The Vivo X200 Ultra is the company’s upcoming flagship smartphone, and based on a new rumor, it could ditch its predecessor’s 1-inch camera sensor. Its predecessor, the Vivo X100 Ultra used the Sony LYT-900 camera sensor.

The Vivo X200 Ultra could ditch its predecessor’s 1-inch main camera sensor

This information comes from Digital Chat Station, one of the best-known tipsters out there. He’s rarely wrong about such information, so we have no reason to doubt this info. It was published on Weibo, by the way.

The Vivo X200 Ultra will replace the 50-megapixel Sony LYT-900 1-inch main camera with a 50-megapixel 1/1.3-inch camera sensor. We’re not sure which one just yet, but it could be the same one the Vivo X200 Pro is using.

The Vivo X200 Pro is equipped with a 50-megapixel 1/1.28-inch Sony LYT-818 sensor. Now, that may seem like a downgrade, but that’s not necessarily the case. This is a newer sensor and it has its perks, it’s not all about the sensor size. Besides, the Vivo X200 Pro sits side by side with the Vivo X100 Ultra in terms of image quality, based on what we’ve seen.

We do expect Vivo to make a difference between the Vivo X200 Pro and Vivo X200 Ultra main cameras, however. So, this camera sensor could include variable aperture, or perhaps Vivo has some other sensor in mind completely. We’ll have to wait and see. Chances are we won’t get the same experience on the two phones, though.

The periscope camera will seemingly use the same camera sensor as the Vivo X100 Ultra

Digital Chat Station also mentioned the periscope telephoto camera that will be included on the phone. The Vivo X200 Ultra will include a 200-megapixel 1/1.4-inch camera sensor for its periscope telephoto camera.

That is the sensor size of both the Vivo X100 Ultra and Vivo X200 Pro periscope telephoto camera. So… that one could remain unchanged too, at least as far as the sensor itself is concerned.

The Vivo X100 Ultra is still lauded as one of the best, if not the best camera smartphone on the market, at least as far as photos are concerned. So we have high hopes for the Vivo X200 Ultra. The VIvo X200 Pro will arrive to global markets soon, at which point we’ll be able to test it ourselves and see what’s the deal. The Vivo X200 Ultra is not expected until Q2 2025, unless Vivo changes its release cycle.

After a lengthy consideration, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Amazon’s “captive-audience meetings” are a violation of the National Labor Relations Act. These are mandatory meetings where an employer shares its stance on unionization.

“Ensuring that workers can make a truly free choice about whether they want union representation is one of the fundamental goals of the National Labor Relations Act. Captive audience meetings—which give employers near-unfettered freedom to force their message about unionization on workers under threat of discipline or discharge—undermine this important goal,” Chairman Lauren McFerran said of the ruling. “Today’s decision better protects workers’ freedom to make their own choices in exercising their rights under the Act, while ensuring that employers can convey their views about unionization in a noncoercive manner.”

The decision noted that employers may hold meetings about unionization as long as workers receive advanced notice about the topic, are told that attendance is voluntary and without consequences for opting not to participate, and that attendance records are not kept.

Today’s ruling centers on Amazon, which has a rocky history with its employees’ efforts to organize and with the NLRB. However, the decision could impact other big tech firms that have followed similar practices around unionization.

Every year, more than 1,000 startups join Station F, the iconic startup campus in Paris. As it can be hard to sift through 1,000 startup descriptions, Station F selects the 40 most promising startups and shares a list of what it calls the “Future 40.” The campus also invests in 10 of these startups (but never discloses that list).

The 10 startups it invests in participate in a program run by Station F itself or by a partner, such as Binance, LVMH, Meta, and Microsoft.

Station F’s flagship program is the Founders Program. Companies apply to join this highly competitive accelerator program and be invited to workshops and classes to iterate rapidly on their projects and get to product-market fit as quickly as possible. Station F now takes a 1% equity stake in these startups.

But the startup campus also runs the Fighters Program, which is specifically designed for entrepreneurs with underprivileged backgrounds. It has also run vertical-specific programs in the past — such as the FemTech Program — when the Station F team believes startups in a specific vertical need additional support.

