最新 AI 资讯
Amazon will train on Twitch streamers’ content by default, unless they opt out
The streaming platformTwitchwill nowuse creators’ contentto help train generative AI models for its parent company, Amazon. This move has inspired swift and concentrated backlash from the Twitch community, especially because creators are opted in to having their content used for this AI training by default. For Amazon, these stream recordings are incredibly valuable, offering thousands of hours of audio and video content to help train AI models. But Twitch users worry that since creators have to manually opt out, they might be surrendering their content to train Amazon’s AI content models without even knowing it. This is especially concerning on a platform like Twitch, where creators are often recording livestreams of themselves and their voices for many hours per week. In astreamon the official Twitch channel, Twitch Head of Community Mary Kish and Chief Product Officer Mike Minton addressed a live audience of nearly 3,000 aggrieved users, many of whom were posting anti-AI sentiments in the chat. “Why is it not opt-in? That’s what everybody is spamming in chat. I get it. ‘Let me opt in versus making me opt out,’” Minton said. “Well, there’s an honest answer… If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That’s honestly the answer.” Twitch knows that its community of streamers is largely opposed to the use of generative AI, since the most prevalent generative AI products are trained on books, images, videos, and other materials scraped from the internet without consent. Even Twitch’s approach to breaking this news shows that the company is braced for backlash. Instead of telling the community that Amazon would begin training on Twitch users’ content, Twitchframedthis change as “[adding] a setting that lets you opt out of having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon.” In some cases, this created confusion among streamers about whether their content had already been fed to Amazon without their knowledge. When one user asked if their videos had already been used for training, Minton responded, “I don’t actually know the answer to that question because I don’t know what Amazon […] has done in terms of model training and what they’ve used and not used.” Kish noted that Twitch is not unique in its use of user content for AI training. Meta, for example, uses public content from its platforms totrain its own AI models,meaning that if your Facebook and Instagram accounts are public, then your data has probably already been used for Meta’s AI training. (If youlive in the U.K., you can opt out of Meta’s training — if not, the only way to “opt out” is to use private settings, which isn’t feasible for creators who monetize their accounts.) Kish said that even including an opt-out option on Twitch is “a reflection of reacting to this community’s voice that you are not wanting to train Gen AI models, and we want to give you that option.” To opt out of AI training on Twitch, users can navigate to their channel settings (not the creator dashboard), select the security and privacy tab, scroll down to the option “training for generative AI,” and toggle it off.
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Some Claude users are mad that Anthropic’s new watermarks will catch them using it at their jobs, classes
Anthropic recently made the decision to watermark Claude’s outputs — inserting invisible code into the chatbot’s editorial text that marks it as AI-generated. Anthropic rolled out this new policy to satisfy theEU AI Act’s Transparency Code, which now requires tech companies to label content that has been AI-generated or edited in a manner identifiable to computer systems. Yet while European regulators may be happy, some AI users are decidedly not. One need look no further than Reddit to find evidence of brewing discontent, though other posters on the site are not in agreement. One of the morehistrionic postsI came across was from a user named visionode, whose account is notably only three weeks old. According to visionode, the new watermarking system is a draconian conspiracy designed to victimize innocent chatbot users worldwide. Visionode’s basic argument appears to be that, while savvy Claude users may be able hide evidence of their AI usage by paraphrasing or otherwise cleaning their outputs through other AI services, the average user of Claude will be caught. “Who will get caught? You. The student who used Claude to reorganize a paragraph. The journalist who asked the AI to summarize a two-hundred-page transcript. The writer who had creative block and asked for synonyms. Those guys come out of the process with a digital tattoo on their forehead.” Far be it from me to undermine visionode’s outrage, but those are not the best examples. A journalist asking AI to summarize a two-hundred-page transcript is not going to be bothered by a watermark attached to that summary, unless they are copying and pasting the summary verbatim into their article — which is plainly unethical and shouldn’t be happening. It is equally unethical for a student who copies and pastes Claude’s output into an essay after asking it to “reorganize a paragraph.” Other Redditors were also not particularly supportive of the poster’s outrage. “Get a load of this guy,” one poster merely commented. Another asked the OP to take “a deep breath.” Visionode wasn’t the only one complaining. Another unhappy camper called the watermarks “unethical” and “disgusting” and argued that by using Claude, they had done the lion’s share of the work. In their view, the chatbot was merely a “tool” that had facilitated their arduous labor. “I gave the instructions, context, decisions, and countless refinements, claude was the tool. If Claude starts watermarking the code or anything else it generates, what exactly is it claiming credit for?”the poster asked. Again, other users dogpiled onto the critic. “It’s not claiming credit though,” one user shot back. “It’s about being able to detect AI generated outputs because of the risks AI generated outputs can cause in various situations.” “Bro couldn’t even complain about Claude without using Claude to write it,” another quipped. Some critics have steered clear of the victimhood narrative and made slightly more nuanced arguments against Anthropic’s new policy. For instance, one poster complained of a general hypocrisy in watermarking an editorial product that was, itself, generated by hoovering up other people’s work. “I think it’s a very sinister direction to take,”said the user. “I don’t use Claude to write anything but having an AI that watermarks your work is terrifyingly ironic given how many of the frontier models came by their training data.” In general, however, users have tended to support the watermarking system as a sensible way to track material that was generated by algorithm. “There is literally no good argument for why this isn’t a good idea,” a useron another thread said. “The only reason you wouldn’t want this is to lie to people.”
