This Week in Tech (Week Ending Aug 1, 2025)
TL;DR - 😢US shooting; 🤖MSFT assesses job vulnerability to AI; 📈📈Figma’s IPO
Hey folks!
Happy Friday and hello August‼️ 😎 Tech news below.
TL;DR -
😢 A gunman killed 4 people and then himself in a midtown Manhattan office on Monday, and the western US experienced a tsunami warning but thankfully no issues.
⭐️Microsoft released a study assessing jobs' vulnerability to being replaced by AI. Is your job on there?
📈📈Figma’s IPO was a wild success - initially priced at $33 a share, its stock soared so quickly on Thursday that trading was halted for a short time due to market volatility. The stock closed at $115.50 and a $47 billion market cap.
🇨🇦Katy Perry was named the new ambassador to Canada - jk but she was seen having dinner w Justin Trudeau so ppl are speculating that they’re dating??
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
😢 A gunman killed 4 people and then himself in a midtown Manhattan office on Monday. It’s the deadliest shooting in New York City in 25 years. It appears the shooter had mental health issues and may have targeted the building because it housed the NFL, and the shooter believed he had CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) as a result of playing football.
🌊The western US experienced a tsunami warning mid week after an 8.8 earthquake in Russia. Thankfully there were no major issues.
🇵🇸Food supplies in Gaza have declined under the new Israeli aid plan, operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. In response, the Israel Defense Forces said it would implement a humanitarian pause in several population centers across Gaza at the start of this week.
🇹🇭🇰🇭Thailand and Cambodia agreed to a cease-fire after deadly border clashes. At least 34 people died and tens of thousands fled their homes.
🇷🇺Russia's largest airline Aeroflot was hacked and flights were grounded over the weekend.
Feedback on the BBB? More than half of respondents told a poll from The Wall Street Journal that they opposed Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax-and-spending law, including 54 percent of independents.
🇬🇷🇹🇷🔥Wildfires are blazing across Greece and Turkey during a heat wave.
🐄Enjoy your beef now while you can: The New World screwworm, a parasitic fly that was eliminated from the U.S. in the 1960s, is now creeping again toward the US’ southern border. It appears increasingly likely the country will face an outbreak, which will certainly threaten US cows and the cost of beef.
💪Weird flex but I get it: Presidents globally are now finding it necessary to point out that they govern sovereign nations. Why? 🍊 Trump’s threats like randomly re-naming the Gulf of Mexico and jokes about annexing Canada have seemed to nudge officials into reminding the public that they’re not going to bow down to threats. The NYT offers examples from Mexico 🇲🇽, Canada 🇨🇦, Panama 🇵🇦, Colombia 🇨🇴, and Brazil 🇧🇷.
Trending - smaller workforces: CEOs are now practically boasting about smaller workforces as evidence of their ability to achieve more in the AI era. The shift reflects a cooling labor market, in which bosses are gaining an ever-stronger upper hand.
'CEO gig economy’: there's a sudden surge in CEOs taking on entire companies for the short term. Why it matters: Dipping in and out of the C-suite is quickly becoming the next workplace revolution after five years of constant changes on where we work, how we do our jobs and AI.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
Earnings
📈Microsoft’s revenue growth accelerated to 18% in Q2, driven by stronger-than-expected sales in its Azure cloud computing unit. And with that, Microsoft became the world’s second $4tn company
📈Meta reported second-quarter revenue of $47.5 billion, up 22% from a year earlier. That exceeded its own forecast of $42.5 billion to $45.5 billion, showing the strength of its digital advertising business
🤖Tesla isn’t making Optimus humanoid robots fast enough to meet CEO Elon Musk’s goal of 5,000 by the end of this year. Musk has increasingly hyped Optimus, along with Tesla’s nascent robotaxi service, as the future of the company, even as its core electric vehicle business has suffered.
YouTube is introducing age-detection technology to identify teens on the platform in the U.S. and apply protections.
Spotify executives signalled that the departure of its ad chief, Lee Brown, was in response to their unhappiness with the speed of changes with the company’s ad business.
Meta
Meta Platforms in October will stop political and social issues-related advertising in the European Union.
Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses sales more than tripled in the first half of the year YOY.
👓 Alibaba Group unveiled its first artificial intelligence glasses, as Meta Platforms’ success with its Ray-Ban AI smart glasses prompts Chinese tech giants to follow suit.
JPMorgan Chase is in advanced talks to take over Apple’s credit-card program.
Biohackers unite: Oura’s revenue grew to more than $500 million in annual revenue last year, and grew at more than 120 percent. One of the accelerants for growth was more adoption by women after adding cycle-tracking.
Jack Dorsey's Bluetooth messaging app Bitchat is now available on the App Store. It has 4.8/5 stars and 150 ratings so far.
Tea, an app that allows women to post anonymous comments about men they’ve supposedly dated, announced that it has suffered a data breach, with hackers gaining access to 72,000 images.
This one’s for the parents: Skechers is making kids' shoes with a hidden AirTag compartment.
🤖 AI News
⭐️Microsoft released a study assessing jobs' vulnerability to being replaced by AI. Is your job on there?
