Velvet Sundown, an AI‑created band with ~850,000 monthly Spotify listeners and two recent albums, shows how some listeners are turning to anodyne AI music (Ian Bogost/The Atlantic)
Tech Blog
Published on 2025-07-06
DefiLlama: monthly DeFi fees have risen to $577M from an April low of $366M, with major protocols generating $275M through automated market-making services (The Block)
A profile of Steam developer Valve, which has a flat corporate structure and high profit per head; Ampere: Steam hit 170M MAUs in May, versus 153M a year prior (Louis Ashworth/Financial Times)
How Shein is leveraging its Reliance Retail partnership in its return to India, as fashion now accounts for 27% of India's online sales, up from 16% in 2020 (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)
A look at DeepSeek's impact on the AI model race and market share landscape, roughly 150 days after DeepSeek R1 shook stock markets and the Western AI world (SemiAnalysis)
PitchBook: VC exits through public listings, acquisitions, and buyouts reached $67.7B in Q2 2025, up from $38.5B a year ago and the strongest showing since 2021 (Richard Waters/Financial Times)
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act expands Qualified Small Business Stock benefits for VCs, founders, and startup staff, raising tax-free gains from $10M to $15M (Robert Frank/CNBC)
Analysts estimate AI services within Microsoft Azure generated $11.5B in revenue in the just-ended fiscal year, up 100%+ YoY but only ~4% of Microsoft's revenue (Wall Street Journal)
Savvy Wealth, a digital wealth management service for financial advisors, raised a $72M Series B led by Industry Ventures, taking its total funding to $100M+ (Davis Janowski/Wealth Management)
An interview with Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost on settling the proxy fight with Starboard Value, serving the "design and make" workforce, US reshoring, and more (Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson/Semafor)
