However, entrepreneurs can choose to opt out during this temporary phase, as the bigger headache will be adjusting their businesses to the update rolling out seamlessly.

Stating that the extended deadline will give customers more time, while the Satya Nadella-venture continues to add missing features and various other improvements to the update, Microsoft also noted witnessing “strong and accelerating adoption” of the new Outlook.

“We continue to invest heavily in expanding capabilities and addressing feedback from customers who want to go further with new Outlook,” the company added.

However, when it comes to Microsoft rolling out the new Outlook, things haven’t gone smoothly. In early 2025, the tech venture confirmed that in April 2026, it would begin forcing enterprise users to use the new Outlook, with an opt-out option. The delay now pushes the next deadline to March 2027.

According to the Satya Nadella-led Silicon Valley giant’s original plan, if enterprises opened “Outlook Classic” in April 2026 or later, they would have been automatically upgraded to the new Outlook. This also means the new Outlook would auto-download and open on PCs, but the users still had the option to go back to Outlook Classic.

“Users will be toggled into new Outlook once with this roll-out, with the potential to be toggled again in the future. Users will maintain the ability to go back to and use classic Outlook,” Microsoft previously stated in a roadmap update.

While the new Outlook offers a streamlined, modern user interface characterised by larger icons and increased white space to enhance focus and productivity, it represents a significant shift from the traditional desktop experience. The new version is built on a web-based, cloud-centric architecture that provides superior integration with Microsoft 365 services such as Teams and OneDrive, making it ideal for users who prioritise a unified ecosystem.

In contrast, the classic Outlook remains the preferred choice for power users who rely on its extensive customisation options and ribbon-based toolbars. A critical distinction between the two lies in their extensibility: The classic version supports robust third-party tools such as COM-based extensions and VBA macros, whereas the new Outlook currently offers more limited add-on capabilities, prioritising a cleaner but less flexible environment.

The company claims it is experiencing massive adoption by clients for its new Outlook software. An end-of-support date hasn’t been officially announced for the Classic Outlook, but existing clients can expect support until 2029 at the minimum. New clients can switch to Classic Outlook if they so prefer, but the company is encouraging users to proactively transition as quickly as possible rather than waiting for the deadline.

The post Microsoft delays enterprise Outlook switchover again, new deadline set at 2027 appeared first on International Finance.

Aguilar, who leads the Los Angeles–based nonprofit LatinoProsperity, feared the move would betray OpenAI’s founding mission to “benefit all of humanity” by empowering investors to reap unlimited private profits.

That moment spurred Aguilar to action. He began speed-dialling allies in California’s philanthropic and civil rights circles, determined to scrutinise OpenAI’s restructuring plan and its implications for the public interest.

Over the ensuing months, a broad coalition of more than 50 advocacy organisations coalesced: labour unions, community foundations, tech accountability groups. All rallied around a shared concern that OpenAI’s transformation from a nonprofit lab into a profit-driven corporate behemoth could set a dangerous precedent.

By January 2025, they were urging California’s attorney general to intervene, warning that billions in charitable assets (the ones intended for the public good) were at risk of being effectively privatised.

What had begun as a little-noticed corporate restructuring proposal was quickly snowballing into a high-stakes battle over the future of OpenAI, the governance of artificial intelligence, and the integrity of the nonprofit system itself.

From idealistic lab to tech titan

OpenAI’s origin story is steeped in idealism. The San Francisco research lab launched in late 2015 as a nonprofit venture backed by tech luminaries including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who together pledged $1 billion to fund it. At the time, concerns were growing that AI development was dominated by a few big tech firms driven by profit.

OpenAI’s founders vowed a different path: build advanced AI in the service of all humanity and share the research openly. Its charter emphasised long-term social benefits over financial gain, even declaring that when conflict arises, the nonprofit mission would “take precedence” over any obligation to generate profit.

For several years, OpenAI operated like an AI think tank, publishing cutting-edge research and freely sharing its code. But as the race to develop powerful AI accelerated, the organisation faced a dilemma. Training world-class AI models required far more computing power (and money) than its initial philanthropic funding could support.

By 2019, OpenAI’s leadership made a controversial pivot. They set up a hybrid structure by creating a for-profit arm, OpenAI Global, under the umbrella of the original nonprofit, OpenAI. This allowed them to attract venture capital while ostensibly keeping the nonprofit’s oversight and mission intact.

This compromise introduced a novel “capped-profit” model. Investors could earn returns on their money, but those returns were capped at a certain multiple. After that point, the nonprofit would retain surplus value to fund its mission. The idea was to access billions in Silicon Valley capital without fully sacrificing OpenAI’s altruistic DNA.

In practice, the hybrid model allowed OpenAI to tap deep-pocketed backers. Microsoft alone poured in a reported $13 billion (across multiple funding rounds) for a share of OpenAI’s technology and profits.

By late 2023, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had become a global sensation, drawing over half a billion weekly users and solidifying OpenAI as a leading AI provider.

Yet the influx of capital came with mounting pressure to compete and monetise. OpenAI began behaving more like a Silicon Valley startup than a pure research outfit. It charged for API access, launched paid subscriptions, and curtailed its once-open research disclosures for “security and competitive” reasons. The tension between its nonprofit ideals and market ambitions grew harder to ignore.

The breaking point came in November 2023 with an extraordinary boardroom drama. OpenAI’s nonprofit board, tasked with ensuring the company stayed true to its mission, abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman, citing a “lack of consistent candour” in his communications.

The shock ouster of Altman, the charismatic figurehead of ChatGPT’s rise, sent the tech world into a tailspin, especially after it emerged that concerns about AI safety and OpenAI’s rapid pace might have been at issue.

Within five days, Altman was reinstated following an employee and investor uproar. Most of the board members who had ousted him resigned under pressure. The episode was a stark illustration of OpenAI’s governance quandary. The nonprofit oversight that reassured the public about OpenAI’s benevolent mission had become a wildcard factor in a company now valued like a $100 billion startup.

As Vox observed, the saga “made it clear that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit could potentially have huge implications,” particularly for Microsoft, which had billions at stake. After that turmoil, OpenAI’s leadership grew even more convinced that its existing structure was unsustainable.

Shift to a public-benefit corporation

In late 2023, OpenAI started mapping out a plan to overhaul its corporate structure. The centrepiece would be converting OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary into a new entity incorporated as a public benefit corporation (PBC). A PBC is a company that balances profit-making with a stated social mission.

Crucially, unlike the earlier capped-profit model, this change would remove the hard ceiling on investor returns, allowing venture backers to profit without limit. OpenAI’s nonprofit parent would likely either become a minority shareholder in the new PBC or receive a one-time payout. In other words, OpenAI was preparing to shed the very safeguards that once made it unique: the nonprofit’s veto power and the cap on profits, all in favour of a more typical corporate arrangement.

Developing advanced AI has become a capital-intensive arms race, with rivals like Google, Meta, Anthropic, and Elon Musk’s new startup xAI all vying for talent and computing resources. OpenAI’s leadership argues that staying ahead in AI requires access to far greater funding than a nonprofit model can provide. Under American law, nonprofits face strict limits on raising investment.

Neil Elan, a partner at a tech law firm, stated that “they can’t sell stock or offer returns.”

He explains that “equity is what drives a lot of these high-valuation models in Silicon Valley. Without the ability to issue lucrative shares, OpenAI feared it wouldn’t fully compete with Meta, Microsoft, and Google, which have access to a lot more resources… without comparable funding.”

Those worries crystallised as OpenAI negotiated a blockbuster financing deal earlier this year. In April 2025, OpenAI announced it had closed a record-setting $40 billion funding round led by Japan’s SoftBank. The deal pegged OpenAI’s valuation at an eye-popping $300 billion. The catch? Roughly 75% of that investment is contingent on OpenAI completing its structural revamp by the end of 2025.

The investment agreement allows SoftBank and other backers to withdraw up to $30 billion of the funding if OpenAI does not transition to the new PBC structure on schedule. The message was clear: to secure the full war chest needed for its aggressive AI roadmap, OpenAI had to cast off any structural quirks that made investors nervous.

And the investors were getting nervous. The November boardroom fracas had highlighted how OpenAI’s nonprofit oversight could unpredictably intervene in business decisions. This created a risk factor almost unheard of among tech unicorns.

According to a previously unreported letter from OpenAI’s lawyers to California regulators, “many potential investors in OpenAI’s recent funding rounds declined to invest due to its unusual governance structure.”

This contradicts earlier narratives that investors were lining up in droves.

