Nik Storonsky, the man behind Revolut, has closed a $500m second fund for QuantumLight, the algorithmic venture-capital firm he co-founded to let software, rather than partners, decide where the money goes.

The fund is double the size of QuantumLight’s $250m debut vehicle from last year, a swift escalation for an outfit still trying to prove that data can out-pick the humans.

Nik Storonsky, whose personal fortune has climbed with Revolut and who is reportedly in line for a vast share award, is the firm’s most conspicuous backer.

QuantumLight’s pitch is a direct challenge to the clubby traditions of venture capital. Instead of a bench of star partners trading on instinct and network, the firm runs a systematic, data-driven model that screens companies at scale and generates investment decisions quantitatively, something closer to a quant hedge fund than a Sand Hill Road partnership.

The approach is of a piece with Nik Storonsky’s reputation as fintech’s most relentless optimiser. He built Revolut into Europe’s most valuable private tech company on a culture of aggressive targets and data over sentiment, and last year QuantumLight published a hiring playbook distilling the management methods behind that rise, a set of blunt tips that read like an operating manual for high-growth companies.

QuantumLight applies the same conviction, that most decisions are better made by system than by instinct, to the business of picking winners.

Doubling the fund in barely a year is a statement of confidence, though whose confidence is the interesting question.

QuantumLight has not detailed its outside backers, and Storonsky’s own wealth gives him ample means to seed his own experiments.

An oversubscribed close suggests limited partners are buying the thesis too, wagering that algorithmic sourcing can surface growth-stage companies that traditional funds overlook, and that the model deserves twice the firepower after a single year.

QuantumLight’s first fund is only a year old, far too young to have produced the exits that would show whether the machine actually beats the market, and venture returns take the better part of a decade to judge.

Plenty of firms have promised to “quant-ify” venture capital before, and the discipline’s best returns still tend to come from a handful of outlier bets that are notoriously hard to model, precisely because they look unreasonable at the moment they are made.

Still, the timing is apt. As AI reshapes every knowledge industry, the people who allocate capital are hardly exempt, and a wave of funds now claim to use machine learning to source deals, score founders and time markets.

QuantumLight is among the most committed to the idea, and the most credibly funded, which makes its record a useful test case for whether software can genuinely industrialise a trade that has always prized taste and relationships over spreadsheets.

There is also the matter of a chief executive’s attention. Storonsky is steering Revolut through a pivotal stretch, having lately won a French banking licence and pushed into business banking, with an IPO reportedly a couple of years away and likely to list in the US, all while running a second act in venture capital.

Founders are rarely one-company people, but the split focus is the kind of thing Revolut’s eventual public-market investors may come to weigh.

For now, $500m is a serious sum with which to test a serious idea: that the qualities venture capitalists have always sold, judgment, instinct, a good eye, can be replaced, or at least bettered, by code.

If Nik Storonsky is right, QuantumLight will look prescient. If he is wrong, it will be an expensive reminder that some bets resist being reduced to a model. Either way, the experiment has just doubled in size.

In context: A new Mac Mini assembly line at Foxconn’s Houston facility is expected to begin production later this year, expanding Apple’s US manufacturing footprint for AI-related hardware. The project is part of Apple’s effort to increase domestic production while continuing to rely on contract manufacturers and an international supply chain.

The line will operate in a new 170,000-square-foot space at the plant, which already makes AI servers for Apple. Foxconn is funding the assembly-line buildout, while Apple has committed to purchasing the products made there.

The Mac Mini has seen stronger demand over the past year, particularly among customers using the compact desktop to run AI models at home. Its planned Houston production also comes after Apple discontinued the Mac Pro, which was assembled in the US at a Flextronics plant that President Trump visited with Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2019.

Cook and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick toured the Houston site last week. The visit included a new manufacturing school that Apple is opening to provide hands-on training for small and midsize US companies. Apple previously launched a classroom-based manufacturing program in Detroit.

“Advanced manufacturing is where the puck is going,” Lutnick told workers taking an Apple manufacturing course. “The problem is we need to train Americans.”

Cook said Apple’s US investment plans reflect its broader commitment to domestic production. “We believe in the promise of this nation and we’re proud to put our money where our mouth is,” he said in a speech.

