Techmeme
December 15, 2025, 11:35 AM

Top News

Bloomberg:
iRobot files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and reaches a restructuring agreement to hand over control to its secured lender and main Chinese supplier Shenzhen Picea  —  iRobot Corp., the company that revolutionized robot vacuum cleaners in the early 2000s with its Roomba model …
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch:
A look at iRobot, founded in 1990, and its slow collapse after US and EU regulatory pressure killed Amazon's $1.7B deal in 2024 amid growing Chinese competition  —  There's something painfully American about the arc of iRobot, the company that taught your vacuum to navigate around the furniture.
Financial Times:
Sources: the UK government wants Apple, Google, and others to block explicit images at the OS level by default to protect kids and have adults verify their ages  —  Home Office expected to encourage companies to introduce controls  —  The UK government wants technology companies …
Emilia David / VentureBeat:
Nvidia launches Nemotron 3, a family of AI models using a hybrid mixture-of-experts architecture and the Mamba-Transformer design, in 30B, 100B, and ~500B sizes  —  Nvidia launched the new version of its frontier models, Nemotron 3, by leaning in on a model architecture that the world's …
Martin Peers / The Information:
Filing: Oracle signed ~$150B of data center leases in the three months ending November 30, raising its total data center and cloud capacity commitments to $248B  —  Oracle struck about $150 billion worth of lease commitments on data centers in the three months ending November …
Reuters:
Internal docs: Meta earned $18B+ in annual ad sales from China in 2024, making up 10%+ of its global revenue, with $3B+ linked to fraudulent ads, like for scams  —  A Reuters investigation reveals the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp decided to accept high levels of fraudulent advertisements from China.
Luke James / Tom's Hardware:
LG smart TV owners say a webOS update pinned Microsoft Copilot to the home screen, with no apparent way to remove the app; LG unveiled an AI TV strategy at CES  —  Users report Copilot appearing after a recent software update, with no option to uninstall.  —  LG smart TV owners are reporting …
Mike Baker / New York Times:
Anna Heim / TechCrunch:
Berlin-based Mirelo, whose AI models can interpret videos to add synced sound effects, raised a $41M seed led by Index Ventures and a16z, after a $3M pre-seed  —  AI lets anyone create videos, but many AI video creation tools lack support for audio.  Mirelo is building AI that adds soundtracks to match the video's action.
Brian Merchant / Blood in the Machine:
Interviews with copywriters on generative AI's impact: their work used for training, layoffs, wages and rates in free fall, freelancers losing clients, and more  —  Copywriters were one of the first to have their jobs targeted by AI firms.  These are their stories, three years into the AI era.
Naomi Nix / Washington Post:
Tech whistleblowers like Yaël Eisenstat say coming forward has unexpectedly derailed their lives and careers; Meta is in litigation with Sarah Wynn-Williams  —  By exposing the harms of Big Tech, many whistleblowers say they faced poorer job prospects and professional exile in Silicon Valley.
Dan Primack / Axios:
Source: Dragoneer raised $4.3B for its seventh VC fund and now has over $30B in AUM; it raised $3.8B for its sixth private fund in 2022  —  Dragoneer has raised $4.3 billion for its seventh venture capital fund, Axios has learned. … - The San Francisco-based firm raised $3.8 billion …

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