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- Meta's new lightweight AR prototype shows a future
Meta's new lightweight AR prototype shows a future
Plus: Amazon staff unhappy with return-to-office
Cash Nut
September 26, 2024
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In Today’s Edition
Smartsheet Goes Private in $8.4B Deal with Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone
The US Justice Department has sued Visa
Consumer confidence fell sharply in September
OpenAI considering restructuring to for-profit
In the room where it happened: When NASA nearly gave Boeing all the crew funding
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🚀Startups Nuts
Smartsheet has agreed to be acquired by private equity firms Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners for $8.4 billion, transitioning back to a private company after six years of being publicly traded. This all-cash deal, which values Smartsheet at a significant premium, is expected to close in January pending shareholder approval and includes a period for exploring other offers. Smartsheet, known for its cloud-based work management tools, serves a vast array of Fortune 500 companies and has seen substantial revenue growth alongside reduced operating losses.
Other News
Zing Health, a Chicago-based Medicare Advantage insurer, raised $140m
Distribution, a German B2B ground transportation marketplace, raised $80m in Series C funding
UJET, an SF-based provider of cloud contact center solutions, raised $76M in Series D funding
Crisp, a Bentonville, Ark., supply chain data startup, raised $72m in Series B funding
Qure.ai, an Indian disease diagnostics startup, raised $65m in Series D funding
Marvel Fusion, a German nuclear fusion startup, raised €62.8m in Series B funding
🏭Business Nuts
A staff poll suggests that Amazon's recent return-to-office mandate has not gone down well. Of the over 2,500 Amazon employees polled, only nine percent said they were happy with the order. 73 percent are now considering moving jobs. Amazon is reportedly having trouble hiring staff since the policy was announced, with employees at other companies agreeing that the policy meant Amazon was off their list of potential employees.
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Other News
Private equity firms Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone are acquiring software maker Smartsheet for approximately $8.4 billion in cash, offering $56.50 per share.
Consumer confidence fell sharply in September, the largest drop in three years, as Americans expressed growing concerns about jobs and inflation.
The US Justice Department has sued Visa for creating an illegal monopoly over debit payments by imposing 'exclusionary' agreements on partners and smothering upstart firms, resulting in consumers and merchants paying billions of dollars in additional fees.
Koch Equity Development is in talks to buy Forbes. Koch Equity Development has a history of successful media investments, including its 2017 deal to back Meredith's acquisition of Time Inc. with $650 million and its 2018 and 2019 investments in Getty Images worth $550 million.
MBK Partners sweetened its offer to buy a controlling stake in Korea Zinc, the world's largest refined zinc producer, in partnership with the company's largest shareholder.
Visa agreed to buy Featurespace, a British developer of payments protection technology that raised around $150m from firms like Insight Partners, Highland Europe, Invoke Capital, TTV Capital, Cambridge Angels, and Touchstone Innovations.
Flutter Entertainment, the parent company of FanDuel, is launching up to a $5b share buyback.
Sodexo, a French catering company, is weighing a takeover offer for rival Aramark, which has nearly a $10b market value, per Bloomberg.
📱Tech Nuts
OpenAI’s board is considering plans to restructure the firm to a for-profit business. News of the discussions comes after OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said Wednesday that she is leaving the company after six and a half years. Later in the day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Bob McGrew, the company’s chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, vice president of research, are also departing.
Mark Zuckerberg revealed a prototype of Meta's Orion AR glasses at this year's Meta Connect keynote. While the 100g pair of see-through augmented-reality glasses won't likely be ready for consumer release anytime soon, the demo represents a new vision of lightweight, wide-ranging, see-through smart glasses. Getting the glasses down to a weight of 100 grams was a challenge - a small amount of processing is done in a 'small puck' that connects wirelessly to the glasses. The glasses use tiny projectors embedded into the arms that shoot light into specially designed waveguides instead of a screen, creating a holographic display that allows for a 70-degree field of view. Pictures and more details are available in the article.
Other News
Marques Brownlee, known as MKBHD, addressed backlash over his new wallpaper app, Panels, which charges users $49.99 per year and requests extensive permissions.
OpenAI is expanding the availability of Advanced Voice Mode, a feature in ChatGPT that lets users communicate more naturally with the AI by speaking and interrupting its responses mid-sentence.
Microsoft introduced a feature called "correction" within Azure AI Studio, aimed at detecting and fixing inaccuracies in AI-generated outputs by automatically rewriting incorrect content.
Meta unveiled a lower-cost version of its Quest 3 virtual reality headset Wednesday and demoed its prototype Orion augmented reality glasses alongside significantly expanding its artificial intelligence efforts. Meta's Quest 3S, as the lower-cost model is called, is set to be available on Oct. 15 and starts at $299.
The Allen Institute, known for full open-source releases of its AI models, including the training data, code and weights — has released a new multimodal AI model called Molmo that can point to individual objects within photographs.
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🎁Miscellaneous
This excerpt from the book 'REENTRY: SpaceX, Elon Musk and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age' describes a meeting at NASA headquarters 10 years ago where agency leaders met to decide which companies should be awarded billions of dollars to launch astronauts into orbit. The decision boiled down to three players: Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada Corporation. It came down to three factors, price, mission suitability, and past performance, with price being equally weighted to the latter two factors. The decision was close, with NASA officials nearly choosing only Boeing for the contract, but in the end, SpaceX was included.
💡What else are we reading and seeing?
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Charming ways to start a conversation with literally anyone
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Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
🐦Joke of the Day
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