Google’s Ad Free Rival | Exchange Attacks’ First Named Target | Saving Alaska's Cruise Season

Plus: How This Unsung Black Entrepreneur Changed The Food Industry Forever—And Made A Lot Of Dough

Good morning.

A former Google executive is betting a subscription service-powered search engine can compete against the ad and tracking model of the Mountain View giant. We’re also looking into the first named victim of massive cyber attacks against Microsoft Exchange and at two senators’ plan to bypass Canada’s restrictions and save the Alaskan cruise season.

In The News Today

Shares of electric carmaker Tesla–last year’s best-performing S&P 500 stock—plunged to their lowest level in three months on Monday.

GameStop chose billionaire investor Ryan Cohen to head a committee charged with accelerating the company's transformation as its shares keep rallying.

Top Take-Aways

Cyber attacks against vulnerable Microsoft Exchange servers were thought to have compromised 'hundreds of thousands' of servers, both in the U.S. and abroad. One confirmed target is the EU's banking regulator, the European Banking Authority.

A new study, yet to be peer reviewed, indicates patients who received a second dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine show strong antibody protection against coronavirus variants, but that response was lower against the South African variant of the virus.

One of Google's most important former executives has raised nearly $80 million to create a rival to the Mountain View search engine, one without data tracking and without ads. The revenue will be generated via a subscription model instead.

The husband-and-wife founding duo of AgentSync have raised a $25 million Series A round that values their startup, which tracks insurance broker licensing data for agencies and carriers, at $220 million, up 10x from its valuation just eight months ago. 

Food ID’s rapid-result tests can detect antibiotics in animals and a range of other adulterants, like heavy metals in seafood. The startup has raised $12 million in a Series B round that, it says, will help improve the safety and transparency of the U.S. meat supply.

Andy Kuper launched LeapFrog Investments in 2007 and was one of the first to adopt the term “profits with purpose.” LeapFrog has now landed $500 million from a sovereign wealth fund for impact investments, one of the largest commitments ever in the sector.

Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan are trying to save the Alaskan cruise season with a bill that would allow cruise ships to sail to Alaska without requiring a stop in Canada, as U.S. law would normally require.

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Melinda Gates has announced the ten finalists in the Equality Can’t Wait Challenge, which will award $40 million in grants to fund the most transformative ideas that help expand women’s power and influence in the U.S. by 2030. This is the first competition putting meaningful resources of this scale toward the often overlooked area of gender equality. 

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