TechCrunch Newsletters - Jio Platforms now valued at over $100B

Bank of America bestowed a new title on Jio Platforms — an over $100 billion valuation. If you’re into names, that makes Mukesh Ambani’s India-based telecoms and digital conglomerate a “centicorn.” This comes as parent company Reliance Industries plans to eventually take Jio public, Manish writes. Here’s more.

Next, Natasha has your look at Indian wearable startup Ultrahuman’s first foray into the smart home arena. Announced at CES 2024, this new connected hardware device called Ultrahuman Home is designed to monitor the “health” of your home. For example, it will monitor levels of natural and artificial light, air pollution, noise, humidity and smoke in the room where it’s installed. Get more specs and pricing.

Meanwhile, Romain reports that there isn’t much unity at Unity. The maker of a video game engine is laying off another 1,800 employees as it “restructures and refocuses on its core business, and to position itself for long-term and profitable growth.” This is the company’s fourth round of layoffs in a year, and the public markets didn’t much care for the move. Get the scoop.

And speaking of CES 2024, the event is going strong today in Las Vegas. We continue to bring you a roundup of everything announced so far in case you don’t have time to tune in. Some of the big stories you’ll see include:

Can a striking design set rabbit’s r1 pocket AI apart from a gaggle of virtual assistants?

Honda bets its electric future on ‘thin, light’ 0 series EVs at CES 2024

Amazon’s Alexa gets new generative AI-powered experiences

More top reads

Simpler website design is closer than you think: Developers make everything complicated, right? Well Deco.cx, a Brazilian startup, doesn’t like that approach. So it created an open source, front-end development platform for growing e-commerce brands that want to create high-performance digital experiences. Read more.

Whoops: Someone over at Threads got a bit too excited and executed some new features related to viewing the latest search results. It’s now clawed that back. Sorry, you’ll have to wait a little longer.

There’s more to the story: Carta’s decision yesterday to exit the secondary shares trading market got Alex and Anna wondering if Carta’s growth story is now being overshadowed by its stock trading snafu. You be the judge. (TC+)

More layoffs: Duolingo is blaming the effect of using AI in its business for the reason it made the decision to cut 10% of its contractor workforce. Get the scoop.

Step on it: In other CES 2024 news, VinFast, a Vietnamese electric vehicle startup, unveiled the concept for an electric pickup truck. The newest addition is part of a long list of things VinFast hopes to build in the coming years. Find out more.

Spies among us: Hackers around the world are using artificial intelligence to craft their cyberattacks, but that same technology is helping U.S. spies track them down. See how.

A small victory for spot bitcoin ETFs?: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is close to approving spot bitcoin ETFs, and Valkyrie’s co-founder already has a plan for when that happens. Learn what that is. (TC+)

We can’t find that location: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission banned X-Mode from selling phone location data and ordered the firm to delete whatever collected data it had. Here’s why.

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On the pods

On today’s episode of Found, Dom and Becca talk to Markus Witte, co-founder of Babbel, a language learning app that has been operating since 2007. Babbel has become one of the most prominent language-learning apps but their first product was essentially just a vocab game, and they quickly discovered that a multimodal way of learning will always be more effective. Markus also talked about why he decided to step down as CEO and take on the role of chairman and how all four co-founders have worked together to stick to the original mission of Babbel even after nearly 20 years. Listen here.

• Chief Technology Officer / Cofounder at truckmentum.com (Atlanta, GA, USA)
• IT Technology Analyst II at Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (Middletown, PA, United States)
• IT Project Lead at Valley Water (San Jose, CA, USA)
• Founding Team - Senior Full Stack Developer at Mindworks (San Francisco, CA, USA)
• Senior Software Engineer at Zulu Airline Systems, Inc. (Atlanta, GA, USA)

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