VC investment into Quantum computing declined by 50% last year according to the ‘State of Quantum 2024’ report, dropping from $2.2bn in 2022 to $1.2bn, with funds switching in favour of Generative AI. However, government spending on quantum was predicted to hit $40 billion over the next decade. Now a new VC European fund hopes to capitalise on that trend. 

The idiosyncratically named QDNL Participations has reached a €25 million first close on a proposed €60m global fund for early-stage quantum startups. 

However, QDNL plans to expand outside the country and make investments more internationally. 

The firm’s previous €15 million fund focused on the Dutch quantum ecosystem, backing startups including Qblox, QuantWare, QphoX, and Q*Bird.

Speaking to TechCrunch, Ton van ‘t Noordende, General Partner at QDNL Participations, said: “Quantum is a global field. There’s been incredible research done in the past decade or so and we’ve seen the emerging of a new, startup ecosystem, with 600 or more companies coming up. There’s also been more than $42 billion invested by over 20 governments in the last two or three years. So this has built up the infrastructure, the clean rooms, the facilities, and essentially de-risking the technology.”

QDNL’s appearance is the latest sign that the Netherlands is making a play to be a key Quantum computing ecosystem, and the government (with EU financial backing) has already backed an entire initiative called Quantum Delta NL, which also just happens to be an investor in QDNL.

Its team includes quantum computing pioneer Chad Rigetti as venture partner in the US and specialist quantum VC Kris Kaczmarek in London, who joined as investment director from quantum VC firm 2xN. They join advisors, Nadia Carlsten (CEO of the Danish Centre for AI Innovation) and Charles Marcus of the University of Washington.

Quantum computing had a tricky start to the year with both Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sounding downbeat on when Quantum would arrive. But Nvidia did a quick about-turn and announced a Quantum exclusive Nvidia Day at its upcoming event in March. 

• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Season 2 launches on January 28
• It adds loads of new Zombies content, including new map The Tomb
• This is in addition to a new Wonder Weapon, fresh GobbleGums, and more

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Season 2 launches on January 28 and brings a wealth of new content for Multiplayer. Black Ops 6 Zombies is also receiving some love, with plenty of big new additions.

The most significant is a whole new Zombies map, The Tomb. Set after the events of the Citadelle des Morts map, The Tomb sees protagonists Weaver, Maya, Carver, and Grey venture into a mysterious lost catacomb in the ongoing fight against the Dark Aether.

Over the weekend, I went to DC to meet with all of the right-wing influencers and content creators who made President Donald Trump’s 2024 win possible. They were everywhere.

The 2024 election was the influencer election and inauguration was no different: There were dozens of pre- and post-inaugural parties and balls this weekend, as well as the big event itself. Theo Von sat in front of Jake and Logan Paul under the Capitol rotunda (well, until the podcaster’s chair collapsed). Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Brett Cooper walked the Turning Point USA red carpet and posed for selfies with fans. Jessic Reed Kraus, writer of the HouseInhabit newsletter, hung out with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Make America Healthy Again ball Monday night.

In August, I published a guide on the Republican and Democratic influencers shaping the 2024 election. The influencers and content creators still matter, and they will be communicating and guiding policy decisions for years to come.

Welcome to Trump 2.0, where these creators have the ears not only of their audiences but of the president as well. Here are some of the ones to keep an eye on over the next four years.

The Podcasters and Streamers

The 2024 election was the breakout cycle for podcasters in politics. Most of the shows Trump went on catered to the manosphere, a loose network of creators who push misogynistic, racist, and pro-male ideology online. This includes people like Joe Rogan, Andrew Schulz, the Paul brothers, and Adin Ross, who shared their Trump interviews with millions and millions of their fans. There’s a second branch too, made up of creators who have branded themselves as the intellectual wing of the modern Republican party, like Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, and Lex Fridman. Fridman’s YouTube podcast reaches millions of viewers every week. Shapiro’s show is one of the most popular ones on Spotify.

