• Faye, which offers travel insurance services and uses AI to help resolve claims, raised a $50M Series C led by Madrona, taking its total funding to $100M (Chris Metinko/Axios)
• Developers in Africa are increasingly choosing Chinese open-source AI models over US models, saying they are downloadable, easier to customize, and much cheaper (New York Times)
• Sources: ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming told employees at an all-hands last month that the company will not use model distillation to accelerate capabilities (The Information)
• How Pringles maker Kellanova is using AI and a partnership with Siemens to improve production of the chip in Europe, including making digital twins of its dough (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)
• Anthropic confirms it is building an in-house silicon team to design custom chips for Claude, co-designing hardware and models and using a "multi-chip approach" (Tom Carter/Business Insider)
• Sources: Google is in talks with AI coding agent startup Mechanize on a possible deal, potentially worth $1.5B+, to hire some of its talent and license its tech (Business Insider)
• FanDuel parent Flutter says CEO Peter Jackson is stepping down, replaced by President Dan Taylor, and reports a lower profit outlook as its US business falters (Wall Street Journal)
• The UK Competition Appeal Tribunal rejects Google's bid to block a class action alleging it overcharged businesses for search ads and abused its dominance (Upmanyu Trivedi/Bloomberg)
• Google says it will begin removing Google Assistant from Android and Wear OS devices on September 4, replaced by Gemini; Assistant will remain on connected cars (Abner Li/9to5Google)
• Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says the company plans to spend $10B+ "over the coming years" to deploy 120K driverless vehicles, aiming to be in 15+ cities in 2026 (Financial Times)
• Shopify reports Q2 revenue up 34% YoY to $3.58B, above $3.45B est., GMV up 32% YoY to $115.57B, and forecasts Q3 revenue growth above est.; SHOP jumps 15%+ (Deborah Sophia/Reuters)
• Uber reports Q2 revenue up 12% YoY to $14.19B, below $14.24B est., Gross Bookings up 24% YoY to $58B, above $57B est., and forecasts Q3 adjusted EPS below est. (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)
• Circle reports Q2 revenue up 7% YoY to $701M, vs. $712M est., net income of $48M, vs. $43M est., and ~$73.4B USDC circulation on June 30; CRCL is down 20%+ YTD (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg)
• Study: Palantir's European units made €440.5M in 2024 revenue but reported far smaller profit margins than its US operations, helping cut its European tax bills (Antoaneta Roussi/Politico)
• Disney announces a global deal with TikTok to bring "thoughtfully curated" fan-created short-form videos based on Disney's IP to Disney+'s vertical feed Verts (Brooks Barnes/New York Times)
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