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Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: French startup Shift Technology, which uses AI to help insurance providers detect and prevent fraud, raises $220M Series D at a $1B+ valuation, led by Advent  —  While insurance providers continue to get disrupted by startups like Lemonade, Alan, Clearcover, Pie and many others applying tech …

Mallory Hackett / MobiHealthNews: Vida Health, a virtual care app for patients with chronic conditions, raises $110M Series D led by General Atlantic, Centene, and AXA Venture Partners  —  General Atlantic, Centene and AXA Venture Partners led the Series D round.  —  Vida Health, a virtual chronic condition care platform …

Reuters: Sources: Tencent is in talks with CFIUS to negotiate agreements that would allow the company to keep its ownership stakes in Riot Games and Epic Games  —  Tencent Holdings Ltd (0700.HK) is negotiating agreements with a U.S. national security panel that would allow it to keep its ownership stakes …

Catherine Shu / TechCrunch: Una Brands, which acquires and consolidates third party sellers across e-commerce platforms in the Asia-Pacific region, launches with $40M in debt and equity  —  One of the biggest funding trends of the past year is companies that consolidate small e-commerce brands.

New York Times: Nick Clegg, who shaped Facebook's handling of Donald Trump, will lead the final decision-making process after the Oversight Board handed it back to Facebook  —  Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister, has shaped the company's handling of Donald Trump at every turn.

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Cymulate, which tests clients' networks by running simulated machine learning-based cyber attacks, raises $45M Series C led by One Peak Partners  —  With cybercrime on course to be a $6 trillion problem this year, organizations are throwing ever more resources at the issue to avoid being a target.

Mike Butcher / TechCrunch: Finnish mobile games company Metacore raises $180M in a debt round from Tencent's Supercell to scale its first game Merge Mansion, which has 800K+ DAUs  —  Metacore, a Finnish mobile games company, seems to have an amazing ‘relationship’ with Supercell, another (quite successful) Finnish mobile games company.

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Zynga to acquire Chartboost, a mobile programmatic ad service reaching 700M+ MAUs, for $250M in cash; Zynga says deal will help it grow as IDFA changes roll out  —  Did you miss GamesBeat Summit 2021?  Watch on-demand here!  —  Mobile game publisher Zynga has agreed to acquire mobile ad …

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg: Billboard says it will publish a ranking of the most popular songs in the US based on Twitter conversations; the chart will be updated daily  —  The ranking will be one of Billboard's first that doesn't measure how much people listen to music  —  Billboard, the king of music charts …

M. Corey Goldman / TheStreet: Twilio reports Q1 revenue of $590M, up 62% YoY, vs. $533.4 est., with loss of $206.5M, up from $94.8M last year, and 235K active customer accounts, up 23.6% YoY  —  Twilio (TWLO) - Get Report on Thursday posted better-than-expected revenues and adjusted earnings on ongoing demand for its cloud-based software and related services.

Emily Bary / MarketWatch: PayPal beats with Q1 revenue of $6.03B, up 31% YoY, with record $285B in total payments volume, up 50% YoY, and added 14.5M new active accounts  —  Company increases full-year revenue, earnings forecasts  —  PayPal Holdings Inc. saw a record amount of volume flow through its platform …

Jessica Bursztynsky / CNBC: Uber Q1: $2.9B revenue, below estimates, as net loss shrinks to $108M from $968M QoQ due to self-driving unit sale; delivery gross revenue up 166% YoY to $12.5B  —  - Uber reported first quarter results after-the-bell on Wednesday.  — Overall, Uber's net loss was $108 million …

Neal Rothschild / Axios: NewsWhip: daily social media interactions on stories about Trump fell from ~49M in early Jan. to ~2M by March, largely due to no Trump tweets for media to cover  —  Social media interactions about former President Trump have fallen 91% since January, according to exclusive data from NewsWhip.

Margaret Sullivan / Washington Post: The Oversight Board's decision on Trump's Facebook ban failed to send a clear message that a powerful public official can't use Facebook to endanger the public  —  In more than 1,400 posts from Jan. 1, 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump used Facebook to spread false information with devastating consequences for the country.

Brad Stone / Bloomberg: Jeff Bezos beat the National Enquirer by bypassing media and appealing directly to regular people, retaliating with the brutal efficiency used to build Amazon  —  When a gossip rag went after the CEO, he retaliated with the brutal, brilliant efficiency he used to build his business empire.

John Tozzi / Bloomberg: Collective Health, which offers employers a health benefits management platform, raises $280M in funding at a $1.5B post-money valuation  —  Health-coverage IT firm raises $280 million from investors, including major seller of Blue Cross Blue Shield plans  —  Startup Collective Health …

Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC: Facebook says that Workplace has 7M paid subscribers, up 40% YoY, as it announces new features, like Microsoft 365 and G-Suite calendar integrations  —  - Facebook's Workplace enterprise communications software has now reached 7 million paid subscribers.  — The milestone is up 40% from 5 million last May.

