विज्ञान

JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Jon Medved, the founder of Israel's OurCrowd investment platform, is stepping down as chief executive officer and will become chairman, the company said on Tuesday, citing medical reasons. Medved, 70, founded OurCrowd in 2012 and built it into one of Israel's largest venture investors in the country's booming tech sector. He will focus on strategic initiatives, including OurCrowd’s global expansion, OurCrowd said. Cali Chill was named acting CEO and chief operating officer, effective immediately, where he will oversee day-to-day operations. OurCrowd said Medved, who has been involved in Israeli tech for more than 40 years, was recently diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He is recovering and working from home in his new chairman role, the firm said. OurCrowd has over $2.6 billion in assets under management. It has more than 68 fund positions, 500 investments in portfolio companies and 73 exits. Chill has been with OurCrowd for seven years, most recently serving as chief investment officer and chair of its investment committee. (Reporting by Steven Scheer; Editing by Sharon Singleton)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

LAGOS (Reuters) -Nigerian fintech firm Moniepoint Inc. said on Tuesday it had raised more than $200 million in a funding round led by Development Partners International, as it seeks to expand its digital financial services across Africa and beyond. The Series C financing, which also included LeapFrog Investments, Visa, Google’s Africa Investment Fund, and the International Finance Corporation, is one of the largest equity fundraisings by an African fintech this year. Moniepoint, formerly known as TeamApt, said the funds would support its expansion into new markets and enhance its offerings for small and medium-sized enterprises, which form the backbone of Africa’s informal economy. “This is a proud day for Moniepoint,” said Tosin Eniolorunda, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “We founded the company to widen financial inclusion and help African entrepreneurs realise their potential. This funding will help us accelerate that mission.” Founded in 2015, Moniepoint has grown into Nigeria’s largest business banking platform, serving over 10 million active users and processing more than $250 billion in annual transaction value. The company has remained profitable at scale, a rare feat among global fintechs. The funding follows a string of product launches, including MonieWorld, a remittance platform targeting the African diaspora in Britain, and a bookkeeping tool for micro and small businesses. DPI, which led the first close of the round in 2024, said Moniepoint’s combination of growth and impact made it a standout investment. “Moniepoint continues to deliver innovation alongside sustained profitability,” said DPI partner Adefolarin Ogunsanya. “We’re proud to support its next phase of growth.” LeapFrog’s Karima Ola said the investment aligned with the firm’s vision of building inclusive financial infrastructure across Africa. Lightrock, Alder Tree Investments, Proparco, Swedfund, and Verod Capital Management also participated in the funding round. Financial Technology Partners acted as exclusive adviser to Moniepoint. (Reporting by MacDonald DzirutweWriting by Chijioke OhuochaEditing by Mark Potter)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -Axelera AI, one of the few companies in Europe making specialized computer chips for AI applications, on Tuesday said it will launch its second product line. Like its previous Metis chip line, Axelera's new Europa chips will be used for AI "inference" — running, not training, AI models. The Eindhoven, Netherlands-based company expects to sell the Europa line to customers in advanced industry settings, for instance in a factory that uses multiple cameras and sensors, where the chips would be used to analyse the combined data they produce and quickly identify problems. Axelera says the first shipments of Europa chips, which are being manufactured by Samsung Electronics, will start in the first half of 2026. Axelera received a $66 million grant in March to develop an even more advanced chip dubbed "Titania" for use in supercomputing centres – also referred to as AI factories – across the European Union. That chip is expected in 2027. (Reporting by Toby SterlingEditing by Tomasz Janowski)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

By Svea Herbst-Bayliss NEW YORK (Reuters) -Starboard Value CEO Jeff Smith said Tuesday Tripadvisor should consider selling its restaurant booking platform TheFork and possibly the entire company. Smith, speaking at the annual 13D Monitor Active Passive Investment Summit in New York, said Tripadvisor has an "amazing" brand, but "there is a huge opportunity to transform and reimagine the user experience to improve revenue growth."  The company allows customers to find and review hotels. Its Viator unit lets users book and review tours and other experiences, while TheFork offers restaurant reservation services. "We believe TheFork, the most easily separable and least-integrated of the three businesses, could be sold at an attractive multiple," Smith said. At the end of the presentation, he said there may even be an opportunity to sell the entire company. "There are standalone opportunities for value creation at each of the Tripadvisor three businesses as well as opportunity to potentially sell TheFork or the entire company." Starboard has been engaging with Tripadvisor for several weeks and this was the first time Smith has discussed his team's thesis publicly. His hedge fund is pressing for change at the travel booking site after building a 9% stake in the company earlier this year. "TripAdvisor is too cheap for a company that is growing," he said.  He said Viator's performance should improve meaningfully, noting that booking experiences is the fastest-growing segment in the travel industry. To transform Tripadvisor, Smith said, "we believe there is a substantial cost savings opportunity at Brand Tripadvisor, especially if revenue growth does not accelerate." (Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss. Editing by Dawn Kopecki and Chizu Nomiyama)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

