Chris Metinko / Axios:
Adaptive Security, which uses AI to simulate social engineering attacks and help companies prevent them, raised an $81M Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures  —  Adaptive Security has raised an $81 million Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures, co-founder and CEO Brian Long tells Axios Pro.

The Information:
Sources: Amazon is in talks to invest $10B+ in OpenAI at a $500B+ valuation, with OpenAI using AWS Trainium chips; Microsoft keeps rights to sell OpenAI models  —  Amazon is in talks to invest $10 billion or more in OpenAI, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

Dia Rekhi / The Economic Times:
Sources: Apple is in preliminary talks with India's CG Semi, which offers chip assembly and testing services, to assemble and package chips for the iPhone  —  Exploratory conversations have taken place between Murugappa Group-owned CG Semi, which is building an outsourced semiconductor assembly and test …

Kate Clark / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: New York-based data security startup Cyera is raising $400M led by Blackstone, valuing the company at $9B, up from $6B in June  —  Investment values company at $9 billion as investor interest in cybersecurity startups grows  —  Blackstone is leading a $400 million investment …

Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
California DMV says a California administrative law judge recently ruled Tesla engaged in deceptive marketing around its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems  —  A California administrative law judge recently ruled recently that Tesla's marketing around its “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” …

Xiaomi Mimo:
Xiaomi releases MiMo-V2-Flash, an open-weight MoE model with 309B total and 15B active parameters, saying it excels in reasoning, coding, and agentic scenarios  —  Today, we are releasing and open-sourcing MiMo-V2-Flash.  It is a powerful, efficient, and ultra-fast foundation language model …

Bloomberg:
Sources: Waymo is in discussions to raise more than $15B led by Alphabet at a valuation near $100B, and has achieved an annual revenue run rate above $350M  —  Waymo, Alphabet Inc.'s autonomous driving unit, is in discussions to raise more than $15 billion at a valuation near $100 billion …

Natalie Lung / Bloomberg:
Perplexity updates its iPad app to improve multitasking and focus on research tools, part of a push to add business customers, after launching Comet on Android  —  Perplexity AI Inc. is relaunching its iPad app with features that include improved multitasking and an emphasis on research tools …

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
X updates its ToS to claim rights to the “Twitter” trademark and countersues Operation Bluebird after the startup filed an application to trademark the term  —  Elon Musk's X is updating its Terms of Service to indicate it still lays claim to the “Twitter” trademark.

Yogita Khatri / The Block:
Hong Kong-based RedotPay, a fintech focused on stablecoin-based payments, raised a $107M Series B led by Goodwater Capital, bringing its total raised to ~$200M  —  Partner offers  —  Quick Take  — RedotPay, a stablecoin-based payments fintech, has raised $107 million in a Series B round …

Spencer Soper / Bloomberg:
Amazon partners with payments startup Slope to offer loans of up to $5M to merchants selling on its platform, using Amazon sales data for candidate selection  —  Amazon.com Inc. is partnering with a JPMorgan Chase & Co.-backed startup to provide financing for small online businesses …

Jessica Testa / New York Times:
Netflix announces a partnership with iHeartMedia to exclusively publish 15+ video podcasts from early 2026, including The Breakfast Club and My Favorite Murder  —  The streaming service now has about 30 video podcasts lined up for 2026, including the influential radio show “The Breakfast Club.”

Robert Hart / The Verge:
Google launches CC, an experimental AI assistant that delivers a personalized daily “Your Day Ahead” briefing email based on users' emails and calendar  —  Google's new AI agent delivers a morning briefing personalized using your emails and calendar. … Google wants you to start your day with AI.

New York Times:
The US threatens economic penalties against European companies like Spotify if the EU does not roll back regulations and lawsuits targeting US tech giants  —  U.S. officials excoriated the European Union for discriminating against American technology companies and threatened …

Marina Temkin / TechCrunch:
Leona Health, the maker of an AI copilot that integrates with doctors' WhatsApp accounts for patient chats in Latin America, raised a $14M seed led by a16z  —  Caroline Merin, who spent nearly a decade developing on-demand speed as the first Latin American General Manager for Uber Eats …

Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
OpenAI updates ChatGPT Images to generate images up to 4x faster and edit more precisely, and adds a new section in ChatGPT's app and website for images  —  OpenAI is rolling out an update to ChatGPT that's intended to generate images better and faster, the latest move by the artificial intelligence developer …

Financial Times:
OpenAI hires former UK chancellor George Osborne to lead OpenAI for Countries, the global expansion arm of its $500B Stargate data center initiative  —  Former UK chancellor to lead start-up's effort to spread ‘democratic’ AI across the world  —  OpenAI has hired former UK chancellor George Osborne …

Maxwell Zeff / Wired:
Source: OpenAI rolled back ChatGPT's model router, which sent some queries to reasoning models, for Free and $5/month Go tiers, as it was costly and hurt DAUs  —  As OpenAI scrambles to improve ChatGPT, it's ditching a feature in its free tier that contributed to last summer's user revolt.

Dan Primack / Axios:
Event software company Cvent acquires video content platform Goldcast; source: Cvent paid just under $300M to acquire Goldcast, which had raised around $38M  —  - The deal was announced Monday morning without a price tag. … - Goldcast was founded as a virtual events company at around …

Natalie Lung / Bloomberg:
DoorDash launches Zesty, a standalone AI-powered social app for users to find nearby restaurants, in public testing in San Francisco and New York  —  DoorDash Inc. is experimenting with a standalone artificial intelligence-powered app for users to find new restaurants, expanding its reach beyond its flagship food-delivery service.