Zocks, which has built an AI assistant for financial advisers, has raised $45 million in a Series B funding co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and QED Investors, the startup told Crunchbase News exclusively. All existing backers, including Motive Ventures and 14Peaks Capital, also participated in the financing. The raise comes less than one year after San Francisco-based Zocks raised a $13.8 million Series A. In total, Zocks has raised $65 million since its 2022 inception. Prior to co-founding Zocks, CEO Mark Gilbert spent more than a decade at Microsoft and more than three years as vice president of product management at Twilio. While at Twilio, Gilbert oversaw compliance and was struck by the amount of information and insights that companies were able to extract from their communications. 'We were focused on very high security privacy areas, and that's why we started with, and are 100% focused on, financial services,' Gilbert told Crunchbase News in an interview. 'And what we found was the conversations advisers were having with clients had very, very valuable information for them.'...

Last week was all about inference in AI and new players emerging as forces to be reckoned with in the space. For the last few years, the entire industry has been obsessed with training'stacking thousands of H100s to teach a ghost how to speak. But this week, the vibe shifted. We are moving from a world where we spend billions to create intelligence, to one where we spend billions to serve it. Leading the charge is BaseTen, who just announced a monster $300M round at a ~$5B valuation. Interestingly, NVIDIA is writing the check. BaseTen isn't trying to build the model; they are building the plumbing. Their bet is that inference is the new 'cloud computing''a utility that needs to be boring, reliable, and infinitely scalable. They are effectively saying: 'You bring the weights, we'll handle the nightmare of GPU orchestration.' While BaseTen handles the macro-infrastructure, two other players emerged this week to handle the micro-optimization. First up, we have RadixArk. If you've been hacking on SGLang, you know it's magic for complex workflows. The team coming out of Berkeley just spun this out with a $400M valuation. Their secret sauce is RadixAttention. In a standard inference engine, when a user sends a prompt, you compute the Key-Value (KV) cache from scratch. RadixArk changes the game by treating the KV cache like a classic LRU cache. It automatically reuses the KV blocks from previous requests if they share a prefix. This is massive for agentic workflows where you have a long system prompt or few-shot examples that never change. You aren't recomputing the same tokens over and over; you're just mapping to existing memory....

With the change in TikTok ownership, TikTok users in the U.S. are collectively freaking out over the company's updated privacy policy after being alerted to the changes through an in-app message. The revised document details the U.S. joint venture's conditions for using its service, including the specific location information it may collect. Many users are also posting to social media about language found in the policy, which says that TikTok could collect sensitive information about its users, including their 'sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status.' But despite the panic, this disclosure isn't new ' and it doesn't mean what many users fear. The same language appeared in TikTok's privacy policy before the ownership deal closed, and it's primarily there to comply with state privacy laws like California's Consumer Privacy Act, which requires companies to agree to disclose to consumers what 'sensitive information' is collected. Similar disclosures appear in other social media apps' policies....

Under the agreement, American and global investors will own 80.1% of TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, while ByteDance will retain a 19.9% stake. Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi investment group MGX will each hold 15%. The new venture will be responsible for securing US user data, applications, and recommendation algorithms. These will be hosted in Oracle's US cloud under enhanced cybersecurity and data-privacy controls. The deal follows years of political scrutiny over TikTok's Chinese ownership. A US law passed in 2024 required ByteDance to divest its US assets or face a ban, a measure upheld by the Supreme Court. The White House confirmed that both US and Chinese authorities have approved the agreement. Subscribe to our Newsletter to increase your edge. Don't worry about the news anymore, through our newsletter you'll receive weekly access to what is happening. Join 120,000 other PE professionals today....