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Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
UNFI cyberattack: wholesaler 'still shipping' to customers, CEO says
United Natural Foods continues to ship to customers as the US grocery wholesaler and retailer responds to the cyberattack that has hit the business, its CEO has said. In a stock-exchange filing on Monday (9 June), UNFI said it had detected 'unauthorised activity' on 'certain' IT systems on Thursday last week. The company said it 'promptly' responded by implementing containment measures, including 'proactively taking certain systems offline', which temporarily affected its ability to fulfil customer orders. UNFI published its fiscal third-quarter financial results yesterday and, on a call with Wall Street analysts to discuss the numbers, the company's management faced a series of questions about the cyberattack and its impact on operations. Asked by R5 Capital's Scott Mushkin if UNFI could supply clients, UNFI chief executive Sandy Douglas said the company was able to do so "on a limited basis, and it depends on the technology platform". He added: "Some are in further along on the recovery than others but we are partnering with customers across the country and across our formats in various short-term modes to serve their needs as best as we possibly can. It's getting increasingly positive each day but still work in progress." UNFI is among the largest wholesale distributors of food products throughout North America. It distributes branded and own-label products to more than 30,000 grocery stores, including Amazon-backed Whole Foods Market, as well as independent retailers. Douglas declined to estimate how much of UNFI's deliveries the company was able to make. "The entire process is very fluid and ongoing," he said. "The way I would describe it is each day is better and we're working in a very customised way by market and by customer to serve the capability that exists. "I wouldn't want to give percentages at this time because it's changing every day. It's obviously the top priority of the company to serve our customers as best as we possibly can while we're working to, as rapidly and safely as possible, bring our systems back online." UNFI's food brands include Wild Harvest, Culinary Circle, and Essential Everyday, covering natural, organic, and specialty food products. The group runs 76 retail stores under the Cub Foods and Shoppers chains but the wholesale business accounts for more than 95% of its annual revenue. Douglas was asked later on the call if there are elements of UNFI's operations that made the business "more susceptible" to a cyberattack and whether the breach would mean the company would reassess its investment plans in areas like IT security. "We have, like a lot of companies, a significant investment in process around the cyber area," the UNFI chief said. "It's highly dynamic and rapidly growing and the threat actors out there are always looking for ways to innovate and find new ways to penetrate systems. "We rigorously review and invest in this cyber infrastructure and capability in the company. We use multiple different external benchmarks to assess ourselves and, really hold nothing back in this area. "Having said that, we just got penetrated. We will be continuing to look at every aspect of our defence, every aspect of how our tools are working and what may be necessary to bolster it going forward. It's clearly an area that requires a tremendous amount of focus from companies today and will continue. "How that affects capex going forward? Ultimately, it is a choice and we have and will continue to prioritise cyber investment but I don't think it changes the ultimate big picture for UNFI on capital. But I think a company needs to be both high capability and humble when it relates to cybersecurity and this event is just a demonstrated example of why." For the fiscal year ending 2 August, UNFI reported net sales of $30.98bn, a 2.3% increase from fiscal 2023. The 2024 fiscal year included 53 weeks, compared to 52 weeks in the prior year. Despite the sales growth, operating income fell sharply to $8m, a 93.3% decrease from the previous year. Announcing the results in October, UNFI attributed the decline primarily to increased operating expenses, restructuring, acquisition and integration-related costs, as well as losses on asset sales and charges. It booked a $112m