Chime is paying $590m for its own sponsor bank
Chime is paying $590m for its own sponsor bank

Chime is buying the bank that has held its customers’ money for seven years. The company announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to acquire Stride Bank of Enid, Oklahoma, for $590m in cash. Stride will become Chime Bank and operate as a wholly owned su…

Fresh from €1.2bn, NEURA buys its second company in eleven days
Fresh from €1.2bn, NEURA buys its second company in eleven days

NEURA Robotics is buying a company that makes cleaning robots, and says it wants to replace their brains. The German firm is acquiring 100% of Adlatus Robotics, an Ulm maker of autonomous cleaning and sweeping machines. It announced the deal on Monday,…

Anthropic’s enterprise venture has bought its second consultancy in four months
Anthropic’s enterprise venture has bought its second consultancy in four months

Ode, the enterprise AI company Anthropic set up with Blackstone, has bought an AI consultancy called Casper Studios. Casper helps companies put Claude to work inside software their staff already use, Ode said on Thursday. The announcement gives no pric…

Munich Re is buying cyber-insurer At-Bay for $575mn, half its 2021 price
Munich Re is buying cyber-insurer At-Bay for $575mn, half its 2021 price

Munich Re has agreed to buy At-Bay, a cyber-insurance startup, for $575mn. The deal values the company at less than half what it was worth in 2021. The German insurance group announced the acquisition on Wednesday, in a statement. The price is a reset….

Stripe seals its OpenRouter deal for a reported $7.5bn or more
Stripe seals its OpenRouter deal for a reported $7.5bn or more

Stripe has agreed to buy OpenRouter, the startup whose software helps companies route their spending across hundreds of AI models. The payments firm confirmed the deal on Wednesday, making official an acquisition the press first reported earlier this m…

PayPal is no longer refusing to sell. Now the question is whether regulators allow it
PayPal is no longer refusing to sell. Now the question is whether regulators allow it

The Wall Street Journal reported the talks on 14 August. Cara Lombardo, Gina Heeb and Lauren Thomas wrote it. The framing is what changed. PayPal is in talks to sell itself, rather than fielding an offer it has rejected. Stripe and Advent International…

SpaceX has closed its $60bn Cursor deal, and Cursor was buying a company the day before
SpaceX has closed its $60bn Cursor deal, and Cursor was buying a company the day before

SpaceX confirmed completion in a regulatory filing. Bloomberg’s Carmen Arroyo and Natasha Mascarenhas reported the close. The desk covered the binding agreement in June, when SpaceX filed an 8-K and said it expected to complete in the third quarter, su…

An activist investor says the market has decided Lionsgate is an AI casualty. It wants the studio to prove otherwise or sell.
An activist investor says the market has decided Lionsgate is an AI casualty. It wants the studio to prove otherwise or sell.

Activist investor Anson Funds is pressing Lionsgate to redefine itself for the AI era or put itself up for sale, according to a July letter to the board reviewed by Semafor. The argument turns on how the market reads a film library. “The rise of genera…

The Arena Group is renaming itself Paradium.AI, and its revenue just halved
The Arena Group is renaming itself Paradium.AI, and its revenue just halved

The Arena Group is renaming itself Paradium.AI. The publisher of TheStreet, Parade and Men’s Journal expects the change to finish by the end of August. Business Insider had it first. Steven Tweedie and Ben Shimkus obtained a staff memo from chief execu…

OpenAI just bought a slide deck startup. It is assembling an office suite one acqui-hire at a time.
OpenAI just bought a slide deck startup. It is assembling an office suite one acqui-hire at a time.

OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a startup that turned prompts, notes, documents, and research into finished editable presentations. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the team has moved onto ChatGPT. Founder Ahmed Beshry announced the deal in a not…