Indeed, some of Silicon Valley’s biggest players baulked at OpenAI’s hybrid model after seeing Altman briefly dethroned by a nonprofit board. To calm the investor concerns, OpenAI’s leadership initiated plans soon after the Altman episode to remove nonprofit control and restructure as a profit-centric PBC. In effect, the startup’s meteoric success was forcing it to become more like a traditional corporation in order to keep raising capital at sky-high valuations.

Sam Altman himself has acknowledged that, in hindsight, OpenAI’s founders underestimated how costly and fast-moving the AI race would become.

He noted that if he could redo 2015, he might have structured OpenAI differently from the start. Other AI startups, Anthropic (founded by ex-OpenAI researchers) and xAI (founded by Musk), learnt from OpenAI’s example and launched as public benefit corporations from day one.

Now OpenAI is racing to catch up and give its backers the standard corporate framework and eventual stock market payday they expect. Investors are already eyeing a potential OpenAI IPO by 2027, which could turn early stakes by firms like Microsoft and SoftBank into massive profits.

The activist backlash

As OpenAI moved forward with its restructuring behind closed doors, Orson Aguilar and his allies mobilised a counteroffensive in public. Aguilar’s first call after digesting the news in October 2024 was to Fred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation.

Blackwell, a prominent figure in Bay Area philanthropy, immediately recognised echoes of a past fight. In the 1990s, he and other advocates had taken on a wave of nonprofit hospitals and insurers attempting to convert into for-profit companies.

As those healthcare nonprofits demutualised, some executives manoeuvred to boost payouts for themselves while hollowing out the charitable foundations that were meant to receive the nonprofits’ assets.

Consumer advocates in California, including Blackwell’s colleague Judith Bell, latched onto an obscure but powerful statute. Under state law, all the assets of a nonprofit are irrevocably dedicated to the public and belong to the people of the state forever, only to be used for charitable purposes.

The law grants California’s attorney general broad authority to approve or deny any conversion of a nonprofit’s assets and to ensure that the public is protected when a nonprofit becomes a private entity.

Bell and others built a coalition in the 1990s that pressured the California Attorney General to enforce those rules rigorously. The result was a series of agreements that preserved enormous charitable endowments even as hospitals transitioned into for-profit status.

In California alone, that activism helped create three of the state’s largest private foundations, including the $4 billion California Endowment, which was funded by assets spun out of former nonprofit hospitals.

Advocates estimate that they saved $15 billion in charitable funds from being diverted by businesses and their investors through those deals.

“You can protect the charitable assets and allow these companies to go forth in the for-profit world,” Bell says, reflecting on that chapter. In other words, compromise is possible. Companies can convert, but the public must get its fair share.

Seeing history repeat itself, Bell, Blackwell, and Aguilar decided to revive that old playbook. By late 2023, they had assembled a broad coalition of community and labour organisations. More than 50 groups, ranging from tech accountability nonprofits to unions like SEIU, expressed alarm at the idea of OpenAI’s charitable assets being diverted to private gain.

In January 2025, the coalition launched a public campaign and formally petitioned California Attorney General Rob Bonta to scrutinise OpenAI’s plans. Their request was direct: Do not approve this conversion without firm guarantees that OpenAI’s nonprofit assets (both tangible and intangible) will be fully valued and used for the public good going forward.

The coalition’s letter to Bonta, costeered by Aguilar, expressed doubt that OpenAI intended to comply with the spirit of the law. They accused OpenAI of skirting transparency and failing to detail how its nonprofit stake, which some estimate could be worth $20 to $30 billion given OpenAI’s valuation, would be protected.

Any scheme that values OpenAI’s nonprofit share at even a penny less than fair market value “would be unlawful,” Aguilar argues.

He adds that anything short of full independence for the nonprofit arm risks allowing commercial imperatives to override the charity’s purpose. In short, the activists want OpenAI’s nonprofit to remain firmly in control or receive a payout that reflects its foundational role in creating ChatGPT and other breakthroughs.

Ideally, they envision that endowment fuelling what could become one of the best-resourced nonprofits in history, a massive charitable foundation to fund AI for good, free from the influence of OpenAI’s new for-profit owners.

This grassroots pressure has already scored some symbolic wins. By March, as media coverage of the “OpenAI rebellion” intensified, the company’s leadership reached out to engage with the coalition. Aguilar, Blackwell, and others sat with OpenAI representatives in San Francisco for a tense meeting.

According to participants, OpenAI staff were eager to correct what they described as “misconceptions” about the restructuring and even asked for feedback on how the nonprofit’s mission might evolve in the future. But when Aguilar pressed for concrete answers on how much funding and independence the nonprofit would retain under the new plan, he says OpenAI’s emissaries deflected. Not long after, OpenAI announced it was creating a special advisory commission, a move widely seen as a response to the coalition’s campaign.

California’s attorney general enters the fray

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who oversees nonprofit charities in the state, became a pivotal figure in this unfolding drama. Triggered by the January petition, Bonta’s office quietly opened an investigation into OpenAI’s plans and requested financial records from the company earlier this year.

While such probes are typically confidential, Bonta’s spokesperson publicly confirmed in the spring that the California Department of Justice was actively reviewing OpenAI’s restructuring and remained in continued conversations with the company.

OpenAI must convince Bonta that its conversion plan will not improperly discard any charitable trust obligations. The attorney general has the authority to block the deal or to impose conditions if it fails to meet legal requirements.

At the centre of this scrutiny is a distinctly Californian legal safeguard. When a nonprofit organisation, like OpenAI Inc., houses valuable assets or subsidiaries, those assets are considered charitable in perpetuity. The law allows nonprofits to convert or sell assets, but only if the public interest is fairly served and the charitable value is preserved.

Any windfall generated from, for instance, turning OpenAI’s research into a public stock offering should primarily benefit nonprofit coffers earmarked for public benefit. What activists fear is a repeat of past abuses: insiders or investors structuring deals that shortchange the nonprofit, and by extension the public, out of the true value of what was built under the nonprofit’s umbrella.

Critics say OpenAI’s original restructuring plan appeared to do exactly that. Under the version circulated in late 2023, OpenAI’s nonprofit parent would sell its majority control in exchange for a stake in the new PBC and certain licensing rights. However, it would no longer directly own the core technology it had developed.

Observers noted that the nonprofit appeared to be transforming into just another investor, sacrificing governance for funding, which effectively diminished its public-interest role.

“Nonprofit control over how AGI is developed and governed is so important to OpenAI’s mission that removing control would violate the special fiduciary duty owed to the nonprofit’s beneficiaries,” argued a group of prominent tech experts and legal scholars in an open letter to Bonta.

According to that letter, “The nonprofit’s beneficiaries are all of us, the general public, and no amount of payout could compensate for the loss of a direct role in shaping the future of one of the world’s most powerful AI labs.”

This expert letter, published on a site pointedly titled “Not for Private Gain”, was signed in April by more than 30 prominent AI voices, including pioneering researcher Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, leading AI ethicists Margaret Mitchell and Stuart Russell, and even several former OpenAI insiders.

They called on Bonta and the Delaware attorney general (since OpenAI is incorporated in Delaware) to intervene and prevent any restructuring plan that removes public oversight of OpenAI’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) research. The letter warned that eliminating the nonprofit’s control would gut essential governance mechanisms that keep OpenAI’s profit motives in check.

Legal firestorm and public reckoning

Pressure was also mounting from unexpected directions. In early 2024, Elon Musk, who had co-founded OpenAI but left in 2018, filed a lawsuit to halt the restructuring. He claimed that OpenAI was abandoning the charitable mission for which he had originally donated funds. Musk further alleged that his $100 million donation had been improperly used to help establish the for-profit arm.

Surprisingly, some of OpenAI’s competitors voiced support for Musk’s challenge. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, publicly backed the effort to stall the transformation. While critics noted that both Musk and Meta had their own competitive reasons for opposing OpenAI’s rise, their involvement added to the scrutiny surrounding the company’s motives.

Musk’s legal action did not immediately block OpenAI’s plans. A federal judge in California declined to grant a preliminary injunction in the spring of 2025. However, the lawsuit added complexity and drew public attention. OpenAI responded by countersuing Musk, accusing him of trying to undermine a rival out of self-interest.

Critics emphasised the obvious: many of OpenAI’s financial backers were traditional venture capitalists seeking substantial returns, not long-term philanthropists. When OpenAI transitions fully into a profit-maximising enterprise, skeptics fear it will become beholden to shareholder interests.