These podcasters have amplified Trump and his agenda with very little, if any, pushback. They will likely be key in rallying support for Trump administration decisions.

I spoke briefly with Shapiro on Sunday night, asking what comes next for the GOP and podcasting. “The power continues to grow,” he said. “Legacy media’s completely blown itself out. We’re focused on expanding, not only our brand, but there’s so many other brands that need expansion, I think that it’s gonna be a very rich time for the podcast industry.”

The Meme Pages

DC Draino, the Typical Liberal, RagingAmericans, and Snowflaketears are some of the largest pro-MAGA meme pages on Instagram. Combined, these accounts have over 6 million followers. They act as conduit between GOP leadership priorities and platforms like X and Instagram.

Think of their accounts as news aggregators for people who otherwise may not be consuming it.

The Organizers

While the Democrats worked with influencers over the last election cycle too, no PAC or campaign organized them as effectively and efficiently as the right. Because of Turning Point USA and its leader, Charlie Kirk, many of the GOP’s most popular creators see each other at least a few times a year at the organization’s summits and trainings. According to interviews with some of the right’s top organizers, that infrastructure is only going to grow over the next four years. The organizers themselves have also become influencers to watch.

I wrote about an influencer party (and victory lap) hosted over Inauguration weekend that was put on by CJ Pearson and Raquel Debono. Pearson, a conservative creator with more than 500,000 X followers, cochairs the Republican National Committee’s youth advisory council. He’s played a key role in the party’s adoption of influencers and is planning additional trainings with organizations like the Heritage Foundation.

Visa has joined African fintech Moniepoint as a new investor. The business banking and payments platform confirmed to TechCrunch that it received a “strategic investment” from the global payments giant as both companies look to drive financial inclusion and support the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Africa.

Sources close to the deal say the fintech – which announced a $110 million investment last October, received over $10 million from Visa. The fintech, whose Series C now exceeds $120 million, is reportedly in talks with other investors and may attract more funding in the coming months, all while maintaining its billion-dollar valuation, sources say. Moniepoint declined to comment on the size of Visa’s check or interest from other investors. 

Moniepoint provides businesses and individuals with banking accounts, credit, payments, and other financial tools through an app and a network of agents. The fintech now processes over 1 billion transactions monthly, with total payment volumes reaching $22 billion—a growth of over 25% in under three months. Its rapid rise began during Nigeria’s Central Bank cashless drive in early 2023 and has continued steadily, positioning it as an important player shaping the future of digital payments in the country.

Moniepoint has just a fraction of the total market. Nigeria’s digital payment market spans multiple channels, including electronic transfers, ATMs, POS devices, mobile agents, and web payments. In 2023, businesses and consumers completed transactions worth approximately $400 billion, according to the country’s interbank payments switch. Electronic transfers, powered by the instant payments network NIP—comparable to India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix—dominate the market, accounting for nearly 90% of these transactions, according to data from Stears. Other channels, such as mobile agents, ATMs, and point-of-sale systems, trail far behind.

While Moniepoint operates across most of these channels, Visa’s investment highlights the fintech’s position and potential in Nigeria’s card value chain as both a major issuer and acquirer.

“We’re present in Nigeria today, leading the chart in merchant acquiring and consumer banking,” CEO Tosin Eniolorunda told TechCrunch. “With Visa as our investor, we can strategically collaborate to continue to grow the payment ecosystem and expand to more countries, which is a key goal for us.” 

One way both companies will look to “grow the payment ecosystem” is by introducing contactless payments, Eniolorunda said. “The central bank has indicated the need to drive contactless services to improve accessibility and conduct micro-transactions. So these are some things that we expect from the partnership. It’s progress in the right direction.” 

Nigeria’s Central Bank showed its latest intent to drive contactless payment adoption with draft guidelines for transaction limits in 2023. However, implementation will depend on clearer regulations and resolving issues related to privacy, security, and trust. Once addressed, contactless payments could significantly boost transaction volumes and arguably outpace other payment methods in the country. 