net loss in fiscal 2024, compared with a $24m profit a year earlier. In January, the group set out plans to 'realign' its commercial wholesale organisation into two 'product-centred' divisions with 'focused' sales teams. In the nine months of UNFI's current financial year, a period that ran until 3 May, net sales stood $24.09bn, against $22.83bn in the corresponding nine months in the previous fiscal year. The company booked a nine-month operating income of $47m, compared to $6m a year earlier. It posted a net loss of $31m, lower than the $75m booked in the first nine months of 2023/24. "UNFI cyberattack: wholesaler 'still shipping' to customers, CEO says" was originally created and published by Just Drinks, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
TechCrunch
11-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Standard Nuclear emerges from the ashes of a failed startup
Standard Nuclear emerged from stealth Wednesday with $42 million in funding to make advanced nuclear fuel. Except Standard Nuclear isn't an entirely new company. Rather, it's built on assets purchased at auction following the bankruptcy of the Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) for $28 million. The new company's CEO, Kurt Terrani, served as vice president at USNC. The funding round was led by Decisive Point with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Crucible Capital, Fundomo, and Washington Harbour Partners. Standard Nuclear says it has $100 million in non-binding fuel sales for 2027, and that it is working with customers including Nano Nuclear Energy, which acquired other USNC assets in the bankruptcy auction, and Radiant Industries, another Decisive Point portfolio company. In a statement to TechCrunch, Standard Nuclear acknowledged the bankruptcy purchase, saying that it 'accelerated the launch' of its timeline. USNC had been working to commercialize a type of nuclear fuel known as TRISO, which is a uranium fuel pellet coated in layers of carbon- and ceramic-based materials. The poppy seed-sized particles are considered to be more resistant to melting down, and they can be loaded into larger spheres or cylinders. TRISO is an old idea — it's been around since the 1950s — though the fuel isn't widely used today. That may change as several startups, including Google-backed Kairos and Amazon-backed X-energy, are planning to use TRISO in their reactors. Though USNC was founded on a relatively well-known technology, the company's path was tumultuous. Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW USNC was substantially funded by one investor, Richard Hollis Helms and his family, who over the years had plowed $100 million into the USNC along with $24.7 million in loans. For what was effectively a single-investor startup, the company had a sprawling business model, developing not just TRISO nuclear fuel, but also two different reactor designs, a nuclear space propulsion system, and a nuclear heating source for spacecraft. It's not apparent where Helms's interest in next-generation nuclear came from. He began his career with the CIA as an Arabist in the Middle East. His wife was apparently a spy, too: 'While lying to their children and pretending to have routine office jobs, Richard and Teresa together pursued their international clandestine careers,' his obituary said; he died in May 2024. 'Once certain that their son wouldn't run and tell everybody, they broke the news to their children by showing them the movie 'True Lies.'' Helms retired from the CIA in the wake of 9/11 '[w]hen the agency did not call on his and his colleagues' profound expertise,' his obituary said. He used his retirement to found two national security-related companies: Abraxis, which sold for $124 million in 2010, and Ntrepid, which is still privately held. In 2022, USNC started looking for investors to participate in a Series A, according to court filings. But the company had been slow to bring in significant revenue, and when Helms died, the company's debts were mounting. Posts on Reddit suggest the company wasn't making payroll at the time. USNC declared bankruptcy in October 2024. Standard Nuclear, led at that point by Decisive Point founder Thomas Hendrix, entered a stalking horse bid for USNC's fuel-related assets for $28 million that same month. The sale was completed in February, including the property that today serves as Standard Nuclear's base of operations.
