“Whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing." -- Bill Gates

Sorry (truly), Lakers fans. More takes from around the internet.

A falsified photograph of an explosion near the Pentagon spread widely on social media this morning, briefly sending US stocks lower in possibly the first instance of an AI-generated image moving the market. Bloomberg has more here.

The Chinese government last night barred companies that handle critical information from buying microchips made by Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology. The company’s chips, which are used for memory storage in all kinds of electronics, like phones and computers, were deemed to pose “relatively serious cybersecurity problems” by China’s internet watchdog after a review. The New York Times has more here.

Meta Platforms was just fined $1.3 billion by European Union regulators for sending user information to the U.S., a record privacy penalty for the bloc.The size of the fine underscores the increasing risks of running afoul of the European Union’s privacy rules as its enforcement tightens, notes the WSJ.

While the slowdown began in 2022, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in early March shook the venture industry and shined a brighter-than-ever light on the space. To go beyond the headlines, Juniper Square surveyed nearly 100 venture capital investors about their concerns, plans, and focus areas for the rest of the year. See what they had to say about the state of the industry. Download the State of Venture Capital: 2023 Benchmark Survey now.

Patient21, a four-year-old Berlin startup whose digital health platform encompasses online, digital case histories, check-ins, billing, and insurance, raised a $108.1 million Series C round consisting of both equity and debt. The equity part was led by Pitango, with PICO Venture Partners, Bertelsmann Investments, Artian, Target Global, and Piton Capital pitching in; while IPF Partners provided the debt. TechCrunch has more here.

Chalo, an Indian startup that is helping to digitize bus travel in India for both passengers and operators, raised a $45 million Series D round led by Avataar Ventures, with previous investors Lightrock India and WaterBridge Ventures also contributing. As part of the financing, Chalo secured an additional $12 million in debt from Trifecta and Stride Ventures. The company has raised a total of $119 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Firmbase, a two-year-old Tel Aviv startup that enables companies to create budgets, run financial forecasts, and analyze business data, raised a $12 million seed round led by S Capital, with Meron Capital also chipping in. TechCrunch has more here.

FlowX.AI, a four-year-old London startup that enables enterprises to port legacy and newer software into a single place to build and run applications and services based around them, raised a $35 million Series A round led by Dawn Capital, with previous investors PortfoLion, SeedBlink, and DayOne Capital also investing. The company has raised a total of $43.5 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Infinite Uptime, an eight-year-old Indian startup that supplies predictive maintenance information for industrial machines, raised an $18.85 million Series B3 round led by Tiger Global, with Mayfield, GSR Ventures, VenturEast, and THK also anteing up. The company has raised a total of $30.1 million. TechCrunch has more here.

CTVC, a three-year-old startup that produces a newsletter for investors interested in climate issues, raised a $1.75 million pre-seed round. Investors included John Doerr, Tom Steyer, and AccelR8. More here.

Jotelulu, a four-year-old Madrid startup that claims it can enable any IT company to sell private-labeled cloud services to small- to medium-sized businesses, raised a $4.3 million Series A round led by Adara Ventures and including G2A Investment Partners, Fundación Bankinter, and Big Sur Ventures. The company has raised a total of $5.5 million. More here.

Kiwi, a Puerto Rican startup that is dedicated to helping consumers build credit history and improve financial literacy, raised a $4.5 million seed round and $70 million in debt. Advent-Morro Equity Partners, Altio Capital, and Independent Capital provided the equity, while i80 Group supplied the debt. The company has raised a total of $83 million. More here.

Leadoptik, a 2.5-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based medical imaging company at work on a miniaturized imaging system for real-time imaging deep inside human lungs (the idea is to diagnose cancer much earlier), just raised $5 million in seed funding led by MetaVC Partners, with participation from SOSV, Sony Innovation Fund, TSVC, ENEA, Dropbox cofounder Arash Ferdowsi, BioWare cofounder Ray Muzyka and others. Axios has more here.

Onyx Private, a two-year-old Miami startup that aims to to provide private banking and investment services to high-earning millennials and Gen Zers, raised a $4.1 million. Investors included Village Global, Y Combinator, Global Founders Capital, One Way Ventures, 186 Ventures, and Olive Tree Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Sort, a San Francisco startup that helps web3 developers build smart contracts into their apps, raised a $3.5 million seed round co-led by Lemniscap and The General Partnership, with participation from Alliance DAO, Punk DAO, Orange DAO, Blizzard Fund, Parasol, and Red Rooster Ventures. CoinDesk has more here.

