Samsung Unpacked’s “one more thing” was a bit of a weird one. After the presentation ended, the company rolled a brief pre-packaged video of the Galaxy Edge — not to be confused with the “Star Wars” theme park of the same name.

Though limited, the reveal was confirmation of earlier rumors that the hardware giant is working on an extra-thin version of its new S25 flagship. The Galaxy S25 Edge is, presumably, another tier for the line, slotting in alongside the S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra.

Key details, including pricing, availability, and actual thickness were not revealed, though the company did showcase what appeared to be dummy models at Wednesday’s event. Early rumors pointed to a 6.4 mm thickness, a considerable reduction from the base Galaxy S25’s 7.2 mm.

Samsung clearly wanted to avoid taking too much wind out of the Galaxy S25’s sails during the event, so it opted instead for a more cryptic reveal. Even so, the mere appearance of the device at Unpacked may be enough to keep early adopters from preordering the S25 ahead of its February 7 release.

After all, those are precisely the folks who get excited by things like a 0.8 mm profile reduction.

• GMKTec joins HP with a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 workstation mini PC
• The Max+ 395 is currently the world’s most powerful APU and could be a nuisance to Nvidia’s DIGITS GB10
• Expect products based on the 395 to roll out later in Q2 2025 after Chinese New Year

GMK, an emerging Chinese brand in the mini PC market, has announced (originally in Chinese) the upcoming launch of a new product powered by the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395.

The company claims this will be the world’s first mini PC featuring the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip. It also plans to offer versions with non-Plus Ryzen AI Max APUs.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was literally chuckling when talking to CNBC from Davos about the new rift in Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI. As part of OpenAI’s plans to team up with SoftBank and Oracle on a $500 billion data center project called Stargate, Microsoft is no longer the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI.

“I think it’s extremely important that OpenAI gets to other platforms quickly because Microsoft is building their own AI and I don’t think Microsoft will use OpenAI in the future. They’ll have their own frontier models,” Benioff predicted, laughing. “That’s why they hired Mustafa Suleyman. And Mustafa Suleyman and Sam Altman are not best friends.”

Benioff said their dislike was visible at the year-ago Davos show, “where Sam and Mustafa were on panels together and not getting along.”

The end of Microsoft exclusively hosting OpenAI was destined to happen. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 — years before OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of 2022. Now, OpenAI appears bound for its own tech giant status, perhaps one day to rival Microsoft. OpenAI has also blamed a lack of available compute for product delays, indicating it needs more data center capacity than Microsoft can (or perhaps wants to) provide. And OpenAI’s exclusive agreement with Microsoft was to end whenever OpenAI achieved what they both agreed was AGI. To hear Sam Altman tell it, AGI is possible now. 

Some reports indicate tension between the two companies has been building since at least mid-2023, after OpenAI released its own, competing enterprise product. After Altman was fired and reinstated as OpenAI CEO in late 2023, employees from both companies told Business Insider they really don’t like working together. OpenAI’s folks tended to look down on those at Microsoft, some employees said.

Just a few months later, in early 2024, Nadella thumbed his nose back by hiring DeepMind and Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead Microsoft AI. (Microsoft has not yet responded to our request for comment.)

While Benioff may hope that Microsoft will fully abandon OpenAI in the future, that could be wishful thinking, although Microsoft is reportedly working on its own LLM called MAI-1. Still, when Microsoft announced earlier this month a new AI group led by Jay Parikh that will build AI agents and apps, the post didn’t even mention OpenAI.

This latest fissure in the partnership is good news for Benioff. Salesforce also uses OpenAI’s enterprise models, and is an investor in OpenAI rival Anthropic.

Even so, Benioff’s observations about Suleyman aren’t completely off. Suleyman has been known to dismiss Altman’s vision especially around AGI, and admitted last month in an interview with The Verge that the OpenAI partnership has “little tensions here and there.”

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Amid the Cold War, the possibility of a nuclear attack was deeply feared, yet at the same time, weirdly unimaginable. The stark terror of nuclear disaster persisted for years, highlighted in the 1984 BBC drama film “Threads”.

The film explored the hypothetical event of a nuclear bomb being dropped on a British city, and the societal breakdown that followed. People were horrified by the film, and it showcased everyone’s deepest and darkest fears around nuclear fallout.

After a turbulent few years for companies operating in the real estate market, Divvy Homes announced Wednesday that it is getting acquired by a division of Brookfield Properties for “a total consideration” of about $1 billion.

