Tech Brew Ride Home - Acqui-Investing

Starting point is 00:00:04 Welcome to the TechBoo ride home for Monday, June 22nd, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, metapored $900 million into an Indian startup to acquire the founder to run WhatsApp. Google lost Nobel winner John Jumper to Anthropic, Gettysword on an open-a-eye deal. J.D.com warned robots would replace its couriers and the pivot from toilets to chips. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. I'm getting to the age where I might pull a muscle just by thinking about stretching. That's why Blueprints, longevity mix is. has been such a game changer. Blueprint was started by Brian Johnson, more popularly known as the

Starting point is 00:00:44 don't die guy. His latest endeavor in living longer and aging better led him to create blueprint. With just one scoop, you'll get support for energy, cognitive performance, mood, focused, sleep, cellular resilience, and healthy aging. Science-backed, precision-dosed, and no BS. For a limited time only, our listeners get 20% off plus free shipping at blueprint.bri-a-n-jonson.com. using code TBRH at checkout. That's code TBRH at Blueprint.com for 20% off. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Some bold name musical chairs for you today. META is investing $900 million into Indian fintech startup cred for around a 20% stake and plans to appoint cred founder Kunal Shah as the leader of WhatsApp, replacing Will Kathkart. So this is basically an aqua hire, or I guess an Investa hire, quoting Bloomberg.

Starting point is 00:01:47 Shah will replace the current head of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart, who has been running the popular messaging service for roughly seven years. Cathcart, who saw WhatsApp's user base more than double in size during his tenure, is staying at Meta, but will step into a new role using artificial intelligence tools to develop consumer apps and products. A meta spokesperson declined to share details about Cathcart's next project. The investment represents a new chapter for WhatsApp, which is one of the world's largest messaging platforms. The app has grown considerably in recent years, surpassing

Starting point is 00:02:15 three billion monthly users in 2025, though it's still early in developing several new business lines, including advertising and subscriptions. Building out those revenue streams, as well as integrating AI agents into WhatsApp, will now fall to Shah, CRED's 47-year-old founder. Shaw was recruited by Meta's chief product officer Chris Cox, who was seeking an entrepreneur from a country where WhatsApp already has a strong foothold. Cox called Shaw one of India's most respected entrepreneurs, a serious thinker, and a deeply good person, according to a statement shared by a Meta spokesperson. Shaw currently lives in Bangalore, but will relocate to the Bay Area to work out of Mehta's Melo Park, California headquarters. The spokesperson added,

Starting point is 00:02:56 meta has employed this investment recruitment strategy before to fill out key leadership roles within the company. Last year, the company invested over $14 billion into scale AI and recruited its founder, Alexander Wang, to take over Meta's newly created AI lab. Founded in 2018, offers consumers' perks and rewards tied to their credit card repayments. Its app, which has 17 million monthly users, can also analyze and track spending, according to its website. The company raised $75 million last year in a Series G funding round led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, GIC, according to IBS Intelligence. As part of its investment, META will provide both primary and secondary capital according to the press release, meaning it will purchase shares from

Starting point is 00:03:39 some of CRED's existing investors. Shaw will join Meta full-time, stepping away from CRED, though he will remain a shareholder. Mitten Sampat, an executive leading company strategy, will take over as interim CEO while the board reviews CRED's leadership structure with an eye toward an eventual IPO, the press release said, end quote. Now, quoting Goku Rajuran on X, quote, the meta's hiring of Kunal to run WhatsApp is almost unprecedented in there, bringing a leader from outside Silicon Valley to run a global product. And this wasn't a straightforward hire either. Meta is paying $1 billion for the privilege of hiring him. The only comparable I can think of among tech companies is Apple hiring Angela Arant's CEO of Burberry to run retail. Other than that,

Starting point is 00:04:26 hire every product slash business leadership role at the best tech companies has been filled from people in the valley, if not the U.S. This is a great win for WhatsApp users who will benefit from a leader who has a native and deep understanding of and facility with the product. Meta, who gets one of the best global consumer product thinkers and builders for their crown jewel product, the Indian slash global product talent ecosystem, which will be inspired by seeing that you don't need to be in Silicon Valley to lead a global product, that forward-thinking tech AI companies will stretch to get the best leaders from anywhere in the world, end quote. And Google has lost another one. John Jumper, who won the Nobel Prize for Protein Structure

Starting point is 00:05:12 prediction says he is leaving Google DeepMind after nearly nine years to join Anthropic. Lots of people are saying that the recent departures of talent from Google might put strain on Gemini's efforts to compete with ChatGPT and Claude, quoting Bloomberg. Employees and executives at DeepMind have also raised concerns in recent months that the company doesn't have a clear solution for businesses seeking AI coding tools, which have become a key focus of Anthropic and Open AI and has driven both companies' momentum in recent months. Jumper won the Chemistry Nobel alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hesabas for creating an AI model that can predict the structure of proteins called AlphaFold. Thanks, John, for an extraordinary partnership