The consequences of this transition could extend far beyond OpenAI itself. If the company completes its conversion with minimal nonprofit influence, it might establish a precedent for other tech ventures. Future startups could adopt nonprofit language and structures to attract donations and goodwill, only to switch to for-profit status once they reach commercial success. This possibility alarms nonprofit advocates, who warn that it could erode public trust in charitable innovation.

On the other hand, if regulators force significant concessions, such as creating a large, independent foundation or embedding real public-interest oversight, it could reaffirm the public’s rightful stake in high-impact technologies. That kind of intervention would send a powerful signal that phrases like “for the benefit of humanity” must be backed by accountability and tangible structures.

Ultimately, the key question concerns governance. Who will lead the development of the next generation of artificial intelligence? Will private investment prevail, or will public interest play a significant role? If OpenAI’s nonprofit organisation becomes a passive shareholder, there is a risk that the values of safety, equity, and long-term benefit may be overshadowed by a focus on quarterly earnings.

However, if California’s attorney general and other regulators take action, we could maintain democratic oversight over one of the most significant technologies of our time.

The post Can OpenAI’s idealism survive corporate change? appeared first on International Finance.

Founded by Chris Field and Darby Wong, two former startup lawyers, Clerky, without much limelight, has emerged as Silicon Valley’s most aspirational founders’ go-to online legal service. Currently valued at USD 500 billion, Clerky startups have raised more than USD 100 billion in venture capital. They include some of the most well-known tech companies, such as DoorDash, Instacart, and Coinbase.

Wong and Field observed a recurring issue while practicing startup law at the Orrick law firm: many clients attempted to cut costs by using subpar online services or managing legal paperwork independently. Frequently, this led to legal problems that needed costly fixes. To solve this, they established Clerky to assist new businesses in completing legal documentation accurately from the outset.

Clerky is unique among online legal services because it only focuses on high-growth startups. While the majority of online services address the general needs of small businesses, Clerky customises its products to meet the particular legal needs of new businesses. Because of this specialisation, documents are prepared with the accuracy and diligence required to pass investor scrutiny.

Founders can easily incorporate their startups, issue stock, and handle other legal matters thanks to Clerky’s platform, which streamlines complicated legal procedures. Because of the service’s intuitive design, founders can accomplish legal tasks without requiring in-depth legal knowledge. This method lowers the possibility of expensive mistakes while also saving time.

The company has gained the trust of leading startup law firms due to its dedication to accuracy and quality. Many attorneys advise their clients to use Clerky because they are certain that it offers a dependable and effective means of handling initial legal requirements.

In the future, Clerky will continue to develop new ideas and expand its offerings to meet the evolving demands of startups. Clerky is positioned to continue being a useful tool for business owners negotiating the intricacies of startup formation and expansion by concentrating on the unique legal issues that high-growth companies face.

For startup founders looking to handle their legal documentation accurately and efficiently, Clerky stands out as a reliable partner. Clerky’s specialised focus, user-friendly platform, and dedication to quality are making it easier to manage the legal aspects of starting a business, freeing up founders to concentrate on what they do best—expand their companies.

The post Why startup founders love Clerky & its legal services appeared first on International Finance.

TechCrunch, founded in 2005, is known as a platform providing extensive coverage of Silicon Valley startups and technology trends. While the digital media outlet saw its ownership change from AOL to Verizon, the acquisition also gives Regent an opportunity to expand its portfolio of tech-focused media outlets. This follows Regent’s recent acquisition of Foundry, which encompasses publications such as PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor.

In a lengthy succession of management changes, Jim Lanzone took the CEO position from the new private-equity owner, Apollo Global Management, which had purchased the property from Verizon, the most recent and arguably most inexperienced caretaker (high bar alert). When I see him at the company’s New York City offices, I ask him why he accepted the position. He claims, “I adore turnarounds.”

Lanzone’s resume attests to this. In 2001, he took over AskJeeves, a sinking search property whose share price had dropped from a peak of $196 to less than a dollar. He rebuilt it to the point where Barry Diller’s IAC Corp purchased it for $1.85 billion.

He brought the traditional Tiffany network into the era of streaming while he was at CBS Interactive and later CBS’s head digital office in the 2010s. This month marks Yahoo’s 30th anniversary, which could be its toughest test yet. A public company that was once valued at well over $100 billion was sold to a private equity firm for $5 billion in 2021, partly because of its history of missed chances.

Mark Zuckerberg reportedly agreed to sell Facebook for $1 billion after Yahoo famously declined to buy Google. However, the transaction was cancelled after the then-CEO Terry Semel requested to renegotiate. The WhatsApp founders were among the talented individuals who left Yahoo.

Promising purchases such as Flickr, Tumblr, and Huffington Post were discarded at fire-sale prices. Yahoo was not a top focus for its owner, Verizon, in recent years. Rather than attempting to restore its purple glory, it combined Yahoo’s assets with those of another fallen icon, AOL, and called the new brand Oath.

Some people thought Lanzone had no chance. George Bradt, one of those MBA types who write for Forbes, remarked, “It’s hard to believe anyone else on the planet wants any part of his role.”

Jim Lanzone noticed a change. He considered Yahoo to be an undiscovered treasure.

“If you could remove the name Yahoo from it, you saw billions of dollars in revenue in 2021,” he continues.

Jim Lanzone is not very patient with exhuming past mistakes. He claims that the narrative of Yahoo’s lost potential is stale. “It’s dull.” Rather than lamenting over lost search glory, Lanzone focused on making Yahoo better. He claims, “We didn’t have to worry about what we weren’t.”

In order to move Yahoo Sports into the gambling era, he quietly made several purchases to strengthen the greatest properties, such as the sports betting app Wagr, and eliminated money-losing areas, such as some nonperforming ad tech departments. Additionally, he hired competent executives, such as Ryan Spoon, the current CEO of Yahoo Sports and a former digital head at ESPN.

He claims that Yahoo has produced the fastest return of any Apollo acquisition since he has increased earnings and expanded the company’s audience to that extent. Yahoo’s exact financials are unavailable due to its private nature.

However, Yahoo’s communications team sent a long paper full of information to support Lanzone’s assertion that Yahoo still has a lot to offer. Yahoo is ranked number one in news, number one in finance, and number three in sports by traffic-measuring marketing firm Comscore. In mail, it’s ranked second only to Gmail. He states that “hundreds of millions” of people use Yahoo each month in the United States alone.

The launch of ChatGPT, a year after Lanzone took over, completely changed the tech landscape. In past search, social, and mobile transitions, Yahoo has a near-perfect track record of making these mistakes.

Although Lanzone says Yahoo won’t be investing $100 billion in data centres or developing its own language models, he still thinks the company will take advantage of the opportunity.

He states, “I want to automate the word ‘AI’ so I don’t have to say it so much.”

Yahoo utilises AI technologies developed by other companies while also leveraging its own machine-learning capabilities. For example, it collaborates with the firm Sierra on robot customer support representatives.

Acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news aggregator developed by Instagram cofounders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, in 2024 was one of Jim Lanzone’s most astute AI strategies. When the couple declared it would close after determining it would not be a profitable venture, Lanzone was one of several bidders fighting for the underlying technology.

Artifact’s mission was focused on delivering the most relevant stories to users through AI, utilising proprietary technology to provide curated news and content experiences. The tech behemoth saw this investment as a game-changing one, in terms of advancing its commitment to bringing trusted news and information to hundreds of millions of users globally, while accelerating its vision to offer a more personalised experience for discovering news and information across platforms.

“Instagram’s co-founders built a powerful and useful tool for recommending news to readers—but could never quite get it to scale. Yahoo has hundreds of millions of readers—but could use a dose of tech-forward cool to separate it from all the internet’s other news aggregators. And so, the two sides are joining forces,” David Pierce, a veteran in covering consumer tech for renowned media houses like The Wall Street Journal and WIRED, commented about the deal in April 2024.

In the words of Kat Downs Mulder, the general manager for Yahoo News, “They put a ton of love and care into the way that their content taxonomy and recommendation systems work. How the content is categorised, what signals feed into that content, how to identify what’s really working and can connect and is relevant to you, and then the UX of connecting the user with that content—that whole journey is really hard to get right.”

She also noted in 2024 that Yahoo was working on personalisation and recommendations, but Artifact built something “special.”

When Yahoo revamped its homepage earlier in 2025, it became the focal point.

“Rather than integrating their technology into our product, we did it the other way around,” Lanzone explains.

“Yahoo News is basically now an Artifact. We partnered with Yahoo because they made a compelling offer, but they also intended to reach millions of people with our hard work,” Systrom explains.

Yahoo Finance, the industry leader in consumer financial tools and maybe the company’s crown jewel, is the next to undergo an AI-driven makeover.