The outcome may not be the fire sale as previously described in other reports, although it is less than the $2.3 billion that Divvy was last publicly valued at in 2021. The deal is expected to close in mid-February. (Reporter’s note: After this story was published, TechCrunch learned that some Divvy shareholders may not receive proceeds from the acquisition, according to a letter from CEO and co-founder Adena Hefets that was viewed by TechCrunch.)

Divvy operated a rent-to-own model in which it worked with renters who wanted to become homeowners by buying the home they wanted and renting it back to them for three years while they built “the savings needed to own it themselves,” it said.

The company ran into some hiccups when mortgage interest rates began to surge in 2022, conducting three known rounds of layoffs in a year’s time.

Founded in 2016, the once-buzzy startup had raised more than $700 million in debt and equity from well-known investors such as Tiger Global Management, GGV Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), among others. Divvy’s last known funding occurred in August 2021 — a $200 million Series D funding led by Tiger Global Management and Caffeinated Capital. The Series D round was announced just six months after a $110 million Series C. 

Maymont Homes, the Brookfield unit that is buying Divvy, operates in over 40 markets across the United States. In a written statement, Divvy said it has “created 2,000 homeowners to date.”  

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• The team behind Nord Security, Tesonet, Hostinger, Oxylabs launches AI orchestration platform
• The orchestration platform aims to resolve a major pain point, deploying AI LLMs at scale seamlessly
• $8 million raised to help enterprises handle the mounting amount of LLMs, with more than 200 now supported

As artificial intelligence tools rapidly evolve, businesses face growing challenges in managing AI models, balancing costs, and ensuring reliable performance.

Nexos.ai, a new unified AI orchestration platform from the founders of business VPN vendor Nord is designed to help enterprises deploy AI at scale by addressing these challenges; providing access to over 200 AI models to simplify their integration into enterprise

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An Indian tribunal on Thursday suspended restrictions that would have barred WhatsApp from sharing user data with its parent company Meta, delivering a significant victory for Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire in its largest market by users.

The ruling by the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal temporarily lifts a five-year ban imposed by India’s antitrust regulator, which had accused WhatsApp of abusing its market dominance through its 2021 privacy policy.

India is the largest market for Meta and WhatsApp. More than 700 million users in India use WhatsApp each month, according to insights from Sensor Tower.

In November, the Competition Commission of India determined that WhatsApp’s “take-it-or-leave-it” privacy update constituted an abuse of Meta’s dominant position by forcing users to accept expanded data collection without an opt-out option.

At the time, the watchdog found Meta was dominant in two key markets in India: a so-called “over-the-top” messaging apps through smartphones, and online display advertising.

While staying the ban on Thursday, the tribunal ordered Meta to deposit about $12.35 million — half of a larger penalty — within two weeks. The court will next hear the case on March 17.

The tribunal, led by Justice Ashok Bhushan, expressed concern that the five-year ban could threaten WhatsApp’s business model, which provides the messaging service free to users.

Meta’s lawyers argued that India’s forthcoming digital privacy law, expected to go into effect later this year, should govern such matters rather than competition rules.

“We welcome the NCLAT’s decision to grant a partial stay on the Competition Commission of India’s (CCI) order. While we will evaluate next steps, our focus remains on finding a path forward that supports millions of businesses that depend on our platform for growth and innovation as well as providing high-quality experiences that people expect from WhatsApp,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.

The dispute began when WhatsApp required users to accept expanded data sharing with Meta’s platforms or risk losing access to the messaging service. While European users can opt out of such sharing, Indian users cannot — a distinction that regulators found problematic.

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need clues.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

Stockholm startup Neko Health has made a big bet on consumers wanting to learn about their state of health and how to prevent things going wrong. Now, investors are making a big bet on Neko. 

The startup has raised a fresh $260 million in funding, a Series B that values Neko at $1.8 billion post-money, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.

Neko will be using the capital to break into new markets like the U.S.; continue developing its diagnostics, potentially with acquisitions; and to open more clinics in response to demand. With its waitlist now at over 100,000 people – up from 40,000 just a few months ago – Neko has scanned and evaluated 10,000 patients to date in clinics in Stockholm and its newer market of London.

“It’s very clear that there’s incredible demand for a different way of thinking about health care,” Hjalmar Nilsonne, the CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. He spoke to TechCrunch over a video link from New York, where he is working on laying the groundwork for setting up clinics in the U.S. market. 