Starting point is 00:05:54 and wonderful collaboration over the past nine years. Hesabas wrote on X. What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine, lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity. Jumper is leaving DeepMind after one of Google's most prominent researchers, Noam Shazir, also left for OpenAI. Shazir co-authored a seminal paper that helped catalyze the AI boom. His departure from Google marked a big win for OpenAI as it competes with Anthropic to develop ever more sophisticated models before their initial public offerings, end quote. Getty, also known as Getty Images, has signed a licensing deal with OpenAI, letting its image library appear in ChatGPT's search and discovery features. Getty's stock,

Starting point is 00:06:45 was up 115% at the time of this writing, quoting Bloomberg. On Sunday, Gettys said in a statement that images from its library were appear in the search and discovery features of chat GPT, making a key reversal for the firm. The companies did not share financial terms or disclose any details over whether Gettys images would be used to train future OpenAI models. The Gettys stock had fallen about 55% this year to close at 61 cents on Friday. The stock photo company's shares have plunged over fears that OpenAI and other artificial intelligence developers will poach its business. AI can produce realistic images, and the companies behind the tools have repeatedly clashed with photographers and creators whose work helped train their technology.

Starting point is 00:07:26 Initially, Getty resisted the technology. It tried developing its own AI image generator and had sued stability AI, a developer of another popular tool. OpenAI has cut a number of licensing deals with news publishers and media firms as the chat GPT creator expands into areas like video creation and advertising. In May, Getty reported first quarter sales that missed expectations. The company is still waiting for approval to buy rival shutterstock in a $3.7 billion deal, end quote. JD.com founder Richard Liu says robots will replace the company's 700,000 delivery workers, quote, sooner or later, and that JD will help retrain them in robot maintenance. Quoting the FT, the head of one of China's biggest e-commerce groups has warned that it's

Starting point is 00:08:17 700,000 delivery workers will be replaced by robots sooner or later, underlining the threat from rapid automation to the country's already strained employment market. Richard Liu, founder and chair of JD.com, said the company had signed contracts with about 120 schools to retrain its army of couriers for new work such as repairing and maintaining robots. In the future when robots are delivering parcels sooner or later, there will be a day when couriers are basically no longer needed, Leo told the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, CEO Forum in Beijing on Sunday. It will definitely be robots delivering parcels, but I really do not want over our 700,000 brothers to go without meals, without jobs. Liu did not forecast when robot

Starting point is 00:09:00 deliveries would become widespread in China. However, a number of pilot projects are underway, including airport food delivery robots that take meals to passengers at gates and others that can ride commuter trains to restock convenience stores Chinese media have reported. The comments tap into growing concern among policymakers that China's rapid adoption of robots is threatening the jobs of the economy's most vulnerable workers. The number of gig workers in China, temporary employees doing mostly blue-collar jobs such as factory work, ride-hailing drivers, or deliveries will reach 320 million this year compared with 200 million five years ago, according to the China New Employment Forum's Research Center. Gig workers make up about 40% of all urban employment

Starting point is 00:09:42 in China. The threat to blue-collar jobs from robots, and to white-collar positions from AI comes as the government reported youth unemployment at 16.3% in April. Liu said robot repair jobs would become common, quote, because robots are machinery, they will always at some point have faults. He said technology should, quote, make human life become better and work more interesting rather than take away human beings right to work. JD.com is one of China's largest online retailers competing with Chinese groups, Alibaba and Maitwan, and operates the Joy Buy platform in the UK, France, Germany, and other European countries. It listed on NASDAQ in 2014 and has a secondary listing in Hong Kong, end quote. When inspiration strikes, you're usually not sitting at your desk

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Starting point is 00:11:20 customers don't think in channels and support teams shouldn't either. That's why Twilio helps businesses unify voice messaging chat and other channels into one continuous conversation so customers can move from AI self-service to a human agent without repeating themselves 15 times. Twilio combines conversational AI contextual customer data and omni-channel communications to help teams automate routine support, route complex issues to the right agent, and give every agent the context they need to resolve issues faster. Businesses can turn AI investments into real CX outcomes by connecting AI to customer conversations, memory, and action. TILIO's AI self-service agents can handle common requests like order status, billing questions, account updates, and authentication, while seamlessly escalating more complex issues to human agents with full context intact. Learn more at Twilio.com slash TB2.

Starting point is 00:12:16 That's twilio.com slash TB2. If you can pivot your shoe company to AI, I guess you can do the same with your toilet company. Toto, Japan's largest toilet manufacturer, says it plans to invest $495 million by 2030 to expand its semiconductor materials unit, targeting R&D for next-gen-gen-one-chip chip production. Quoting Tech in Asia. The move expands a business toto has been in since the 1980s, making electrostatic chunks ceramic aerosol deposition films and other advanced ceramics for chipmaking equipment. Electrostatic chunks hold silicon wafers in place with electrostatic force during chipmaking steps such as lithography and etching.

