Alibaba replaces CEO, US VCs up investments in defense tech

Daniel Zhang will be replaced as Alibaba CEO by Eddie Wu effective Sept 10, ending an eight-year run for Zhang, who will remain head of the company’s cloud business; Joe Tsai will take over the former CEO's role as board chairman - Link

PitchBook data: US VCs are investing more in defense tech startups; the first five months of 2023 saw US VCs invest ~$17B in over 200 defense deals; defense tech investments more than doubled between 2019 and 2022, from ~$16B to ~$33B - Link

Time sources: OpenAI successfully lobbied for looser regulations against it in the EU's AI Act, arguing that their models, like GPT-3 and Dall-E 2, should not be considered "high-risk," making them less subject to oversight and transparency - Link

Rose Rocket, a startup building a SaaS platform for managing trucking and logistics companies, raised a $38M Series B led by Scale Venture Partners; the company has between 1K and 1.5K clients - Link

Crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world, and Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com/twist.

First, EyeRate CEO Ray Weisberg joins Jason to break down his startup's business model (4:55), category creation and framing (13:32), how they plan on scaling from $10M to $100M (22:51), and more. Then, Steve Jurvetson gives a presentation on discovering and identifying disruptive new technologies. (36:34) - Link

Steve's talk was recorded live at LAUNCH Angel Summit.

Bloomberg sources: Spotify is launching a higher priced tier, called "Supremium" internally, which offers higher fidelity audio and expanded access to audiobooks; the new tier will first launch outside of the US, starting later this year - Link

FT sources: EU antitrust regulators plan to launch an investigation into Adobe's $20B acquisition of Figma this year - Link

At SoftBank's annual shareholder meeting, Masayoshi Son said short-term losses wouldn't deter the company and that it has positioned itself to "rule the world in the end" due to its AI investments; these were Son's first public comments in seven months - Link

Bloomberg sources: Following Apple's lead, Google has been scouting suppliers in India to assemble its Pixel smartphones, intending to move ops outside of China - Link

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