Shoshana Wodinsky / Gizmodo: Signal says Facebook shut down its ad account over an Instagram ad campaign that showed the user data Facebook collects to sell ads  —  A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former's ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday.

Rebecca Szkutak / Forbes: LoanSnap, whose AI system analyzes users' finances and recommends a loan to improve their financial health, raises $30M Series B led by True Ventures  —  Serial entrepreneur Karl Jacob has tried to tackle a lot of industries in his career, from social networking to cybersecurity.

Carmen Reinicke / CNBC: Dogecoin's price surged roughly 40% on Tuesday, reaching a market cap of $69B, up 11,000% YTD, and making Dogecoin the fourth-largest cryptocurrency  —  The latest cryptocurrency star is a coin named after a meme of a Shiba Inu dog that was started as a joke.

Catalin Cimpanu / The Record: Dell patches a recently discovered 12-year-old driver vulnerability impacting hundreds of millions of Dell systems, which gives local attackers full PC control  —  Hundreds of millions of Dell desktops, laptops, notebooks, and tablets will need to update their Dell DBUtil driver to fix …

Kim Lyons / The Verge: Basecamp CEO apologizes to staff without announcing any further policy changes and says Basecamp would be “rooting for” employees who recently left the company  —  The software company has been under fire for how it handled employees' concerns about culture

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: Microsoft open sources Counterfit, an AI security risk assessment tool that comes preloaded with algorithms that can be used to evade and steal AI models  —  Join Transform 2021 this July 12-16.  Register fo r the AI event of the year.  —  Microsoft today open-sourced Counterfit …

Nick Statt / Protocol: At trial, Tim Sweeney contends that the App Store taking “30% off of the top” is an existential threat to Fortnite becoming a metaverse or platform for creators  —  Epic CEO Tim Sweeney finished his time on the stand Tuesday afternoon, during day two of the Epic v. Apple trial.

Makena Kelly / The Verge: After teasing a new social media platform, Trump debuts a new section on his website that's effectively a blog, ahead of the Oversight Board's decision on Wed.  —  A true poster never logs off for long  —  After months of promising his own social media network for banned posters …

Abner Li / 9to5Google: Google reveals the Pixel Buds A-Series in a now-deleted tweet, which mentions a new Fast Pair feature  —  At the end of March, we exclusively reported about Google's next wireless earbuds, and the first image leaked a week later.  Google today announced the “Pixel Buds A-Series” on Twitter, though the reveal was entirely an accident.

Jessica Bursztynsky / CNBC: Lyft reports Q1 revenue of $609M, up 7% QoQ and down 36% YoY, vs $558.7M est., active riders of 13.49M vs 12.8M est., and net loss of $427M, up from $398M YoY  —  - Ride-hailing company Lyft beat on the top and bottom lines and exceeded Wall Street's rider expectations for its first quarter.

Chance Miller / 9to5Mac: On Day Two of the Apple vs Epic trial, Sweeney said he would have taken an exclusive App Store deal, Apple recounted Epic's praise of Apple's Metal API, more  —  The Apple vs. Epic trial continued today, with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney testifying and facing cross-examination from Apple's layers.

Stephen Shankland / CNET: Intel to invest $3.5B to upgrade its chipmaking plant in New Mexico, resulting in 700 new jobs over three years, as part of CEO Pat Gelsinger's turnaround plan  —  Intel on Monday plans to announce a $3.5 billion upgrade to a chip manufacturing plant in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

Casey Newton / The Verge: Basecamp employees detail an all-hands that led to resignations, including the head of strategy, who questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company  —  I.  —  At 8AM PT on Friday, a bleary-eyed Basecamp CEO Jason Fried gathered his remote workforce together on Zoom to apologize.

Reuters: Apple hires ex-Google AI scientist Samy Bengio, who left Google last month after colleagues' firings; sources: Bengio to lead new AI unit under John Giannandrea  —  Apple Inc (AAPL.O) said on Monday it has hired former distinguished Google (GOOGL.O) scientist Samy Bengio …

Megan Graham / CNBC: Amazon says its ad-supported streaming video content now reaches more than 120M users every month, up from 20M in January 2020, driven by Twitch  —  - Amazon said Monday its ad-supported streaming content now reaches more than 120 monthly users every month.

Mitchell Clark / The Verge: Court docs: Epic's total gross revenue was $5.6B in 2018 and $4.2B in 2019, with the vast majority of revenue coming from Fortnite  —  New financial figures were revealed as part of Epic Games' antitrust case against Apple  —  After a meteoric rise to popularity in 2018 …

Chance Miller / 9to5Mac: Epic vs. Apple trial begins with Epic attacking the App Store's “walled garden”, arguing Apple's 30% cut is monopolistic; Apple argues 30% is standard practice  —  Today marked the beginning of the highly-anticipated Apple vs. Epic trial, and things kicked off with both companies presenting their opening statements.

