Nap analyst, Customer Service Napresentative, Engineering & Napufacturing, Naps Manager and Adminapstrative Support positions. Kindly snooze back if interested.

TransLink proposes major improvements to HandyDART
Customer-First Plan would increase HandyDART capacity, extend hours, and make it easier to plan trips
https://link.etranslink.ca/v/443/61496305bc86358c0d4b8ff78cfb572f24b98893a48c639a23…

Fundraiser by Eric Marienthal : Support Gordon Goodwin's Fight Against Cancer and Stroke
https://www.

How generative AI is used in the financial sector.
#AI

Generative AI in Financial Services: Use Cases & Risks
Explore generative AI in financial services: how it works, top use cases, customer experience gains, key risks, and governance best practices.

lol. Im in a key stakeholder review meeting for a new hardware variant that we are due to ship out to a beta customer on Friday.
They're still arguing over the technical specs that are the "requirements".

@… You mentioned about stickers. I remembered that a customer had recently made some stickers from a mascot that I made for them https://social.lol/@andycarolan/115605087487528134.

Listen Labs, whose AI tools help Microsoft and others run customer research and interviews, raised a $69M Series B led by Ribbit Capital at a $500M valuation (Iain Martin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/20

This $500 Million AI Startup Runs Customer Interviews For Microsoft And Sweetgreen
The San Francisco-based company, which has run more than 1 million customer interviews with its automated AI tools to help major companies figure out what their users want, has now raised $69 million.

you can bring down 20% of the internet with a single-character typo in a regex, but you can also destroy a nearly 50 year old bridge with a single incorrectly placed piece of heatshrink
isn't technology beautiful
https://blog.cloudflare.com/details-of-t…

Q&A with AMD CTO Mark Papermaster, who says AMD is the first customer for TSMC's 2nm process, on AMD's rise since he joined in 2011, AI in chip design, and more (Dr. Ian Cutress/More Than Moore)
https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/an-interview-wit…

An Interview with AMD CTO Mark Papermaster
The Future is Faster Than Anyone Expected

from my link log —
ARIN incident report: IP address issuance error.
https://www.arin.net/announcements/20251212/
saved 2025-12-21 https://

Public Incident Report – 4.10 Issuance Error
Executive Summary On 2 December 2025, an IPv4 block 23.150.164.0/24, correctly allocated to the Original Customer, was inadvertently removed and reissued to the …

Late night thought:
https://www.quora.com/profile/Ben-Curthoys/Consider-the-Kano-model-of-customer-sat…

Coinbase says a former customer service agent was arrested in India, following a May breach where hackers bribed contractors to access sensitive customer data (Muyao Shen/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/202…

I've been lucky to run an ecommerce store for 10 years and only got 2 chargebacks.
One of them was a fraudulent one, where customer received the item but claimed it was defective without contacting us, sending us a photo or giving us a chance to make it right. For all we know, it was not defective.
Just won the chargeback dispute, which is actually not too frequent.
#ecommerce

Nike probes potential cyber incident after hackers claim data leak https://therecord.media/nike-probes-alleged-cyber-incident

#Expedia never was the pinnacle of customer #service. But as of recent, they have dug themselves into a hellhole of #AI that doesn't work. At the same time, their website

Imagine if the restaurant you go to started serving shit sandwiches. Some people seem to like the shit sandwiches but you're like "Dude, these are literally shit sandwiches! I do not want these!" but the restaurant owner starts forcing every customer take a shit sandwich even if they don't want one.
This post is about AI.

Very cool, received a fake product ordering on walmart.com from a 3rd-party seller.
Amazon and Walmart seem to be in a race to the bottom to ruin their reputations.
I have to say that Amazon's customer support is way better when you're a victim of fraud.

Oh my god.
"Australia's TPG Telecom said a customer died after their Samsung mobile phone running out-of-date software failed to connect with the Triple Zero emergency services, and there was no network outage at the time."
https://www.

Banking tech vendor SitusAMC says it suffered a November 12 hack that could expose sensitive customer data; sources say JPMorgan, Citi, and others are impacted (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/22/business/bank-data-hack.html

A Swath of Bank Customer Data Was Hacked. The F.B.I. Is Investigating.
SitusAMC, a technology vendor for real estate lenders, holds sensitive personal information on the clients of hundreds of its banking customers, including JPMorgan Chase.

OK, that’s bad, but WTF is anyone doing in a supermarket without a mask? @… https://infosec.exchange/@RedwoodSec/115555377373661471

Outset, which develops AI agents that help Microsoft and other companies conduct customer research and surveys, raised a $30M Series B led by Radical Ventures (Chris Metinko/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/enterprise-software-deals/202…

Exclusive: Customer research startup Outset raises $30M
Radical Ventures led the round.

From Translink
Customer-driven improvements are coming to Metro Vancouver transit
TransLink’s new five-year plan outlines 34 actions shaped by feedback, focused on reliability
Better real-time transit information, more reliable elevators and escalators, easier ways to report cleanliness issues, and continuing design work for Bus Rapid Transit are among the improvements TransLink is advancing through its new Customer Experience Action Plan.

