Thomas Brewster / Forbes: Microsoft confirms it does provide BitLocker recovery keys for encrypted data if it receives a valid legal order and the user has stored the keys on its servers — The tech giant said it receives around 20 requests for BitLocker keys a year and will provide them to governments in response to valid court orders.
Iain Martin / Forbes: Lightning AI merges with data center operator Voltage Park to create an “AI cloud” with a $2.5B valuation, managing 35,000+ Nvidia GPUs across six data centers — The startup behind open source tool PyTorch Lightning has merged with compute provider Voltage Park to create a …
Iain Martin / Forbes: Listen Labs, whose AI tools help Microsoft and others run customer research and interviews, raised a $69M Series B led by Ribbit Capital at a $500M+ valuation — The San Francisco-based company, which has run more than 1 million customer interviews with its automated AI tools …
Marco Chiappetta / Forbes: SiFive will integrate Nvidia's NVLink Fusion infrastructure with its RISC-V processor IP platforms, allowing SiFive silicon to communicate with Nvidia GPUs — SiFive To Integrate Nvidia NVLink Fusion — In a move that could have major implications for future AI datacenters, SiFive …
Alicia Park / Forbes: AI sector minted 50+ new billionaires in 2025; Crunchbase: investors poured $200B+ into AI startups in 2025, or about 50% of global funding, up from 34% in 2024 — Record activity in the AI sector this year has boosted dozens of founders and business executives into the billionaire ranks.
Thomas Brewster / Forbes: Some US schools are deploying AI surveillance tech like facial recognition and listening devices; critics say there is little evidence they make school safer — Schools across the U.S. are rolling out AI-powered surveillance technology, including drones, facial recognition and even bathroom listening devices.
Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes: PermitFlow, which develops AI-powered workflow software for construction permitting, raised a $54M Series B led by Accel, a source says at a ~$500M valuation — This week's edition of The Prompt newsletter covers Warner Music Group's settlement with Suno, why Decagon has a competitive streak …
Joan Verdon / Forbes: Salesforce: online Black Friday sales grew 6% YoY to $79B globally, including $3B in US sales driven by AI agents; Adobe: US online sales rose 9.1% to $11.8B — Joan Verdon is a veteran retail reporter based in Northern New Jersey. — Consumers spent record amounts online on Black Friday …
Jonathan Burgos / Forbes: Several of Asia's top tycoons and conglomerates are joining the data center race as tech giants plan $240B in APAC hyperscale expansion over the next five years — The buildout of AI infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific is in high gear. Masayoshi Son and Mukesh Ambani are among the region's wealthiest taking the lead.
Christopher Marquis / Forbes: Seneca, which is developing autonomous firefighting drones, raised $60M in seed and Series A rounds led by Caffeinated Capital and Convective Capital — Climate change is no longer a remote future threat. Rising temperatures, more extreme weather, and worsening fire seasons …
Forbes: A look at AI startups aiming to address loneliness among the elderly; a study predicts the AI market for aging and elderly care will grow to over $43B in 2025 — The AI boom has brought with it a new crop of startups looking to build a business on an urgent but vaguely dystopian idea: solving loneliness among the elderly.
Martina Di Licosa / Forbes: A profile of Anton Pavlovsky, CEO of Kyiv-based Headway Inc, which develops gamified educational apps and has 160M users across its five-product portfolio — Shelf-ish: “Books and reading are really important to me, but we realize not everyone is so into books,” says Headway founder Anton Pavlovsky …
John Kang / Forbes: Shares of ISU Petasys, a South Korea-based multi-layer PCB supplier for AI servers used by Alphabet, Nvidia, Microsoft, and others, are up 215% so far this year — Based in Daegu, a city in southeastern South Korea, ISU Petasys makes multi-layer printed circuit boards that hold chips and other components for AI servers.
Robert Olsen / Forbes: New York- and London-based ClaimSorted, which uses AI to help speed up insurance claims and works with 20+ insurers, raised a $13.3M seed led by Atomico — Robert Olsen is a journalist covering transatlantic business news. … The tedious, time-consuming process of settling insurance claims is practically begging for disruption.
Forbes: A profile of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, whose estimated 11% stake is now worth $1B+ following ICE's $2B investment, as its rivalry with Kalshi intensifies — A $2 billion investment from NYSE parent ICE vaults Polymarket's 27 year-old founder Shayne Coplan into the three-comma club …
Richard Nieva / Forbes: AMD's SVP of AI Vamsi Boppana says the company's AI software, designed with input from OpenAI, helped secure the multi-billion dollar deal with OpenAI — Chips aren't the only star of the massive agreement. AMD's software efforts have slowly turned it into a more formidable competitor to Nvidia.
