Baseten's $1.5B, Android Dev Verification

AI inference company Baseten is close to finalizing a stunning $1.5 billion funding round at a $13 billion valuation, the Wall Street Journal reports . Just five months ago, the startup announced that it had raised a $300 million Series E at a $5 billion valuation. And that round was just nine months after raising a $150 million Series D.

If finalized, this latest round would represent a 160% increase in valuation in less than half a year. However, the WSJ reports that this is a split-priced round , a tactic startups are using to boost their headline valuation and make lead investors look good on paper.

Launched in 2019, Baseten is a startup benefiting from what The Next Wave hailed the “ inference gold rush ,” in which VCs are pouring enormous amounts of money into companies building the inference layer. Inference is what the model does after a user submits a prompt.

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You’ve probably used VLC Media Player, the free video player with the orange traffic-cone icon — it’s been downloaded more than 6 billion times. But according to its lead developer, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, robots will soon be almost as ubiquitous as his open source video software.

Convinced that “hundreds of millions of robots and drones” will be roaming the streets in a few years, this French serial entrepreneur and open-source legend has been building Kyber , an infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time. Its core software is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal latency.

This lines up well with the rise of physical AI, and it’s part of why the Paris-based startup was able to raise a $5 million round led by Lightspeed, which has also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI. “Physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems running it,” the American VC firm wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing its investment.

Kyber’s potential applications go well beyond AI, though. Kempf told TechCrunch the platform is built for “all the use cases where the person who’s operating is not in the same place as the compute, which is not in the same place as the action.”

Remote control is one half of the equation; speed is the other — and it’s what inspired the startup’s name, a nod to the lightsaber crystals in Star Wars. “If you control things in the real world, every millisecond matters,” Kempf said.

Google has claimed that developer verification is a necessary change to smartphone software distribution, pointing to the increased prevalence of scams that trick Android users into installing malware apps. Google’s solution requires verifying the identities of developers outside the Play Store just like it does for devs publishing on its platform. This has proven to be a contentious change for myriad reasons.

In the new blog post , Google’s Matthew Forsythe confirms that the developer verification system is slated to come online on September 30 of this year. The initial deployment will be limited to countries with a high level of app scams: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

Google released its new developer console back in March, giving external developers the opportunity to pay $25 and verify their identities early. Developers who don’t register will find that their apps cannot be sideloaded on Google-certified Android devices once verification has rolled out.

This system places more burden on developers who want to make software for Android, even if they don’t want to deal with Google directly. There are a few updates that aim to streamline the experience. Google is following through on its promise to extend verification to trusted third-party stores—if a developer is verified in one of these storefronts, they are verified on Google’s side.

Developers will also have access to new APIs to make registering as an external developer less arduous. In the coming months, Google will release an Android Developer ID Status API that will check if a package name is already registered with Google. The Android Developer Console API will let you register and manage your app package names without leaving your development environment, too.

Leading PC manufacturers, such as HP, are exploring options to integrate Chinese CXMT memory chips into their products.

These discussions are primarily focused on devices intended for sale in Asian markets.

The consideration comes amidst a period of rapidly increasing prices for DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory).

Industry analysts attribute the price surge to a slower-than-expected growth in global manufacturing capacity.

While CXMT offers an alternative, its use is constrained by national security concerns in Western markets.

John Jumper, a Nobel laureate best known for his work on AlphaFold at Google DeepMind, is making a significant career move.

He is joining Anthropic, a leading AI safety research company, bringing his expertise in AI and protein folding.

This high-profile talent acquisition is expected to greatly enhance Anthropic's research capabilities.

Jumper's contributions to AlphaFold revolutionized protein structure prediction, impacting biological sciences.

His arrival at Anthropic signals a deepening focus on advanced AI research and its scientific applications.