'We did a retro, and wouldn't you know' The person who's asking for the new request was the new decision maker [we] didn't even realize existed,' said Kataria, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Centralize, in an interview. 'We missed the fact that the prior person had left, and the context had shifted hands, and no one had tracked that.' The financing includes participation from Salesforce Ventures,1 Y Combinator, 20 Sales, Ritual Capital, Adverb Ventures and high-profile angel investors including former Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield and Scott Woody, CEO and founder of Metronome. Combined with a previous $4 million seed round led by Salesforce Ventures, Centralize has now raised $19 million since its 2023 inception to build what Kataria calls a 'deal GPS' for enterprise revenue teams. Both went on to build high-scale products across Big Tech. Kataria served as a founding engineer on Facebook Shops during Meta's e-commerce push during COVID-19, scaling the platform from zero to a quarter billion monthly active users in a year. Wang, meanwhile, created Slack Huddles, building the initial version alongside Slack executives Cal Henderson (CTO), Noah Weiss (VP of product), and Butterfield (CEO), and later leading engineering and product teams at Slack....

At an internal meeting on Tuesday, the company's executives outlined a plan for salespeople to negatively compare AI products from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to its own, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The meeting, billed as a strategy session for the new fiscal year, reportedly leaned heavily on pitching the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of Microsoft's in-house models against those of its rivals. 'Everyone else is selling parts ' we're selling the full end-to-end system. That's the story that we all need to get out there and tell in FY27,' Executive Vice President Jay Parikh reportedly told the room. Executive Vice President Jacob Andreou reportedly went further, delivering a presentation comparing Copilot directly to Anthropic's chatbot Claude. According to Bloomberg, Andreou noted that, when it came to performance within Microsoft's office apps, Anthropic's model was 'slower and less accurate, and lacked the proper security integrations,' Bloomberg writes....

Our business is changing because the world around it is changing. The way technology is built, deployed, and used is transforming faster than at any point in my time here. Our customers' needs are shifting, the business models that serve them are shifting, and that means the work itself ' what we do, where we focus, and how we're organized ' has to transform too. Companies don't get to choose whether their industry changes; they only get to choose whether they change with it. That means we will need to adjust resources and roles and shift how we operate so we can have the greatest impact for our customers. The layoffs build on Microsoft's recent launch of its Frontier Company business unit, which is focused on delivering enterprise AI deployments with the firm's existing AI tools and an army of forward deployed engineers. That move is backed by a $2.5 billion investment, mirroring a common theme we're seeing among layoffs this year ' job cuts are correlating with increased AI spending. Speaking about the Xbox layoffs, Coleman said little: 'We are restructuring to position the business for long-term success. Engineering teams across the company will also evolve their structure and priorities to meet customer needs and innovate for the future.'...

Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched issued a progress report on Tuesday, after TSMC successfully manufactured its chip earlier this year. The startup says it has already booked $1 billion in contract orders for its product: full systems powered by those chips. Etched is currently in the process of testing that first product with customers. It calls these systems 'frontier inference clusters,' bundles that include the chips along with custom-designed racks and software, all built to help frontier models run inference faster, more cheaply, and with better power efficiency than rivals, Etched claims. (Inference is what happens after a user submits a prompt ' it's currently the biggest bottleneck, and the biggest cost center for AI companies trying to serve customers at scale, which is exactly why investors are paying attention to anyone promising to solve it.) Etched, founded in 2022, also revealed that it has now raised a total of $800 million to date. The most recent tranche was an unannounced $500 million round closed in December at a $5 billion post-money valuation, the company said....