Nvidia smashes Q1 earnings

Nvidia Q1 earnings (its shares soar past $1000 for first time on AI-driven sales surge):

Meta assembles a tech executives group to advise on AI products. Members include Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO), Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO), Tobi Lütke (Shopify CEO), and Charlie Songhurst (former Microsoft executive).

The SEC approves rule change to allow the creation of ether ETFs. This comes 6 months after the SEC approved bitcoin ETFs.

The US Department of Justice and 30 state attorneys filed a lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment (owner of Ticketmaster) for alleged monopolistic practices.

Microsoft had its annual Build conference, announcing expansions of its Copilot with autonomous agents and adds AI to your Windows clipboard.

Meta and Google are pitching AI to Hollywood. They’ve met with major Hollywood studios to license content for their AI video generation platforms.

OpenAI reportedly didn’t intend to copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for its ai chatbot ‘Sky’.

OpenAI signs a multi-year agreement (worth more than $250M over 5 years) with News Corp to allow it to use content from News Corp’s publications like The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and New York Post.

Linktree, the link-in-bio startup, reaches 50M sign-ups, a significant jump from 2.7M it had in 2019.

Amazon pilots a new program where Amazon drivers will pick up returns from customers’ houses and bring them to its facilities for processing.

SpaceX demos cellular Starlink tech powering video calls between phones.

TikTok plans significant layoffs of Operations and Marketing employees. This will affect a large percentage of the roughly 1,000 people working on these teams.

Anthropic hires Krishna Rao, a former executive at Airbnb and Fanatics, as its first CFO as it competes with OpenAI and Google.

Zoom reports Q1 earnings:

Microsoft unveils Copilot+ PCs—the fastest, most secure Windows PCs ever built.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink gets FDA approval to implant its brain chip in a second person.

Blue Origin successfully launches its first crewed mission since 2022.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel shifts focus to AI after reviving ad business

Expedia ousts CTO (Rathi Murthy) and Senior Engineering leader (Sreenivas Rachamadugu) for policy violations.

Microsoft plans to release the next Call of Duty on Game Pass, its game subscription service.

Humane, the creator of the $700 AI Pin, is seeking a buyer. It’s priced itself between $750M and $1B. For context: it has raised $230M to date.

AI ‘agent’ startup Adept held talks in recent months about a possible sale or strategic partnership with large tech companies—one of which was Meta. It’s valued at over $1B and is under pressure due to substantial costs and intensified competition.

Snowflake will not ultimately acquire AI startup Reka AI. The deal was supposedly worth more than $1B.

Groq, an Nvidia rival that develops specialized server chips and AI software, (different than Elon Musk’s Grok) enlists Morgan Stanley to help with raising $300M.

Farcaster, a decentralized social network that allows users to move their data freely between different apps, raised $150M at a $1B valuation.

Scale AI raises a $1B Series F round led by existing investor Accel, nearly doubling its valuation to $13.8B.

Anduril, a military defense startup founded by Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, is seeking $1.5B at a $12.5B valuation.

Suno, an AI music generator startup, raised $125M in new funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, at a $500M valuation.

Peloton launches a $1B leveraged loan to refinance debt and a $275M sale of convertible senior notes.

Neros, an autonomous drone startup, raised a $10.9M seed round from Sequoia Capital.

Overland AI, an autonomous ground vehicle tech company for the defense sector, raised a $10M seed round.

Teal, an accounting infrastructure for vertical SaaS businesses, raised an $8M seed round.

Bumble, the popular dating app maker, has acquired Geneva, a platform for forming groups and clubs, for an undisclosed amount. Bumble aims to expand further into friendships with this acquisition.

Kudos, an AI-powered smart wallet service, raises a $10.2M Series A round.

CoreWeave, an AI infrastructure startup, raises $7.5B in debt to pay for servers packed with GPUs and networking equipment. This follows a $1.1B funding round the startup announced 2 weeks ago.

Spotify created its own variable font called Spotify Mix. It’s meant to be as diverse and dynamic as the content on its platform.

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan reveals his ‘secret sauce’ for getting into the prestigious startup accelerator.