Trends: Generative AI apps have seen tremendous growth in both downloads and in-app revenue in the first half of 2025. Users downloaded GenAI apps 1.7 billion times, compared to 1 billion in H2 2024. These apps doubled in-app revenue, bringing in $1.87 billion in H1 2025, as compared to $932 million in H2 2024.
OpenAI has reached $12 billion in annualized revenue, nearly double its pace at the beginning the year. The rise suggests the company will be able to hit is projections of generating $12.7 billion in revenue this year.
🧠 OpenAI is trying to shed its reputation as a student cheating tool with a new "study mode" that was released this week.
Groq, a chip startup taking on Nvidia, recently cut its 2025 revenue projections from more than $2 billion to more than $500 million. The company gave out the lower projections as it talks to investors about a new round of funding that would double its post-investment valuation to $6 billion.
Google is testing Opal, an AI coding tool that can generate apps based on text prompts. Google is also launching Web Guide, which will organize search results by subject matter.
Microsoft's Edge browser introduced an AI-powered "Copilot Mode" for smarter web browsing
Nothing will replace Clippy! Microsoft started rolling out Copilot Appearance, an animated blob character that makes facial expressions and can talk with users.
🤣lol use AI prompting for good (deals): someone fooled ChatGPT into giving out Window activation keys:
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
Nice, which automates customer services, acquired Cognigy, which develops AI agents for customer service, for $955 million.
PagerDuty, an incident management software maker, is exploring a potential sale.
Palo Alto Networks will buy the login software firm CyberArk for $25 billion
🚃 Union Pacific agreed to buy Norfolk Southern for $85 billion, including debt. The cash-and-stock deal would create the nation’s first coast-to-coast rail network, spanning some 50,000 miles across 43 states.
Fundraising
Anthropic is in early talks with investors to raise around $3 billion at a
$150 billion valuation$170bn valuation, which is about 42 times its annualized revenue of $4 billion (source: The Information).Cerebras Systems, a startup that is developing artificial intelligence chips to challenge Nvidia’s, is in talks to raise up to $1 billion in private funding, potentially delaying a plan to go public this year.
Cohere, the AI model maker, is in talks to raise up to $500 million in a new funding round at a $6.3 billion valuation. This company recently generated revenue at an annual pace of $100 million. At a $6.3 billion valuation, this implies a forward revenue multiple of roughly 60, steeper than other AI model makers.
Cognition, which develops AI coding assistant Devin, is in talks to raise $300 million at a $10 billion valuation.
Aidoc, which develops AI for healthcare, raised $150 million in a funding round.
Armada, which makes mobile data centers in shipping containers, raised $131 million in funding
Fireworks AI, a three-year-old startup that rents out Nvidia chip servers to developers that use artificial intelligence models, is in talks to raise funding at a $4 billion valuation
Quince, the ecommerce retailer, is raising roughly $200 million in new funding, in a round that more than doubles the company’s valuation to $4.5 billion
BlinkOps, which develops AI agents for cybersecurity, raised $50 million in Series B funding
Partnerships
Tesla struck a $16.5 billion deal for Samsung chips. Tesla will buy semiconductors that Samsung plans to manufacture at a new plant in Taylor, Texas.
JPMorgan Chase and Coinbase signed an agreement to directly link customers’ bank accounts to their cryptocurrency wallets, a move that could undercut data aggregators between banks and companies.
Amazon will pay the New York Times between $20 million and $25 million in cash each year to license its content for AI. That sum is equal to roughly 1% of the Times’s 2024 revenue.
IPO
Figma priced its IPO at $33 a share on Wednesday, giving it a $19.3 billion valuation on a fully-diluted basis, and its stock soared so quickly on Thursday that trading was halted for a short time due to market volatility. The stock closed at $115.50 and a $47 billion market cap.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
The Booker Prize nominations were released - see here for the 13 titles nominated.
Gwyneth entered the Astronomer chat: After spending the past week-plus in the headlines due to a social media scandal, Astronomer launched a tongue-in-cheek video starring actress, entrepreneur and Coldplay frontman’s ex-wife, Gwyneth Paltrow. Oh and the entire video was led by Ryan Reynolds’ ad agency. Astronomer’s post has been viewed more than 37 million times since it went up Friday night.
The massive Las Vegas venue known as Sphere will be screening its first classic movie, “The Wizard of Oz,” starting on August 28.
💗Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau were seen dining together and ppl speculate they were on a date 👀
plus more celeb couples: Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson are an item after starring in The Naked Gun together; Tom Cruise and Ana de Armas are probably together?
Culture
Fun piece about Ralph Lauren’s ‘man of mystery’, Doug Bihlmaier, whose job was to travel the world on a corporate credit card to find and buy cool old stuff.
A really beautiful visual article about Claude Monet’s gardens at Giverny
Movies that I’m getting too excited for way too early:
💙Avatar 3’s trailer dropped this week - out Dec 19th.
⚽️🥭A Bend it Like Beckham sequel is in the works!
👰🏻My Best Friend’s Wedding is getting a sequel
Surprisingly, the new movie The Naked Gun has a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes (out this Fri)
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