According to Jim Lanzone, product improvements have already helped him. He claims that Yahoo is now concentrating more on data and is no longer attempting to compete with CNBC in the finance news space. However, a more significant makeover is being planned. He claims that “we will use AI to do that for you, and you’re going to make more money and save more money.”

Though the corporation still utilises purple in its branding, we are unsure if using a Yahoo service like Finance or Weather indicates an unexpected love for the colour. When people claim that Yahoo is not as good as the sum of its parts, Lanzone responds that a Yahoo Finance user will become enmeshed in the Yahoo-sphere and utilise other services.

A hint to 2025 conduct supports the endeavour. In an effort to position itself as a platform for viral content, Yahoo has agreements with more than 100 influencers. He claims that, in a way, the business is going back to its original goal of making the internet’s bounty available to as many people as possible. He recently hosted cofounder Jerry Yang in an all-hands, suggesting a revived legacy and a symbolic reunion.

“What attracted people to Yahoo as a portal? For what reason did they adore it? What made it so beneficial to them?” he enquires.

You can truly meet the users’ everyday needs, which begin with the news and weather as soon as they wake up, followed by their communications tools and other necessities.

The widespread consensus in Silicon Valley is that chatbot agents, not homepages, will soon be able to handle all of those tasks. Using Yahoo’s uptrending data, Lanzone warns, “Not so fast.”

Regarding his endgame, Jim Lanzone is evasive. He claims that “Yahoo is the same as any late-stage pre-IPO company.”

There are only three possible consequences for that: you get acquired, you go public, or you remain private indefinitely. We’re in building mode and don’t have anything to announce. But you can handicap such results without a betting programme.

It doesn’t seem possible to remain private forever. At the time of Apollo’s sale, Reed Rayman, a partner and current Yahoo chair, stated that Lanzone would “steward Yahoo through a transformational stage.”

A short-term initial public offering (IPO) does not appear to be feasible in the current depressed financial climate.

However, if the Trump administration chooses to put off merger oversight, the company might be acquired by one of the giants. Do you recall Microsoft’s 2008 attempt to pay over $50 billion to acquire the faltering business? Keep in mind that Yahoo already manages a large portion of its generative AI and its search index.

Jim Lanzone appears content to continue the turnaround for the time being. About ten years ago, Yahoo and the 49ers struck a long-term agreement that required the displays to display the Yahoo exclamation point and lead the audience in the yodel that has been a staple of TV commercials after each touchdown.

Soon after taking over as CEO, Lanzone was in the stands when Christian McCaffrey scored, to the cheers of 80,000 spectators. Lanzone didn’t believe that they were considering turnarounds and portals.

“It just struck me,” he adds, “that this brand has a lot of latent love.”

The post TechCrunch exit signals Yahoo’s shift appeared first on International Finance.

Reporting on the development, The Economist reported, “Ten times a second an object shaped like a thick pizza box and holding a silicon wafer takes off three times faster than a manned rocket. For a few milliseconds, it moves at a constant speed before being halted abruptly with astonishing precision—within a single atom of its target. This is not a high-energy physics experiment.”

On January 5th, American semiconductor giant Intel became the first owner of ASML’s latest technical marvel, which it will use for assembling chips at its Oregon factory.

ASML hits a jackpot

As January 2024 passed by, ASML closed at a record high after its orders more than tripled. Order bookings rose to a record €9.19 billion ($9.98 billion) in the fourth quarter from €2.6 billion in July to September 2023, driven by demand for ASML’s most sophisticated chip making machines.

What makes ASML’s presence crucial for the semiconductor industry is that the company is the only one which produces the equipment needed to make the semiconductors.

ASML has also been witnessing record orders for its ultraviolet lithography machines as Intel, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) are all lining up to induct the tool in their production ranks.

“ASML also benefited from strong demand from China last year (in 2023) as chipmakers there rushed to get lithography machines ahead of Dutch export rules meant to hobble Beijing’s semiconductor ambitions. The rise in Chinese demand helped offset the effects of a global chip industry slowdown on ASML, which is the only producer of the equipment needed to produce most advanced semiconductors,” Bloomberg noted.

China accounted for 39% of ASML’s sales in the fourth quarter and became the Veldhoven-based company’s largest market in 2023.

However, ASML has been targeted by the United States in the latter’s effort to curb exports of cutting-edge technology to China. In 2023 itself, Joe Biden’s administration urged the Netherlands government to prevent ASML from shipping chip making devices to China without a license. US officials also reached out to ASML and gave similar directions to the venture, as per Bloomberg reports.

And as the West keeps on preventing companies from its shores from supplying cutting-edge tech to Beijing, ASML too has fallen in line by restricting its China exports. The venture now expects as much as 15% of its China sales in 2024 to be affected by the new export control measures.

Why ASML is so special?

Apart from its cutting-edge chip making products, the Dutch venture is also known for its market value being quadrupling since 2019, to €260 billion ($285 billion), thereby ensuring that the company stays as Europe’s most valuable technology firm. Between 2012 and 2022, ASML’s sales and net profit both rose roughly four-fold, to €21 billion and €6 billion respectively.

“In late 2023, ASML’s operating margin exceeded 34%, staggering for a hardware business and more than that of Apple, the world’s biggest maker of consumer electronics,” stated the Economist.

You can say that Silicon Valley still leads the innovation race, but none of its innovations will see the daylight if they don’t get powered by cutting-edge semiconductors. That’s where ASML comes in handy, by holding the monopoly over this critical supply chain. And the West needs to be thankful because ASML is a Netherlands-based venture, not a China-based one.

The global semiconductor sales are predicted to double to $1.3 trillion by 2032. However, the US-led Western Bloc will be looking to ensure that Beijing doesn’t get the cherry. So ASML’s business will depend to some extent on geopolitical developments, but to its credit, the company has created a network of suppliers and technology partners across Europe, that itself looks like a well-oiled lucrative industrial vertical.

“Its business model ingeniously combines hardware with software and data. These unsung elements of ASML’s success challenge the notion that the old continent is incapable of developing a successful digital platform,” the Economist commented further.

ASML’s complex machines project chip blueprints onto photosensitive silicon wafers. In 1986, when the Dutch venture delivered its first machinery model, individual transistors measured micrometres and its kit almost looked like a glorified photocopier, states Dutch journalist Marc Hijink.

Jump forward to 2024, with transistors being shrunk by a factor of a thousand, ASML lithography gear has emerged as the most sophisticated equipment ever sold commercially.

ASML and its partners pulled off the shrinking trick through some engineering manoeuvring. It involved powerful lasers incinerating droplets of molten tin, each no thicker than a fifth of a human hair and travelling at over 250kph. The process produces extremely short-wavelength light, which then smoothly gets reflected by a set of mirrors. ASML’s latest lithography gear costs over $300 million and exposes enough semiconductors. The object that holds the silicon wafer (known as a ‘table’) accelerates faster than a rocket and comes to a stop at exactly the right spot.

Entering ASML’s supply network

Economist paid a visit to ASML’s Berlin factory, where the venture makes the ‘mirror blocks’, which serve as the main part of a wafer table.

“These are sturdy pieces of a special ceramic material, a square 8cm thick and measuring about 50cm on each side. Some get polished, measured, repolished, remeasured and so on, for nearly a year—until they are exactly the right shape, including allowances for the fact that they will sag by a few nanometres once installed,” the media house noted further.

The factory’s owner, Berliner Glas, was acquired by ASML in 2020. Berliner Glas, along with 800 other firms (mostly European), helped put together ASML’s machines. ASML owns stakes in only a few of these businesses, meaning most of these ventures operate as independent units, while being part of ASML’s massive manufacturing ecosystem.

ASML outsources over 90% of its manufacturing workloads and directly employs less than half the estimated 100,000 people required for its operations.

This is due to the fact that ASML, during its spin-off in 1984 from the Dutch electronics giant Philips, did not possess its in-house production lines. Since then it has been relying upon specialist component suppliers.

Also, manufacturing the various parts of the lithography machine is cutting-edge in itself. Carrying out all these functions can easily overwhelm ASML. Also, semiconductor economics preaches the decentralisation of the production networks.

In this particular industry, demand moves up and down in the blink of an eye. With the tech sector steadily moving towards the ‘Everything AI’ kind of future, semiconductors will be in great demand in the coming years.

The sector is very much prone to supply chain gluts. So the industry stakeholders are now outsourcing some of the component manufacturing duties to its suppliers, which can limit the fallouts by catering to customers working in different business cycles.

The practice which ASML started in 1984, has now become a phenomenon called ‘Hyper-Specialisation’, which prevents the risk-reducing double sourcing (practice of using two suppliers for a given component, raw material, product or service).

