- Waymo becomes the first company to offer driverless rides on freeways, launching 24/7 services in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles for users who opt in (Zoe Thomas/Bloomberg)
- Amazon Echo Show 8 ($180) and Echo Show 11 ($220) review: better hardware and software, and Alexa+ is an improvement, but no camera cover and ads in the future (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge)
- Filing: Synopsys plans to lay off ~10% of its staff, or ~2,000 employees, after completing its $35B acquisition of engineering design firm Ansys earlier in 2025 (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)
- Anthropic plans to spend $50B on a US infrastructure buildout, starting with data centers in Texas and New York in partnership with Fluidstack, opening in 2026 (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
- Circle reports Q3 revenue up 66% YoY to $739.8M, USDC in Circulation at quarter end up 108% YoY to $73.7B, and net income up 202% YoY to $214M; CRCL drops 5%+ (Reuters)
- Fei-Fei Li's World Labs launches Marble, its first world model to let users turn prompts, photos, and other media into editable 3D environments, after a beta (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
- Airbnb plans to launch a three-month pilot on January 5 to let guests order groceries via Instacart within its app for rentals in Phoenix, Orlando, and LA (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)
- Indian investment app Groww raised ~$748M in its Indian IPO, closing up 29% and giving it a ~$9B market cap; Groww is the first Indian YC-backed startup to IPO (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
- Coinbase plans to move its incorporation from Delaware to Texas, saying Delaware "once provided companies with consistency" but now has "unpredictable outcomes" (Ari Levy/CNBC)
- Tel Aviv-based Sweet Security, which helps spot abnormal cloud infrastructure behavior, raised $75M led by Evolution Equity, taking its total funding to $120M (Marissa Newman/Bloomberg)
- Deezer-Ipsos survey of 9,000 music listeners in eight countries: 97% can't distinguish AI-generated music, 73% support clear labelling of AI tracks, and more (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)
- Boston-based Teradar, which aims to launch a solid-state sensor for autonomous cars in 2028 that it says can outperform lidar and radar, raised a $150M Series B (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)
- An analysis of 47,000 publicly shared ChatGPT conversations: ~10% related to emotional or mental health, ChatGPT exhibits a "default to yes" behavior, and more (Washington Post)
- Maryland-based Forterra, an autonomous military vehicle software startup founded in 2002, raised $238M, including $50M in debt, at a $1B+ valuation (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)
- Stockholm-based driverless truck startup Einride plans to go public in H1 2026 via a blank-check merger at a $1.8B valuation and reports ~$43M in 2024 revenue (Paul Berger/Wall Street Journal)