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
United Natural Foods cyberattack disrupts services and systems
US grocery wholesaler and retailer United Natural Foods (UNFI) has taken 'certain systems' offline following a cyberattack. In a stock-exchange filing, UNFI said it had detected 'unauthorised activity' on 'certain' IT systems on 5 June. The company said it 'promptly' responded by implementing containment measures, including 'proactively taking certain systems offline', which has temporarily affected its ability to fulfil customer orders. The incident has led to 'temporary disruptions' in UNFI's business operations, it added. UNFI is among the largest wholesale distributors of food products throughout North America. It distributes branded and own-label products to more than 30,000 grocery stores, including Amazon-backed Whole Foods Market, as well as independent retailers. A Whole Foods spokesperson told Just Drinks: "We are working to restock our shelves as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused for customers." UNFI's food brands include Wild Harvest, Culinary Circle, and Essential Everyday, covering natural, organic, and specialty food products. The group runs 76 retail stores under the Cub Foods and Shoppers chains but the wholesale business accounts for more than 95% of its annual revenue. The investigation into the impact and scope of the incident is still in its 'early stages', UNFI added. For the fiscal year ending 2 August, UNFI reported net sales of $30.98bn, a 2.3% increase from fiscal 2023. The 2024 fiscal year included 53 weeks, compared to 52 weeks in the prior year. Despite the sales growth, operating income fell sharply to $8m, a 93.3% decrease from the previous year. Announcing the results in October, UNFI attributed the decline primarily to increased operating expenses, restructuring, acquisition and integration-related costs, as well as losses on asset sales and charges. It booked a $112m net loss in fiscal 2024, compared with a $24m profit a year earlier. In January, the group set out plans to "realign" its commercial wholesale organisation into two "product-centred" divisions with "focused" sales teams. In March, UNFI reported half-year net sales of $16.1bn, up from $15.33bn in the corresponding period the year previous. It booked operating income of $32m – versus break-even in the first half of fiscal 2024/25 – and a net loss of $24m. UNFI had recorded a net loss of $54m in the first half of its previous financial year. The company is set to report its third-quarter results today. "United Natural Foods cyberattack disrupts services and systems " was originally created and published by Just Drinks, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
CNBC
10-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
4. Anthropic
Founders: Dario Amodei (CEO), Daniela Amodei, Chris Olah, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Tom BrownLaunched: 2021Headquarters: San FranciscoFunding: N/AValuation: $61.5 billionKey Technologies: Artificial intelligenceIndustry: Enterprise technologyPrevious appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 1 (No. 7 in 2024) If OpenAI's explosive growth is best measured by consumer adoption, its rival Anthropic is the gold standard for enterprise use of large language models. That is not to say OpenAI isn't making gains in enterprise deals, and Anthropic is popular with millions of individuals for gen AI tasks. But its AI-as-a-service model, in particular for coding tasks where generative AI is making huge leaps in ability, has led the Alphabet- and Amazon-backed startup to exponentially grow its business-to-business deals, and revenue. Anthropic just hit $3 billion in annualized revenue, an increase in under one year from the $1 billion revenue pace it was on last December, with many customers paying as much as $100,000. The company told CNBC that annual revenue from code generation and software development rose by 10x in the last three months of 2024. From March to May 2025 alone, annual recurring revenue grew by $1 billion. "We've looked at the IPOs of over 200 public software companies, and this growth rate has never happened," Meritech General Partner Alex Clayton recently told CNBC. The growth has pushed up the firm's valuation, and its access to various forms of capital. In mid-May, it received a $2.5 billion credit line. That followed a $3.5 billion funding round in March that valued the company – which was founded by former OpenAI executives and first debuted its Claude chatbot in 2023 – at $61.5 billion. Companies that use Anthropic AI include top coding startups, including GitLab and Cursor, as well as big names across the market, from Intuit to Pfizer, Salesforce, Asana, DoorDash and fellow disruptor Canva. Claude's biggest moment yet came in May, when Anthropic launched two models, called Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, that can work for seven-consecutive hours without performance degradation, a milestone in AI productivity. "I do a lot of writing with Claude, and I think prior to Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, I was mostly using the models as a thinking partner, but still doing most of the writing myself," Mike Krieger, Anthropic's chief product officer, recently told CNBC. "And they've crossed this threshold where now most of my writing is actually ... Opus mostly, and it now is unrecognizable from my writing." Last October, it launched its "agentic AI" rival to offerings from Meta and OpenAI's Operator, called Computer Use, with Claude effectively being able to view a computer monitor, use buttons, type, search the internet and execute real-time tasks. Those types of capabilities are being adopted by companies including PayPal, Square, Plaid, Atlassian and Asana. Anthropic has been pouring its R&D dollars into more complex tasks for business use cases, shifting away from some focus on B2B and consumer chatbot technology earlier in its history. Anthropic has not been free of AI controversy — Reddit recently sued the company, alleging unauthorized use of content — and its leadership has not shied away from sensitive AI debates, whether the issue is the threat to human jobs or geopolitics. Its CEO Dario Amodei recently predicted that AI could wipe out as much as 50% of entry-level office jobs. The company has also taken a vocal stance on the trade war with China and export controls that the U.S. government has placed on chips, after a year marked by the emergence of China's DeepSeek, a direct threat to both Anthropic and OpenAI's lead in the AI race. Anthropic has argued for tighter export controls, referencing DeepSeek's rise, and sparked a war of words with chip giant Nvidia when it claimed in a blog post that Chinese smugglers hide AI chips in "prosthetic baby bumps" and "packed alongside live lobsters."