“In the case of ASML, technical demands are so high and production volumes so low (it shipped 317 machines in 2022) that it would be uneconomical to manage several suppliers for a single part even if they could be found. For such crucial components as lasers and mirrors, which are made by Trumpf and Zeiss, two German firms, respectively, it is impossible,” Wayne Allan, who is in charge of sourcing on ASML’s board, told The Economist.

Approaching things smartly

ASML mostly limits itself to designing the architect of its cutting-edge semiconductor-making tools. After that, the venture decides who (suppliers) does what, apart from defining the interfaces between the main parts of its machines (modules) and carrying out the required research and development activities.

This simplified workload helps the venture to test the machine equipment, certify and assemble them, followed by the transportation of the finished products. The suppliers have also been encouraged to experiment with technologies. The whole thing works on two Ts: ‘Trust’ and ‘Transparency’.

Information flows freely throughout the supply chain. As engineering teams from different firms work together, ideas and patents get shared, along with financial data and profits. Also, suppliers engage in healthy competition with each other.

If a supplier runs into operational trouble, ASML proactively intervenes to ease things out. If the trouble is bigger in size, then the venture ends up buying the supplier, as it did with Berliner Glas.

Can anyone challenge ASML?

ASML’s manufacturing ecosystem is something to envy about. It is a loosely coupled structure that ensures the operational autonomy and financial well-being of all the component suppliers. The whole model is well-oiled enough to outperform an entire industrial vertical.

ASML is now trying to consolidate its market dominance by complementing its chip making hardware with software and data. The goal is to further refine the ‘Wafer Table’ in the lithography machines. The process will be performed through data mining and machine learning. In that way, ASML will make itself into some sort of AI venture too.

Of the 5,500 devices ASML has sold since 1984, 95% are still in operation and many even send data back to the venture’s Dutch headquarters. These data then get used to fine-tune the products further, which in turn leads to higher semiconductor production ratios and generates even more data to help digital services like the Internet and Internet of Things (IoTs) to perform stronger.

“If rivals cannot topple ASML, can anything? Maybe physics. Even with the best AI, you can’t shrink transistors forever (certainly not in a commercially viable way). If technical requirements become too otherworldly the supplier network may unravel. Or maybe economics. Chipmakers may recoil at ASML’s data hunger, which extends to other linked devices in their factories. Some are pushing back against its digital expansion, insiders say,” The Economist noted.

“Then there is geopolitics. ASML’s share price dipped after news broke about the cancelled deliveries to China. The worry is less over lower sales; ASML cannot build its machines fast enough anyway. Of greater concern is the risk that strict export controls could in time push China to build its own chipmaking-gear industry. That could one day threaten ASML’s position at the centre of the sector. For the time being, though, the company’s network and its network effects remain indomitable. Who said Europe couldn’t do tech?” it concluded.

The post ASML: Powering the semiconductor industry appeared first on International Finance.

The analysts now feel that the incident has set up an example of how a company’s corporate affairs should not be run by persons, who, apart from having a little background in business administration, can compromise their oversight duties by making decisions based on their superficial way of seeing things.

After coming back at OpenAI’s helm, Altman sacked the board. It now has Adam D’Angelo (from the previous board), CEO of Quora, ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former US Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard University, Larry Summers.

The previous panel had Tasha McCauley (heading GeoSim Systems) and Helen Toner (an expert on AI and foreign relations at Georgetown’s Centre for Security and Emerging Technology). McCauley is one of the core heads of the United Kingdom board of Effective Ventures, a group affiliated with effective altruism, and Toner also worked for the US-based effective-altruism group Open Philanthropy.

In the new board, neither Sam Altman nor OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman will feature, and the panel will soon have six additional members.

Transparency went missing

OpenAI’s board reportedly lost confidence in Altman’s ability to lead the organisation and accused him of not being ‘candid in his conversations’. Altman wanted to transform the venture from a non-profit into a commercially viable business, which brought him into confrontation with the board. The board felt that the tech maverick was moving too quickly on the AI front, “Without sufficient concern to the safety implications of a technology that, left unchecked, could create content capable of harming the public.”

One may attempt to believe the possibility of independent directors like McCauley and Toner getting influenced by the section of sceptics who thought that OpenAI was moving away from its mission of “building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity” for commercial gain.

Earlier in November, tech companies and Western governments decided upon a new safety testing regime to allay concerns about AI’s growth pace and the lack of global safeguards in place to control it. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the world was “playing catch-up” in efforts to regulate AI, which had “possible long-term negative consequences on everything, from jobs to culture”.

Coming back to OpenAI, Sam Altman’s firing wasn’t due to his company’s financial, business, safety or security/privacy practises.

The directors’ duty, as written by the OpenAI’s organisational structure, was to ensure that the AI benefits the entire humanity. Did they get burdened by that responsibility, while removing Altman? Were they influenced by the ‘AI Apocalypse’ worries?

OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever recently spoke about the venture anticipating a technology breakthrough that may come with ‘safety concerns’. However, Sutskever himself quashed the possibility of the board acting out of ‘AI Apocalypse’ fears, while removing Sam Altman.

Neither Emmett Shear, co-founder of video streaming site Twitch, who took over the AI venture’s leadership duty briefly, nor Satya Nadella, the man leading the tech biggie Microsoft (which also holds a 49% stake in the OpenAI) were informed about the actual reason behind Altman’s removal.

In 2019, Altman transformed OpenAI into a for-profit unit to draw commercial investors, before launching ChatGPT in 20222-end. What started as a research lab became a professional tech company.

In November 2023, OpenAI hosted its first developer conference, where Sam Altman announced an app store for chatbots.

The old OpenAI board functioned as an entity independent of the for-profit company. Ilya and the three independent directors formed the majority needed to make the leadership changes, while following the organisational bylaw which allows for the removal of any director, including the chair, with/without a cause.

Ilya’s behaviour makes him a contradictory person. After removing Sam Altman, he “deeply regretted” his role in the board’s actions, thereby taking a U-turn from his earlier concern, where he spoke about OpenAI’s fast-paced commercialisation of its technologies compromising on the safety front.

Ilya Sutskever faces the heat

From November 17-21, OpenAI faced a massive internal backlash over Altman’s firing, with 743 out of 770 of its staff threatening to quit the company and join Microsoft en masse. Their condition was simple, the removal of the board, including Sutskever, who, as per The Atlantic, “likes to burn effigies and lead ritualistic chants at the company, and appears to have been one of the main drivers behind Altman’s ousting.”

As Sam Altman briefly joined Microsoft, a perplexed Ilya Sutskever wrote in his X account, “I never intended to harm OpenAI.” The crisis came for OpenAI at the time when it was eyeing to achieve the USD 90 billion valuation target.

“Sutskever has established himself as an esoteric ‘spiritual leader’ at the company, cheering on the company’s efforts to realise artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hazy and ill-defined state when AI models have become as or more capable than humans, or maybe, according to some, even godlike,” The Atlantic commented. Altman too championed attaining AGI as OpenAI’s number one goal.

As per the reports, Ilya Sutskever, apart from making the employees chant, “Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!”, even commissioned a wooden effigy to represent an “unaligned” AI that works against the interest of humanity, only to set it on fire.

Now imagine, such a volatile personality, with three other independent directors (with two of them coming from philanthropic backgrounds), deciding to fire Altman, who himself stresses about AI being governed, so that the tool acts responsibly towards humanity.

“Instead of focusing on meaningfully advancing AI tech in a scientifically sound way, some board members sound like they’re engaging in weird spiritual claims,” this is how The Atlantic summed up the situation, which also justifies the reason why Sam Altman wanted to fire the board so desperately.

A delusional board

In 2015, OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab, with the mission of developing artificial intelligence on par or beyond the human level—termed artificial general intelligence or AGI, in a safe way.

As per Sutskever, the tech venture found a promising path in large language models (LLMs), as the latter started generating strikingly fluid text. However, developing and implementing those models required huge amounts of computing infrastructure and capital. So, OpenAI created its commercial arm to draw outside investors. Sensing the opportunity, Microsoft jumped into the fray. Apart from helping OpenAI to develop and launch ChatGPT, the Satya Nadella-led venture is also using the start-up’s solutions like Bing Chat and Co-pilot to improve its products.

“Virtually everyone in the company worked for this new for-profit arm. But limits were placed on the company’s commercial life. The profit delivered to investors was to be capped—for the first backers at 100 times what they put in—after which OpenAI would revert to a pure non-profit. The whole shebang was governed by the original non-profit’s board, which answered only to the goals of the original mission and maybe God,” Wired commented.