Flip, which offers an Alexa-like voice AI experience for businesses, raised a $20M Series A, bringing its total funding to $31M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/vertical-ai-based-customer-service-flip-raise/<…

Flip Raises $20M Series A For Its Verticalized Approach To AI-Based Customer Service
Flip, a startup that claims to offer an Amazon Alexa-like voice AI experience for businesses, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/22/business/bank-data-hack.html
Oh wow.
SitusAMC, a technology vendor for real estate lenders, holds sensitive personal information on the clients of hundreds of its banking customers, including JPMorgan Chase, was hacked.

A Swath of Bank Customer Data Was Hacked. The F.B.I. Is Investigating.
SitusAMC, a technology vendor for real estate lenders, holds sensitive personal information on the clients of hundreds of its banking customers, including JPMorgan Chase.

Yelp acquires Hatch, which charges a monthly fee for AI-powered agents that can respond to customer inquiries and make appointments, for $300M (Laura Mandaro/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/yelp-buy-ai-agent-startup-300-million<…

Yelp to Buy AI Agent Startup for $300 Million 
Recommendation app Yelp on Wednesday said it agreed to acquire AI agent startup Hatch for $300 million, or roughly 12 times the startup’s annual recurring revenue. Hatch charges a monthly fee for AI-powered agents that can respond to customer inquiries and make appointments. Yelp, which has a $1.8 billion market capitalization, said it plans to operate Hatch as a standalone business as well as

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan reveals that Anthropic placed a $10B order for Google's Ironwood TPU racks in Q3 and says it placed an additional $11B order in Q4 (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/broadcom-reveals-its-mystery-10-billion-custo…

Broadcom reveals its mystery $10 billion customer is Anthropic
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said Anthropic placed an additional $11 billion order in the fourth quarter.

JPMorgan Chase secures deals with fintech middlemen, like Plaid, covering 95% of third-party data pulls, and will receive payment for access to customer data (Hugh Son/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/jpmorgan-chase-fintech-fees.html

JPMorgan Chase wins fight with fintech firms over fees to access customer data
The JPMorgan Chase deals mark a shift in the power dynamic between banks, middlemen and the fintech apps that are increasingly threatening incumbents.

Amazon Threat Intelligence observed sustained targeting of global infrastructure between 2021-2025, with particular focus on the energy sector, by Russian state-sponsored threat actors.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/

Amazon Threat Intelligence identifies Russian cyber threat group targeting Western critical infrastructure | Amazon Web Services
As we conclude 2025, Amazon Threat Intelligence is sharing insights about a years-long Russian state-sponsored campaign that represents a significant evolution in critical infrastructure targeting: a tactical pivot where what appear to be misconfigured customer network edge devices became the primary initial access vector, while vulnerability exploitation activity declined. This tactical adaptation enables the same […]

Google confirms hackers stole Salesforce-stored data from 200 companies via a supply chain hack involving Gainsight, which provides a customer support platform (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/21/goog

Google says hackers stole data from 200 companies following Gainsight breach | TechCrunch
Notorious hacking collective Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters takes credit for the breach that affected Salesforce customers’ data, and said it is planning another extortion campaign.

A look at the entry-level hiring squeeze in marketing, communications, and customer service as executives increasingly argue AI can absorb much of the workload (Anjli Raval/Financial Times)

Yet another major Korean cyber incident
Kyowon Group shuts down internal network after suspected ransomware attack
https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2026-01-12/business/tech/Kyo…

Kyowon Group shuts down internal network after suspected ransomware attack
Kyowon Group said on Monday it had shut down parts of its internal network after detecting what it believes to be a ransomware attack and is investigating whether any customer data was compromised.

The UK announces a £100M plan to support local AI hardware startups via guaranteed "first customer" payments, and estimates its AI market to be worth over £72B (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/d4d9d091-5fd7-4c20-a3ca-f68f580f7d6b

UK government will buy tech to boost AI sector in £100mn growth push
Liz Kendall unveils plan to offer guaranteed payments for British start-ups making AI hardware

An Airwallex executive warned in 2023 that China staff were pushing to access client data; Keith Rabois accuses Airwallex of enabling Chinese access to US data (Lucas Baird/Australian Financial Review)
https://www.afr.com/companies/finan…

Airwallex data access concerns over about China-based staff accessing customer data
A senior executive warned about improper access of private customer details presumably “driven by [China]“, but received pushback due to revenue concerns.

Sources: Salesforce's Slack tells customers in China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan that they must migrate their accounts to partner Alibaba before February (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/salesforces-slack-stop-…

Salesforce’s Slack to Stop Direct Service in China, Farm Out to Alibaba
Salesforce’s Slack has told customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan that they must migrate their accounts to partner Alibaba Group before February, if they want to continue with instant-messaging service, according to a Slack customer in mainland China and an Alibaba Cloud employee. The move is in response to a privacy and data security law that came into effect this year in

Customer engagement service MoEngage raised $180M in a follow-on Series F, split into a $57M primary and $123M secondary round, weeks after raising $100M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/16/week…

Weeks after raising $100M, investors pump another $180M into hot Indian startup MoEngage | TechCrunch
The deal valued MoEngage at "well over" $900 million post-money.