Globally, Visa notes that contactless card usage surpasses mobile wallets in many markets. Moniepoint is in that sweet spot to lead this transition in Nigeria by offering contactless-enabled payment terminals to businesses and chip cards to individuals, setting the stage for further adoption.

On the other hand, Moniepoint will leverage Visa’s Cybersource system to gain better visibility into transactions. Additionally, it plans to integrate with Visa Direct for remittances and money transfers as it looks to expand into markets within and outside Africa. 

• Nvidia has commanding lead over rivals in latest Adobe After Effects benchmarks
• Even lower-performance Nvidia GPUs outpace Intel and AMD cards
• But to Apple’s credit, the M3 Max pulls ahead in 2D significantly despite its laptop form factor

Nvidia‘s GeForce RTX 40-Series GPUs has shown off some significant advantages when it comes to dealing with 3D workflows over comparable Intel and AMD cards, new figures have claimed.

The latest Puget Systems After Effects benchmarks say Nvidia’s flagship GeForce RTX 4090 delivered up to 20 times the performance of Apple’s MacBook Pro M3 Max in 3D tasks; reflecting the card’s technical design focus on GPU-intensive workloads.

The one exception to that is the UMG v. Anthropic case, because at least early on, earlier versions of Anthropic would generate the song lyrics for songs in the output. That’s a problem. The current status of that case is they’ve put safeguards in place to try to prevent that from happening, and the parties have sort of agreed that, pending the resolution of the case, those safeguards are sufficient, so they’re no longer seeking a preliminary injunction.

At the end of the day, the harder question for the AI companies is not is it legal to engage in training? It’s what do you do when your AI generates output that is too similar to a particular work?

Do you expect the majority of these cases to go to trial, or do you see settlements on the horizon?

There may well be some settlements. Where I expect to see settlements is with big players who either have large swaths of content or content that’s particularly valuable. The New York Times might end up with a settlement, and with a licensing deal, perhaps where OpenAI pays money to use New York Times content.

There’s enough money at stake that we’re probably going to get at least some judgments that set the parameters. The class-action plaintiffs, my sense is they have stars in their eyes. There are lots of class actions, and my guess is that the defendants are going to be resisting those and hoping to win on summary judgment. It’s not obvious that they go to trial. The Supreme Court in the Google v. Oracle case nudged fair-use law very strongly in the direction of being resolved on summary judgment, not in front of a jury. I think the AI companies are going to try very hard to get those cases decided on summary judgment.

Why would it be better for them to win on summary judgment versus a jury verdict?

It’s quicker and it’s cheaper than going to trial. And AI companies are worried that they’re not going to be viewed as popular, that a lot of people are going to think, Oh, you made a copy of the work that should be illegal and not dig into the details of the fair-use doctrine.

There have been lots of deals between AI companies and media outlets, content providers, and other rights holders. Most of the time, these deals appear to be more about search than foundational models, or at least that’s how it’s been described to me. In your opinion, is licensing content to be used in AI search engines—where answers are sourced by retrieval augmented generation or RAG—something that’s legally obligatory? Why are they doing it this way?

If you’re using retrieval augmented generation on targeted, specific content, then your fair-use argument gets more challenging. It’s much more likely that AI-generated search is going to generate text taken directly from one particular source in the output, and that’s much less likely to be a fair use. I mean, it could be—but the risky area is that it’s much more likely to be competing with the original source material. If instead of directing people to a New York Times story, I give them my AI prompt that uses RAG to take the text straight out of that New York Times story, that does seem like a substitution that could harm the New York Times. Legal risk is greater for the AI company.

What do you want people to know about the generative AI copyright fights that they might not already know, or they might have been misinformed about?

