 | Mar 31, 2025 | | | | Supported by  | | | | | Welcome back! Apple is developing an artificial intelligence agent for a revamp of its Health app. Elon Musk merges X and xAI. President Trump pardons Nikola founder Trevor Milton, who was convicted of fraud in 2022.
| | | | Apple is developing a revamp of its Health app to incorporate an artificial intelligence-powered agent product to designed to replicate a doctor, Bloomberg reported. The report said Apple devices would collect data to be used by the agent to offer personalized health recommendations. It said Apple was currently training the agent helped by doctors on staff. A big focus of the app would be on food tracking. Apple has previously identified health as a major area of focus for its products, particularly its watch. | | | | Elon Musk combined his xAI startup with his X social media service, he revealed in a post on X, stating that the combination valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, excluding X's debt of $12 billion. The announcement came as a surprise, although Musk had already connected the two companies by giving X a stake in xAI. The AI startup, founded two years ago, had trained its Grok AI chatbot on data from X, which Grok acknowledges on its web site. In his X post today, Musk said that the futures of the two companies were "intertwined." The merger will "combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent" of the two companies. The combined enterprise will "deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people." The merger will also reduce pressure on Musk to turn around X, whose revenue has fallen by nearly half since he bought it (then named Twitter) in late 2022. | | | | President Donald Trump pardoned Nikola founder Trevor Milton, who was appealing a four-year sentence for defrauding investors by exaggerating the capabilities of the company's electric truck. Milton himself announced the pardon in a video taken on his phone Thursday as he drove his car. He said Trump had just telephoned him and said "how much of an injustice this all was, done by the same offices that harassed and prosecuted him." Milton, whose lawyer is Brad Bondi, the brother of Trump's attorney general, Pam Bondi, founded Nikola in 2015. In 2020, he took the company public amid an investor frenzy for electric vehicle and battery startups. He resigned just months later after allegations that—among other things—Nikola had faked a promotional video, depicting the truck as operating on its own when actually it was rolling down an incline. A federal jury convicted him of fraud in 2022 and he had been out on bond while appealing. | | | | OpenAI's ongoing $40 billion megaround is dependent on a key condition: the ChatGPT maker being able to complete its conversion to a for-profit structure by the end of the year, according to a person briefed on the round's terms. If OpenAI isn't able to do so, the round's lead investor, SoftBank, could slash the size of the round in half, to $20 billion, the person said. The round consists of two tranches: an initial tranche of $10 billion and a second tranche of $30 billion which is expected to come later this year. If OpenAI is unable to complete the for-profit conversion, the second tranche would be cut to $10 billion, the person briefed said. SoftBank is expected to provide at least $30 billion of the $40 billion OpenAI is attempting to raise this year. The initial tranche of funding is expected to close in the upcoming weeks, the person said. A spokesperson for SoftBank declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the conversion condition. This term highlights the amount of pressure OpenAI is under to get its for-profit business out from under the control of the nonprofit. The company has faced several obstacles in doing so, including ongoing negotiations with Microsoft and lawsuits from Elon Musk, an OpenAI cofounder, attempting to stop the conversion process. | | | | AI cloud provider CoreWeave said it raised $1.5 billion in its IPO Thursday, a smaller amount than it had expected after investor enthusiasm for the offering waned. It will be begin trading on Nasdaq Friday. The deal, at $40 a share, would value the company at $23.3 billion, on a fully diluted basis. The company had been hoping to raise as much as much as $2.6 billion at a $32 billion valuation earlier this week. The deal is still the largest tech IPO by size since SoftBank-backed chip designer Arm went public in September 2023. But the smaller size likely means CoreWeave will have to raise more additional debt than expected. | | | | San Francisco-based startup Anysphere, the maker of popular coding assistant Cursor, is generating $200 million in annual recurring revenue from the subscriptions it expects over the next 12 months. That's up from $50 million in annual recurring revenue it was generating in November. The revenue milestone, which The Information reported today, comes as the business is talking to investors about a financing round that would value the company at $10 billion. Investors including Accel, Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz are involved in the talks. Anysphere, which has hired 50 people, has seen Cursor usage soar because it is quickly and cleanly able to reference and understand a user's code base. And so far, those customers are sticking around: Anysphere's net revenue retention rate for customers who joined in March 2024 is 250%, according to the person familiar with the company's financials, a metric that measures a company's ability to hold onto existing customers and increase their spending. For perspective, a one-year net retention rate of 115% is wonderful. Users say that the business is causing them to switch from older alternatives, such as Github Copilot, to take advantage of the artificial intelligence-powered coding support. | | | | Nike is partnering with Togethxr, a startup co-founded by a group of women's sports stars, to distribute Togethxr's "Everyone Watches Women's Sports" apparel, underscoring the demand for women's sports merchandise as well as Nike's efforts to jumpstart sales through collaborations with emerging rivals, particularly in womenswear. Nike will co-brand the clothing and accessories with Togethxr, which was co-founded in 2021 by Alex Morgan, Sue Bird, Chloe Kim and Simone Manuel as a women's sports media and commercial product company. Togethxr launched an apparel line with its "Everyone Watches Women's Sports" slogan in late 2023, which generated $6 million in sales in its first year. The size of the market for women's sports merchandise in the U.S. is estimated to be $4 billion, according to a first-of-its-kind report by Sports Innovation Lab, an industry think tank, in 2024. Nike's distribution with Togethxr is its second such collaboration with a woman's startup in as many months. In February, the company announced its partnership with Kim Kardashian's Skims, as Nike continues a broad turnaround amid declining sales and profits. "The apparel space is ripe for fresh thinking," Nike's new CEO Elliott Hill told investors last week, saying he had asked the company's executives to find opportunities like the Skims partnership "to complement our brands and product portfolio." | | | | | | | | | Opportunities Empower your teams to stay ahead of market trends with the most trusted tech journalism.
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