Strike Graph, a three-year-old Seattle startup that uses AI tools to test and evaluate the effectiveness of a company's security and privacy practices, raised a $7 million Series B from Bamcap, with participation from previous investors Madrona Venture Group and Information Venture Partners. The company has raised a total of $18.9 million. GeekWire has more here.

Twirl, a Swedish startup that is building a data platform to allow companies to easily port data from one system to another, raised a $2.6 million round, according to Axios. The lead investor was Creandum, while Cocoa Ventures took part. More here.

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Anthemis Group, a 13-year-old, London-based fintech-focused venture firm, is trying to raise $200 million for a third fund, according to an SEC filing flagged this morning by Axios. It has been in the market since last year and has so far secured commitments of just $36.4 million. The firm separately had to scrap plans to raise a SPAC late last month. TechCrunch has more here.

Daylight, a three-year-old start-up billing itself as a new kind of bank for the LGBTQ+ community, is shutting down, with operations expected to cease on June 30, according to co-founder and CEO Rob Curtis. Last month, New York Magazine wrote about a lawsuit filed by three former employees against the outfit that alleges Curtis misrepresented the company’s data and finances; other claims against the company include age and wage discrimination, whistleblower retaliation, and fraud. Also included in the lawsuit: a claim by one litigant that when he asked Curtis about the source of some figures in a document he sent to investors, including a projection that Daylight would process $500 million in transactions by the end of 2023, Curtis replied, “I made that shit up.” Daylight raised $20 million in funding from investors. Anthemis Group led its $15 million Series A in 2022. Other backers include Kapor Capital, Precursor Capital, Clocktower, Financial Venture Studio and Citi. TechCrunch has the scoop on the wind-down here.

SoftBank, which acquired the investment firm Fortress Investment Group in 2017 for a reported $3.3 billion in cash, just sold 90% of its equity stake to both Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala Investment Co., and Fortress management. Bloomberg reported the news earlier today. Fortress will continue to operate as an independent investment manager after the deal closes; it will own a 30% equity interest and a class of equity entitling it to appoint a majority of seats on the board. Mubadala will own 70% of Fortress's equity in Fortress; Mubadala is also a limited partner in SoftBank's original Vision Fund, having contributed at least $15 billion to the effort. That fund, unveiled in 2017 as the world's largest tech-focused investment vehicle, has since suffered breathtaking losses. Terms of this particular sale aren't being disclosed.

Activist investor TCS Capital Management has built a stake in Yelp and is calling on the service-recommendation site to explore strategic alternatives including a sale, according to the WSJ. The outlet notes that Yelp's shares, which closed today at $32.52, reached their high point of $100 back in 2014.

Cava, the Washington, D.C.-based fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant chain, has filed for an IPO, according to an SEC filing. Per Axios, the "frozen IPO market is continuing to crack as the restaurant industry sees a post-pandemic surge in sales." More here.

Jeff Bezos and girlfriend Lauren Sanchez are engaged, Page Six, reported this morning. The couple are in the South of France for the Cannes Film Festival, where they have been "hitting the star-studded party circuit while staying on his $500 million yacht with a mermaid resembling Sanchez adorning the prow." 

Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein discovered that Bill Gates had an affair with a Russian bridge player and later appeared to use his knowledge to threaten Gates, according to a weekend WSJ story. Gates reportedly met the woman around 2010. Several years later, Epstein paid for her to attend software coding school and several more years after that, emailed Gates and asked to be reimbursed for the course. (It was a very long con, apparently.)"The implication behind the message . . . was that Epstein could reveal the affair if Gates didn’t keep up an association between the two men," reports the outlet. More here.

Forty-five-year-old tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson -- who made a name for himself as the former head of the digital payments company Braintree --  has an exceedingly patient teenage son.

Meta has built AI models that can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages—a tenfold increase on what’s currently available.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever say the world will likely need a regulatory body for superintelligence. More here and here.

TikTok has been struggling to export its livestream shopping model outside its home country of China, reports the FT. Though live shopping, where users can buy products from sellers during a live broadcast, is a hugely popular format in Asia, it appears to be failing to resonate with western consumers.

Bill Gates believes the future top company in AI will likely have created a personal digital agent that can perform certain tasks for people. “Whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you’ll never go to Amazon again,” he reportedly said at an AI event in San Francisco today.

Gen Z loves Snap’s messaging app. Will they stick with it when they’re 30?

Hyundai’s PR department can't return your call right now; they're on a veranda somewhere, smoking cigars.

An afternoon with me, the man in that REI ad.

A look at Being Mary Tyler Moore.

The best watches from the fourth season of "Succession" from Kendall’s Richard Mille to Tom's Audemars Piguet.

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