AI-powered marketing platform Nectar Social announced Thursday that it raised a $30 million Series A round led by Menlo Ventures and its Anthology Fund, which was created alongside Anthropic.

The company, which officially exited stealth last year, is an agentic operating system for marketers. It told TechCrunch that it uses autonomous AI agents to help brands run “social activity, moderation, creator workflows, competitive intelligence and commerce conversations end-to-end.” It also has data partnerships with companies like Meta and Reddit that allows the Nectar agent pull and pool data into one place from various platforms, rather than brands needing to use different tools to manage different platforms.

Nectar Social was founded by sisters Misbah and Farah Uraizee, ex-Meta employees. Misbah, the CEO, told TechCrunch that this round will help the company expand and hire more across applied AI, enginnering, and go to market.

“The buying conversation has moved into social, and no human team can staff every place it happens,” Misbah said. “We’re accelerating our category lead in building the operating system that lets brands show up everywhere.”

The company said clients include Liquid Death, Figma, and e.l.f Beauty. Other investors in the round include Gwyneth Paltrow’s Kinship Ventures, GV, and True Ventures.

An ex-Apple designer has revealed just how long ago that the company began working on AirPods Max and the reasoning behind not having an Apple logo on the product.

The original AirPods came out in 2016, and AirPods Max weren’t launched until 2020. So it’s an easy assumption that Apple only decided to make AirPods Max once those initial tiny white earbuds had proven to be a success.

Then, too, it took so long for AirPods Max to ever be updated that it had to feel like they were not considered important. That’s especially so since their eventual update chiefly consisted of switching them to using USB-C for charging.

Yet according to designer Eugene Whang, he was working on AirPods Max fully five years before they were released. Speaking to Highsnobiety magazine, Whang described the job as really being about three products.

Those were the headband, the case, and the cushion that together hold the AirPods Max comfortably against people’s ears. It was reportedly especially hard to get the cushioned section right because of trying to suit as many different size and shape heads as they could.

The process involved experimenting with “hundreds and hundreds of variations,” he said.

According to Whang, there weren’t just practical or technical issues to consider, nor was it all about what to add to the product. Instead, there were deeper issues, such as the way AirPods Max intentionally omit something every other Apple product has: an Apple logo.

“We didn’t want to brand your head,” says Whang.

Inside the design team

AirPods Max was reportedly one of the last products Whang worked on in his 22 years at Apple. And throughout that time, Apple was always about being disciplined in your approach to design.

“We would huddle around a table for hours,” says Whang. “Everyone’s equal. You’re only as good as your ideas. We were very direct with one another.”

“No one had any ego,” he continued. “You’re not criticizing the person; you’re criticizing the idea.”

Jony Ive has talked before about the importance of detail, and of how the care that goes into a product is felt by the user. Whang believes that too.

“If it’s not right on the inside, it’s not going to be right on the outside,” he says. “We literally designed from the inside out.”

“The interior details would have as much design work as the exterior,” he continues. “The shape of the PCB. The placement of components. Constant shuffling and Tetris of internals.”

Hundreds and hundreds of variations were tried for how AirPods Max should fit comfortably

Whang is not shy about how he says Apple’s designers “literally shaped culture through our products.” But he seems to say it as factual, rather than through ego, because he then says that immediately after launch, the whole team is constantly concerned.

“There’s always defense mode,” he says. “What’s going to go wrong that we didn’t think of?”

Then, too, he was able to talk about this incredible impact of Apple products, and the concomitant pressures to keep doing well. “When you’re in the eye of the storm, it doesn’t feel that crazy. You’re just doing the work,” he says.

Whang left Apple shortly after Jony Ive did, and was one of the designers who went to work for Ive’s startup, LoveFrom. Ultimately, he wouldn’t shortly quit in order to care for his ill mother, but says that during his time at LoveFrom, he worked on a huge range of projects from technology to interior design.

“It was amazing, the work was inspiring,” he says, “the people were inspiring.”

Separately, LoveFrom most recently showed off its technology and interior design with the Ferrari Luce electric vehicle.

