Latest news with #California-headquartered
Rakyat Post
3 days ago
- Lifestyle
- Rakyat Post
Lace Up, Lift Off: New Running Shoes Land In Malaysia For Everyday Runners
Subscribe to our FREE Whether it's your morning jog around the neighbourhood, a weekend race, or just the daily habit of lacing up before dawn, finding the right running shoe can make all the difference. Shoemaker Skechers' new AERO Series might just become your new running companion. The AERO Series represents a big step forward for Skechers in the running world—this isn't just about making comfortable shoes anymore, it's about combining serious cushioning with advanced performance technology for runners who want both comfort and speed. The AERO Series isn't about breaking world records (though it won't stop you from trying)—it's about making running feel good. The California-headquartered multinational footwear and apparel company has introduced three new running shoes designed to make each step feel lighter, faster, and more enjoyable. Three Shoes, Three Different Runs First up is the AERO Spark (RM659) . Think of it as your everyday running shoe—perfect for morning jogs, regular runs, or even that quick sprint to catch the train. It features a breathable mesh upper and can be thrown in the washing machine when it gets dirty. It's also made without any animal products. For Long-Distance Adventures: AERO Burst For runners who love going long distances, there's the AERO Burst (RM759) . This one's built for those who rack up serious kilometres. The mesh upper keeps your feet cool in our hot Malaysian weather, and it's designed for reliable comfort and performance. Finally, there's the AERO Tempo (RM799) —the speed demon of the group. This ultra-light shoe is designed for speed, featuring a snug mesh upper. It's the shoe you'd wear when you're trying to beat your personal best, whether that's in a 10K race or just trying to outrun your morning routine. The Technology Behind the Performance What makes the AERO Series special is the smart technology working behind the scenes: 🏃♂️ HYPERBURST ICE™ & HYPERBURST® Technology – These dual-density foam cushioning systems provide premium responsive comfort and energy return, ideal for running styles, ensuring you can hit every mile with confidence while maintaining stability. 💨 Hyper Arc™ Technology – Adaptable to your stride for a more efficient run, this rocker system ensures smooth transitions from heel to toe while providing support to reduce fatigue, making each step feel effortless during your runs. ⚡ Carbon-Infused Winglet Plates – Embedded within the midsole, these lightweight plates add powerful propulsion and enhanced performance with every stride, contributing to the shoe's responsive feel. 🚀 New Chapter of Running Innovation – The Aero Series opens a new chapter of running innovation, delivering a high-tech blend of propulsion, support, and everyday style for serious runners who need to go further, faster. The cushioning keeps things bouncy and comfortable, while the READ MORE : READ MORE : Share your thoughts with us via TRP's . Get more stories like this to your inbox by signing up for our newsletter.
Time of India
3 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Cross-border digital payments startup Aspora raises $93 million from Sequoia Capital, Greylock and others
Y Combinator-backed cross-border payments startup Aspora has raised $93 million over three equity funding rounds between September 2024 and May 2025, giving it a $500-million valuation, according to its founder, Parth Garg. The London-headquartered startup, which offers remittance services to immigrant diaspora, raised the funds over three rounds in the last eight months. Its first institutional funding of $5.8 million from Hummingbird Ventures had come in 2022. Garg told ET that the startup raised $5 million in an extension of the first round in September 2024, after which came a $35-million infusion led by US-based venture firm Sequoia Capital along with participation from US-based Greylock Partners. Last month, Aspora secured another $53 million in financing, led by Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners, with participation from London-based venture fund Quantum Light. Angel investors Balaji Srinivasan, ex-CTO of Coinbase, Sundeep Jain, previously the CPO of Uber, and Prasanna Sankar, cofounder of Rippling, were among the other participants in the round. Overall, the startup has raised more than $98 million since inception. 'Aspora's current valuation is $500 million,' Garg said from London. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories Garg had started the business in Bengaluru, but earlier this year shifted base to London, which he said made it easier for him to coordinate global operations of the brand. For the California-headquartered venture firm Sequoia Capital, this is the first major investment in an Indian-origin startup offering services to Indian consumers. In the middle of 2023, Sequoia Capital had separated from its units in China and India and Southeast Asia. While the Chinese unit was renamed HongShan, the India entity was rebranded into Peak XV Partners . Peak XV Partners has set up a team in the US to scout for early investment opportunities in that part of the world. ET had reported in April that Peak XV Partners is looking to raise $1.2 billion for its first independent fund after the spinoff from Sequoia Capital. Aspora was previously known as Vance, but the company had to overhaul the brand's identity after JD Vance became the US vice president. Garg said all his brand promotions and online marketing efforts were getting branded as political advertisements because of the similarity in names. The company has around 250,000 users who use the platform to remit money back to India. The startup offers services to consumers in the UK, European Union region and the UAE. 'We are launching in the US in July, and Canada, Australia and Singapore by the end of the year,' he said. While headquartered in London Aspora has around 30 out of its 50 people in Bengaluru and the remaining mostly in the UK and the UAE. 'People use our platform to send money home to their parents, for investments to buy property or invest in alternative assets, we target communities and social groups of Indians in these countries to popularise our product,' Garg said. Aspora gets around 55% of its customers via referrals and around 20% from performance marketing channels. The startup has kept its customer acquisition costs at a fraction of competition, mainly by leveraging local Indian communities which are socially very active in these countries. Aspora competes with the companies such as Remitly and Wize and is disrupting the business which used to be dominated by banks and the likes of Western Union.