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Why Sandbar thinks it’s voice-enabled ring can avoid the AI hardware graveyard
AI notetaking hardware has taken offover the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables — rings especially — are betting people want to capture stray thoughts and ideas the same way. One of the companies chasing that bet isSandbar, the startup behind the private voice ring Stream, which has raised $36 million to date, including a$23 million Series Aled by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Sandbar co-founder and CEOMina Fahmiabout why he thinks so many voice hardware devices before Stream struggled to break through, and why he’s betting that keeping the human firmly in control is what it’ll take to get wearable tech right. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Lovable confirms new $13.3B valuation, raises another $400M
Europe’s favorite vibe-coding startup Lovable has confirmedpreviously reported whispersthat it was raising another mega round at a $13.3 billion valuation. Lovable said on Wednesday that it hasraised $400 millionin a Series C round led by Menlo Ventures and the Scaleup Europe Fund, with more than a dozen other investors participating. This new funding comes after Lovable hit $500 million in annualized run rate revenue in June,the startup told TechCrunch. Its previous round, announced in December, brought in$330 million at a $6.6 billion valuationand was also led by Menlo Ventures, with CapitalG as co-lead. As the startup has grown — it now says it hosts 60 million projects that attract 900 million monthly visitors — so has its back-end needs and sophistication, the company says. Lovable, for instance,offers its own in-house trained AI model, as well as the usual frontier model options. In June, it signed amultiyear dealwith Google Cloud, a fivefold increase in usage. Lovable has alsobacked other European startups, such as Danish startupAtech, which is building vibe-coding software that designs tech hardware. Note: One of Lovable’s new Series C investors is Regent, the investment firm that also owns TechCrunch.
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Why Stream ring-maker Sandbar says the future of AI wearables is voice
Loading the player… AI notetaking hardware has taken offover the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables — rings especially — are betting people want to capture stray thoughts and ideas the same way. One of the companies chasing that bet isSandbar, the startup behind the private voice ring Stream, which has raised $36 million to date, including a$23 million Series Aled by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Sandbar co-founder and CEOMina Fahmiabout why he thinks so many voice hardware devices before Stream struggled to break through, and why he’s betting that keeping the human firmly in control is what it’ll take to get wearable tech right. Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Mesh, Automattic’s CRM for everyone, comes to Android
Mesh, the relationship manager and personal CRMacquired by WordPress.com’s parent company, Automattic, last year, is now available to users on Android devices. The software allows users to privately visualize and keep track of the people in their personal and professional networks, add notes to people’s contact information, and be reminded when to reach out. OnAndroid, the company customized Mesh’s app to work with key platform features, like split-screen and pop-up views. This allows users to access Mesh while working in other apps, like messages or email. It also supports keyboard shortcuts for foldables and tablets, in-app search, home screen widgets (with Material You colors that match your Android’s wallpaper), and real-time sync across devices. The company’s broader plans for Mesh could eventually see it tied more closely to Automattic’s all-in-one messaging app,Beeper, which offers a way to connect with people across platforms, including through WhatsApp, Instagram, Signal, Messenger, X, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, Google Messages, and more. Already, Mesh and Beeper interoperate to some extent, as Mesh users can draft a text to someone in Beeper or click deep links in the app to visit a Mesh user’s profile. In time, the company wants to add additional AI features that will make users of both products more productive in terms of managing their personal relationships. “We’re thinking a lot about how can AI help you be a better friend and have better work and personal relationships?,” Mesh co-founder Zachary Hamed told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this spring. “We have users who have ten-, twenty-, or fifty-thousand connections across multiple social media apps, across their work products. It’s an impossible task to think and be conscientious with you, with each of those people, by yourself,” he