Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Kais Khimji has spent most of his professional career as a venture investor, including six years as a partner at the prominent VC firm Sequoia Capital. But just like several other former Sequoia partners — including David Vélez, who founded the Brazilian digital bank Nubank — Khimji (pictured left) has always wanted to be a startup founder. On Thursday, he announced that he has revived an idea he began working on as a student at Harvard about 10 years ago, turning it into the AI calendar-scheduling company Blockit. In a major vote of confidence, Khimji’s former employer, Sequoia, led the…
2026-01-23T01:51:44.817Z Share Copy link Email Facebook WhatsApp X LinkedIn Bluesky Threads lighning bolt icon An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt. Impact Link Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Log in. Amazon plans to lay off thousands of corporate employees in coming days. This second major round of Amazon layoffs since October would bring the total to about 30,000 jobs. Amazon is trying to streamline operations and reset its culture. Amazon is planning to eliminate thousands of corporate employees, with…
OpenAI has reorganized some of its leadership and picked a familiar face to lead its push into selling AI to business customers as the company looks to catch up to its rivals in 2026. The company appointed Barret Zoph to lead its efforts to sell its AI to enterprises, according to reporting from The Information, citing an internal OpenAI memo. TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for confirmation and more information. Zoph returned to OpenAI last week after leaving Thinking Machine Labs, former OpenAI co-founder Mira Murati’s AI startup where Zoph had served as a co-founder and chief technology officer since…
TikTok’s US workers can finally breathe a sigh of relief.The company announced Thursday that it has closed a deal to spin off parts of its US business in a new joint venture with an investor group.”The safeguards provided by the Joint Venture will also cover CapCut, and Lemon8, and a portfolio of other apps and websites in the US,” the company said.Adam Presser is leading the new venture, according to the company’s announcement. Presser has worked at TikTok for nearly four years, most recently leading operations and trust and safety. The venture’s seven-man, majority-American board includes TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew.The…
LiveKit, a developer of infrastructure software for real-time AI voice and video applications, has announced the raise of $100 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation. The round, which comes 10 months after LiveKit’s previous fundraise, was led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investors, including Altimeter Capital Management, Hanabi Capital, and Redpoint Ventures. LiveKit powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT voice mode. The startup’s other customers include xAI, Salesforce, Tesla, as well as 911 emergency service operators and mental health providers. The company was founded in 2021 by Russ d’Sa and David Zhao as an open source software project for…
The creators of the open source project vLLM have announced that they transitioned the popular tool into a VC-backed startup, Inferact, raising $150 million in seed funding at an $800 million valuation. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, confirming TechCrunch’s earlier reporting that vLLM has raised capital from a16z. Inferact’s debut mirrors the recent commercialization of the SGLang project as RadixArk, which sources told us secured capital at a $400 million valuation led by Accel, as we reported on Wednesday. As the focus in AI shifts from training models to deploying them in applications, a…
It’s been nearly two years since Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted AI would replace knowledge work — the white-collar jobs held by lawyers, investment bankers, librarians, accountants, IT, and others. But despite the huge progress made by foundation models, the change in knowledge work has been slow to arrive. Models have mastered in-depth research and agentic planning, but for whatever reason, most white-collar work has been relatively unaffected. It’s one of the biggest mysteries in AI — and thanks to new research from the training-data giant Mercor, we’re finally getting some answers. The new research looks at how leading AI…
Paris Hilton and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are taking on AI-generated deepfake porn.The hotel heiress and businesswoman traveled to the Capitol on Thursday for a press conference with the New York Democrat and Republican Rep. Laurel Lee of Florida to promote the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, or DEFIANCE Act.The bill would create a civil right of action allowing victims of AI-generated deepfake porn to sue the creators and distributors of those images.”While these images may be digital, the harm to victims is very real,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Women lose their jobs when they are targeted with this, teenagers…
The United States could soon no longer be a country considered free of measles.The Pan American Health Organization, the part of the World Health Organization that tracks infectious disease in the Americas, is set to review the U.S. and Mexico’s measles elimination status in April. The review stems from the sweeping outbreaks that began in the U.S. in January, 2025, the organization said in a statement.Losing this status, defined by the WHO as freedom from the continuous spread of a disease for at least a year, backtracks on what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called a “historic public…
BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge ruled on Thursday that the academics, who are party to a lawsuit alleging U.S. policy singles out noncitizens for detention or deportation over their pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses, can seek relief from the court if their immigration status is changed as retribution for taking part in the case.The ruling from U.S. District Judge William Young comes in the wake of trial last year, in which he ruled the Trump administration violated the Constitution when it targeted non-U.S. citizens for deportation solely for supporting Palestinians and criticizing Israel. Young repeatedly chastised the administration for…