Starting point is 00:13:03 Ceramic films are used in equipment that needs durability, heat resistance, and specific electrical properties. The one nanometer target is a longer-term goal rather than a current mass production milestone. The source said the most advanced mass-produced process today is TSMC's two nanometer. CTO Riosuki Hayashi said semiconductor-related capital expenditure is expected to account for more than half of Toto's total spending in the coming years. He also said profits from Toto's newer semiconductor division have surpassed those of its bathroom equipment business. Following the announcement, Toto shares rose more than 10% on June 22nd, end quote. Well, you knew someone would have to come out with these eventually, quoting the times.

Starting point is 00:13:52 Humanizers are apps that rewrite AI-produced text to make it sound less robotic, formulaic, and trite. Autotypers slowly drip words and sentences into documents making it appear as if papers were typed at a human pace when, in fact, they were produced by AI. They even fabricate typos, deletions, and revisions. Both tools can help students evade software designed to detect AI. Colleges and K-12 schools are trying to keep up with AI detection becoming a. significant expense. But educators attempting to restrict the technology worried about students failing to develop basic skills are often lagging in what tech industry leaders are calling a detection arms race. In some cases, the very same companies selling detection tools are also making apps that allow students to cheat, including by writing papers for them or rephrasing

Starting point is 00:14:42 text written by others. The apps promised to help them avoid accusations of misconduct by scanning their work before they submit it, allowing them to rewrite passages identified as AI. Even honest students are often willing to fork over $10 to $20 per month for premium tools, since AI detectors sometimes flag legitimate work. In one TikTok video, Carter Smith, a young tech influencer known as Carter PCs, gleefully shows viewers how an autotyping and humanizing app called Grubby AI can make it seem like a person naturally wrote an essay that was, in fact, produced by ChatGPT. Mr. Smith has an enormous following of 6.5 million TikTok users.

Starting point is 00:15:20 The video is not labeled an ad, though Mr. Smith had previously identified himself as a paid partner of Grubby AI. The app Mr. Smith and the talent agency that represents him, RACUGO Media, did not respond to interview requests. Autotypers are a response to the fact that many teachers and professors now check a document's version history for signs of AI use. If a thousand words suddenly appeared in a Word or Google document at 11.59 p.m., it could mean the student pasted in text produced by a chatbot. Grubby AI and its many competitors are finding ways around those systems. Drip Rider's website says the app provides believable typos and fixes, along with background autotyping, so your essay keeps working when you step away. Dui AI, an app that

Starting point is 00:16:04 describes itself as the number one autotyper for Google Docs, tells customers that when they're too tired or busy to focus or out with friends, the document looks like you wrote it, end quote. And back to the geopolitical beat for all of this, a speculative scenario titled Europe. 20301 is projecting economic and political instability in the EU if the EU fails to keep pace with the U.S. and China in the AI race. Quoting the Guardian, in the heady week of G7 talks that followed, this scenario has gone viral feeding a feverish discussion of the urgency for EU tech sovereignty. It has been read by members of the European Parliament and say it's all. authors was brought up in track 1.5 discussions between British and German officials earlier this week. It lays out like this. The Americans spend huge sums on a massive AI building program.

Starting point is 00:17:03 The scenario highlights a real-life $100 billion deal between Open AI and Nvidia, the $300 billion agreement between Open AI and Oracle, and bulldozers breaking Earth in Texas for an AI data center. Europeans, meanwhile, in this scenario, put forward a tepid investment package and ignore advisors, please for a full regulatory cart blanche for data center providers. In a matter of years, America monopolizes 70% of the world's compute the semiconductor chips that fill the data centers that power AI models. Europe's economy is meanwhile gasping for air, mostly because its companies have not adopted AI. As AI-powered cyber attacks shred European firms and unemployment surges, EU officials scramble to parlay their one last bargaining chip, the Dutch lithography firm,

Starting point is 00:17:47 ASML, which is vital to the production of AI semiconductors into concessions from Beijing or Washington. But it's too late. The U.S. deploys powerful frontier AI software and learns the deepest fears of AI officials and also which of them are having affairs. The authors of Europe 2031 think that the solution to all of this is data centers. Europe needs to build more, faster, and ideally in AI zones where matters such as power and planning can be streamlined and deregulated. Brussels politicians who read the piece may take away a simpler message. The scenario has crystallized a conversation about the need for Europe to have technological sovereignty. This scenario, Europe 2031, I believe that some of the parts they mentioned can happen,

Starting point is 00:18:30 says Nicholas Cesaris, a member of the European Parliament from Spain, but I think they are increasing a bit the alarms in order to call our attention. The U.S. cutting off Europe's access to fable, he says, means that the EU needs to ask ask itself harder questions about who is building its AI infrastructure and who will benefit from it. What is the added value of having open AI or anthropic data centers in Europe? He says, we are buying a narrative that we need a lot of data centers not to lose the race for AI. But this is crazy. We are paving the way for infrastructure that they will use and sometimes not allow us the possibility of using it, end quote.

Starting point is 00:19:14 Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Acqui-Investing

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