noted. Today, Mesh’s Nexus AI is in early access, offering a way to use AI to navigate your network. That means users can ask questions like who they know at a particular company or who lives in a certain city, or who has expertise in a particular topic. The company is also experimenting with using AI technology to provide a voice-based, hands-free experience and an improved business-card-scanning feature. Importantly, personal information stored in Mesh isn’t shared or used for ad targeting, the company says, as the product is supported bysubscriptions. (It’s free for up to 1,000 contacts, then has higher tiers for unlimited contacts and other features.) In time, Mesh may consider a bundled subscription with Beeper or other Automattic products, but has nothing to announce on that front at this time. Currently, the majority of Mesh’s customers, or around 70%, are using the app for some type of business purpose. Mesh co-founder Matthew Achariam says Mesh’s sweet spot is executives running bigger teams or those who have a tight network to stay in touch with. However, the company still thinks about the consumer use case, he notes. “The beauty of [serving business users] is that the same things they’re using apply to every individual consumer. So every feature that we think about has to apply to both,” he says. Mesh (formerly Clay) for Android will roll outto Google Playfor phones, tablets, and foldables as a free download with in-app purchases.
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OpenAI-backed Thrive Holdings raises $2B to bring AI to the enterprise
Thrive Holdings has raised $2 billion in new funding at a $12 billion valuation from investors like SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital. Thrive Holdings is akin to a private equity firm for AI, buying traditional businesses like accounting firms and implementing AI into their workflows. So far, Thrive has focused on accounting and information technology, but part of Wednesday’s raise will go toward expanding a new vertical in physical assets. Key to that strategy is Thrive’s close relationship with OpenAI. The New York Timeswas first to report the news. The firm is a spinout ofThrive Capital, one of OpenAI’s major investors. In December 2025, OpenAI took anownership stakein Thrive Holdings. Part of the deal involved OpenAI sending employees to work with Thrive’s companies to accelerate AI adoption. That hands-on model of AI implementation has become a business in its own right, and may help explain investor enthusiasm behind Thrive’s latest fundraise. OpenAI and Anthropic have both partnered with large private equity firms to launchThe Deployment CompanyandOde with Anthropic, respectively — billion-dollar ventures that are building teams of elite engineers who embed themselves into enterprises and implement AI solutions into workflows. The raise comes off the back of proven success for Thrive’s companies, which has surpassed 70 businesses on Thrive Holdings’ platforms. The company has focused on two pillars to date: Current, its accounting arm with more than 50 firms and more than 2,000 professionals, and Shield, its information technology arm with around 20 companies on the platform. Current’s self-improving tax agents, dubbed TaxAI, processed more than 7,000 tax returns at 98% accuracy, lowering tax prep times at participating firms by over 30%, according to Thrive. Meanwhile, Shield’s AI products have sped up help desk resolution times by 36x, and the platform has doubled the number of custom AI agents deployed in the last month. Part of Wednesday’s fundraise will help Thrive launch a third platform focused on regulatory services for the built environment, described by a spokesperson as: “the work required to get physical assets approved, built, certified, and kept in operation.” “The U.S. needs to build and modernize more critical infrastructure, but projects are often constrained by local, technical, and regulatory complexity,” Anuj Mehndiratta, a founding member of Thrive Holdings, told TechCrunch. “This applies across data centers, manufacturing, healthcare, power, water, transportation, and other physical infrastructure.” That sort of complexity is where Thrive, well, thrives — large, fragmented, mission-critical, and operationally complex. While Mehndiratta says AI won’t replace field work, local judgement, or professional sign-off, it can help ease manual workflows like research, reporting, permit preparation, inspection documentation, and compliance tracking. “We think AI partnered with a lot of the experts and practitioners at these businesses can really help compress [regulatory bottlenecks], keep the safety standards high, but also be able to do it with less of a burden to the actual building of that and help it do it more efficiently, lower cost and do it faster,” Kareem Zaki, a founding member of Thrive Holdings, said in a statement emailed to TechCrunch.