Mint
09-06-2025
- Business
- Mint
More Retail raises ₹400 crore ahead of 2026 IPO, eyes deeper push into smaller towns
Mumbai: Supermarket chain More Retail has raised around ₹400 crore from existing investors Samara Capital and Amazon, as well as new domestic family offices over the past 12 months, as it gears up for a public listing within the next year, two people aware of the matter said. The capital raise—separate from earlier rounds in previous years—will be used to fund the company's store expansion and operational growth, one of the two people said. More Retail managing director and CEO Vinod Nambiar confirmed the fundraise in an emailed statement, but Samara and Amazon did not respond to Mint's requests for comment. The fresh infusion comes as More Retail prepares to scale up its operations, expand into smaller cities and ramp up its role in powering Amazon's grocery delivery arm, even as losses persist and revenue shrinks. The company is reportedly targeting a ₹2,000 crore initial public offering (IPO) next year, with no secondary share sale planned. Read this | Neobank Jupiter in early talks to raise up to $50 million from existing investors to expand 'We've spent the last few years strengthening our fundamentals and building a robust, profitable, and scalable business model," Nambiar said. 'This consistent performance has reinforced the confidence of our existing and new investors, who continue to support our long-term vision and have invested (approximately) ₹400 crore in the last year." More plans to expand its hybrid retail model to over 2,000 stores by 2030, with a sharper focus on tier-2 and smaller cities, Nambiar said. The company had reportedly raised ₹387 crore from Amazon and Samara in FY24, ₹300 crore in FY23, and ₹400 crore in FY22. However, More clarified that the latest fundraise is distinct from those rounds and includes participation from both existing and new investors. Retail strategy More Retail was set up by the Aditya Birla group in 2006 and acquired in 2019 by Samara Capital and Amazon via Witzig Advisory Services, now More Consumer Brands Pvt. Ltd (MCBPL). Samara owns and controls 51% of MCBPL through its Alternative Investment Fund, while the remaining 49% is held by the Amazon Group. Over the past two years, the company has shuttered loss-making outlets, exited categories such as general merchandise, reduced hypermarket operations, and trimmed corporate headcount. It now operates over 750 stores in 270 towns, with a strong presence in southern and eastern India—down from more than 900 stores in FY22. Read this | Amazon-backed More Retail plans expansion of supermarkets in India The retailer has reduced its footprint in western and central India over FY23 and FY24 to focus on its core markets. In a November 2024 report, India Ratings said More would continue to benefit from its heavy concentration in South India (which accounts for over 70% of its stores), followed by moderate exposure in the north and east. The company has also become a critical part of Amazon's grocery delivery strategy, serving as a fulfilment layer for the Amazon Fresh platform. In India's top 14 cities, Amazon Fresh orders are fulfilled via a mix of warehouses and More stores; in the rest of the country, they are serviced entirely through More locations. As of September 2024, 277 More stores were fulfilling Fresh orders, up from 150 a year earlier—a number that is expected to grow further. According to the India Ratings report, the company faces challenges from increased borrowings and debt servicing obligations as it has been refinancing its existing debt due to weak cash flow generation on account of continued losses. It intends to continue funding its expansion and operational cash losses primarily through equity infusions, with little or no reliance on external debt, the credit rating agency added. Also read | Fast and furious: Early-stage startups tweak supply chain operations as they shift to quick commerce lane In FY24, More Retail reported a revenue of ₹4,148.7 crore, down from ₹4,506.7 crore a year earlier. Its net loss narrowed slightly to ₹532.6 crore from ₹550.3 crore, according to a report by Inc42. More faces tough competition from quick commerce players and traditional retailers such as D-Mart and Reliance Fresh. Platforms offering fast delivery and discounts are increasingly drawing urban customers away from kirana stores and traditional supermarkets.