The thing that I hear most often that’s wrong as a technical matter is this concept that these are just plagiarism machines. All they’re doing is taking my stuff and then grinding it back out in the form of text and responses. I hear a lot of artists say that, and I hear a lot of lay people say that, and it’s just not right as a technical matter. You can decide if generative AI is good or bad. You can decide it’s lawful or unlawful. But it really is a fundamentally new thing we have not experienced before. The fact that it needs to train on a bunch of content to understand how sentences work, how arguments work, and to understand various facts about the world doesn’t mean it’s just kind of copying and pasting things or creating a collage. It really is generating things that nobody could expect or predict, and it’s giving us a lot of new content. I think that’s important and valuable.

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching “strategic market status” (SMS) investigations into the mobile ecosystems of Apple and Google.

The investigations constitute part of the new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Act which passed last year and came into effect in January. The Act includes new powers for the CMA to designate companies as having strategic market status if they are deemed to be overly dominant, and propose remedies and interventions to improve competition.

The CMA announced its first such SMS investigation last week, launching a probe into Google Search’s market share which is reportedly around the 90% mark. The regulator announced at the time that a second one would be coming in January, and we now know that it’s using its fresh powers to establish whether Apple and Google have strategic market status in their respective mobile ecosystems, which covers areas like browsers, app stores, and operating systems.

‘Holding back innovation’

Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a major surprise. Back in August, the CMA said it was closing a duo of investigations into Apple and Google’s respective mobile app ecosystems, which it had launched starting back in 2021. However, the CMA made it clear that this would be more of a pause, and it would be looking to use its new powers to address competition concerns around the two biggest players in the mobile services market.

In November, an inquiry group set up by the CMA concluded that Apple’s mobile browser policies and a pact with Google were “holding back innovation” in the U.K. The findings noted that Apple forced third-party mobile browsers to use Apple’s browser engine, WebKit, which restricts what these browsers are able to do in comparison to Apple’s own Safari browser, and thus limits how they can effectively differentiate in what is a competitive market.

As part of its new probe, the CMA has now confirmed that it will look at “the extent of competition between and within” Apple’s and Google’s respective mobile ecosystems, including barriers that may be preventing others from competing. This will include whether either company is using their dominant position in operating systems, app distribution, or browsers to “favour their own apps and services” — many of which are bundled by default and can’t always be uninstalled.

On top of that, the CMA said it would look into whether either company imposes “unfair terms and conditions” on developers that wish to distribute their apps through their app stores.

Alex Haffner, competition partner at U.K. law firm Fladgate, said that today’s announcement was “wholly expected,” adding that the more interesting facet is how this new probe fits into the broader changes underway at the U.K. regulator.

Indeed, news emerged this week that the CMA had appointed ex-Amazon executive Doug Gurr as interim chair, constituting part of a wider shift as the U.K. positions itself as a pro-growth, pro-tech nation by cutting red tape and bureaucracy.

“What is more interesting is how this fits into the current sea change which is engulfing the broader organisation of the CMA and in particular the very clear steer it is getting from central government to ensure that regulation is consistently applied with its pro-growth agenda,” Haffner said in a statement issued to TechCrunch. “We can expect this to feature heavily once the CMA gets its teeth stuck into the specifics of the DMCC regime, and its dealings with the tech companies involved.”

Remedies

Today’s announcement kickstarts a three-week period during which relevant stakeholders are invited to submit comments as part of the investigations, with the outcomes expected to be announced by October 22, 2025. While it’s still early days, potential remedies — in the event that Apple and Google are deemed to have strategic market status — include requiring the companies to provide third-parties with greater access to key functionality to help them better compete. It also may include making it easier to pay for services outside of Apple and Google’s existing app store structure.

In a statement issued to TechCrunch, an Apple spokesperson said that it will “continue to engage constructively with the CMA” as their investigation progresses.

“Apple believes in thriving and dynamic markets where innovation can flourish,” the spokesperson said. “We face competition in every segment and jurisdiction where we operate, and our focus is always the trust of our users. In the U.K. alone, the iOS app economy supports hundreds of thousands of jobs and makes it possible for developers big and small to reach users on a trusted platform.”

