Julia covers startups and venture capital for The Silicon Valley News, from seed to late stage — funding rounds as business events, not press releases.
As location data surveillance becomes a central policy battleground, the shift from federal inaction to fragmented state-level regulation creates a complex landscape for tech firms.
Mistral AI has confirmed a substantial €3 billion Series D funding round, propelling its valuation to €21 billion and reinforcing its position as a critical player in the global generative AI market. This capital infusion underscores confidence in its distinctive approach to larg
Federal regulators have launched an immediate investigation into Tesla's newly deployed Cybercab robotaxi fleet in Austin, challenging the company's vision-only autonomous technology and its lack of physical safety controls.
XDOF is accelerating the development of synthetic data for robotics, aiming to solve the high-fidelity simulation bottleneck that currently limits autonomous deployment.
The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft escalates, with recent court filings highlighting fundamental challenges to copyright law posed by AI model training and content generation.
As quantitative trading and AI workloads demand unprecedented power, Crusoe's massive new contract with Jane Street highlights how specialized, energy-adjacent GPU clouds are challenging traditional hyperscalers.
A Massachusetts federal court has ruled that subjective, even objectively unreasonable, beliefs shield copyright holders from liability for bad-faith DMCA takedowns, raising concerns over online censorship.
Félix, an AI-powered WhatsApp remittance platform, has secured $200 million in Series C funding, signaling significant traction in its mission to simplify financial transfers for Latino immigrants.
A federal judge has ruled that Google must alter its dominant advertising technology operations to resolve antitrust violations, stopping short of ordering a forced divestiture of the business.
As AI data centers strain regional power grids, utility companies are bypassing traditional infrastructure to invest directly in modular fusion startups like Realta Fusion.
As antitrust regulators secure landmark victories against Google and Meta, judges increasingly hesitate to order structural breakups due to the rapid pace of technological change.
As artificial intelligence transitions from digital screens to physical machines, former Apple engineers at Lyte are building the edge-computed spatial perception stacks needed to make robots truly autonomous.
A federal court has blocked the Department of Defense from using supply chain risk designations to punish AI developer Anthropic for asserting ethical limits on its technology.
With a successful 8,500-nautical-mile voyage completed, startup Newlight is proving that injecting hydrogen into traditional maritime engines can significantly boost fuel efficiency.
The Federal Trade Commission and 22 state attorneys general have filed a lawsuit against Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of systematically overcharging businesses for advertising through a hidden surcharge mechanism.
Indian aerospace startup Alteon is developing autonomous aircraft designed to remain airborne for up to a year by harvesting wind energy, offering a low-cost alternative to orbital satellites.
The European Commission has designated ChatGPT and Reddit as Very Large Online Platforms, forcing both companies to redesign core algorithmic systems and submit to unprecedented independent audits.
Global venture funding into space and satellite technologies has reached an unprecedented $20.3 billion this year, reflecting a profound shift towards commercialization and innovation in an industry traditionally dominated by government agencies.
A federal lawsuit alleging Elon Musk’s xAI trained its Grok models on child sexual abuse material exposes the severe legal and technical vulnerabilities of uncurated web-scraping pipelines.
As startups like Instinct draw massive backing to build persistent AI assistants, they face a critical architectural challenge: balancing agentic utility with deep user privacy.
A federal appeals court has ruled that prediction markets cannot classify event contracts as financial swaps, effectively subjecting platforms like Kalshi to strict gambling oversight.
Belgian startup Any is pivoting away from the commuter-focused electric motorcycle model, introducing the LUV1 with a modular 120-liter cargo capacity.
Meta's settlement with state attorneys general mandates pervasive age verification, shifting the burden of online safety from parental oversight to platform-level identity architecture.
A new wave of geospatial startups is digitizing subterranean utility infrastructure, aiming to replace outdated paper records with high-fidelity digital twins.
France's top court has struck down a proposed ban on social media for minors, marking a pivotal moment in the global debate over state-mandated digital age verification.
By acquiring agentic AI startup Fravity alongside a new capital injection, identity verification giant Socure signals a shift from passive data matching to autonomous, active fraud investigation.
The Federal Trade Commission's investigation into individualized 'surveillance pricing' faces pushback from critics who warn that sweeping restrictions on algorithmic pricing could eliminate consumer discounts.
By focusing on fixed-route, medium-duty logistics instead of long-haul trucking, Gatik is demonstrating that the path to viable vehicle autonomy lies in narrowing the operational domain.
The Federal Trade Commission has finalized a settlement with Zillow and Redfin, unwinding a restrictive syndication agreement that regulators argue illegally suppressed competition in the digital rental advertising market.
General Intuition is expanding its AI foundation model, designed to train generalized agents in spatial and temporal movement, into the robotics sector, signaling a strategic convergence of advanced AI software and physical automation.
The Dutch Data Protection Authority has issued a landmark €825 million penalty against Uber, targeting the ride-hailing giant's use of automated algorithms to suspend drivers without sufficient human intervention.
Castelion, a startup founded in 2022, is challenging traditional defense contractors by developing capabilities to mass-produce hypersonic weapon systems at significantly lower costs and faster speeds, signaling a strategic shift in defense technology.
The Department of Justice's investigation into Andreessen Horowitz over potential interlocking directorates marks an aggressive expansion of antitrust enforcement into the structural foundations of Silicon Valley governance.
As terrestrial data centers face power and environmental constraints, Starcloud is moving compute to orbit—but its massive new capital injection underscores a looming crisis in commercial launch availability.
The record-breaking settlement resolves a 2024 federal lawsuit accusing the platform of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting data on minors without parental consent.
AI-native accounting startup Rillet has achieved unicorn status through rapid product adoption, doubling its annual recurring revenue in three months and signaling a significant shift in enterprise financial operations.
As frontier model developers shift their focus from raw compute to high-quality training datasets, AI data platform Micro1 has reached a $500 million gross run rate, highlighting the massive scale of the data curation industry.
A recent Ninth Circuit decision prevents online platforms from immediately appealing lower court denials of Section 230 immunity, forcing them into prolonged and costly litigation over user-generated content before a final ruling.
By deploying its first physical silicon cluster with Jane Street, chip startup Etched is demonstrating that application-specific integrated circuits dedicated to transformer models can compete with general-purpose GPUs in high-stakes production environments.
Under pressure from European regulators and Germany's cartel office, Apple is adjusting its App Store fee structures and redesigning its App Tracking Transparency consent prompts.