AI everywhere

Startups in this year’s batch have already raised €93 million to date (a hair less than $100 million). While entrepreneurs tackle a variety of sectors, 34 of the 40 startups are using artificial intelligence. It’s clear that every new startup going forward will incorporate AI in some way.

Looking at this year’s Future 40 startups, some names stand out of the selection — such as Arago, a startup working on new AI-focused chips that use optical technology at the chipset level to speed up operations. Or EXXA, a startup that’s optimizing AI inference to bring per-token rates down.

Expect to see more startups focused on optimizing AI workloads now that innovation in AI model development is drastically slowing down.

Elsewhere, Altrove (a startup we previously covered) and Entalpic are both working on materials research. These are just two startups in a new wave of materials companies that have turned to AI to accelerate development.

In this year’s Future 40, there are also quite a few startups working on energy optimization. For instance, Optimmo is a remote companion that can help home owners improve the energy performance of a house or apartment with the most efficient retrofitting works. Kelvin is another interesting home energy retrofitting startup that we’ve already covered.

Orus Energy is a software solution that shifts energy loads to off-peak hours. With these optimizations, companies can save on costs and reduce their carbon footprint.

Many other startups deserve mention, but we’ll keep this section brief so you can explore the Next 40 directly (full list below). We’ve also covered some of them already here on TechCrunch, such as Koyeb and Presti.

Here’s the full list of this year’s Next 40 startups at Station F:

.omics (Dotomics): .omics is crafting personalized plants that will meet the demands of a changing climate and an evolving world, addressing critical societal challenges such as enhancing food security for a growing population and advancing sustainable, plant-derived medicines.

.txt (dottxt): .txt is a tool which makes LLMs reliable enough for the world to build on. The team is creating an ecosystem where developers can design, execute, deploy, and evaluate LLM applications.

Altrove: Using the latest advances in AI models and lab automation, Altrove develops and manufactures alternatives to critical yet insecure materials needed to reach net zero, bridging the gap between prediction and industrial application. Their patent-pending technology enables them to develop new materials 100x faster than ever before.

Arago: Arago creates a unique component to overcome both computing and memory limitations, by using a totally different medium: light. Arago was founded by a trio of AI researchers and physicists from École Polytechnique and MIT, backed by executives from leading AI and semiconductor companies, including Arm’s GM, Intel’s CTO, Hugging Face’s CSO, Apple’s VP, and others.

Biolevate: By harnessing the power of AI, Biolevate turns mountains of data into actionable insights, accelerating the discovery of breakthrough treatments, and transforming the pace of innovation. They’re automating the tedious and complex, freeing up the brightest minds to focus on what truly matters: making revolutionary scientific discoveries.

Bluco: Bluco helps companies fill open positions within a week by bringing AI to messaging apps and integrating into current recruitment platforms.

CarbonFarm: CarbonFarm pioneers satellite-verified carbon credits in agriculture, starting with rice. They unlock additional revenues for farmers adopting sustainable practices, while helping corporations reach their net-zero goals. CarbonFarm has raised a €2.5 million seed round.

CleanMob: CleanMob is a B2B car green tech revolutionizing automotive telematics by enabling companies to boost their vehicle fleets’ performances and productivity using connected car data and cutting-edge virtual sensors technology.

COMIN: COMIN is the first ride-hailing platform to offer a fair, sustainable and participative model, built to redefine urban mobility by empowering drivers and delivering affordable, eco-friendly rides to passengers.

Corma: Corma has built an IT copilot that monitors, governs, and automates your software licenses and identities.

Drawbridge Labs: Drawbridge Labs is building the studio of the future based on a SaaS platform for computer-generated imagery (CGI) production to empower a new generation of content creators. The founders are entertainment industry veterans with senior leadership experience at Disney, Pixar, and Wētā Digital.

Entalpic: Entalpic is an AI company dedicated to accelerating materials research to drive a fair ecological transition. The team develops a machine learning platform to discover new catalysts that optimize chemical reactions, cutting CO₂ emissions in key industrial processes and making a substantial environmental impact.

