- Thoma Bravo acquires a majority stake in Java platform Azul, which received a $340M majority investment from Vitruvian Partners and Lead Edge Capital in 2020 (Chris Metinko/Axios)
- General Atlantic purchases a $96M minority stake in Japanese HR software unicorn SmartHR, marking the PE firm's first growth equity investment in Japan (Lisa Du/Bloomberg)
- Federato, which provides AI-powered insurance lifecycle software, raised a $100M Series D led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, taking its total funding to $180M+ (InsurTech Analyst)
- New York-based emergency alerts platform RapidSOS raised $100M led by Apax Digital Funds, a source says at a $1B+ valuation, for US and international expansion (Bloomberg)
- Finland-based NestAI raised €100M led by Finland's sovereign fund Tesi and Nokia to build AI products for defense applications, including for unmanned vehicles (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)
- Alphabet's stock closed at a record high of $299.66 on November 21, continuing a strong recent run after Google's Gemini 3 impressed analysts and consumers (Rani Molla/Sherwood News)
- Italy's competition authority closes its July 2024 probe into Google's alleged unfair practices over users' personal data after Google adopted remedies (Gianluca Semeraro/Reuters)
- Sources: China's Moonshot AI, developer of the Kimi models, is raising several hundred million dollars at a ~$4B valuation and is aiming for an IPO in H2 2026 (Wall Street Journal)
- Sources: the White House has put on hold a draft executive order that would seek to preempt state AI laws, following bipartisan backlash (Karen Freifeld/Reuters)
- Waymo says California authorized it to operate across the entire Bay Area and Sacramento, and between LA and San Diego, where it plans to expand to in mid-2026 (Aidin Vaziri/San Francisco Chronicle)
- Figure AI's former head of product safety sues the humanoid robot startup, alleging he was unlawfully terminated after warning executives about product safety (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)
- Analyzing Gemini 3's model card and safety framework report: the model is excellent but the safety report withholds or makes it difficult to understand key info (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase)
- Anthropic finds that LLMs trained to "reward hack" by cheating on coding tasks show even more misaligned behavior, including sabotaging AI-safety research (Anthropic)
- A look at AMD's pivot to AI chips in 2022 under CEO Lisa Su, increasing AMD's market value from $90B to $335B+ in three years, as the chipmaker takes on Nvidia (Wall Street Journal)
- A US judge is expected to rule next year on breaking up Google's ad tech monopoly, after the DOJ and Google delivered closing arguments in a remedies hearing (David McCabe/New York Times)