Maria Deutscher
Latest from Maria Deutscher
Justice Department sues Visa over $5.3B Plaid acquisition
The U.S. Justice Department is suing Visa Inc. in a bid to block its proposed $5.3 billion acquisition of Plaid Inc., a startup that Visa executives allegedly saw as having the potential to threaten one of its core businesses. The Wall Street Journal reported on the lawsuit this morning. Visa’s namesake payments network is used ...
Ayar Labs raises $35M for light-based chip communications
Startup Ayar Labs Inc. today said that it has raised $35 million for its optical interconnect technology, which enables chips inside supercomputers and other systems to communicate with each other using light. The technology is based on a decade-long research collaboration between MIT, the University of California at Berkeley and Colorado University at Boulder that was funded by ...
AMD chips power new ‘big memory’ computing cluster at Lawrence Livermore
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has deployed a new “big memory” high-performance computing cluster dubbed Mammoth that uses chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to help scientists perform COVID-19 research. Mammoth, detailed today, consists of 64 servers each equipped with two AMD Epyc central processing units. The system has a total of 8,192 processors cores ...
Google Cloud debuts new Document AI Platform
The latest addition to Google LLC’s public cloud is the Document AI Platform, which enables enterprises to extract information contained in digital and printed documents automatically using machine learning. The new platform was announced today and is currently in preview. At traditional enterprises, a lot of important information is contained in paperwork such as invoices. That ...
Uber and Lyft shares jump after California voters approve Proposition 22
Shares of Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. rose sharply this morning after California voters passed Proposition 22, a ballot measure exempting the companies from having to classify drivers as employees. The Associated Press projected earlier today that the measure passed with 58% of the votes. Uber and Lyft classify drivers who operate on their services ...
Now profitable, Udacity raises $75M in debt to drive enterprise growth
Udacity Inc., the startup behind the popular online technology education platform of the same name, today said that it has closed a $75 million debt round underwritten by Hercules Capital. Udacity previously raised about $170 million in equity funding from investors that include Andreessen Horowitz. It received a $1 billion valuation after its previous financing round and, early last year, ...
Cato Networks ‘solves’ threat intelligence false alarms with new AI system
Cato Networks Ltd. today introduced a machine learning system that it says can ease cybersecurity teams’ work by eliminating so-called false positives, or cases when a breach alert is generated because of an event that later turns out to be harmless. Cato Networks is a heavily funded networking startup that offers a so-called SASE platform. ...
Alphabet’s X lab details Project Amber mental health project
Alphabet Inc.’s X unit today detailed Project Amber, an internal initiative launched three years ago to give mental health professionals access to better tools for measuring brain waves. The unit is now unwinding the initiative and has decided to open source the technologies developed as part of its research efforts. Those technologies include, among others, the design for a compact headset capable of measuring electrical activity in ...
Coupa acquires Llamasoft for $1.5B to expand its analytics capabilities
Coupa Software Inc., a major provider of financial software to enterprises, today said it’s buying analytics specialist Llamasoft Inc. for about $1.5 billion. Publicly traded Coupa sells a so-called business spend management platform that enterprises such as Salesforce.com Inc. rely on to organize and control their expenses. The company says more than $2 trillion in spending has ...
AWS heads to Switzerland with planned cloud expansion
Amazon Web Services Inc. today disclosed plans to build a cloud region, or data center cluster, in Switzerland to support the numerous local companies and public sector organizations that use its platform. The announcement adds more momentum to the Amazon.com Inc. unit’s infrastructure expansion efforts in Europe, which have accelerated over recent years. The Swiss ...