The U.S. is a priority, he said, because right now it accounts for the most people on its waitlist outside of Europe. “Of course, we want to come to the U.S. We think there’s a lot we could contribute to the ecosystem here, made possible by this funding round,” he added.

Lightspeed Venture Partners, a new investor in the company, is leading this Series B, with General Catalyst, O.G. Venture Partners, Rosello, Lakestar and Atomico participating. The round follows a Series A of $65 million in 2023 from Lakestar, Atomico, General Catalyst and Prima Materia, the investment firm co-founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, who happens to be the other co-founder of Neko. Prima Materia also seeded Neko with its initial funding but is not an investor in this latest round.

The funding and Neko’s growth are coming at a time when demands are shifting in the world of healthcare. 

Around the world, whether healthcare systems are state-backed or privatized, there’s been a rising focus on preventative healthcare to spot signs before they develop into problems, including to offset the costs of handling chronic and complex conditions in populations that are living longer than before. 

Alongside that, there has been a massive injection of technology into the worlds of medicine and health: new devices, new insights, and applications powered by, for example, artificial intelligence are changing how doctors are interacting with patients, what they are able to diagnose, and what patients are looking for in a medical environment. 

Not all of these advances are evolving seamlessly — very far from it — but they show few signs of going away, and Neko is playing into all of these changes.

The Neko Health experience involves a visit to a clinic — calm, futuristic, minimalist — where, for £300, a customer gets an hour-long exam based around proprietary hardware and software. That exam generates “millions of health data points,” Neko says.

Moles and other marks on your skin are detected and counted as part of a check for skin cancer; waist circumference, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, heart rate, grip strength and other parameters are measured and used to determine whether you are at risk of metabolic syndrome, stroke, heart attack, diabetes and more. The visit includes a consultation with a doctor and recommendations for follow-ups if needed.  

Those follow-ups might come shortly after the initial visit — for example, further monitoring of blood pressure or heart activity — or it might be another full appointment the following year. Nilsonne said that currently 80% of its customers have rebooked and paid in advance for appointments in a year’s time.

Considering Neko is a company that has staked its whole ethos on the power of data and advance planning, it had a fairly random start in life. 

It was co-founded back in 2018 after Ek reached out to Nilsonne over Twitter to chat about the state of the healthcare market in response to a tweet of Nilsonne’s. Neither have backgrounds in the field – Nilsson’s previous startup was in climate tech – but through ongoing conversations, early ideas for Neko began to form. 

It took six years to bring together a team and work out Neko’s vertically-integrated approach. Even so, Nilsonne said that Neko went into the market hoping for the best but unsure if their idea would resonate; now, according to the company, demand exceeds capacity. 

Looking ahead, along with building more clinics to take in more users, Neko is focused on R&D around its medical hardware and software. 

It’s starting from a fairly low-tech baseline because of the costs until recently of building and owning medical devices. “The average ECG machine in primary care is 15 years old, meaning the software is 15 years old,” Nilsonne said. “We have a completely different model where we’re vertically integrated, meaning we make these devices, we make the software, and we have the clinic.” 

He added that Neko’s aim is to have updates on a yearly cadence, bringing in more parameters to measure, and likely different tiers of service at different price points.

“The body scan today is kind of the iPod moment for Neko,” he said. “The iPod was an iconic product that people loved, and that was exciting. But no one today is using an iPod. It enabled Apple to invest in this incredible paradigm of hand held computational devices. So we very much see this as the beginning of a journey where we’re trying to contribute, you know, incredibly affordable, high quality preventative diagnostics, and every year we’re going to be able to do more and more with less and less.”

The funding round, he said, will “allow us to double down and really increase our investments in making the product better, which is ultimately about solving some of the core problems in health care.”

It will also give Neko a chance to put more space between itself and others looking at preventative healthcare opportunities, such as Zoi in France and Aware in Germany. The capital could also set it apart from efforts from public health services, such as the Health Check provided by the NHS in the U.K., which covers many of the same areas that Neko does.

Some weeks ago, I heard from one of Neko’s early backers that some of the most insistent waitlisters were investors who wanted to check out the company first-hand for the health of their bodies and of their funds. 

It seems that getting Lightspeed off the waitlist quickly yielded a strong result. As part of this funding round, Lightspeed partner Bejul Somaia will join Neko’s board.