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As AI safety concerns mount, three pioneers make the case for staying open
As projects like Pacing the Frontier look to major labs as a way to keep AI research safe, open-source models have becomea sore spot for the industry. With free distribution and little control over how they’re used, open-weight models aren’t easily controlled, leadingsome labsto treat them as downright scary. But at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas last week, three of the world’s most respected AI researchers — Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, World Labs CEO and co-founder Fei-Fei Li, and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng — spoke out on the issue. And while they disagreed on particular tactics, all three made a powerful case for keeping AI open. For the three speakers, the core concern was allowing a handful of major AI companies to control the pace of progress. When a few companies control access to a technology, as Apple and Google do with mobile operating systems, innovation can slow and the companies that control the platforms can influence what gets built on them. Andrew Ng said that he worried about a similar dynamic emerging in AI. “I don’t want there to be gatekeepers,” Ng said. “That limits how all of us can access AI.” Companies have an incentive to protect their competitive advantages, including by influencing the rules that govern the industry. That could create a dynamic where only the largest, best-capitalized firms with the resources to build the most advanced AI systems. Ng’s solution was to maintain multiple providers, with models and companies competing rather than allowing a handful of of players to dominate the field. “If I were to try to give one prescription, it would be to promote openness,” Ng said, “because AI is amazing technology and I want it to be in everyone’s hands.” But not everyone agreed that open-weight models would help preserve that state of play. Hinton, in particular, drew a distinction between open-source software, which makes the underlying code available for inspection and modification, and open-weight models, which release the parameters of a trained AI model to the public. “Open source is great. You show people the code, and lots of people look at the lines of code and say, ‘Oh, there’s a bug.’ Open weights means you train a big model and then you give people the weights. That’s very different,” Hinton said. “I was against open [weights] because it makes it so easy for people to take these big foundation models, which are very expensive to train, and for much less money train them to do bad things like cyber attacks.” But whatever his reservations, Hinton acknowledged that open-weight models are already a permanent fixture of AI. “I think that battle’s been lost. We now have open-weight models, so the barrier to lots of people getting these big models, which was the cost of training foundation models, that barrier has disappeared. It’s too late.” Yet accepting reality didn’t mean ignoring the risks. Hinton’s position was clear: AI would continue to advance, and he thought that was largely a good thing. He said it would boost productivity and improve education and healthcare. “Worrying about the possible bad effects of AI and the things that intelligent beings might do when they’re smarter than us. I don’t think that’s unfair. I think it is unfair to label anybody who thinks like that as a fear-monger,” Hinton added. Ng took a different view. The question, he argued, wasn’t whether open models were risky, but who controlled access and who would win the market. Whoever built the cheaper model would have the advantage. If China’s open-weight models gained widespread adoption across Asia, Africa, and/or the developing world, he warned, they could influence how billions of people encountered ideas about democracy, freedom, and human rights. “One thing I hope we do is encourage American competitiveness and open-source AI. It turns out that AI is a tremendous source of soft power. You can see the way China’s model has tremendous accomplishment with Africa, for example,” Ng said. “But my worry is because of all the lobbying in the U.S. and the fear-mongering, building open-source AI in America is struggling to compete with open-weight models coming out of China, and my worry is that if China figures out a fundamentally more cost-efficient way to build AI, then things that are more cost-efficient have a fundamental business adoption advantage.” Li pushed back on that framing. “It’s very dangerous to make this a dichotomy between complete openness all the way to complete closedness,” she said. “In complex software systems as well as scientific systems it’s much more nuanced.” Li used nuclear physics as an example: scientific papers are published openly, but uranium is regulated, while laboratory work falls somewhere in between. The lesson, she explained, was that openness doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing choice. Different layers of the ecosystem can operate at different levels of openness. She also highlighted collaborations between public and private institutions, such as the Human Genome Project. The resulting knowledge became a platform that others could build on, she said, allowing pharmaceutical companies to profit, scientists to advance their work and society to benefit. “So I think we have to use [AI] as that kind of infrastructure,” Li said. “We need some levels of openness, both in scientific discovery, in education, in global partnership, as well as lucrative business models for entrepreneurs. But we also will accept closed-source systems. This debate, especially at the sweeping level of ‘we can only tolerate one,’ is a false debate. We need to get to a level of nuance.” But everyone agreed that some level of regulation would be necessary to keep AI on the right track. “What we want to do is develop AI in a direction that helps people, and regulation will help us do that,” Hinton said. “You can’t leave it to people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to decide how AI should be done.”