Thomas Brewster / Forbes: US public records: AWS is aggressively promoting AI surveillance tech to law enforcement agencies, partnering with companies such as Flock Safety and ZeroEyes — With a growing roster of partners, Amazon has been peddling AI drone surveillance, gun detection, and real-time crime center technology …
Phoebe Liu / Forbes: A profile of Edwin Chen, the CEO of Surge AI, a Scale AI rival that had $1.2B revenue in 2024, is profitable, and is reportedly raising $1B at a $30B valuation — This story appears in the October/November 2025 issue of Forbes Magazine. Subscribe — An alum of Google, Facebook and Twitter …
Alicia Park / Forbes: A look at prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket; Kalshi has ~$1B in current monthly volume and processed $6.9B in total, including $6.4B since October 2024 — Kalshi co-founders, Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara — The savviest billionaire traders are placing their bets on budding prediction marketplaces.
Javier Bastardo / Forbes: Downloads of Jack Dorsey-backed Bluetooth P2P messaging app Bitchat spiked to 48K+ in Nepal during recent protests, according to Bitchat developer “callebtc” — The Nepali government blocked access to 26 major social media platforms on September 4, including Facebook, X, YouTube, and Instagram.
Forbes: Brain Co., co-founded by Jared Kushner, Elad Gil, and others to help enterprises and governments use AI, comes out of stealth with a $30M Series A — Kushner teamed up with prolific solo investor Elad Gil and Luis Videgaray, the former Mexican foreign minister, to launch Brain Co. …
Richard Nieva / Forbes: A profile of Mercor, a Scale AI rival valued at $2B in February, which hires domain experts to train models; it had a $100M run rate in March and $6M H1 profit — Mercor, debuting on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, built an AI recruiter to interview job candidates.
Thomas Brewster / Forbes: Public records show C3 AI's Project Sherlock, its flagship contract to speed up policing in San Mateo County, has struggled with usability and other issues — San Mateo County pumped $12 million into a grand AI surveillance system made by billionaire Tom Siebel's C3 AI that was supposed to level up its police work.
Thomas Brewster / Forbes: A profile of Flock Safety, which operates 80K AI surveillance cameras across the US and hit a $7.5B valuation in March 2025, as it expands into US-made drones — With more than 80,000 AI-powered cameras across the U.S., Flock Safety has become one of cops' go-to surveillance tools and a $7.5 billion business.
Forbes: UK filings: TikTok's revenue in the UK, Europe, and Latin America grew 38% YoY to $6.3B in 2024, up from $2.6B in 2022 — Revenue from Chinese social media giant ByteDance's short video app leapt up 38% to $6.3 billion last year in Europe even as it faces the threat of being banned in the United States.
Iain Martin / Forbes: Grok's “share” button generates a unique URL that makes users' chats searchable on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo; Google has indexed 370K+ Grok conversations — xAI made people's conversations with its chatbot public and searchable on Google without warning …
Amy Feldman / Forbes: Medallion, which automates health care back-office operations and compliance, raised $43M led by Acrew at a ~$440M valuation, bringing its total raised to $130M — Medallion is setting up a national clearinghouse to streamline a healthcare credentialing process that costs more than $1 billion annually.
Martina Di Licosa / Forbes: A profile of UCB CS professor Ion Stoica, a billionaire who has helped launch four startups out of his privately-funded research lab, including Databricks — This computer science professor became a billionaire launching four startups out of his privately-funded research lab, including unicorns Databricks and Anyscale.
Forbes: Sources say Meta's chaotic culture and lack of vision have led to AI brain drain; Meta strongly denies it has had issues with talent and retention — At Meta, a chaotic culture and lack of vision have led to brain drain, with rivals saying its AI talent is lackluster.
Justin Birnbaum / Forbes: Jump, a SaaS startup founded by Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore for managing sports ticketing and fan experiences, raised a $23M Series A at a $100M+ valuation — Founded by the MLB legend alongside billionaire Marc Lore, his Timberwolves co-owner, the company is now valued at more than $100 million as it builds a one-stop shop for fans.
Richard Nieva / Forbes: How Google's Jigsaw and pollster Scott Rasmussen plan to use AI to survey Americans on political views to find common ground ahead of the US' 250th anniversary — A collaboration between the tech giant and a polling nonprofit will gather five to 10 people each from every congressional district …
Alex Knapp / Forbes: Tahoe Therapeutics, which is building AI models of living cells, raised $30M led by Amplify Partners at a $120M valuation, taking its total funding to $42M — The Palo Alto, California-based company, now valued at $120 million, has developed a scalable way to quickly generate crucial biological data needed …
Emily Baker-White / Forbes: A profile of Rumble founder Chris Pavlovski, who declined an offer to become CEO of Truth Social and opted to provide services to the platform through Rumble — Before he helped run Truth Social, Chris Pavlovski owned porn domains. Now, he's allied with a political movement that wants to ban pornography.