Berlin-based Parloa, which develops AI customer service agents for Booking.com and others, raised $350M at a $3B valuation, taking its total raised to $560M (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/d0436edf-008a-4852-8e30-54e41f244bc1

Sources: Apple now needs to fight for TSMC production capacity amid the AI boom; Nvidia was likely TSMC's top customer in at least one or two quarters in 2025 (Tim Culpan/Culpium)
https://www.culpium.com/p/exclusiveapple-is-fighting-for-tsmc

Apple is Fighting for TSMC Capacity as Nvidia Takes Center Stage
[Exclusive] A 15-year relationship helped TSMC grow and Apple leap ahead of rivals, but now it's struggling to get enough capacity as it competes with Nvidia for supply

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon's rivalry is moving beyond ads with explicit customer poaching efforts and lawsuits; AT&T twice blocked T-Mobile's Easy Switch tool (Patience Haggin/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/busi…

Israeli startup Wonderful, which helps companies manage customer-facing AI agents across voice, chat, and email, raised $100M at a $700M valuation (Steven Scheer/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/israeli-ai-s…

Source: Microsoft quietly becomes one of Anthropic's top clients and was recently on pace to spend nearly $500M/year for Anthropic to power Microsoft products (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-spending-anthr…

Microsoft’s Spending on Anthropic AI Is on Pace to Hit $500 Million
OpenAI is Microsoft’s most important AI provider and its biggest cloud server customer. But as OpenAI does more business with Microsoft’s cloud rivals, Microsoft is doing more business with Anthropic, OpenAI’s archrival. Microsoft has quietly become one of Anthropic’s top customers and was ...

Indian IT giant TCS agrees to acquire Coastal Cloud, a Florida-based Salesforce consulting partner, for $700M, in a bid to boost its AI and US customer business (Mark Haranas/CRN)
https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2025/tcs-bu

TCS Buys Salesforce Star Coastal Cloud For $700M To Create ‘Top Five Salesforce’ Firm
Tata Consultancy Services acquires Salesforce partner Coastal Cloud and ListEngage to boost AI revenue, American customers and Salesforce business.

A profile of SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell, who has worked at the company since 2002, and is known as a customer emissary and Musk translator (Micah Maidenberg/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/gwynne-shotwell-sp…

Personal finance app Betterment says an individual accessed certain systems to send fake crypto scam notification and believes the person accessed user info (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-…

CoreWeave reports Q3 revenue up 134% YoY to $1.36B, vs. $1.29B est., and a net loss of $110M, down from $360M a year ago; CRWV is up 164% since its March IPO (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/10/coreweave-crwv-q3-earnings-report-2025.html…

CoreWeave's revenue more than doubles as AI buildout expansion accelerates
On top of deals with Meta and OpenAI, CoreWeave pointed to expansions from a large unnamed customer in the third quarter.

Disney and OpenAI sign a deal to bring 200 Disney characters to Sora; Disney makes a $1B investment in OpenAI and will become a "major" OpenAI customer (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

Uber launches Uber Intelligence, an insights platform that lets advertisers tap into Uber's data about customer trips and deliveries (Lara O'Reilly/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-ads-launches-intelli…

Uber is turning trip and takeout data into insights for marketers
Uber has said its ad business is on track to generate $1.5 billion in revenue in 2025. It's hoping a new insights platform will encourage more spend.

Boom Aerospace, which is building a supersonic plane, announces Superpower, a 42MW natural gas turbine using Boom's supersonic engine, to power AI data centers (Boom)
https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/ai-needs-more-power-than-the…

Boom - FlyBy - AI Needs More Power Than the Grid Can Deliver. Supersonic Tech Can Fix That.
Today, we’re announcing Superpower, our new 42 MW natural gas turbine, along with a $300M funding round and Crusoe as our launch customer.

Source: Lambda, which rents access to AI chips and is backed by Nvidia, is in talks to raise $350M led by Mubadala Capital, ahead of an IPO planned for H2 2026 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-back…

Nvidia-Backed Cloud Provider Lambda in Talks to Raise $350 Million Ahead of IPO
Lambda, an upstart cloud provider that rents out Nvidia AI chips—and whose biggest customer was recently Nvidia itself—is trying to raise at least $350 million before a potential initial public offering this year, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Mubadala Capital, which ...

A look at Bret Taylor's AI agent startup Sierra as it launches new products; source: Sierra is on track to exceed $100M in annualized revenue by January 2026 (Richard Nieva/Forbes)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2025/11/05/sierra-bret-taylor-c…

How Two Silicon Valley A-Listers Became Billionaires By Remaking Customer Service With AI
Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor had leadership roles at the world's biggest tech companies. Now they’re in the startup trenches, using AI agents to help companies interact with their customers.