Last month, Mitchell Hashimoto, HashiCorp co-founder, publicly declared that he was moving his popular open source Ghostty terminal emulator project from GitHub. GitHub runs the world’s largest service built on the Git distributed version control system, created by Linus Torvalds.

Once an enthusiastic user, Hashimoto grew disillusioned with service disruptions, and increasingly slow pull requests. “This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day,” he wrote. 

Hashimoto was quick to defend Git itself: “The issue isn’t Git, it’s the infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc.”

Many have blamed GitHub’s performance on Microsoft, which acquired the company in 2018. But to be fair, GitHub itself has been experiencing heavier-than-expected traffic thanks to a proliferation of AI-generated pull requests.

In 2025, GitHub saw a 206 percent year-over-year growth in AI-generated projects measured by the use of Bash shell scripts, a widespread way of running agents. And more AI code means more bugs. Research from GitClear found that AI-generated code heaped 10.83 issues per pull request, compared to 6.45 for the old-fashioned human variety.

Our new agentic workforce is raising big questions about how the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) should evolve, and if Git should come along. 

“Agents are nudging us toward a continuous flow,” warned Peco Karayanev, co-founder of DevOps platform provider Autoptic, which bridges Git-based deployments with observability tools for agent-based remediation.

Autoptic’s entire user base runs on some form of Git, either homebrew or from a service provider like GitLab. 

Given the volume and magnitude of changes across repos, “we need git to start operating in a more continuous mode,” Karayanev wrote in an email interview.

Git operations, especially when used in GitOps-style automated deployments, still need to be managed by people. Updates, commits, pushes, merges are often yoked into sequences of “stop/go” episodes where someone has to hit enter on the keyboard a few times to continue the workflow, Karayanev noted. This model may not hold up once agents start getting priority. 

A butler for Git

Git has always had its share of critics, especially those who use the tool daily. 

There may not be another piece of software that is so widely adopted and yet so inscrutable. Torvalds and other Linux kernel developers built Git in 2005 after frustrations with trying to shoehorn Linux code into the commercial BitKeeper tool. Linux, a global group project of mammoth proportions, required a distributed version control system able to support non-linear development of thousands of parallel branches. 

Like any distributed system, Git can be difficult to understand.

One of the co-founders of GitHub, Scott Chacon co-wrote a book on using Git (2009’s Pro Git) and still he finds himself occasionally flummoxed by the version control system.

There are still “sharp edges” to Git, Chacon told The Register. “There’s a lot of stuff that it doesn’t do very well from a usability standpoint,” he said. 

Chacon co-founded GitButler as a way to “rethink the porcelain” of Git, to make Git more suitable to modern workflows. (Last month, GitButler received $17 million in venture capital funding). 

Think of GitButler as a super-powered Git client. It allows the developer to work on two different branches simultaneously, using a technique called virtual branching. It reconciles the code a developer is working on with the upstream code. They can reorder commits, or edit the comments of a previous commit. It offers richer metadata about the files being worked on. It can show which commits are unique to that branch.

Best of all, it eliminates what many developers call “rebase hell,” where merges into an updated codebase must be checked one at a time, a problem GitButler solves by keeping the user’s code synchronized with what is upstream.

Many of these actions GitButler offers can be done through the Git command itself – although Git’s command language, and its rules, can be so obtuse that “you will probably make a mistake at some point,” Chacon said.

A Git for agents

Chacon believes GitHub’s current reliability issues stem from the current tsunami of agentic work. 

This is “ironic” because GitHub was built to scale Git, he said. “But an influx of agents is pushing the service to the brink.”

The problem lies not with Git itself, but with everyone using one service, Chacon argued. Last year, GitHub had about 180 million users working across 630 million repositories – with 121 million created in 2025 alone, according to the company’s most recent annual Octoverse report. 

“From the longer-term perspective, it doesn’t need to be like this,” he argued. Maybe Git should be run locally, mirrored globally and managed with clients … such as GitButler, Chacon suggested. Perhaps Git-based version control systems could be customized for specific industry verticals. 