Time of India
4 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
AI firms are hyping up threat to coders to push their model sales
Anshul Ramachandran , founding team member at artificial intelligence (AI) coding platform Windsurf , said he believes that the idea that AI will replace software developers is a narrative being overhyped by some AI founders and chief executives largely to push their model sales. 'My personal belief is that most of them wanted to fire a lot of people anyways, and AI is a very good excuse,' Ramachandran told ET in an exclusive interview. 'And then I think some of these folks leading model companies have some incentive as well—they're building models that are for software engineering. That's like very much a business tactic to sell more models.' The California-headquartered AI-assisted coding platform, which was valued at $3 billion within a year of launch, is reportedly in talks for acquisition by OpenAI . The company has seen India emerge as its second-largest market after the US, both in terms of developer adoption and enterprise partnerships, Ramachandran said. 'There are close to 17 million developers in India and there's very real energy for adopting the latest and greatest AI,' Ramachandran said. 'We're expanding our team there and actively thinking about building GPU clusters in India.' He said the company is working with every leading IT company in India at various levels. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories Moreover, Indian IT companies are disrupting themselves faster than their international peers by using more AI, he said. But, he added, that only means a lot more software will now be created out of India because these companies have already made technology a differentiator. Windsurf is also considering offering special pricing for a cost-sensitive market like India, Ramachandran said, particularly for enterprises. 'We've always provided a very generous free tier. And part of that rationale is, even in markets like India, we want to be able to democratise the technology,' he said. While work in the future will be AI-assisted, humans will remain in the driver's seat, according to Ramachandran. AI-based tools like Windsurf have the potential to reduce the number of people needed to do the same work, which could be viewed negatively, he said. 'It's actually been quite the opposite. People see it as an opportunity to have more business.' He added that we will create ten times more software and, therefore, always need 'engineering 101' and investments in the workforce. 'That's where the counterintuitive part comes in, because every incremental hire you make now can actually create even more software than before,' he said. On Windsurf's rapid growth, Ramachandran said the company was at 'the right place at the right time'. 'We chose a problem space that we understood that ended up being of great value,' he said. 'We were an infra company before we were even an AI company, so our background in GPU infra has absolutely helped us.'