“We are the only company in the world which has a capped profit structure. Here is the reason it makes sense: If you believe, like we do, that if we succeed well, then these GPUs are going to take my job and your job and everyone’s jobs, it seems nice if that company would not make truly unlimited amounts of returns,” Ilya Sutskever told the media outlet.

So the picture is clear now. While profit-seeking was a must for OpenAI to carry on research activities, the board’s responsibility was to ensure that “AI doesn’t get out of control.”

The board was playing the holy role of “Guardian of Humanity”. Now reports are suggesting that through ‘Porject Q’, Altman got a breakthrough in OpenAI’s long search for AGI, as the new model solved math problems. However, unlike a calculator, AGI can generalise, learn, and comprehend.

OpenAI describes AGI as ‘autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.’ While the venture’s Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati had acknowledged the existence of ‘Project Q’ in an internal email to employees, she also alerted them to ‘certain media stories’ without commenting on their accuracy.

The board was warned about the potential dangers which the model could bring. However, there was no clarity on what those dangers were.

What is even more perplexing is the fact that Altman himself warned about the AGI’s cons, as he wrote in one of his blogs, “AGI would also come with serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption. Because the upside of AGI is so great, we do not believe it is possible or desirable for society to stop its development forever; instead, society and the developers of AGI have to figure out how to get it right.”

As Wired spoke with a source familiar with the OpenAI board’s thinking, it emerged that the decision makers through the firing of Sam Altman would make sure that the company developed powerful AI safely.

“Increasing profits or ChatGPT usage, maintaining workplace comity, and keeping Microsoft and other investors happy were not of their concern. In the view of directors Adam D’Angelo, Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley—and Sutskever—Altman didn’t deal straight with them. Bottom line: The board no longer trusted Altman to pursue OpenAI’s mission. If the board can’t trust the CEO, how can it protect or even monitor progress on the mission?” the report commented further.

Instead of initiating a discussion with Sam Altman on ‘Project Q’, the board decided to arm-twist the tech maverick and force him to leave his own company. The result was completely the opposite. There is no doubt in the fact that, when it comes to generative AI, Altman is a cult hero, A persona who is the pioneer of the 21st century AI revolution and at the same point of time, talks about the tool’s responsible and regulated usage.

Microsoft hiring him for a brief period proved the above point right. If Satya Nadella doesn’t maintain high regard for you, no one else will, in Silicon Valley.

“Altman did little or nothing to dissuade the outcry that followed. To the board, Altman’s effort to reclaim his post, and the employee revolt of the past few days, was kind of a vindication that it was right to dismiss him. Clever Sam is still up to something! Meanwhile, all of Silicon Valley blew up, tarnishing OpenAI’s status, maybe permanently,” Wired commented further.

While the instance of 743 out of 770 OpenAI staffers, in their open letter, asking the board to quit and accusing the members of being “incapable of overseeing OpenAI,” might sound unprecedented, these aggrieved professionals were correct from their standpoint.

As per the Wired report, the board compared the staff outburst similar like negotiating with terrorists. Isn’t it a prime example of being in delusion? If the board members felt Sam Altman was not being honest in his communication with them, they should have talked the matter out, rather than jumping the gun and forcing the OpenAI CEO to leave his venture, thereby opening the Pandora’s Box called ‘chaos’.

“Having deleted his distrust of Altman, Sutskever and Altman have been sending love notes to each other on X, the platform owned by Elon Musk, another fellow OpenAI cofounder, now estranged from the project,” the report noted.

In fact, in the worst-case scenario, had Sam Altman stayed in Microsoft’s AI division, OpenAI staffers have joined him too, thereby orchestrating the death of the tech sector’s most happening start-up.

A New York Times report even claimed that OpenAI leaders thought that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the venture’s mission.”

However, things changed, as the board came to its senses and agreed to Altman’s return as OpenAI CEO. Two of the directors resigned, leaving only D’Angelo on the board. The latter was joined by Bret Taylor and Lawrence Summers. The new board and Sam Altman need to decide upon a couple of things. Should the venture continue as a non-profit one with a for-profit arm? In case a ‘Project Q’ like situation breaks out again, how to handle it without forcing important officials to resign?

Had OpenAI been dissolved, Microsoft would have gained immensely. OpenAI is known for pioneering the 21st century’s AI revolution and gaining the venture’s talent pool would have been the best coup in Silicon Valley’s history.

It would have been the best example of a venture like OpenAI, formed intending to thwart Silicon Valley biggies from dominating AI technology, delivering its talent and research infrastructure to a multi-trillion-dollar giant.

“Microsoft would have no qualms whatsoever about pocketing truly unlimited amounts of returns from future breakthroughs from the ex-OpenAI staff—something that anyone who was thinking of following Altman over there might have pondered, in light of their previous time at a company with different founding principles,” Wired summed the hypothesis up further.

However, OpenAI will continue to exist and as per reports, is now working on PPO (Proximal Policy Optimisation), which is a reinforcement learning algorithm used to train AI models to make decisions in complex, or simulated environments. While PPO’s versatility allows it to excel in scenarios like robotics, autonomous systems, and algorithmic trading, the venture has adopted PPO in a variety of use cases, from training agents in simulated environments to mastering complex games. The latest buzz is that OpenAI is now aiming to achieve AGI through gaming and simulated environments with PPO’s help.

Both the tech industry and OpenAI need each other, given the fact that ‘Innovation’ and ‘Positive Disruption’ keep the sector moving. ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and CoAssit are all being built and run on NVIDIA’s AI supercomputer and data centre infrastructures. Add Microsoft’s stable backing towards OpenAI. What we are witnessing right now is the formation of an ecosystem, which is set to change the industry forever.

Therefore, a stable corporate boardroom is a necessary one, both for OpenAI and this ecosystem.

The post Sam Altman & the OpenAI boardroom drama appeared first on International Finance.

Thanks to the region’s excellent entrepreneurial potential, the funding environment saw enormous growth in 2017 compared to previous years.

With 35 deals, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt emerged as the top-performing nations in the venture capital sector.

According to venture research firm Wamda, the MENA area raised USD 247 million across 46 deals in January last year, a staggering 474% rise from the year before.

Additionally, Bahrain’s crypto fintech firm Rain raised USD 110 million in a series B fundraising round in January 2022, setting a record-breaking USD 15 million in funding.

In January 2022, Saudi Arabia financial company Foodics acquired food tech startup POSRocket. Other noteworthy transactions included Kuwait’s online coffee marketplace COFE App purchasing e-commerce Sippy Beans and the UAE’s property tech firm Huspy buying mortgage consultancy Home Matters.

In February 2022, Saudi Arabia startups raised USD 219 million in 23 deals, accounting for 58% of the fundraising value. This was primarily due to the haulage company TruKKer’s USD 96 million series B round and the online grocery store Nana’s USD 50 million growth round.

Egypt came in second with USD 70 million in 18 sales, followed by the UAE with a total of USD 77.6 million raised through 20 deals.

The most active accelerator was TechStars Riyadh, which invested in over 12 firms. Flat6Labs, situated in Abu Dhabi, saw eight graduates from its Tunisia cohort.

However, the region’s revenue in March 2022 fell by 22% from the previous month to USD 229 million.

However, compared to the same month in 2021, it saw an increase of 71%.

With 31 out of 79 agreements closed in the region during the month, Saudi Arabia investors were the most active, followed by Egypt with 20.

The post Startup impact: Is MENA the next Silicon Valley? appeared first on International Finance.

Tech observers are used to this craziness. Covid-19 wreaked economic havoc on western countries in 2020 and 2021, but the IT industry was unaffected. While we were under lockdown, tech CEOs and owners got richer. Their enterprises expanded faster and were more profitable than others. Apple spent $90bn (£74bn) buying its shares, nearly Kenya’s GDP. Amazon spent $50bn in 2021 on warehouses, tens of thousands of people, electric vehicles, cloud computing centers, etc.

While the pandemic left many conventional enterprises on life support, it seemed to consolidate Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple’s power, making them the new masters of our networked universe.

And then… The Nasdaq stock market index (heavily influenced by tech businesses) reached 16,057, then plunged on November 19, 2021. Currently, it’s 12,369. So was this a “market correction” or a sign that this speculative bubble had burst?

According to quarterly numbers revealed last week by IT companies, the bubble has popped. Luke Gbedemah and Sebastian Hervas-Jones of Tortoise Media said the data shows a difference between companies that can “sustain an economic crisis” and those that may face existential decline. In addition, for the first time in the industry’s history, the companies’ combined real revenue growth rate was negative, and actual sales overall were lower than the year before.