We need to think about how we “distribute these systems more,” he said. “Git is designed to be distributed but we’re not distributing it,” he said.

GitButler has created a command line interface specifically for agents. It was designed to give MCP servers an integrated map of the repository, which otherwise would require stitching together multiple Git commands. The Virtual Files concept allows the agent to work on a section of code that is also being worked on by a developer, or another agent.

These are changes that point to a rethinking of how a Git workflow should run. 

“I think all of these systems should fundamentally change, because all of our workflows have changed, right? There needs to be different, sort of primitives for how to deal with these problem sets,” Chacon said. 

A tip from gaming development

One company that wants its platform to replace Git altogether is Diversion, which has built an eponymous distributed version control system initially pitched for large-scale game design.

“Git’s architecture is actually an issue that prevents scaling,” argues Diversion CEO Sasha Medvedovsky in an interview with The Register. “Fundamentally it’s an architecture problem that can’t be fixed and is a bottleneck for end users and hosting services.”

Git is a distributed system insofar as every user, or hosted service, requires a dedicated database (much like blockchain). “It’s not distributed in the regular sense but rather replicated,” he wrote in an exchange with The Register on LinkedIn. 

Operations run on a single thread, making concurrent operations impossible. As a result, the larger the repository, the slower the commit operations – a deadly combination for fast-paced agentic software development, Medvedovsky noted. 

Of course, every CEO will have their talking points ready about a competitor’s weaknesses (Diversion is finalizing a blog post with hard numbers about Git and GitHub performance). But there are a growing number of other initiatives around prepping Git for the challenging times ahead.

Perhaps most notable is Jujutsu, a Git-compatible distributed version control system, stewarded by Google senior software engineer Martin von Zweigbergk. Like GitButler, Jujutsu (jj) aims to eliminate a lot of the annoyances that come with Git. It includes an undo button and the ability to keep committing even when there is a conflict. 

And because everything written in C must be recast into Rust these days, long-time Git contributor Sebastian Thiel started a project called Gitoxide to rebuild Git in Rust. Potential benefits include significant performance improvements through multicore processing, and the much-needed memory safety that comes with Rust. 

Will Git 3 solve all the problems?

Git’s chief maintainer is Junio Hamano, who took the reins from Torvalds in 2005. And he remains busy keeping Git current.

At FOSDEM this February, core Git contributor and GitLab engineering manager Patrick Steinhardt discussed some of the changes coming in the next version of Git, version 3, which is gradually being rolled out this year. 

One of the chief improvements will be in the way Git manages the commit references, the IDs that point to each change being made. Surprisingly, this operation is a real bottleneck for the software. “The design is inefficient,” Steinhardt told the audience.

Every time a programmer commits a code change, it gets recorded in a “packed-refs” file, which saves time by not giving each commit its own reference file. 

As projects grow larger, however, it takes longer for Git to amend or to delete a reference in packed-refs (One GitLab repo has a packed-refs file of more than 20 million references, Steinhardt said). 

This is especially problematic when you have multiple, simultaneous readers and writers of that file. And just forget about getting a consistent view of all the references. 

The freshly implemented Reftable feature, which will be the default in Git 3.0, stores references in an indexable binary format. The Git folks borrowed this concept from the Eclipse Foundation’s JGit Java implementation of Git. 

Reftable allows for block updates, eliminating the need to rewrite a 2 GB-sized file for a single entry. And it is much faster for reading, which would pave the way for Git supporting larger, more sprawling repositories – perfect for an ever-busy agentic workforce.

For nearly two decades, Git has proved to be the version control system of choice for geeks worldwide. But even with these new features and various third-party enhancements, can it retain relevance for a new generation of agentically enhanced coders? 

The battle is on. ®

• Bank cards and IDs are easily available, and cheap, on the dark web, NordVPN warns
• UK citizens are a major target, with their data worth more
• The best fix is to secure your online accounts

We already know about the risks of using the internet, and how basic cybersecurity hygiene principles can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to keeping you safe, but NordVPN has revealed exactly what happens with your data after it’s been stolen.

