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Jun 25, 2025
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Happy Wednesday! Polymarket is close to raising $200 million at a $1 billion-plus valuation led by Founders Fund. Waymo expands robotaxi service in Atlanta. Court rules that Anthropic's use of books in AI model training is fair use.
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Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, is finalizing a deal to raise more than $200 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion, The Information reported Tuesday. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, an existing investor, is leading the round. Founded in 2020 by CEO Shayne Coplan, Polymarket rose to prominence last year amid the US election. It is currently off-limits to U.S. users under a 2022 regulatory settlement. But the company intends to return to the U.S. in the future, Coplan said last year. While
Polymarket’s monthly volume declined after the presidential election, it was much higher in the first half of this year than it was in the same period a year earlier, according to data from The Block.
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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to the public in Atlanta, offering rides in a 65-square mile area exclusively through the Uber app. Waymo previously offered rides in the city, but just for people who signed up for early access. Atlanta is the second city where Waymo is available exclusively on the Uber app. Waymo also launched exclusively with Uber in Austin earlier this year. Waymo said last month it has completed 10 million paid rides since it began accepting paying customers. It expects to launch in Miami and Washington D.C. next year.
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Anthropic did not violate copyright law by training its large language models on copies of books because the training was protected under “fair use,” a federal district court in San Francisco ruled Tuesday. Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Johnson sued Anthropic last year, alleging that the AI company violated copyright laws by purchasing and downloading books, including their own, and using them to train its Claude models. The court ruled that Anthropic’s use of these books in training was “exceedingly transformative,” so it qualified as fair use. “To make anyone pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory, each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable,” the court wrote. However, it found that Anthropic—in addition to buying millions of print books—also “pirated” over 7 million books, including from popular sources such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, when it downloaded the books and stored them, which was not protected by fair use. Anthropic has argued that it only downloaded the books to develop its AI, which is fair use. This claim is set to go to trial.
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Cybersecurity company Snyk announced today that it has acquired Swiss AI security research startup Invariant Labs for an undisclosed price. Invariant Labs, founded in 2024, develops tools to build secure and reliable AI agents. It was founded by ETH Zurich researcher Marc Fisher and hasn’t disclosed any outside funding. The acquisition will expand Snyk Labs, a research lab that focuses on advancing AI security through a newly launched AI Trust Platform, said CEO Peter McKay in a press release. Snyk has long been considered an IPO candidate and had drafted IPO paperwork as of early 2024, The Information reported. It was last valued at $7.4 billion in December 2022 when it raised $196.5 million in a Series G round led by Qatar Investment Authority.
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New Zealand-based accounting software company Xero will pay $2.5 billion to acquire Melio, a New York startup that sells bill payments software to small and medium-sized businesses, as part of Xero’s U.S. expansion strategy, the companies announced Tuesday. Melio investors will receive a mix of cash and shares in the Australian-listed Xero as part of the deal, the companies said. The price slightly tops Melio’s last private valuation in October, when investors led by payments company Fiserv valued it at $2 billion. However, the acquisition is a drop from its peak in 2021, when investors led by General Catalyst and Thrive valued the startup at $4 billion. The company, which made the list of The Information’s most promising early startups in 2020, said it generated $153 million in revenue over the year through
March. Melio CEO Matan Bar, who co-founded the company in 2018, will lead the combined Xero business in the U.S. Xero CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy said her company would continue to invest in Melio’s payments product to accelerate the growth of both firms in the U.S. Other Melio backers include Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel, Aleph and American Express Ventures.
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Walmart is adding more small retail warehouses, Bloomberg reported, as it looks to speed up delivery times and better compete with e-commerce rivals like Amazon. The facilities will be so-called “dark stores” that are closed to the public, according to the report. One of the warehouses is currently open in Dallas, the report said, and another is planned for Bentonville, Ark., where Walmart is headquartered. The facilities will be stocked with some of the retail giant’s most popular items, and Walmart is weighing plans for more locations,
the report said. Walmart has previously experimented with a similar format, converting a retail store in Dallas into an online fulfillment center in 2021. Walmart’s e-commerce business is on track to turn profitable this year, executives have said, and the company has used its sprawling store network to speed up delivery times and offer in-store pickup for online orders. Walmart also previously announced plans to add small, automated warehouses onto some of its stores that stock a range of items from groceries to electronics and can fulfill online orders.
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