EXXA: EXXA is building the most efficient batch inference infrastructure to process high-volume workloads and generate high-quality tokens at a fraction of typical costs.

Formality: Formality helps companies and their legal teams secure revenue and control spending thanks to its automatic contract monitoring platform.

ICONO: ICONO allows any media producer to create their own AI video search engine.

Jimini: Jimini’s mission is to automate most low-value tasks, allowing legal professionals to focus on higher-value work. Their AI-powered co-pilot assists professionals in law firms and in-house counsel with research, analysis, and drafting, delivering unmatched efficiency and accuracy.

Kelvin: Kelvin is a B2B SaaS that generates home energy retrofit plans. Earlier this year, the startup raised €5 million. The CEO, Clémentine Lalande, is a graduate of Centrale Paris and TU Berlin. She’s the former CEO and co-founder of Once, a dating app that grew to 12 million users across eight European countries.

Koyeb: Koyeb provides a serverless cloud for developers and teams to seamlessly deploy apps and databases on high-performance infrastructure around the world. The platform is the fastest way to run low-latency AI workloads, web applications, and APIs globally.

Kulipa: Kulipa created a debit card issuer for crypto wallets. They make crypto payment as smooth and fast wherever Mastercard and Visa are accepted. With their white-label platform, they provide a solution that covers both the technical and regulatory requirements of card payments.

Leadbay: Leadbay is a domain-specific AI model for B2B sales, trained on companies in their local market and its knowledge domain (CRM, ERP, CSV), that’s capable of predicting their next customers.

Leanear: Leanear empowers organizations to secure multimodal AI solutions by protecting their data in the cloud beyond traditional perimeter security.

Leasi: Leasi revolutionizes the way consumers access their technology products to make it more flexible, economical, and green.

Moneco: Moneco is the neobank of the French-speaking African diaspora based in Europe. They make it easy for their users to open a bank account (only a passport is needed) and give them access to a range of financial services (FR IBANs, international VISA card, P2P, wire transfers, instant remittances to Africa).

Neuralk-AI: Neuralk-AI develops their own AI embedding models specialized for structured data representation, allowing enterprises to build custom AI solutions that accurately interact with their own structured data.

Optimmo: Optimmo accelerates energy retrofitting with a state of the art tech enabling every real estate owner to have the best retrofit scenarios, 100% remote.

Orus Energy: Orus Energy is an energy flexibility software enabling consumers to automatically shift flexible loads off carbon peak times, thereby supporting the balance and resilience of the power grid.

Pollen Robotics: Pollen Robotics is revolutionizing the field of robotics by creating open source humanoid robots that address critical challenges in automation. Their mission is to empower the AI community with cutting-edge, human-like robots designed for complex physical tasks, improving efficiency and solving labor shortages across industries.

Presti: Presti helps furniture companies create product visuals with AI. Unlike other generative AI tools, their core model is optimized for furniture products and includes multiple features tailored to the unique needs of the furniture industry. Earlier this year, the team raised €3.5 million.

Qevlar AI: Qevlar AI revolutionizes security operations centers with its autonomous, explainable AI-powered alert investigations. Seamlessly integrating into any environment, it leverages existing resources to conduct comprehensive analyses, providing analysts with actionable insights.

Raidium: Raidium has pioneered the first-ever radiological foundation model, dubbed the “GPT” of radiology. This AI breakthrough aims to create an imaging biomarker factory for clinical and research purposes, embedded in an AI-native platform to address precision medicine’s complexities.

Rakoono: Rakoono is the first AI study companion in every student’s pocket. Powered by machine learning, LLMs, and VLMs, Rakoono breaks down problems step-by-step, generates quizzes aligned with upcoming deadlines, creates exercises based on students’ passions, and keeps parents in the loop with weekly progress reports.

Rounded: Rounded is a comprehensive platform that enables any company to easily assemble, deploy, and monitor AI voice agents at scale.

Steerlab: Steerlab is an AI-first solution that helps pre-sales teams automate over 80% of their responses to requests for proposals (RFPs), security questionnaires, and other vendor documents.