Nina Bambysheva / Forbes: A profile of Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, whose personal fortune has surged 6x over the past year to $6.1B, as the company leans into tokenized stock derivatives — First Vlad Tenev blew up the brokerage industry's fee model. Now, thanks in part to his full-on crypto embrace …
Iain Martin / Forbes: A profile of Swedish AI coding startup Lovable, which became the fastest-growing software startup ever, reaching $100M+ in annualized revenue in eight months — ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE | For decades coders have rushed to ship the minimum viable product. Lovable CEO Anton Osika (right) …
Derek Newton / Forbes: Honor Education, an e-learning service for individuals and enterprises founded by former Dean of Apple University Joel Podolny, raised a $38M Series A — I write about education, edtech and higher educat Honor Education, a skills and mindset learning platform for individuals and enterprise …
Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes: A look at “Generative Engine Optimization” startups like Profound and Bluefish AI, which help businesses improve content to appear in AI search summaries — Businesses are scrambling to be cited in AI-generated answers on Google, Perplexity and ChatGPT.
Thomas Brewster / Forbes: Cellebrite acquires Florida-based Corellium, which makes phone virtualization tools, for $170M; founder Chris Wade, who Trump pardoned in 2020, will stay as CTO — Corellium founder and CEO Chris Wade is selling his startup to Cellebrite, law enforcement's favorite cellphone forensics business.
Phoebe Liu / Forbes: Metaverse startup Infinite Reality, which claims a $15B+ valuation, told shareholders it is rebranding as Napster, an “AI-powered digital experiences” provider — Florida-based metaverse startup Infinite Reality, which claimed to have raised one of this year's largest funding rounds …
Richard Nieva / Forbes: An interview with Niantic CEO John Hanke on the company selling its games business, pivoting to enterprise AI, returning to its digital mapping roots, and more — Niantic was still raking in hundreds of millions a year from the beloved mobile game when CEO John Hanke decided to sell its games business and pivot to enterprise AI.
Gil Press / Forbes: Somite AI, which is developing AI foundation models for stem cell therapies, raised a $47M+ Series A led by Khosla Ventures, taking its total funding to ~$60M — Gil Press writes about technology, entrepreneurs and innovation. — SaveComment — Startup Somite AI announced today …
Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes: Sources: Decagon, which is building customer service-focused AI agents, is in talks to raise $100M in new funding led by a16z and Accel at a $1.5B valuation — The company, which builds customer service AI agents, is raising fresh funding as it continues to help businesses shave millions in labor costs.
Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes: Identity verification startup Persona, which has 3,000+ clients, raised a $200M Series D led by Ribbit at a $2B valuation, taking its total funding to $417M — Persona helps companies like OpenAI, LinkedIn and Reddit verify the identities of millions of users at a time when AI agents have made it increasingly difficult to do so.
Martine Paris / Forbes: Sam Altman says ChatGPT users had doubled in the past few weeks and that “10% of the world uses our systems”, which would peg the number closer to 800M users — Martine Paris is a San Francisco-based reporter covering trends in AI — OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman might …
Forbes: A TollBit analysis of 160 websites on its content licensing platform finds AI search engines drive 96% less referral traffic than traditional Google Search — AI companies promised publishers their AI search engines would send them more readers via referral traffic. New data shows that's not the case.
Davey Winder / Forbes: Google says it plans to use QR codes for Gmail account authentication, ditching SMS to “reduce the impact of rampant, global SMS abuse” — It is certainly no secret that using SMS text messages for security codes used to authenticate your identity is far from ideal.
Forbes: Collate, which is developing tech to automate paperwork for life science companies, emerges from stealth with a $30M seed led by Redpoint at a $100M+ valuation — Surbhi Sarna sold her last startup, nVision Medical, for $275 million. Now she's leaving a partner role at Y Combinator to launch Collate …
Sarah Emerson / Forbes: Sources: Eric Schmidt is working on an AI startup called Hooglee, which describes its mission as “democratizing video creation with AI” — The billionaire technologist has quietly founded a startup that aims to “bring people closer, simplify communication, and enhance engagement” through artificial intelligence.
Alex Konrad / Forbes: Young founders and coders applying for Elon Musk's DOGE cite a range of professional and civic motivations; sources say DOGE is seeking 100 full-time DC hires — The incoming Trump administration's planned agency for cutting government excess is seeking 100 full-time hires in the nation's capital …
Richard Nieva / Forbes: Q&A with Google DeepMind Director John Jumper on winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, merging science and AI, advancing AlphaFold, rival labs, and more — While language models are getting better at performing tasks like writing poetry and emails, Jumper is looking forward to an era …