Alphabet’s revenues rose 13%, but earnings plummeted 14%. Apple’s revenues rose by a hair, but earnings fell by 10%. Amazon’s sales rose 7%, but profits plunged 60.6%. Facebook had a bad quarter, with marginally lower revenues and 36% lower earnings. Microsoft’s revenues were up nearly a fifth, while profits were only up 2%.

In interpreting these numbers, the usual caveats apply: these are just one quarter’s results (though Meta has had two terrible ones); global supply chain problems and pulling out of Russia may have impacted Apple; and Amazon’s results may reflect its massive investment in Rivian, the electric vehicle manufacturer from which it has ordered 100,000 vehicles.

Investors formerly praised these companies for being different from regular, uninteresting corporations. These gigantic money-printing machines are headed into unknown territory, where they will push margins, expenses and privileges trimmed, workers fired, and efficiency found. Alphabet’s CEO urges employees to be “more entrepreneurial, working with greater urgency, sharper concentration, and more appetite than on sunnier days.” Similar sanctimonious exhortations are likely coming from other heavyweights.

Firstly, the era of “tech exceptionalism” – when investors and speculators praised companies and their supporters for being different from typical, boring corporations – may be ending. This is because these corporations are now no different from BT or Unilever.

Secondly, we’ve misjudged Microsoft because it blew the smartphone opportunity. Instead, it provided organizational computing infrastructure for organizations worldwide. For example, the NHS has 750,000 PCs running Microsoft OS and apps. Ditto for the UK government, massive firms, university administrations, and western SMEs. Microsoft’s cloud computing business is booming; though not glamorous or thrilling, it’s a stable business. Buying shares 30 years ago would provide you with an excellent pension now, and it’ll likely exist long after Facebook.

United, one of the world’s most well-known and popular teams, is anchored at the bottom of the English Premier League after dropping their first two games. Over the previous two months, the team has struggled to rebuild a group that did very poorly last season adequately.

In the past year, the value of its New York-listed shares has dropped by 24 per cent, putting it at just over $2 billion.

The American Glazer family owns Manchester United. Requests for comment were not immediately answered by either the Florida-based family or Musk.

Fans and analysts are increasingly calling for a change in ownership at the three-time champions of the European Cup, the most prestigious club competition in the world of soccer, as their streak of failure to win major championships grows longer.

This year, Forbes ranked Real Madrid and Barcelona as the world’s top two most valuable football clubs, with Manchester United coming in third with a value of $4.6 billion.

The post Is the tech bubble finally bursting? appeared first on International Finance.

1. Coinbase
A sell-off in crypto assets has triggered a huge drop in the market value of the largest US cryptocurrency exchange in 2022.

Late on July 10, Coinbase reported a first-quarter loss and 27% lower revenue than a year ago, missing Wall Street’s forecasts. The following day, Coinbase shares plummeted more than 25% to hit their lowest level ever. Its shares lost more than half their value in that week alone — from $130.15 on July 4 to $53.72 on July 11, according to a report by Forbes.

The stock has recovered slightly since then but is still at $69.70, down almost 72% in 2022, and 81.1% down from its all-time high of $368.90 in November 2021.

Founder Brian Armstrong, who had a personal fortune of $13.7 billion in November and about $8 billion at the end of March, is now worth under $3 billion.

2. Snap Inc.
In June, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel warned that “the macroeconomic environment has deteriorated further and faster” than it anticipated in its earnings guidance.

In the filing, Snap said it expected revenues and adjusted earnings to fall “below the low end” of its guidance range in the second quarter of 2022.

On July 12, Snap’s shares plunged 43%, their biggest intraday decline ever, falling below the 2017 IPO price of $17. The sell-off erased almost $16 billion in market value and dragged down Snap’s larger peers, including Meta, Alphabet, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Social media stocks lost more than $135 billion in market value that day, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped about 2.4% to 11,264.45.

3. Netflix
Shares of Netflix tumbled 39% on April 20 after it reported a sharp decline in its subscriber base. The stock fell as low as $212.51 in New York, down 64% this year, making it the worst-performing stock on the S&P 500 and Nasdaq this year.

The streaming service shocked Wall Street, saying it lost 200,000 customers in the first quarter – the first time it has shed subscribers since 2011. It also projected it would lose another two million customers in the second quarter.

In its earnings report, the company said the war in Ukraine and the decision to raise its prices in the US had hit subscriber numbers. Pulling out of Russia alone had cost it 700,000 members, Netflix said.

About a month later the company laid off 150 employees – about 2% of its North American workforce – mainly in its office in California. It said the job cuts were due to a drop in revenue.

Though the stock has fallen further and is now down almost 68%, it has been dethroned by Coinbase and Snap as the biggest loser of 2022.

4. Sea Ltd
On February 16, Sea Ltd. lost more than $16 billion of value after its shares plummeted 18% — their biggest one-day drop – on reports that India had abruptly banned its most popular mobile gaming title, Garena Free Fire, along with 53 other apps linked to China.

India has banned hundreds of Chinese apps over the past two years, but the inclusion of Sea’s app took everyone, including the company, by surprise. While Sea is based in Singapore, its founders are Chinese-born. The company is also backed by the Chinese technology and entertainment firm Tencent.

Shares of Sea plunged another 13% in US trading on March 1, after the company reported an earnings miss in its fourth-quarter data, wiping out $1.1 billion of chairman Forrest Li’s net worth.

On May 18, Sea’s shares jumped 14% after its first-quarter revenue beat analysts’ expectations, but the stock is still down more than 64% this year.

5. Meta
Shares of Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms crashed more than 25% on February 3, the biggest single-day slide in market value for a US company, after the social media giant issued a dismal forecast, blaming Apple’s privacy changes and increased competition.

The huge drop, erasing over $200 billion from Meta’s market capitalization and around $29 billion from Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth, spilled over to the broader technology sector and dragged the Nasdaq Composite Index lower.

It marked the company’s worst one-day loss since its Wall Street debut in 2012.

Meta’s rallied on April 28 posted its slowest revenue growth in years and narrowly missed analysts’ predictions for daily and monthly active Facebook users. Its profits, while ahead of expectations, were down 21% from the same period a year ago. Amid the broader downturn, weary investors found something to celebrate after this decidedly mixed news, sending Meta’s shares soaring 18% in after-hours trading.

Meta’s shares are still down 43.4% this year – a stunning number for a company with a market cap of around $935 billion on January 1.

The post Top 5 most affected tech companies in 2022 appeared first on International Finance.

It is reported that there are 643 technology hubs on the continent, with significant numbers spotted in Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya and South Africa. That said, 41 percent of the technology hubs are incubator facilities, while 24 percent of them are innovation hubs and 14 percent of them are accelerators. These hubs are collectively considered pivotal to the continent’s technology business. 

According to a research carried out by Briter Bridges and AfriLabs, Nigeria has the highest ratio of hubs pointing to 90. Meanwhile, South Africa followed second with 78, Egypt with 56 and Kenya with 50 across the 34 countries that the study covered. The research report titled Building a Conducive Setting for Innovators to Thrive observed that the majority of survey hubs on the continent have received funding that is less than $100,000. Shockingly, 62 percent of the hubs have below 10 paid employees. 

A re-discovered learning is that underutilisation of talent will not foster technology growth. Ibrahim Youssry, the general manager of Microsoft Middle East & Africa Emerging Markets, told International Finance, “According to the African Development Bank, 12 million young Africans enter the workforce each year. This means the continent could have a larger pool of Information Technology talent by 2035 than the United States, China and India combined.” The continent is witnessing a revolution in new cloud and data centre capacity, with a growth forecast of 80 percent and 50 percent, but there are constraints that need to be removed. 

Microsoft plays a big role in Africa’s cloud

This is profound news. Microsoft, for example, is observed to be spending more than $100 million on a cloud development centre which will employ 500 staff in the next five years. Currently, it has a data centre in Cape Town and Johannesburg. “Since Microsoft first opened its offices in Africa, we have witnessed incredible growth on the continent—more internet connectivity, more digital capability, and more innovation. Africans have expanded the applications of technology, changing the way communities bank, farm and even access healthcare,” Youssry explained. 

The establishment of cloud data centres have positioned Microsoft as the first public cloud provider offering cloud services on the continent. “Therefore, we see an increasing number of technology companies like Microsoft investing in local data centre infrastructure. We were the first global provider to deliver cloud services from data centres on the continent with the launch of two new enterprise-grade data centre regions in Africa, based in Cape Town and Johannesburg in 2019. Also, in 2019, Microsoft launched Edge Nodes in Kenya, Nigeria and Egypt to bring its customers a faster network and enhanced access to cloud services,” he said. 