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Joby Aviation stock keeps rising on news that it will ‘explore opportunities' to supply flying taxis to Saudi Arabia
Shares in Joby Aviation (NYSE: JOBY) jumped yesterday after the air taxi company announced a potential deal with the Saudi Arabia-based Abdul Latif Jameel. The deal could lead to Joby supplying up to 200 of its eVTOL aircraft. Here's what to know about the potential and its effect on Joby's stock price. The household auto fleet is a money pit Why AI Is Making 1:1 Meetings Irrelevant Where are the wildfires in Canada? Maps pinpoint the location of fires and air-quality threats from smoke Joby Aviation, better known as Joby, is a Santa Cruz, California-headquartered aviation company that is developing a fleet of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles—in other words, flying taxis. Joby was founded in 2009 and went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021 via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Prior to its NYSE debut, Joby was named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies for 2021. While the company is developing flying taxi vehicles, one of its primary aims is to become a service—an Uber of the skies, so to speak. Because of its relatively small market cap of around $6.7 billion and interesting futuristic product (a flying rideshare service), Joby's stock is somewhat popular with investors who lean more toward dabbling in meme stocks and small-cap stocks that have potential to see sky-high returns if their products eventually take off (no pun intended). Joby says it currently has 'strategic partnerships' with Toyota, Delta, and Uber, and it employs more than 1,700 engineers. For its Q1 2025, which ended March 31, Joby reported a net loss of $82.4 million. Yesterday, Joby Aviation announced a potential deal with Abdul Latif Jameel, a business based in Saudi Arabia. Potential is the key word here. That's because the two companies didn't actually agree to sell anything to or buy anything from one another. Instead, they signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). This MoU will see the companies 'explore opportunities to establish a distribution agreement in Saudi Arabia for Joby's electric aircraft,' according to Joby. That potential distribution agreement may see Joby deliver up to 200 air taxis and other related services valued at up to $1 billion to Abdul Latif Jameel 'over the coming years.' Joby has positioned the potential deal as a win-win for both American and Saudi Arabian business interests. 'This collaboration is about bringing America's leadership in electric air mobility to the world,' Joby Aviation CEO JoeBen Bevirt said in a statement announcing the deal. Given that Joby has recently been worth about $6 billion in total, it's no wonder the company's stock jumped yesterday after it announced it was exploring a single deal worth up to $1 billion. By the close of the market yesterday, JOBY stock had risen over 7% to $8.03 per share. In premarket trading this morning, as of the time of this writing, JOBY stock is up another 2%. However, while JOBY stock has been flying high over the past two days, it's important to put the stock's past performance into perspective. Despite JOBY's stock price surge in the last 24 hours, the company's stock was still down year-to-date by 1.23% as of yesterday's close. At the same time, when you look at the last 12 months, JOBY shares have had a significant return. Since last June, the stock has risen nearly 65%. Where the stock goes from here is anyone's guess. However, the company has had some exciting advances in recent years. In February 2024, Joby announced that it plans to launch an air taxi service in Dubai by 2026, and in October 2024, Joby showed off one of its air taxis to much fanfare in New York's Grand Central Station. The company said that an air taxi could carry up to 1,000 pounds of payload/people, had a range of 100 miles, and could reach speeds up to 200 mph. This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter:
The Hindu
04-06-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
U.S. firm Evergent Tech's innovation hub opened in Hyderabad, to employ 1,000 people by 2025
California-headquartered AI-powered SaaS solutions provider for media and entertainment, telco and digital consumer businesses Evergent Technologies formally opened its global value centre (GVC) in Hyderabad and with it announced plans to hire at least 400 additional employees for the GVC by this year. Established as a strategic product and innovation hub, the centre has onboarded more than 600 engineering and AI professionals thus far. The company aims to scale this to more than 1,000 employees by 2025, Evergent said after Industries and IT Minister D. Sridhar Babu inaugurated the GVC on Tuesday (June 4, 2025). The launch of the GVC syncs well with Telangana's vision to contribute $1 trillion to India's economy over next decade. Facilitating a shift from volume-led to value-led growth in tech industry will be one of the growth drivers, something that could be achieved by building capacity in high-impact areas like AI, semiconductors, defence, and deep-tech, the Minister said. Setting up of such facilities marks a shift to building high-value IP and global products from Telangana, leveraging Hyderabad's deep tech talent and driving innovation at scale, a press release from the Minister's office on his speech said. Under Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy's leadership, Telangana has attracted investments worth ₹3 lakh crore over the past 18 months, he said. The focus is on making Telangana a hub for emerging technologies such as AI, ML and Quantum Computing. Evergent CEO and founder Vijay Sajja said 'we have combined the best of Silicon Valley and India to build mission-critical, AI-driven SaaS solutions that power monetisation for global media giants. Hyderabad's exceptional engineering talent is at the core of our innovation...' he said. The firm is developing proprietary intellectual property in Hyderabad that enables monetisation for global media giants such as the NBA, Sky, DirecTV, and SonyLIV across more than 180 countries. Its platform, entirely built in India, has helped onboard over 920 million subscribers worldwide on behalf of its clients, creating one of the largest datasets for AI-driven business intelligence.