Oliver Bethell, senior director for competition at Google, echoed this sentiment, noting that the company “will work constructively with the CMA.”

“Android’s openness has helped to expand choice, reduce prices and democratise access to smartphones and apps. It’s the only example of a successful and viable open source mobile operating system,” Bethell wrote in a blog post today. “We favour a way forward that avoids stifling choice and opportunities for U.K. consumers and businesses alike, and without risk to U.K. growth prospects.”

• Elon Musk slams Project Stargate initiative
• Claims backers of $500bn initiative “don’t actually have the money”
• Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, hit back at Musk claims

The global AI market appears to have descended into a playground battle of insults after Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, and others all clashed over the launch of Project Stargate.

Revealed earlier this week to huge fanfare as part of the new Trump administration’s plans to boost AI across the US, Project Stargate is reportedly set to see as much as $500 billion invested into data centers to support the increasing data needs of Altman’s OpenAI.

We may see OpenAI’s agent tool, Operator, released sooner rather than later. Changes to ChatGPT’s code base suggest that Operator will be available as an early research preview to users on the $200 Pro subscription plan.

The changes aren’t yet publicly visible, but a user on X who goes by Choi spotted these updates in ChatGPT’s client-side code. TechCrunch separately identified the same references to Operator on OpenAI’s website.

Here are the three interesting tidbits we spotted:

• There are multiple references to the operator.chatgpt.com URL. This URL currently redirects to the main chatgpt.com web page.
• There will be a new popup that tells you to upgrade your plan if you want to try Operator. “Operator is currently only available to Pro users as an early research preview,” it says.
• On the page that lists the Plus and Pro plans, OpenAI will add “Access to research preview of Operator” as one of the benefits of the Pro plan.

Bloomberg previously reported that OpenAI was working on a general-purpose agent that can perform tasks in a web browser for you.

While this sounds a bit abstract, think about all the mundane things you do regularly in your web browser with quite a few clicks — following someone on LinkedIn, adding an expense in Concur, assigning a task to someone in Asana, or changing the status of a prospect on Salesforce. An agent could perform such multi-step tasks based on an instruction set.

More recently, The Information reported that OpenAI could launch Operator as early as this week. With today’s changes, it seems like everything is ready for a public launch.

Anthropic has released an AI model that can control your PC using a “Computer Use” API and local tools that control your mouse and keyboard. It is currently available as a beta feature for developers.

It looks like Operator is going to be usable on ChatGPT’s website, meaning that it won’t interact with your local computer. Instead, OpenAI will likely run a web browser on its own servers to perform tasks for you.

Nevertheless, it indicates that OpenAI’s ability to interact with computers is progressing. Operator is a specific sandboxed implementation of the company’s underlying agentic framework. It’s going to be interesting to see if the company has more information to share on the technology that powers Operator.

• Beyerdynamic’s new IEMs come in four specifications, for every band member
• The numbers you need to remember are 70, 71, 72 or 73
• …Oh, and $499, which is the price

Revered hi-fi brand Beyerdynamic (see the Aventho 300 for the firm’s most recent headphone hit, but that’s just for starters) has released a new line of professional in-ear monitors, and the company wants you to know that every member of the band has been specifically catered for here.

The DT 70 IE, DT 71 IE, DT 72 IE, and DT 73 IE (that’s the full quartet) all feature Beyerdynamic’s own TESLA.11 dynamic driver system, boasting a Total Harmonic Distortion (often abbreviated to THD) of just 0.02%, which is very low indeed – anything below 0.1% is typically considered gifted for an in-ear monitor. Beyer calls it “one of the loudest, lowest-distortion systems available”, but you also get five different sizes of silicone eartips and three pairs of Comply memory foam eartips to achieve a decent fit and seal (nobody wants distractions from the Amazon delivery guy outside while trying to lay down a particular riff).