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Microsoft wants to make it easier for developers to build AI-powered apps on Windows devices. On Monday during its Build 2025 conference, Microsoft announced Windows AI Foundry, a rebranding and expansion of the Windows Copilot Runtime service the company launched last May. Microsoft describes Windows AI Foundry as a “unified platform for local AI development” — a way to fine-tune, optimize, and deploy the AI models underpinning Windows apps. Microsoft increasingly sees AI, whether running locally or in the cloud, as a major profit driver, despite the high costs associated with developing tentpole models. In January, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said…

As part of an effort to make building AI-powered chatbots on the web simpler, Microsoft is launching an open project called NLWeb. Announced at Build 2025, NLWeb lets websites provide a “conversational interface” — i.e. a text field and a submission button — for their users with a few lines of code, the AI model of their choice, and their own data. A retailer could use NLWeb to create a chatbot that helps users choose clothing for specific trips, for example, while a cooking site could use it to build a bot that suggests dishes to pair with a recipe.…

Can AI speed up aspects of the scientific process? Microsoft appears to think so. At the company’s Build 2025 conference on Monday, Microsoft announced Microsoft Discovery, a platform that taps agentic AI to “transform the [scientific] discovery process,” according to a press release provided to TechCrunch. Microsoft Discovery is “extensible,” Microsoft says, and can handle certain science-related workloads “end-to-end.” “Microsoft Discovery is an enterprise agentic platform that helps accelerate research and discovery by transforming the entire discovery process with agentic AI — from scientific knowledge reasoning to hypothesis formulation, candidate generation, and simulation and analysis,” explains Microsoft in its release.…

At its Build 2025 conference, Microsoft open sourced a number of apps and tools, including a new command-line text editor for Windows called Edit. Open source software may not earn the company direct revenue, but it can serve as a form of market research — and a funnel to paid applications and services. By contributing to the open source community, Microsoft gains valuable knowledge and product suggestions, as well as ideas for future directions. Edit, which will be installed by default on Windows via the Windows Insider Program beginning this summer, will allow developers to edit files directly in the…

NEW YORK (AP) — Less than three weeks after his release from an immigration jail, the Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi strode across the graduation stage at Columbia University on Monday morning, savoring a moment the Trump administration had fought to make impossible.Draped in a keffiyeh, Mahdawi, 34, paused to listen to the swell of cheers from his fellow graduates. Then he joined a vigil just outside Columbia’s gates, raising a photograph of his classmate Mahmoud Khalil, who remains in federal custody.“It’s very mixed emotions,” Mahdawi told The Associated Press. “The Trump administration wanted to rob me of this opportunity. They…

BreachRx, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity firm, has raised $15m in Series A funding to scale its intelligent incident response platform for enterprise organisations.The oversubscribed round was led by Ballistic Ventures, with participation from SYN Ventures, Overline, and Silver Buckshot Ventures. The funding also sees Ballistic Ventures general partner and former Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia join the board, while journalist and author Nicole Perlroth becomes a board observer.BreachRx offers a secure platform that automates cyber incident response across teams. Its technology delivers real-time coordination, dynamic playbooks, and clear tasking to ensure every stakeholder is aligned during a crisis. The tool supports…

You don’t have to start a company or grow up wealthy to become a billionaire. Most billionaires got rich by building businesses or inheriting big bucks from someone who did. Yet a small but growing group of current and former American executives have managed to amass three-comma fortunes as very well-paid employees. Altogether, Forbes found a record 48 of these hired-hand billionaires in 2025, up from 29 a year ago. And that count is sure to keep climbing thanks to soaring share prices and sky-high executive pay packages. The average annual compensation of the ten highest-paid CEOs in America shot…

Lendflow, a technology firm based in Austin, Texas, that specialises in embedded credit infrastructure for FinTech firms, vertical SaaS platforms, and lenders, has secured $15m in growth capital.The investment comes from Trinity Capital, a Nasdaq-listed alternative asset manager known for supporting high-growth companies across tech, life sciences and financial services verticals.Lendflow provides scalable, low-code solutions that enable platforms to integrate lending capabilities seamlessly into their workflows. Its technology stack includes a proprietary operating system and a decisioning engine powered by aggregated data and contextual lending tools. These features allow customers to handle underwriting, decisioning, and capital deployment efficiently, while maintaining…

Thndr, a digital investment platform based in Cairo, has reportedly raised $15.7m in new funding to support its regional expansion efforts.The round was led by Prosus Ventures and joined by Y Combinator, BECO Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, JIMCO, Raba, and Onsi Sawiris, along with participation from a prominent U.S. university endowment, according to a report from Wamda. This brings Thndr’s total capital raised to $37.76m since its inception.Founded in 2020 by Ahmad Hammouda and Seif Amr, Thndr enables users in the Middle East to invest in local and international stocks, mutual funds, bonds, and other financial instruments through a low-cost, mobile-first…

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A jury has found a former Rhode Island high school basketball coach not guilty of second-degree child molestation and second-degree sexual assault after he spent decades asking hundreds of male student-athletes if they were “shy or not shy” before asking them to get naked so he could their check their body fat.Instead, the 12 jurors found Aaron Thomas guilty of a lesser charge, misdemeanor battery, in their verdict handed down Monday. In the final days of the trial, attorneys agreed that the jury could consider convicting Thomas of misdemeanor battery rather than the harsher charges originally…