Nvidia smashes Q1 earnings

Good morning,

Here are the most important things you need to know for this week in tech…

Top 5 hits

• Nvidia Q1 earnings (its shares soar past $1000 for first time on AI-driven sales surge):

  • Total revenue: $26B (+262% YoY)

  • GAAP Net income: $14.88B (+628% YoY)

  • Non-GAAP Net income: $15.23B (+462% YoY)

  • Next quarter revenue guidance: $28B

• Meta assembles a tech executives group to advise on AI products. Members include Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO), Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO), Tobi Lütke (Shopify CEO), and Charlie Songhurst (former Microsoft executive).

• The SEC approves rule change to allow the creation of ether ETFs. This comes 6 months after the SEC approved bitcoin ETFs.

• The US Department of Justice and 30 state attorneys filed a lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment (owner of Ticketmaster) for alleged monopolistic practices.

• Microsoft had its annual Build conference, announcing expansions of its Copilot with autonomous agents and adds AI to your Windows clipboard.

This week’s videos

Other news

• Meta and Google are pitching AI to Hollywood. They’ve met with major Hollywood studios to license content for their AI video generation platforms.

• OpenAI reportedly didn’t intend to copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for its ai chatbot ‘Sky’.

• OpenAI signs a multi-year agreement (worth more than $250M over 5 years) with News Corp to allow it to use content from News Corp’s publications like The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and New York Post.

• Linktree, the link-in-bio startup, reaches 50M sign-ups, a significant jump from 2.7M it had in 2019.

• Amazon pilots a new program where Amazon drivers will pick up returns from customers’ houses and bring them to its facilities for processing.

• SpaceX demos cellular Starlink tech powering video calls between phones.

• TikTok plans significant layoffs of Operations and Marketing employees. This will affect a large percentage of the roughly 1,000 people working on these teams.

• Anthropic hires Krishna Rao, a former executive at Airbnb and Fanatics, as its first CFO as it competes with OpenAI and Google.

• Zoom reports Q1 earnings:

  • Total revenue: $1.141B (+3% YoY)

  • GAAP Net income: $216.3M

  • Non-GAAP Net income: $426.3M

  • Next quarter revenue guidance: $1.145B–$1.15B

  • Highlights:

    • Reached 90 contact center accounts with over $100K ARR

    • Amassed 5 Zoom phone customers with over 100K seats

    • Surpassed 700K customer accounts enabling Zoom AI companion.

• Microsoft unveils Copilot+ PCs—the fastest, most secure Windows PCs ever built.

• Elon Musk’s Neuralink gets FDA approval to implant its brain chip in a second person.

• Blue Origin successfully launches its first crewed mission since 2022.

• Snap CEO Evan Spiegel shifts focus to AI after reviving ad business

• Expedia ousts CTO (Rathi Murthy) and Senior Engineering leader (Sreenivas Rachamadugu) for policy violations.

• Microsoft plans to release the next Call of Duty on Game Pass, its game subscription service.

Deal flow

• Humane, the creator of the $700 AI Pin, is seeking a buyer. It’s priced itself between $750M and $1B. For context: it has raised $230M to date.

• AI ‘agent’ startup Adept held talks in recent months about a possible sale or strategic partnership with large tech companies—one of which was Meta. It’s valued at over $1B and is under pressure due to substantial costs and intensified competition.

• Snowflake will not ultimately acquire AI startup Reka AI. The deal was supposedly worth more than $1B.

• Groq, an Nvidia rival that develops specialized server chips and AI software, (different than Elon Musk’s Grok) enlists Morgan Stanley to help with raising $300M.

• Farcaster, a decentralized social network that allows users to move their data freely between different apps, raised $150M at a $1B valuation.

• Scale AI raises a $1B Series F round led by existing investor Accel, nearly doubling its valuation to $13.8B.

• Anduril, a military defense startup founded by Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, is seeking $1.5B at a $12.5B valuation.

• Suno, an AI music generator startup, raised $125M in new funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, at a $500M valuation.

• Peloton launches a $1B leveraged loan to refinance debt and a $275M sale of convertible senior notes.

• Neros, an autonomous drone startup, raised a $10.9M seed round from Sequoia Capital.

• Overland AI, an autonomous ground vehicle tech company for the defense sector, raised a $10M seed round.

• Teal, an accounting infrastructure for vertical SaaS businesses, raised an $8M seed round.

• Bumble, the popular dating app maker, has acquired Geneva, a platform for forming groups and clubs, for an undisclosed amount. Bumble aims to expand further into friendships with this acquisition.

• Kudos, an AI-powered smart wallet service, raises a $10.2M Series A round.

• CoreWeave, an AI infrastructure startup, raises $7.5B in debt to pay for servers packed with GPUs and networking equipment. This follows a $1.1B funding round the startup announced 2 weeks ago.

Interesting gems

• Spotify created its own variable font called Spotify Mix. It’s meant to be as diverse and dynamic as the content on its platform.

• Y Combinator’s Garry Tan reveals his ‘secret sauce’ for getting into the prestigious startup accelerator.

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That’s it for this week. Let me know what you think!

🌜 Loryn from Dark Mode Digest