Techmeme
March 15, 2021, 5:10 AM

Top News

Financial Times:
Stripe raises $600M from Sequoia Capital and others at a valuation of $95B, becoming the most valuable private company in Silicon Valley  —  Payments provider becomes Silicon Valley's most valuable private company  —  Stripe has become the most valuable private company Silicon Valley has produced …
Elizabeth Dwoskin / Washington Post:
Internal docs: a Facebook study about US users' vaccine hesitancy finds “substantial harm” from content that doesn't violate the company's rules  —  Internal study finds a QAnon connection and that content that doesn't break the rules may be causing ‘substantial’ harm
Kim Lyons / The Verge:
Clubhouse says it won't require access to users' phone contacts anymore, and announces a creator accelerator program that will initially accept 20 participants  —  The voice chat app will provide users with resources and help them monetize their shows  —  During Clubhouse's weekly town hall on Sunday …
Jaron Schneider / PetaPixel:
Adobe adds a new feature to Adobe Camera Raw called Super Resolution, which uses AI to double linear resolution of a photo, increasing its pixel count by 4x  —  Adobe has shipped the first version of Photoshop that can run natively on Macs equipped with Apple Silicon and also has announced …
Bloomberg:
Federal judge rules Google must face a class action suit alleging that it collects browsing history and other data even when a user is in private browsing mode  —  - Judge concludes company didn't notify users of data collection  — Class action suit alleges Google knows ‘who your friends are’
Jeff John Roberts / Decrypt:
A look at issues arising around digital ownership and NFTs: while they can be a source of revenue for creators, they are spurring new forms of piracy  —  If there was a contest for acronym of the year, “NFT” would be the clear favorite for 2021.  Short for non-fungible tokens …
Reuters:
Baidu says its AI chip unit Kunlun recently raised funding, source says at a $2B valuation led by Chinese PE firm CITIC Capital  —  BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese search giant Baidu Inc said on Monday that its artificial intelligence chip unit Kunlun recently completed a round of fundraising …
More: KrASIA
Bryce Roberts:
In a postmortem, Indie.vc founder shares the reasons why the alternative VC financing experiment failed  —  Last week's post was designed to be a simple and direct announcement that our initial Indie.vc experiment was ending and would no longer be accepting applications.
Hannah Kuchler / Financial Times:
Insitro, which uses machine learning to speed up drug discovery, raises $400M led by Canada Pension Plan; other investors include SoftBank, Temasek, and a16z  —  Start-up run by former Stanford professor uses AI to analyse human genetics and work out where to target drugs

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Earlier Picks

Hamish McKenzie / Substack Blog:
Micah Singleton / Billboard: