Slack’s founder got one hour with Benioff before the $27.7bn sale
Slack’s founder got one hour with Benioff before the $27.7bn sale

Johnny Rodgers, one of Slack’s original eight team members, has written a first-hand account of Slack’s first two years inside Salesforce. It quotes Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s co-founder and former chief executive, throughout. Rodgers spent 11 years …

Bending Spoons completes its $1.355bn Miro acquisition
Bending Spoons completes its $1.355bn Miro acquisition

Bending Spoons now owns Miro, the online whiteboard used by more than 250,000 organisations. The Milan group closed the all-cash Miro deal on Monday, it said in a statement on Business Wire. Bending Spoons agreed to buy Miro in September at an enterpri…

OpenAI’s discounts win Anthropic customers, The Information reports
OpenAI’s discounts win Anthropic customers, The Information reports

Replit moved most of its AI spending from Anthropic to OpenAI in recent months after OpenAI offered a discount of more than 30%, The Information reported on Saturday. The contract is worth over $100M a year, a person familiar with the deal told The Inf…

OpenAI brings GPT-6 Astra and Codex to Google Cloud, a rival’s platform
OpenAI brings GPT-6 Astra and Codex to Google Cloud, a rival’s platform

OpenAI is bringing its frontier models and its Codex coding agent to Google Cloud, the two companies said on Wednesday. GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna are rolling out now in private preview in Google Cloud’s Model Garden, Google wrote. Select …

Town raises $108M at a $1B valuation so AI assistants can work as a team
Town raises $108M at a $1B valuation so AI assistants can work as a team

Town, a San Francisco startup that gives each person at work an AI work assistant, has raised $108m in a Series B that values it at $1bn. Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures co-led the round, the company announced on Monday. Existing investors a16z …

UiPath’s Michael Atalla on AI slop, junior jobs and a Shaolin monk’s advice
UiPath’s Michael Atalla on AI slop, junior jobs and a Shaolin monk’s advice

UiPath’s marketing team has stopped paying outside firms to pull together its advertising data. The head of its paid media team built an AI agent on UiPath’s own platform instead, chief marketing officer Michael Atalla told TNW. It collects the data, a…

SAP’s Sean Kask: software firms must become AI companies or perish
SAP’s Sean Kask: software firms must become AI companies or perish

Established software companies have to rebuild their products around AI, not add it as one more feature, SAP’s chief AI strategy officer Sean Kask said. He spoke at Wave by Vento in Turin on Thursday. “Like the famous quip that every company is becomin…

Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier says Meta’s Muse saved him $3,105 in five days
Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier says Meta’s Muse saved him $3,105 in five days

Zendesk will end the year with about $400m of AI revenue, up from about zero two years ago, chief executive Tom Eggemeier told TNW. Most of it comes from AI agents that customers pay for only when they resolve a case. Eggemeier has run Zendesk since la…

Miro CEO says companies must redesign work around AI, not bolt it on
Miro CEO says companies must redesign work around AI, not bolt it on

Miro co-founder and chief executive Andrey Khusid says adding AI to existing teams and processes will not deliver its full productivity gains. Companies need to redesign how work happens from the ground up, he said. He spoke at Wave by Vento in Turin o…

Nous Research raises $90M to take its Hermes AI agent to businesses
Nous Research raises $90M to take its Hermes AI agent to businesses

Nous Research has raised $90M to build a business version of Hermes, its open-source AI agent. Nvidia, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures are among the investors, chief executive Dillon Roln…