AI, athletes, and Keith Rabois: StrictlyVC is back in New York on September 10
A boutique StrictlyVC evening returns to New York's West Village on September 10 with Keith Rabois, Craig Shapiro, Jason Levien, Tristan Walker, Brynn Putnam, and Deven Parekh — covering AI, sports investing, community-building, venture economics, and politics, with cocktails, food, and networking throughout the night.
Affirm and Shopify Take Shop Pay Installments to Australia
Australian shoppers can now select installment payments powered by Affirm when they click on Shopify’s Shop Pay button, Affirm said in a Thursday (Aug.…
27) press release.
This capability is enabled by the global partnership of Affirm and Sho…
Shop Pay Installments was previously launched in the United States, Ca…
Anthropic Previews Standard for AI Control of Physical Devices
Anthropic is opening a research preview of a shared specification for artificial intelligence agents to operate physical devices, specifically lab and manufacturing instruments, the company said in a Thursday (Aug.…
27) announcement.
The Model Hardware Standard (MHS) enables agents to operate instrument…
Anthropic is making MHS available to a first group of partners in the …
Affirm Makes Smaller Purchases BNPL’s Next Growth Test
Affirm’s latest quarter shows buy now, pay later (BNPL) moving deeper into everyday spending, where affordability depends less on financing one large purchase and more on giving consumers flexibility across a growing number of transactions.…
That pattern showed up clearly in the numbers for the fiscal fourth qu…
Gross merchandise volume rose 36% year over year to $14.
1 billion in the latest quarter, while transactions rose faster, up 41…
Anthropic and OpenAI are joining the AI stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the AI Stage is back to dig into the single hottest topic in the community for the past few years, presented by Google for Startups.
Cisco Deploys Custom AI Agent to Entire 90,000-Person Workforce
Cisco is rolling out its artificial intelligence (AI) agent, MyAgent, to 90,000 employees, Thimaya Subaiya, executive vice president, operations at Cisco, said in a Thursday (Aug.…
27) blog post.
MyAgent is built on Cisco’s secure, governed, multi-model agnostic AI …
MyAgent performs supervised autonomous workflows across Outlook, Webex…
Thomson Reuters Taps Decades of Content to Train AI
Thomson Reuters has launched a proprietary large language model that the company developed in-house and trained on its decades of content from Westlaw, Practical Law, Checkpoint and Reuters, the company said in a Monday (Aug.…
24) press release.
Dubbed “Thomson,” the LLM began with an open-source foundation and was…
As a result, Thomson is fully controlled by Thomson Reuters and does n…
Meta Tests Hatch AI Assistant That Can Fill Out Forms and Buy Products
Meta’s upcoming artificial intelligence assistant, known in-house as “Hatch,” can fill out forms, buy things, perform deep research and “do anything you can do online,” the company said in an internal memo, Business Insider reported Thursday (Aug.…
Hatch is designed to be a personal agent for general consumers.
It has a better memory than most AI models, and it allows users to app…
For Meta, Hatch could join the company’s AI models, coding agent and A…
B2B Pricing Power Changes When Software Can Prove Its Own ROI
A new problem is emerging across the B2B economy.Companies can now deliver measurable value to customers without making that value particularly measurable by customers.…
A payments platform may reduce processing costs and procurement softwa…
But when renewal season arrives, many customers still struggle to tran…
This gap, around visibility into value, has traditionally been attacke…
Buried in Meta’s $18B settlement is a legal pass on kids’ data
Meta’s settlement with 29 states allows it to retain certain data from children under 13 to train and test age-detection models, highlighting a privacy tradeoff built into the deal.
Bitcoin Climbs Past $80,000 as Wall Street Returns
Bitcoin climbed above $80,000 this week for the first time since May, with renewed demand from institutional investors and improving interest from retail investors, Bloomberg reported Thursday (Aug.…
The report attributed Bitcoin’s recovery to a “brighter mood” in specu…