The company’s research found stolen UK payment card details are now being commonly sold on dark web marketplaces for around £9 (around $12), with full more complete ‘digital identity packs’ being sold for around £30 ($40).

Public Sector

Are you ready to RAAC?

England’s Department for Education is
advertising a role paying up to £200,000 a year to lead a new digital and
infrastructure group overseeing school buildings and maintenance, as well as technology and data.

Its Director General, Digital and
Infrastructure, will lead the technology function of
around 1,800 staff, develop a new strategy covering digital services, data, and artificial intelligence, and lead work on a unique identifier
for children and other learners in England. Scotland, Wales, and
Northern Ireland run education services on a devolved basis.

The successful candidate will also
implement a new strategy for “the education estate” of schools,
colleges, nurseries, and children’s homes. The job ad warns the function “carries
some of the highest levels of risk and accountability in the
department – including life-and-death decisions on safety,” citing ongoing work to remove unsafe reinforced
autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) from schools.

“I am looking for a leader who is
motivated by impact – someone who is able to combine their digital
and data expertise with their drive to improve outcomes for children
and young people,” writes the department’s permanent secretary, Susan Acland-Hood, in a briefing document with the advert. “Whilst
you do not need to be an expert on education policy, you need to be
curious and committed to rapidly building your understanding of the
latest evidence, system, and policy landscape.”

The department is willing to base the
job in Bristol, Cambridge, Coventry, Darlington, London, Manchester,
Nottingham, or Sheffield, although those who do not work in the
capital will need to go there frequently. Applications close on June 1.

Several other departments have
recently advertised digital director-general posts, the civil service
job category just below permanent secretary (equivalent to chief
executive). In January, England’s Department of Health and Social Care
advertised the role of director general for technology, digital and
data with a salary of up to £285,000 a year. 

In February, the Ministry of Defence offered £270,000 to £300,000
for its chief digital and information
officer job. And in April, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology
advertised for three directors-general, one paid £174,000 and the
other two paying between £200,000 and £260,000 annually. ®

During the Trinity nuclear test on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert—the world’s very first test of an atomic bomb—a new material spontaneously formed. It was discovered only recently, by an international research team coordinated by geologist Luca Bindi at the University of Florence, which identified the novel clathrate based on calcium, copper, and silicon. It’s a material never before observed either in nature or as an artificial compound created in the laboratory.

What Are Clathrates?

The term “clathrates” denotes materials characterized by a “cage-like” structure that traps other atoms and molecules inside, giving them unique properties. Of great technological interest, these materials are being studied for various applications ranging from energy conversion (as thermoelectric materials capable of transforming heat into electricity) to the development of new semiconductors, to gas storage and hydrogen for future energy technologies.

The New Material

To discover the new material, researchers focused on trinitite, a silicate glass containing rare metallic phases. Using some techniques like x-ray diffraction, the team was able to identify a type I clathrate based on calcium, copper, and silicon within a tiny copper-rich metal droplet embedded in a sample of red trinitite.

The new material, the researchers say, formed spontaneously during a nuclear explosion. This indicates that the extreme conditions, such as extremely high temperatures and pressures, can generate new materials that are impossible to obtain by traditional methods.

Natural Laboratories

The discovery is even more interesting because in the same detonation event another very rare material was formed: a silicon-rich quasicrystal, already documented by the team of experts led by Bindi a few years ago.

A quasicrystal, as Bindi told WIRED at the time, is something that is not a crystal, but looks a lot like one. “Their peculiarity,” he said, “is that the atomic arrangement that is not periodic, but nearly so, creates incredible symmetries from which derive amazing physical properties, among other things, very difficult to predict.”

Establishing the link between these structures therefore helps scientists better understand how atoms organize under extreme conditions and expand the possibilities for designing new materials. “Events such as nuclear explosions, lightning strikes, or meteoritic impacts function as true natural laboratories,” the researchers explain. “They allow us to observe forms of matter that we cannot easily reproduce in the laboratory.”

In essence, this research opens new vistas for the development of innovative technologies, demonstrating that even destructive events can bequeath discoveries useful for the future.

This story originally appeared in WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.