Syntetica: Syntetica uses green chemistry to close the loop on synthetic textiles, starting with nylon. Founded in 2023, the startup raised a €4.2 million seed round led by EQT Ventures. The team is working with Victoria’s Secret and ETAM as its first customers to deliver 100% recycled nylon materials.

Theremia: Theremia is an AI-powered platform that creates drug derivatives for specific population subgroups, particularly targeting neurological disorders. By utilizing multi-scale algorithms, along with advanced machine learning techniques, it optimizes drug properties — such as dosage, frequency, and formulation — to enhance efficacy and minimize side effects.

Twelve: Twelve is an AI practice management software for dental offices.

Twenty: Twenty is a modern, powerful, and affordable open source CRM platform for managing customer relationships. Built around customer data and adaptable to unique workflows, Twenty is designed to meet the evolving needs of fast-growing companies.

Upstream: Upstream is an email client designed for team collaboration. It adds features such as channels and task-tracking functionality on top of a typical email client, so that teams can have full context and transparency on all of their conversations, and make decisions more efficiently.

Vazy Data: Vazy Data is a simple and intuitive AI data analysis co-pilot that helps companies manage their decisions with ease and speed.

Veeton: Veeton is a cutting-edge AI platform that develops proprietary models to transform fashion imagery. It generates on-model photos from flat images, allowing brands to create high-quality visuals quickly and at scale.

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PayPal is introducing a new money-pooling feature that aims to make it easier to collect and pay for things as a group. The feature is free and allows PayPal users to create a pool online or via the platform’s app, invite friends and family to contribute, track contributed funds, and transfer that cash to their own PayPal balance.

Provided you trust the pool organizer who will hold the power to spend or withdraw those funds, the pooling feature should provide a simple way to gather cash for things like gifts and group traveling collectively. Pool organizers can share pool joining links via “text, email, WhatsApp, and more” to people regardless of whether they have a PayPal account or not. Contributions can be made using a PayPal balance or bank account, and organizers can also set a pool name, description, target date, and funding goal amount.

The money pooling feature is rolling out today across the US, UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Users in those regions can access it by selecting “Pool Money” from either the PayPal app menu, or in the “More Options” menu within the “Send/Request” tab. 

Other apps like Settle Up are already available that directly focus on tracking and pooling group expenses. Venmo also introduced a similar feature last year called “Groups” with a notable distinction — the responsibility is entirely shared, which may be a better solution if you don’t want a single individual in charge of the group.

• A report suggests the Samsung Galaxy S25 will be unveiled on January 23
• Samsung is apparently aiming to launch the S25 Slim at the same time
• A leaker has reiterated that all S25 models will use a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset

The wait for the Samsung Galaxy S25 series could almost be over, as according to a report the S25, Galaxy S25 Plus, and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra will all be announced on January 23.

That’s according to South Korean site FNNews (via @Jukanlosreve), citing “industry sources.” It’s a date that makes sense, since based on past form we always expected to see the Galaxy S25 range appear in either January or February.

The New York Times has introduced the next title coming to its Games catalog following Wordle’s continued success — and it’s all about math. Digits has players adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers. You can play its beta for free online right now. 
In Digits, players are presented with a target number that they need to match. Players are given six numbers and have the ability to add, subtract, multiply, or divide them to get as close to the target as they can. Not every number needs to be used, though, so this game should put your math skills to the test as you combine numbers and try to make the right equations to get as close to the target number as possible.

Players will get a five-star rating if they match the target number exactly, a three-star rating if they get within 10 of the target, and a one-star rating if they can get within 25 of the target number. Currently, players are also able to access five different puzzles with increasingly larger numbers as well.  I solved today’s puzzle and found it to be an enjoyable number-based game that should appeal to inquisitive minds that like puzzle games such as Threes or other The New York Times titles like Wordle and Spelling Bee.
In an article unveiling Digits and detailing The New York Time Games team’s process to game development, The Times says the team will use this free beta to fix bugs and assess if it’s worth moving into a more active development phase “where the game is coded and the designs are finalized.” So play Digits while you can, as The New York Times may move on from the project if it doesn’t get the response it is hoping for. 
Digits’ beta is available to play for free now on The New York Times Games’ website