By Svea Herbst-Bayliss NEW YORK (Reuters) -Starboard Value CEO Jeff Smith said Tuesday TripAdvisor should consider selling its restaurant booking platform TheFork. Smith, who was speaking at an invite-only conference in New York, said TripAdvisor had an "amazing" brand, but "there is a huge opportunity to transform and reimagine the user experience to improve revenue growth." His hedge fund is pressing for change at the travel booking site after building a 9% stake in the company earlier this year.  "TripAdvisor is too cheap for a company that is growing," he said.  (Reporting by Svea Herbst. Editing by Dawn Kopecki and Chizu Nomiyama )

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

By Greg Bensinger, Shubham Kalia and Deborah Mary Sophia SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Amazon.com cloud service returned to normal operations on Monday afternoon, the company said, after an internet outage that caused global turmoil among thousands of sites, including some of the web's most popular apps like Snapchat and Reddit. Still, Amazon said some AWS services had a backlog of messages that would take a few hours to process. AWS hosts applications and computer processes for companies around the world, and the disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo offline and halted others from conducting normal everyday tasks like paying hairdressers or changing their airline tickets. Users on Monday afternoon had complained of lingering difficulties using services such as digital wallet Venmo and video calling site Zoom. It was the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies. It was at least the third time in five years that AWS's northern Virginia cluster, known as US-EAST-1, contributed to a major internet meltdown. Amazon did not address a request for more clarity about why that particular data center keeps being impacted. The problems stemmed from what is known as the Domain Name System, or DNS, which prevented applications from finding the correct address for AWS's DynamoDB API, a cloud database relied upon to store user information and other critical data. ROOT CAUSE IS NETWORK HEALTH MONITOR Earlier, AWS said the root cause of the outage was an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers. The issue, AWS said, originated from within the "EC2 internal network", Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS.  Shortly after 3 p.m. PT (2200 GMT), Amazon said, "all AWS services returned to normal operations. Some services such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours." Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, said software developers need to build better fault tolerance. He said AWS provides tools developers can use to protect themselves in the event of a problem at one of any of its sprawling network of data centers, and developers can also create backups with other cloud providers.  "When people cut costs and cut corners to try to get an application up, and then forget that they skipped that last step and didn't really protect against an outage, those companies are the ones who really ought to be scrutinized later," Birman told Reuters. ISSUE ORIGINATED FROM AWS SITE KNOWN FOR PREVIOUS OUTAGES AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world's largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft's Azure and Alphabet's Google Cloud. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms – ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems – that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS said on its status page that Monday's outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020. According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services.  "FRAGILE INFRASTRUCTURES" The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and their reliance on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch wreaking havoc on business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said. "This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures," said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at European cybersecurity firm ESET. In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were all hit, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website. Vodafone, however, said on Tuesday the outage was unrelated to its mobile or broadband networks. "The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service," said Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science. Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident. "For major businesses, hours of cloud downtime translate to millions in lost productivity and revenue," said Ryan Griffin, U.S. cyber practice leader at insurance broker McGill and Partners. Wall Street was largely unfazed, sending Amazon shares 1.6% higher to $216.48. FROM SNAPCHAT TO VENMO: OUTAGE TAKES DOWN APPS Ookla said at least a thousand companies were affected by the outage. Apps like Reddit, Roblox, Snapchat and Duolingo had all been affected. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS. Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit. Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the United States. In a post on X, Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work. (Reporting by Shubham Kalia, Devika Nair, Ananya Palyekar and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by James Pearson, Jaspreet Singh and Arsheeya Bajwa; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Joe Bavier, Richard Chang and David Gregorio)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

By Svea Herbst-Bayliss NEW YORK (Reuters) -Starboard Value CEO Jeff Smith said Tuesday Tripadvisor should consider selling its restaurant booking platform TheFork and possibly the entire company. Smith, speaking at the annual 13D Monitor Active Passive Investment Summit in New York, said Tripadvisor has an "amazing" brand, but "there is a huge opportunity to transform and reimagine the user experience to improve revenue growth."  The company allows customers to find and review hotels. Its Viator unit lets users book and review tours and other experiences, while TheFork offers restaurant reservation services. "We believe TheFork, the most easily separable and least-integrated of the three businesses, could be sold at an attractive multiple," Smith said. At the end of the presentation, he said there may even be an opportunity to sell the entire company. "There are standalone opportunities for value creation at each of the Tripadvisor three businesses as well as opportunity to potentially sell TheFork or the entire company." Starboard has been engaging with Tripadvisor for several weeks and this was the first time Smith has discussed his team's thesis publicly. His hedge fund is pressing for change at the travel booking site after building a 9% stake in the company earlier this year. "TripAdvisor is too cheap for a company that is growing," he said.  He said Viator's performance should improve meaningfully, noting that booking experiences is the fastest-growing segment in the travel industry. To transform Tripadvisor, Smith said, "we believe there is a substantial cost savings opportunity at Brand Tripadvisor, especially if revenue growth does not accelerate." (Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss. Editing by Dawn Kopecki and Chizu Nomiyama)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

