<p>Nerdio, a platform designed to simplify how companies deploy and manage Microsoft cloud technologies, has raised $500 million in a Series C round of funding. The Chicago-based startup says its valuation has now quadrupled since its Series B round two years ago and is now firmly in unicorn territory &#8212; though the company wouldn&#8217;t reveal [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Update: the deal is done at $32 billion, in cash. Read more here. Google&#8217;s parent company Alphabet is again in advanced talks to acquire cloud cybersecurity startup Wiz, a person familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. The two companies were close to securing a deal at a $23 billion valuation last summer, but the transaction [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Intel&#8217;s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan seems ready to get right to work to turn around the struggling company.&nbsp; The semiconductor giant&#8217;s new executive is considering sweeping changes for the company&#8217;s chip manufacturing and AI strategies, according to Reuters, including cutting middle management staff and revamping the company&#8217;s approach to manufacturing chips. Tan reportedly told company [&hellip;]</p>

<p>It’s gloves off in one of the more tense rivalries in the world of startups. HR company Rippling Monday morning announced a lawsuit against Deel, another big player in the same space. The dramatic 50-page complaint alleges racketeering, misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition, and aiding and abetting a breach of fiduciary duty. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI will soon begin testing a way for business customers to connect apps like Slack and Google Drive to ChatGPT. OpenAI plans to start beta testing a new feature called ChatGPT Connectors, according to a document viewed by TechCrunch. ChatGPT Connectors will allow ChatGPT Team subscribers to link workspace Google Drive and Slack accounts to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>GTC, Nvidia&#8217;s biggest conference of the year, begins Monday and runs till Friday in San Jose, with the biggest announcements probably coming Tuesday. TechCrunch will be on the ground covering the news as it happens — and we&#8217;re expecting a healthy dose of announcements. And we&#8217;re making it easy for you to follow along. CEO [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Most of the focus in generative AI has been on text-based interfaces used to generate text, images, and more. The next wave appears to be voice, and it’s rolling in fast. In the latest development, Google today announced that it would be adding Chirp 3 — its speech-to-text and HD text-to-speech models — to its [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google is doubling down on building out its AI business in the U.K. On Monday morning in London, the CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian appeared alongside customers BT and WPP to spell out some of the company&#8217;s plans. The company said it would expand UK data residency to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>SoftBank is marching ahead on its ambitions to build out a major AI operation in its home market of Japan, on its own steam and in strategic partnership with others like OpenAI. On Friday, the tech company confirmed it would pay $676 million for a factory previously used by Sharp to build LCD panels and [&hellip;]</p>

<p>UiPath has acquired Peak.ai, a startup out of Manchester that builds “decision-making” pricing and inventory management AI solutions.</p>

<p>Employees at many companies today are expected to make decisions through careful data analysis, but the tools they need to do it are clunky, slow or — in some cases — don&#8217;t exist. That&#8217;s according to Colin Zima, the CEO of Omni, a business intelligence (BI) platform that aims to help organizations simplify how they [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A judge in Singapore granted bail to three men suspected of deceiving suppliers of server computers that may contain Nvidia chips affected by U.S. export rules that bar the sale of them to certain countries, as a route to halting them being sold to organizations in China. The move comes nearly two weeks after the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Semiconductor giant Intel hired semiconductor veteran Lip-Bu Tan to be its new CEO. This news comes three months after Pat Gelsinger retired and stepped down from the company&#8217;s board, with Intel CFO David Zinsner and executive vice president of client relations Michelle Johnston Holthaus stepping in as co-CEOs. Tan, who was most recently the CEO [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Back in 2010, Rackspace and NASA launched a project called OpenStack, which was meant to become an open source option for running an AWS-style cloud inside of private data centers. The two companies then moved OpenStack to the OpenStack Foundation, which has steadfastly shepherded the project through its many ups and downs. Right now, with [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Back in 2019, Microsoft open sourced Dapr, a new runtime for making building distributed microservice-based applications easier. At the time, nobody was talking about AI agents yet, but as it turns out, Dapr had some of the fundamental building blocks for supporting AI agents built-in from the outset. That&#8217;s because one of Dapr&#8217;s core features [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Enterprises have troves of internal data and information that employees need to complete their tasks or answer questions for potential customers. But that doesn&#8217;t mean the right information is easy to find. Onyx wants to solve that problem through its internal enterprise search tool. There are other big names in the category, like Glean — [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google is replacing lead-acid battery backup units with lithium-ion cells, freeing up space for more servers.</p>

<p>Ditto, a company that&#8217;s setting out to bring &#8220;resilient&#8221; connectivity to edge devices, has raised $82 million in a Series B round of funding at a post-money valuation of $462 million, more than double its Series A valuation from 2023. &#8220;Edge,&#8221; in the context of Ditto&#8217;s industry, refers to a distributed computing model that brings [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Salesforce plans to invest $1 billion in Singapore over the next five years as it seeks to fuel the adoption of its AI agent development platform, Agentforce. Salesforce claimed that Agentforce can help alleviate Singapore&#8217;s ongoing labor issues and augment the country&#8217;s workforce and enterprises by creating &#8220;digital workforces&#8221; that combine humans with autonomous AI [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Uber Technologies has ended its acquisition of Delivery Hero’s Foodpanda in Taiwan, the Germany-based tech firm said on Tuesday. The announcement comes roughly three months after Taiwan&#8217;s antitrust regulator blocked the deal, citing competitive issues. The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said that if Uber acquired Foodpanda, its market share in Taiwan would increase to 90%, [&hellip;]</p>