“The continent’s growing demand for cloud services is driving ever-increasing opportunity for digital transformation in the market. Even before Covid-19, organisations across Africa were embracing the potential of cloud to engage their customers more effectively and optimise operations,” Youssry explained. “Already, the use of cloud among medium and large organisations was near pervasive.” It is worth noting that Microsoft has been investing in Africa since 2013. The 4Afrika initiative, for instance, was pivotal as it opened doors for the company to closely work with governments, partners, startups and young entrepreneurs to develop greater access to the internet and promote relevant technologies on the continent.  “Investing in digital transformation to help boost the region’s economic development is more important than ever and cloud is a key factor in enabling that transformation.” 

For Africa, the trend in promoting new technologies is evolving. But there is a stubborn challenge. A report states that ‘a multitude of dictatorships’ in various countries like Sudan, Zimbabwe and Chad among others that face Internet shutdowns is making predictions on investment returns quite difficult for companies. But Youssry remains optimistic about the continent’s technology potential. “While there was great optimism at the start of the decade with bold ambitions for growth and success, the pandemic has challenged African organisations and governments. But technology offers a real opportunity for the continent to recover and reimagine the future.”

MARI is making a difference

Microsoft is even expanding its footprint to reach new African regions. It is seeking to build up presence in Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, while Angola is on its radar. In the big picture, the cloud service delivered by Microsoft on the continent will help local companies to move their businesses to the cloud in a secure manner. “At Microsoft, we are very fortunate to have played a part in realising this potential, building strong partnerships to accelerate digital transformation and create sustained societal impact,” Youssry said. “A big milestone for this investment came last year with the launch of our first Africa Development Centre (ADC). The two sites in Nairobi, Kenya and Lagos, Nigeria serve as a premier centre of engineering for Microsoft, where world-class African talent can create solutions for local and global impact.”

For that reason, Microsoft created the new Microsoft Africa Research Institute (MARI) in Kenya, which will be co-located with the Africa Development Centre. The research institute will focus on foundational research to improve productivity in three prime areas: work, health and society. First: Several organisations in Kenya are using technology to create new organisational structures which will enable creation of new artificial intelligence and  machine learning solutions on a global scale. Second: The institute will explore how artificial intelligence-enhanced mobile technology can improve the effectiveness of healthcare interventions. Third: The institute will present itself as an ideal platform for addressing some of the biggest societal challenges. It will even demonstrate how analytics can be used to improve work on the ground and address problems globally. The mission of the institute is to ‘understand, build and deploy cloud and artificial intelligence technologies’ on the continent. What is interesting about the institute is that it not only seeks to draw the essence of the continental opportunities, but also to address local challenges to build the technology of the future. 

In 2019, 17 African countries presented their progress on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals at the United Nations. Although the progress was identifiable, it required radical interventions to achieve those ambitious goals. The answer to that was already clear: cloud computing. Several American companies have been in action for building their cloud services on the continent. There are four fundamental pillars that need to be in place for cloud computing to add value to the continent’s development. These pillars are skills development, policy and safeguards that ensure privacy and security of all data and infrastructure that provides reliable and affordable access to the Internet.

According to Youssry, the growth of cloud computing has been greatly assisted by the rising number of undersea cables connecting the continent to the rest of the world. In an example, Google launched its Project Link initiative which is essentially building links between undersea cables, ISPs  and mobile networks. The company’s first metro fibre network was rolled in Kampala in 2015 and expanded into Ghana, where it plans to build over 1,000 kilometres of fibre in Accra, Tema and Kumasi. The initiative has also evolved in the CSquared business and Google has committed an additional $100 million to boost its expansion into the African continent. 

Is data colonisation rampant? 

But the heart of the issue here is the fear of data colonisation for African countries, and their subsequent efforts in implementing laws that might dwarf growth.  Although the growth of big technology companies is a boon to the economy—extraction, monopolisation and monetisation are forming the crux of data colonisation. For what it is worth, this is a prevalent problem beyond Africa. According to the United Nations for Trade and Conference, there are pronounced gaps in cyber law adoption that are leaving consumers vulnerable to global crises, such as the coronavirus pandemic. 

The organisation found that only 66 percent of the countries of the world protect consumer data privacy. This is despite an estimated fact that there would be a 11 percentage point increase in adoption of data protection and privacy legislation between 2015 and 2020. This finding simply highlights how vulnerable Africa is amid the pandemic, especially in comparison to its European counterparts. To make the difference more obvious, 96 percent of European countries have data protection laws in place—and then the number drops to only 50 percent of countries in Africa. 

The continent is technologically diverse yet nascent in its own way. Although it trails the developed part of the world in digital penetration and capabilities, it still offers vast datasets for big technology companies. But the relative lack of data protection policies and restricted understanding of how valuable data is—is the trigger for data colonisation. Because data is a valuable commodity and deserves full protection—African policymakers must proactively develop a pan-African strategy for cross-border data flows. 

Contrasting theories on data localisation

For the uninitiated, cross-border data flows are crucial to ensure secure provision of mobile money-enabled remittance services that cannot be compromised. According to a report published by GSMA, data localisation requirements can directly impact the ability of emerging markets to capture the full potential of mobile money to reduce remittance cost—which has become a cause for concern for mobile and digital players. The regime usually involves: Data storage requirements and data processing requirements. By definition, data storage requirements point to certain datasets, such as government data and personal data of national citizens, which are hosted in data centres in the national territory. On the other hand, data procession requirements point to activities related to data entry, manipulation and processing. In this case, management takes place domestically. 

There are mixed views about data localisation laws. One school of thought is that these laws can result in: Improved data security; robust privacy protection for citizens’ personal data; easy access to data and control; and creation of local jobs for establishing data centres. The second school of thought is that data localisation laws will sever access to cloud services, which in turn can potentially dwarf technology growth, because cloud is becoming the lifeblood of African economy—and is absolutely essential for it to flourish in the fourth industrial revolution. For that reason, governments should enable companies to access the cloud without restrictions in accordance with global standards. The positive effects of that will lead to an increase in international investment, stimulate growth of local technology companies and build resistance to cyber attacks at large. 

Does the law dwarf economic modernisation?

Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya and South Africa have vouched for data localisation. These laws might have been in response to the growing concerns of African governments, but they have come at a cost. Take Nigeria, for example, where the data localisation framework specifically underlines its ‘clear negative trade balance’ in the Information Technology sector. Although few governments are investing efforts to control data colonisation on the continent—there are real concerns stemming from those efforts for policymakers. For one, there is very little evidence to prove that data localisation has led to outcomes in line with the first school of thought.  

Even in the economic aspect of things, the benefits of data localisation is only observed for some local companies that own data centres and have fewer employees. More importantly, what it seems occurred is that these laws have not led to an increase in foreign direct investment from big technology companies that are seeking to establish their infrastructure on the continent. In hindsight, data localisation laws are more of a trade barrier, making cloud computing burdensome and hindering economic modernisation. 

Policymakers in action 

To combat these problems, African policymakers can consider the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation as a benchmark for building a framework that fits with the current circumstances and capabilities through public-private cooperation. In this context,  Youssry said “Microsoft has long standing commitments to privacy and with the understanding that our customer data belongs to them, we have regularly taken steps to give customers more information and more choice, including being the first large company to voluntarily extend strong privacy protections offered under the GDPR to customers from around the world.” 

Already, the continent is found to have transformed itself during the pandemic and it will  continue to see results if the regulations are favourable. “Covid-19 pandemic had an unprecedented effect on digitisation. We saw two years’ worth of digital transformation in the first two months of the pandemic—and Africa has been no exception,” Youssry explained. “From the outset, business leaders have viewed technology as key to overcoming challenges posed by Covid-19 and helping them thrive in a post-pandemic world. According to PwC, 80 percent of African CEOs cite operational efficiency as a key growth driver. A further 62 percent want to accelerate automation in the workplace post-pandemic”

To achieve that, companies will need to embrace the cloud, which is ‘foundational to digital transformation’. Youssry pointed out that The Cloud in Africa 2020 report shows that companies in sub-Saharan Africa are already increasingly leveraging cloud technologies to drive digital transformation. More than half of all respondents to the survey believed that over a quarter of their applications will have moved to the cloud by the end of next year. So what is really needed is a comprehensive data flows framework that will allow local startups and big technology companies to scale across the continent. After all, the Internet of Things and data-driven insights are important for the continent to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution.

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