Techmeme: India-based Cashify, a marketplace for selling and buying used smartphones and other gadgets, has raised a $90M Series E, bringing its total funding to $130M+ (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

Top News

Jeffrey Dastin / Reuters:

Amazon is working on letting Alexa mimic any voice after hearing less than a minute of audio, as a way to “make the memories last” of deceased family members — Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) wants to give customers the chance to make Alexa, the company's voice assistant, sound just like their grandmother — or anyone else.

Sander Lutz / Decrypt:

Coinbase says it plans to shut down its standalone, trader-focused Pro service by the end of 2022 and replace it with Advanced Trade in the main app and site — The standalone service will be replaced by Advanced Trade, a feature within the main Coinbase app.

More: The Coinbase Blog, CoinDesk, Benzinga, Ethereum World News, and Blockworks

Tweets: @rager, @mdudas, @iamtexture, @fintechfrank, @worm_emoji, @scottshapiro, @titanxbt, @8bit, and @rleshner

Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:

Brave says its search engine had 411.7M queries in May, up ~5,000% since its June 2021 launch, and launches Goggles, which lets users customize searches — Brave Search, the browser developer's privacy-centric Internet search engine, is celebrating its first anniversary after surpassing 2.5 billion queries …

More: Brave Browser, Wired, GitHub, The Verge, Engadget, PCMag, and TechRadar

Tweets: @brave, @brave, @perpetualmaniac, @brave, and @brendaneich

Maddie Ellis / Wall Street Journal:

Instagram begins testing tools to verify ages, starting with 17 or under, using either Yoti's facial recognition tech, photo IDs, or adults vouching for users — Meta's new policy will make it tougher for teens to update to adult accounts. But they can still lie about their age in the first place

More: TechCrunch, Washington Post, The Verge, Protocol, Meta, and Instagram

Mitchell Clark / The Verge:

Meta rebrands Facebook Pay as Meta Pay; Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is working on an interoperable “wallet for the metaverse” that will have “proof of ownership” — Also, the Meta Pay rebrand is here — Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday that Facebook Pay …

More: Facebook, Engadget, Cointelegraph, CNBC, CNBC, Social Media Today, Khaleej Times, and Laptop Mag

Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg. Tweets: @ldrogen and @lisapease

Francisco Pires / Tom's Hardware:

Cerebras says its “wafer-scale” chip sets a record for the largest AI model trained on a single device with up to 20B parameters — Democratizing large AI Models without HPC scaling requirements. — Cerebras, the company behind the world's largest accelerator chip in existence …

More: Business Wire, VentureBeat, Protocol, HPCwire, SiliconANGLE, Protocol, and insideHPC

Tweets: @peterjansen_ai and @karlfreund

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:

India-based Cashify, a marketplace for selling and buying used smartphones and other gadgets, has raised a $90M Series E, bringing its total funding to $130M+ — Cashify, a marketplace for gadgets trade-ins and buybacks in India, has raised $90 million in a new financing round as it looks …

More: Entrackr, Tech in Asia, The Economic Times, YourStory.com, and Business Standard

Wall Street Journal:

Sources: Comcast and Google have emerged as the top contenders to help Netflix develop an ad-supported tier, and Netflix has discussed ad partnerships with Roku — Deals with the streaming company could include exclusive agreements and revenue-sharing — Comcast Corp.'s NBCUniversal …

More: The Economic Times, PYMNTS.com, Tubefilter, and 9to5Google

Tweets: @asharma, @matt_cochrane7, and @digitalshields

See also Mediagazer

Bloomberg:

A profile of Changpeng Zhao, who built Binance into the largest crypto exchange, as he navigates a regulatory crackdown in a brutal crypto winter — During the first few months of this year—back when buying digital tokens named after dog memes was still seen, at least in some of the most …

Tweets: @calvinayre, @alastairjmarsh, and @emilyjnicolle

Annie Njanja / TechCrunch:

Ghana-based Fido, which offers financial tools and loans to individuals and businesses via its mobile app, raised a $30M Series A led by Fortissimo Capital — After extending credit to thousands of customers over mobile phones since 2015, Ghana-based fintech Fido is now in search …

More: PYMNTS.com and FinSMEs

Natasha Mascarenhas / TechCrunch:

MasterClass, which offers celebrity-taught online classes, lays off ~120 employees, or 20% of its team; sources: MasterClass was valued at $2.75B in May 2021 — MasterClass, an education platform that sells subscriptions to celebrity-taught classes, has cut 20% of its team to …

More: SFGATE, Inc42 Media, and Variety. Tweets: @frankcatalano

Financial Times:

Singapore's fintech policy chief says the country will be “brutal and unrelentingly hard” on “any market bad behaviour” in the crypto industry — Stance marks shift in rhetoric from city-state that had courted digital currency companies

Tweets: @deweysim, @davidgura, @wublockchain, and @katie_martin_fx

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:

Deno, the company behind a JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly runtime based on Rust and the V8 JavaScript engine, raised a $21M Series A led by Sequoia — Deno, the development company behind the eponymous Deno runtime, today announced that it closed a $21 million Series A round led …

More: Deno. Tweets: @championswimmer

Financial Times:

A look at Alibaba's plans to expand into South Asia as its growth in China falters, including through its Daraz unit in Pakistan, acquired for $194M in 2018 — In a vast warehouse on the arid outskirts of Pakistani megacity Karachi, hundreds of young workers sort through boxes of nappies, cooking oil and mobile phones.

Tweets: @dreyerchina, @rencapman, and @b_parkyn

Washington Post:

The Senate's $52B US chip production bill, passed in June 2021, has become mired in unrelated disputes, like climate provisions, delaying the release of funds — Proponents are racing to salvage a bipartisan measure that would provide $52 billion for domestic chip production

More: The New Stack. Tweets: @markseibel, @toddntucker, and @mariannareports

Reuters:

Sources: eight buyout offers taking Toshiba private value the deal at up to ~$22B, a 27% premium on its stock; Toshiba had two offers that would keep it public — Bidders for Toshiba Corp (6502.T) are considering offering up to 7,000 yen ($51.41) per share to take the troubled Japanese conglomerate private …

More: Bloomberg. Tweets: @reutersbiz

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Mountain View-based Sanas, which develops a call center voice AI that changes users' accents in real time, raised a $32M Series A led by Insight Partners — A startup called Sanas has built voice AI to change accents, now it's raised $32M from GV and others

More: PR Newswire, Bestgamingpro, Techzine Europe, and San Francisco Examiner

Tweets: @ingridlunden and @mrinaldesai

Financial Times:

London-based payments services company SumUp raised €295M equity and €295M debt at an €8B valuation; a January report said it targeted an up to €20B valuation — Implied price tag for London-based payment-services group slips by half as global tech sell-off makes itself felt

More: TechCrunch, Reuters, Tech.eu, and Bloomberg

Jessica Golden / CNBC:

Tel Aviv-based Jackpot, which is developing an app and website to make buying US state lottery tickets easier, raised a $35M Series A led by Accomplice — - Jackpot is looking to grow the U.S. lottery business by putting it online. — The company has raised money from top sports executives …

More: PR Newswire, Casino.org, Front Office Sports, and FinSMEs

Jared Newman / Fast Company:

Valve's Steam Deck makes a brilliant case against walled gardens by running Arch Linux and allowing software from anywhere, unlike every major game console — The Steam Deck is a portable gaming system that breaks the biggest rule of gaming systems. — Unlike practically every major game …

More: Slashdot. Tweets: @denniscode, @onejarednewman, @jzb, @onejarednewman, and @shanegillio

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