Katie Canales / Insider: SensorTower data shows Clubhouse was downloaded only about 900,000 times in April, down from 2.7M installs in March and from February's peak of 9.6M  —  - Clubhouse's 922,000 downloads in April is a dip from February when 9.6 million users installed it.  — The audio app has enjoyed …

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Court docs: in a 2011 email Phil Schiller floated cutting Apple's 30% fee, provided it could still generate $1B in annual App Store profits when the fee was cut  —  - Top executive proposed fee cut at $1 billion in annual profit  — App Store fee structure, policies at issue in trial with Epic

Alex Sherman / CNBC: Source: AOL has ~1.5M users paying $10 to $15/month for tech support and ID monitoring service AOL Advantage; dial-up users now number in the “low thousands”  —  - Apollo Global Management is paying $5 billion for Verizon Media Group, which houses Yahoo and AOL.

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: PortalOne raises $15M seed from Atari, Founders Fund, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, and others for its hybrid gaming/TV show app, coming out of closed beta soon  —  Gaming and streamed video have been two of the biggest pastime winners during the last year+ of pandemic living.

Jeff Grubb / VentureBeat: Sony says Discord will be integrated into PlayStation Network starting early 2022; Sony will invest an undisclosed amount in Discord as part of the partnership  —  Join GamesBeat Summit 2021, happening today!  Watch live here!  —  Sony is planning to integrate Discord into PlayStation Network starting in early 2022.

Eric Slivka / MacRumors: Apple releases iOS 14.5.1, watchOS 7.4.1, and macOS Big Sur 11.3.1 with security fixes for flaws in WebKit that Apple says were being actively exploited  —  Alongside iOS 14.5.1 and watchOS 7.4.1, Apple today also released macOS Big Sur 11.3.1, which the company says “provides important security updates”.

Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss / Reuters: Blockchain-based trading platform INX says it estimates it raised $125M from over 7,200K investors in its SEC-approved token and equity offerings  —  NEW YORK (Reuters) - INX Ltd, the blockchain-based global trading platform for digital securities and cryptocurrencies, said on Monday it expects …

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Twitter opens Spaces, its live audio feature, to anyone with 600+ followers and details plans for Ticketed Spaces, reminders, co-hosting, accessibility, more  —  Twitter Spaces, the company's new live audio rooms feature, is opening up more broadly.  The company announced today it's making …

Joe Rossignol / MacRumors: Epic Games vs. Apple Trial Begins With Opening Remarks Underway  —  The first day of the bench trial between Fortnite creator Epic Games and Apple is officially underway, with the companies delivering opening remarks before District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in a Northern California courtroom.

Juli Clover / MacRumors: Kuo: Apple is planning to launch a foldable iPhone with an 8" QHD+ flexible OLED display in 2023; Kuo says Apple will ship 15M to 20M foldable iPhones in 2023  —  Apple is working to launch a foldable iPhone with an 8-inch QHD+ flexible OLED display in 2023, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo …

New York Times: SensorTower data shows Clubhouse has been downloaded 1.1M times in the Middle East, where its users see it as an open forum to discuss politics and taboo issues  —  The social networking app is booming in authoritarian countries, where users are speaking freely about otherwise taboo topics.

Pete Rizzo / Bitcoin Magazine: A look back at Satoshi Nakamoto's role in the Bitcoin project and exchanges with its community, 10 years after the disappearance of the mysterious figure  —  10 years ago today, Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto's disappeared.  Pete Rizzo tells the story.  —  10 years ago today, Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto's disappeared.

Shiyin Chen / Bloomberg: Dell has agreed to sell Boomi, which specializes in integrating cloud platforms for companies, to Francisco Partners and TPG in a cash deal valued at $4B  —  Dell Technologies Inc. has agreed to selling its Boomi cloud business to private-equity firms Francisco Partners and TPG in a cash deal valued …

Sam Goldheart / iFixit News: Teardown of Apple's AirTag: it has a magnet to turn its body into a speaker driver, but still has a more compact design than the Tile Mate or Galaxy SmartTag  —  The long-rumored, tiniest Apple product (that isn't a dongle) is finally here.  Welcome, AirTag!

Bloomberg: Sources: Verizon is nearing a deal to sell its media division, including AOL and Yahoo!, to Apollo; deal could be worth ~$5B and be announced as soon as Monday  —  - Deal for Verizon Media could be announced as soon as Monday  — Division includes online brands Yahoo!, AOL and TechCrunch

David Phelan / Forbes: SEC filing: Rockley Photonics, developer of sensors that can be used for blood pressure and glucose monitoring, says Apple is currently its biggest customer  —  A new report says that a future Apple Watch could have a new raft of health sensors, including blood pressure and …