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AI coding startup Cognition reportedly already in talks to raise at $40B valuation
Cognition, makers of the AI coding agent Devin, is reportedly already talking to investors about raising another funding round with a big leap in valuation, after it raised $1 billion at a$26 billon valuationin May. This new round could deliver at least a $40 billion valuation based on achieving a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate, according to sources cited byBloomberg. Three months ago, when it announced its last raise,Cognition’s Scott Wu confirmed to TechCrunchthat it had achieved a $492 million annualized revenue run rate and that enterprises were growing their usage of Devin by 50% month-over-month for the past six months. Wu, a famed wunderkind programmer himself, also told TechCrunch that Devin is not being sold as a human replacement. The agent is often tasked with doing long-tail grunt-work that many programmers dislike such as bringing old software up to date or moving applications off one platform and onto another. This could account for much of its growing popularity among enterprises that have adopted it. The company says its customers include Mercedes-Benz, NASA, and Goldman Sachs.
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Everything announced at Made by Google ’26: Pixel 11, Pixel Watch 5, Pixel Tag, and tons of Gemini features
Google is holding itsMade by Google 2026 eventon Wednesday, unveiling the Pixel 11 series, the Pixel Watch 5, and even a competitor to Apple’s AirTag. The tech giant also used the event to show off new Gemini-powered features across its devices. Google spent a good portion of the event talking about Gemini and other AI features coming to its devices. One of the more notable accessibility updates is an expansion of “Live Transcribe” tosupport American Sign Language. Using the Pixel Camera, users can have sign language translated into text, giving people another way to communicate without relying on typing. Google also introduced “Rambler,” a new voice-input feature designed to better understand the way people actually talk. Rather than requiring carefully phrased sentences, Rambler is designed to handle run-on sentences, filler words, and less structured speech while still figuring out what the user is trying to say. There are a few smaller additions, too. “Circle to Search” can now be accessed more directly from the Pixel Camera, allowing users to identify objects, search for things in the distance, translate text, or ask questions about what’s around them without leaving the camera experience. The standard Pixel 11 gets a redesigned camera bar that is thinner than the one on the previous generation. Google says the new camera bar is more than 40% thinner and now uses an all-glass surface that stretches across the width of the phone. Google is also increasing the base storage to 256GB, doubling the previous starting capacity. The starting price for the new model is set at $899, reflecting a $100 increase compared to the Pixel 10. This price hike comes with the decision to drop the 128GB storage option. Plus, the ongoing RAM supply shortage plays a part in this increase. The Pixel 11 will be available in Frost, Hibiscus, Pistachio, and Obsidian. Google is making durability a bigger part of the Pro lineup. The company says the Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro XL have improved drop resistance and a new anti-scratch display coating that provides more than twice the scratch resistance of the Pixel 10 Pro models. The Pixel 11 Pro starts at $1,099, compared to $999 for the Pixel 10 Pro. The phones are available in Canyon, Fog, Olive, and Obsidian. Notably, this year’s Obsidian option gets an all-matte finish. Google says the new foldable is nearly 10% lighter and almost 1mm thinner than the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. It also has slimmer bezels, a 48-megapixel main camera, and 30x Super Zoom. The company is also building on the IP68 water and dust resistance introduced with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold uses a glass-fiber composite back cover designed to better withstand cracking, while a redesigned hinge offers additional protection for the inner display. Google says the changes make the model three times more durable than its predecessor. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold comes in Olive and Obsidian. Google finally has its own tracking tag. Called Pixel Tag, the small device is designed to help people keep tabs on things such as keys, wallets, and luggage. It connects to Android’s Find Hub network, allowing users to see the tag’s location through the Find Hub app (similar to Apple’s Find My). The tag, priced at $29 (or $99 for a four-pack), can also be located from a Pixel Watch. Pixel Buds users can ask Gemini to find or ring a Pixel Tag, adding a voice-controlled option for tracking something down. The Pixel Watch 5 is getting several health-related updates. The Google Health app will provide monthly summaries of blood pressure trends, with the goal of helping users notice patterns over time. It will also provide monthly summaries of insulin resistance trends. The 41mm Pixel Watch 5 starts at $399, while the 45mm version starts at $429. Google is also offering a Stephen Curry edition for $579, with an exclusive design built for workouts. (This is featured in the image above.) Meanwhile, the Pixel Buds Pro is arriving in a new Olive color.