Apple’s investment strategy relies heavily on its purchasing power rather than on building and owning factories. The company’s capital spending remains far below that of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which have made major investments in AI infrastructure and semiconductor capacity. Apple’s total capital expenditures since 2023 are less than what each of those companies spent in its most recent quarter.

That model is evident in Houston. Foxconn is paying to build the production lines, while Apple is supporting the project through product orders. The arrangement preserves Apple’s long-standing reliance on manufacturing partners while allowing it to use its supply-chain scale to influence where production and component sourcing take place.

Apple has made similar commitments in semiconductors. The company is among the businesses that have agreed to buy chip wafers from TSMC’s Arizona plant, a project expected to cost more than $200 billion. Apple has also reached a preliminary agreement for Intel to manufacture some of its device chips and said it plans to spend $30 billion on US-made chips from Broadcom.

The company has pledged to invest $600 billion in the US over four years. The total includes spending already planned for its American business, including employee pay, retail and corporate operations, and purchases from domestic suppliers.

The administration has encouraged Apple to expand its US manufacturing operations. President Trump has pressed the company to make iPhones domestically, but Apple has not announced such plans. Instead, it is expanding iPhone assembly in India.

The Houston event was among Cook’s final public appearances as Apple’s chief executive. He is expected to become chairman next month, with John Ternus, Apple’s longtime hardware engineering chief, expected to succeed him as CEO.

Image credit: The Wall Street Journal

Microsoft says some users are experiencing issues searching in Microsoft 365 apps, including Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive.

According to an incident report seen by BleepingComputer and tracked under MO1456424 in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, the root cause is what Microsoft describes as a recent deployment that causes resource utilization problems.

“Impact is specific to some users served through the affected infrastructure who are attempting to search for content in SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Outlook on the web, or Outlook desktop,” Microsoft said.

“Our investigation identified that a recent deployment introduced a resource utilization inefficiency issue, leading to impact.”

Microsoft says it has already developed a fix and deployed it to reduce resource pressure and restore service for all affected Microsoft 365 users.

While the company has yet to share which regions were impacted by this outage, it tagged it as an incident, which usually describes a critical service issue with noticeable user impact.

Last year, Microsoft mitigated similar incidents that broke file search for OneDrive, Outlook on the web, and SharePoint Online users.

In July, it also addressed a massive outage that took down Azure and Microsoft 365 services for users in North America after a bug in its automated network maintenance request system removed IP routes from more devices than intended.

On Monday, Microsoft resolved another incident that brought down GitHub, its website, the API, and many other services for more than eight hours, with users reporting server errors when trying to access GitHub, while others encountered problems loading commits, repositories, and Pull Request pages.

Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.

The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.

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Samsung could be planning an even wider Galaxy Z Fold for 2027. A new report suggests the company is working on a foldable specifically designed to make video viewing more comfortable.

According to ETNews, Samsung has expanded its planned 2027 foldable lineup to five devices. Alongside the expected Galaxy Z Fold 9, Galaxy Z Fold 9 Ultra, Galaxy Z Flip 9 and a new Galaxy Z TriFold, the company is reportedly developing a second wide-format foldable.

Details are still thin, but the key difference could be its display. The report says Samsung is working on a screen aspect ratio specifically optimised for watching video instead of sticking with the 4:3 ratio used by the Galaxy Z Fold 8.

That could mean a noticeably wider display when the phone is unfolded. Samsung hasn’t revealed the exact ratio, so 16:9 or 16:10 are only possibilities at this stage, rather than confirmed specifications.

As global supply chains remain exposed to geopolitical and climate uncertainty, retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) businesses face challenges of fluctuating prices and demand. In the United Kingdom, supply chain volatility is adding to uncertainty in raw material and packaging costs to impact CPG companies’ production economics.

Research has found that a huge majority of British retailers were not confident of scaling up their supply chain operations to meet the expected increase in consumer demand. In fact, 43% of retail leaders ranked supply chain issues among their top three business challenges in 2025, highlighting widespread concern over operational capacity in the face of rising demand and cost uncertainty.