Autonomous vehicle startup Waabi has raised $1 billion and struck a partnership with Uber to deploy self-driving cars on the ride-hailing platform — the company’s first expansion beyond autonomous trucking. The funding consists of an oversubscribed $750 million Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners and roughly $250 million in milestone-based capital from Uber to support the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis exclusively on its platform. The companies did not provide a timeline for such a large-scale deployment.   The partnership represents a bet that the startup’s AI technology can succeed where others have…

Google is expanding its push into AI-powered learning by adding full-length practice tests in Gemini for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), India’s nationwide engineering exam used to shortlist candidates for the country’s top technical institutes and taken by millions of students each year. Google said students can take full-length mock exams for the JEE within Gemini, which will offer questions based on vetted content from Indian education firms PhysicsWallah and Careers360. The launch comes after the company recently rolled out similar test-prep tools for the SAT. Once students complete a mock test in Gemini, Google said the chatbot will provide…

Imagine a world where your credit card no longer works, your Amazon account is shut down, and using U.S. tech companies is no longer an option. It’s almost impossible to shop online, wire bank transfers to an overseas family member, or rely on anything that involves the United States, including the U.S. dollar. For one Canadian, this is now her reality. Last year, the Trump administration added Kimberly Prost, a judge on the International Criminal Court, to its economic sanctions list, after she served on an appeals chamber that in 2020 unanimously authorized the ICC’s prosecutor to investigate alleged war…

OpenAI launched on Tuesday a new scientific workspace program called Prism that is available for free to anyone with a ChatGPT account. Designed as an AI-enhanced word processor and research tool for scientific papers, Prism is deeply integrated with GPT-5.2, which can be used to assess claims, revise prose, or search for prior research. Prism isn’t designed to conduct research on its own and without human guidance. Executives believe it will accelerate the work being done by human scientists, and compared Prism to coding interfaces like Cursor and Windsurf. “I think 2026 will be for AI and science what 2025…

Shadowfax stumbled in its market debut, with shares falling as investors weighed concerns about the logistics firm’s heavy reliance on a handful of large e-commerce clients. The company raised about ₹19.07 billion (about $208.24 million) in its initial public offering. The shares fell about 9% from the offer price of ₹124 to ₹112.60 on Wednesday, valuing the Bengaluru-based logistics firm at roughly ₹64.7 billion (about $706.58 million) on debut, roughly matching its last private valuation of close to ₹60 billion (roughly $655.01 million) in early 2025. The offering, priced in a band of ₹118–124 per share, combined a fresh issue…

Google is bringing AI-powered photo editing to more users around the world, making it easier to fix your photos with simple text commands instead of complicated editing tools. The company announced Tuesday that it’s expanding natural language-based editing in Google Photos to additional countries, including Australia, India, and Japan. The feature, which Google first launched for Pixel 10 users in the U.S. last August, lets people describe the changes they want to make to their photos rather than manually adjusting sliders or learning complex editing software. Users in these newly supported countries will now see a “Help me Edit” box…

Google on Tuesday announced its more affordable Google AI Plus plan is now available in all markets where its AI plans are available. This includes the U.S, where it will cost $7.99 per month. The expansion brings the lower-cost plan to 35 new countries and territories, after earlier launches in dozens of global markets, which began with Indonesia last September. The plan includes access to Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro in the Gemini app, Flow’s AI filmmaking tools, research and writing assistance in NotebookLM, and more. It also offers 200GB of storage and the ability to share your…

​ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, recently established a separate American entity to run the app’s U.S. operations. This restructuring aims to separate U.S. TikTok from its Chinese parent, addressing concerns about data privacy and foreign control. The move came after years of pressure from lawmakers, who feared the Chinese government’s potential access to Americans’ data. In 2024, Congress enacted a law, mandating that TikTok’s U.S. operations be separated from ByteDance. ​Under the new structure, about 80% of the U.S. TikTok entity is owned by non-Chinese investors, with ByteDance keeping only a 19.9% share. The newly formed entity, “TikTok USDS Joint…

Amazon has reached a settlement valued at more than $1 billion to resolve claims that it failed to properly refund customers for their returns. The settlement includes more than $600 million already distributed or soon to be paid in refunds, plus additional funds that will be paid out to affected consumers, according to court documents. Under the settlement, Amazon will pay $309.5 million into a non-reversionary common fund, a pool of money set aside for members of the class-action lawsuit. The company has already issued about $570 million in refunds, with about $34 million of refunds remaining. Reuters was first…

By Rotation, one of the U.K.’s most popular peer-to-peer fashion rental platforms, announced on Wednesday a partnership with the ride-sharing app Uber.  From now until May 31, By Rotation users in the U.K. can rent outfits from others in their neighborhood and have them delivered via Uber within 60 minutes at a 10% discount. Though the discount applies to all users, the service is geared toward those renting ski gear. By Rotation said that 30% of the ski renters on its platform look for same-day pickup, and this partnership seeks to alleviate the annoyance of renting bulky, expensive ski gear…