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How a $250 million acquisition collapsed into allegations of fraud and forged signatures
When VideoVerseannounced its acquisitionin September 2025, it felt like a victory for startups across India. VideoVerse was a simple clipping service, but after years of startup incubators and pitching clients, the company had pulled off a $250 million exit. The acquirer was Minute Media, an international sports publisher split between New York and Tel Aviv, with plans to scale VideoVerse’s clipping software beyond its Indian niche and into the lucrative world of international sports. Less than a year after the announcement, the deal has unraveled. Investors are still waiting for their share of the $250 million windfall, and founder Vinayak Shrivastav is now at the center of multiple legal cases. Even the acquirer, Minute Media, seems to be backing away. In May, the company said it was terminating its contract with VideoVerse, underscoring that the two had continued operating as separate legal entities even after the acquisition closed. Reached by TechCrunch, a Minute Media representative said that “after, among other things, significant discrepancies were discovered in VideoVerse’s representations, Minute Media decided to terminate its engagement with the company.” If the allegations are true, this was more than just a deal that fell through. Across multiple legal filings, creditors and investors paint a picture of a serially untruthful CEO, who used the guise of a successful business to accumulate cash-generating debts and side deals until the pretense became untenable. The result is an alarming reminder of the limits of due diligence and how much the business of startups still relies on trust. The sheer volume of legal cases shows that trust is now in short supply. Bluestone Capital, which backed VideoVerse in its 2023 round, is now suing the company for fraud, alleging that the startup violated its investment terms and refused to pay out proceeds from the acquisition. In a separate suit, a creditor is seeking to recover $64 million from a loan that Shrivastav took out shortly after the acquisition closed. The same complaint alleges that Shrivastav committed fraud during the acquisition itself, claiming he “used fraudulent merger documents that did not reflect the business terms on which Mr. Shrivastav and Minute Media had agreed to induce Clippings’ shareholders to approve the merger.” Even VideoVerse executives have begun lobbing accusations. The company’s COO alleges in a separate case that Shrivastav forged his signature on loan and share-repurchase agreements, extracting tens of millions of dollars from the company, in the wake of the Minute Media deal. While not a household name, VideoVerse became a key player in the billion-dollar clipping industry, providing automated tools for editing long-form broadcasts into the shorter clips that travel well on social platforms. Its flagship product,Magnifi, is an AI-powered tool that can automatically identify key players and moments. Using the software, clients could easily generate packages of every three-point shot in a basketball game, for instance. Backed by an extensive human support team, the platform attracted high-profile clients like the Indian Premier League, FIFA+ and Nippon TV. It is a lucrative niche, and one in which Minute Media had hoped to expand to the U.S. market before VideoVerse’s internal problems surfaced. Even across the multiple cases against Shrivastav, there are conflicting claims and inconsistencies, as investors struggle to make sense of the current state of the company. What is clear is that tens of millions of dollars are missing, and there are already disputes about where the money went and how much is owed to whom. In October, Shrivastav approached the investment firm Lingotto, arranging a $55 million structured loan — supposedly to satisfy an earlier creditor. With the Minute Media merger already public at more than four times that amount, it appeared to be a safe bet. The financing was even backed by statements from the creditor and Minute Media’s own CEO. According to a court filing from Lingotto, $53 million was transferred to an account controlled by Clippings on October 1, backed by a standard repayment schedule. But Lingotto now says critical documents provided by Shrivastav were forged. Minute Media’s CEO never signed the documents, the lawsuit alleges, and screenshots purporting to show internal bank balances were also fabricated. According to the terms of the loan, Lingotto was owed a $4 million payment on March 31, but it never arrived. When the investment firm called in the full amount of the loan with interest, it discovered a long list of people waiting to be paid by VideoVerse. A separate loan from Bluestone Capital had gone into settlement a few months prior, with similarly overdue payments. By the end of April, Shrivastav was out as CEO. The following months have produced a web of overlapping court claims, as Minute Media, Lingotto, and Bluestone each seek restitution in Delaware Chancery Court. A separate claim from former COO Sabya Das alleges a more complex tangle of fraud involving secondary sales and a confidential high-interest loan. Shrivastav did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him for this story. His most recent listed address, which appears in Das’s complaint, is on the Palm Jumeirah islands in Dubai.
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Sarvam AI Takes Indus to 2,500 Maharashtra Govt Officials
The platform will help officials research policies, draft replies, translate documents and process records while keeping government data within India.
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