(Reuters) -Warner Bros Discovery is considering a possible outright sale of itself due to interest from several potential buyers, it said on Tuesday, even as it moves forward with a previously announced split into two companies. Date Event 1922 Time Inc was founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden to house Time magazine, a weekly news publication that made world affairs accessible to the average reader. The first issue of Time magazine was published in March 1923. 1923 Warner Bros was founded by brothers Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner as a film studio in Hollywood. It revolutionized cinema with the introduction of synchronized sound in films. 1969  Kinney National Company, a conglomerate that later transitioned into media, buys Warner Bros-Seven Arts and later spins off its non-media businesses. 1972 HBO is founded by Charles Dolan with backing from Time. It was the first U.S. subscription-based cable network, offering uncut, commercial-free movies and live sports, pioneering premium cable television. 1990 Time Inc merges with Warner Communications in a $14 billion deal, hailed as a "marriage of content and distribution," creating Time Warner, then the largest media company in the world. 1996  Time Warner merges with Turner Broadcasting, gaining Cartoon Network, CNN, TNT and a vast classic film library. 2000  Time Warner merges with AOL, forming AOL Time Warner, the largest merger in history at the time, aiming to merge traditional and digital media. 2002 AOL Time Warner merger begins to unravel as AOL's value collapses with the launch of an SEC investigation, prompted by allegations of accounting irregularities and inflated revenue reports at AOL. 2003 CEO Steve Case resigns from AOL Time Warner. 2004 Time Warner sells Warner Music to a private equity group led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. for $2.6 billion. 2009 Time Warner fully spins off Time Warner Cable, which had already been partially separated in 2007, ending its role in cable distribution. 2009  Time Warner spins off AOL.  2013 Time Warner spins off Time, its magazine division, which includes Time, People, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, marking its formal exit from publishing. 2016 AT&T announces acquisition of Time Warner for $85 billion. 2018 AT&T completes its acquisition of Time Warner after regulator's approval, renaming it WarnerMedia. 2021 AT&T announced it would spin off WarnerMedia and merge it with Discovery Inc to create a new standalone media company. 2022 WarnerMedia and Discovery complete their merger in a $43 billion deal. 2025 Warner Bros Discovery announces it would separate into two companies — one focusing on streaming and studios businesses, while the second will house its cable TV assets. 2025 Warner Bros Discovery is weighing a potential sale amid interest from several suitors, even as it proceeds with plans to split into two companies. (Reporting by Kritika Lamba and Meghana Khare in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona and Sriraj Kalluvila)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

(Reuters) -Veeam Software has agreed to buy data privacy management software maker Securiti AI for about $1.73 billion, in a bid to tap customers seeking to safeguard and manage cloud data used in artificial intelligence applications. The deal would integrate Securiti AI's Data Command Center product, used to unify and secure data scattered across multiple cloud services, with Veeam's backup and recovery software, the companies said on Tuesday. Veeam aims to better compete with rivals such as Rubrik and Commvault Systems with the acquisition, as cybersecurity incidents surge. Securiti AI Chief Executive Rehan Jalil will join Veeam as president of security and AI after the transaction closes, which is expected in the fourth quarter, the companies said. Morgan Stanley advised Securiti AI on the transaction and JPMorgan provided financing to Veeam. The companies said Veeam will continue to offer the San Jose, California-based Securiti AI's Data Command Center product and plans to announce integrated capabilities soon. In December last year, U.S. private equity firm Insight Partners, which is the largest shareholder in Veeam, said it sold a $2 billion stake in the company in a secondary sale valuing the firm at $15 billion. Veeam was acquired by Insight Partners for about $5 billion in 2020. Veeam's software helps customers quickly recover their data after cybersecurity incidents including ransomware attacks as well as accidental data loss. Its core product supports immutable backups to prevent ransomware from modifying or deleting data, ensuring that clean copies remain available for recovery even if hackers encrypt files. (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

(Reuters) -Veeam Software has agreed to buy data privacy management software maker Securiti AI for about $1.73 billion, in a bid to tap customers seeking to safeguard and manage cloud data used in artificial intelligence applications. The deal would integrate Securiti AI's Data Command Center product, used to unify and secure data scattered across multiple cloud services, with Veeam's backup and recovery software, the companies said on Tuesday. Veeam aims to better compete with rivals such as Rubrik and Commvault Systems with the acquisition, as cybersecurity incidents surge. Securiti AI Chief Executive Rehan Jalil will join Veeam as president of security and AI after the transaction closes, which is expected in the fourth quarter, the companies said. Morgan Stanley advised Securiti AI on the transaction and JPMorgan provided financing to Veeam. The companies said Veeam will continue to offer the San Jose, California-based Securiti AI's Data Command Center product and plans to announce integrated capabilities soon. In December last year, U.S. private equity firm Insight Partners, which is the largest shareholder in Veeam, said it sold a $2 billion stake in the company in a secondary sale valuing the firm at $15 billion. Veeam was acquired by Insight Partners for about $5 billion in 2020. Veeam's software helps customers quickly recover their data after cybersecurity incidents including ransomware attacks as well as accidental data loss. Its core product supports immutable backups to prevent ransomware from modifying or deleting data, ensuring that clean copies remain available for recovery even if hackers encrypt files. (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)