Swipeline

Index Ventures has written a success story with Wiz’s exit, as the cybersecurity startup prepares to join Google in a massive $32 billion deal. The VC firm earned a 250x return on its seed investment and will generate $4.3 billion from its total $245 million investment.

AI startup xAI and chip giant NVIDIA have joined the AI Infrastructure Partnership, a multi-billion dollar AI infrastructure fund established last September by BlackRock, Microsoft, and MGX. The fund aims to grow to $100 billion.

Munich Re, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, has acquired California’s Next Insurance for $2.6 billion. Founded in 2016 and focused on providing insurance to SMEs, Next Insurance will join one of Munich Re’s units with the acquisition.

AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion. The startup, which raised funding last December at a valuation of $9 billion, wants to double its value to $18 billion with this move.

Pavel Durov, founder of messaging platform Telegram Messenger, announced that the service has now reached more than 1 billion active users and made a profit of $547 million last year. Durov also called Telegram's rival WhatsApp a “cheap and bad imitation”.

Since its acquisition by Elon Musk, X has undergone a major transformation and has regained a $44 billion valuation through a secondary share sale. The platform, aiming to fully repay its debts, is preparing to raise $2 billion in funding.

OpenAI has made o1-pro, a more powerful version of its o1 reasoning model, available in the developer API. o1-pro is approximately 10 times more expensive than the o1 model, charging $600 per 1 million tokens generated. 

Japan's SoftBank Group Corp. is buying US chipmaker Ampere Computing, founded by former Intel Corporation president Renée James, for $6.5 billion. With this move, the company aims to strengthen its investment in AI and chip technologies.

The US Department of Commerce has banned its employees from using Chinese AI startup DeepSeek AI’s models on government devices, according to sources. The department cited efforts to ensure the security of its information systems as the reason for the decision.

Elon Musk's AI company xAI acquired Hotshot, which offers AI-powered video production tools similar to OpenAI's Sora, in a deal whose financial details were not shared with the press. The San Francisco-based startup ceased operations after the acquisition.