PAPERTECH
Digital Newspaper
Issue #01
Wednesday, 20 August 2025
© 2025 PAPERTECH
Google Cloud Unveils AI-Powered Security Centers
Google Cloud has announced the launch of its new AI-powered security centers, aiming to strengthen organizations' defenses against an escalating landscape of cyber threats through automated threat intelligence and real-time risk mitigation.
TikTok Launches Campus Verification Feature
TikTok has launched a new feature called Campus Verification, designed to help college students connect with their peers on campus, reminiscent of Facebook's early days as a campus-only social network, available at over 6,000 universities.
Two UC Berkeley Dropouts Raise $28M to Revolutionize AI Marketing Automation
Neil Tewari and James Jiao, who dropped out of UC Berkeley, have raised $28 million for their startup Conversion, an AI-driven marketing automation platform designed to help mid-sized businesses personalize campaigns and automate workflows ethically. The founders, who began their journey as college roommates, secured funding after rigorous customer research and early traction, positioning Conversion as a strong competitor to legacy marketing tools with nearly $10 million in annual revenue. Their innovative approach emphasizes consumer privacy and AI-native solutions, attracting significant investor interest and transforming the marketing automation landscape.
Substack Raises $100M from Chernin Group, Andreessen Horowitz, Skims CEO, and More
Substack has successfully raised $100 million in a recent funding round with major investors including Chernin Group, Andreessen Horowitz, Skims CEO, and others, reinforcing its position as a leading platform for independent writers and creators. This infusion of capital is expected to accelerate Substack's growth, enhance its product offerings, and expand its reach in the creator economy space. The round highlights continued investor confidence in subscription-based content platforms amid increasing interest in creator monetization models.
Sam Altman-backed Coco Robotics Raises $80M to Expand Autonomous Delivery Fleet
Coco Robotics, a startup specializing in last-mile delivery robots, has raised $80 million in funding led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other investors including Max Altman and Pelion Venture Partners. Founded in 2020, Coco operates a fleet of about 1,300 cooler-sized, zero-emission delivery robots across major U.S. cities and Helsinki, completing over 500,000 deliveries so far. The latest funding will be used to advance Coco’s AI platform, scale its fleet to an expected 10,000 robots by next year, and grow enterprise partnerships. Coco's partnership with OpenAI enhances its robots' real-time decision-making capabilities, positioning the company at the forefront of sustainable and scalable urban delivery solutions.
India's Government Proposes Blanket Ban on Real-Money Gaming
The Indian government is set to introduce the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025, which proposes a sweeping ban on all real-money gaming platforms, including those based on skill or chance. The draft legislation aims to prohibit financial transactions for these games, ban their advertisements, and make facilitating such payments a criminal offense with penalties of up to three years imprisonment.
This move threatens to devastate India's rapidly growing online gaming industry, which generated $3.8 billion in revenue in 2023–24, with real-money gaming accounting for the majority share. Industry stakeholders warn that the ban could lead to massive job losses, shutdowns of major startups like Dream Sports and WinZO, and push users towards unregulated offshore gambling sites.
While the government emphasizes preventing addiction, fraud, and associated social harms, critics argue that regulation rather than prohibition is needed to sustain the sector's economic contributions and innovation.
Google's AI Video Tool 'Flow' Surpasses 100 Million Creations in Just Three Months
Google's AI-powered video generation platform, Flow, has achieved a major milestone by producing over 100 million videos within just three months of its launch, highlighting the growing demand for creative AI tools in digital media. The platform, which allows users to generate high-quality videos from simple text prompts, has quickly become a game-changer for content creators, marketers, and educators, enabling faster production of professional-grade visuals.
Industry analysts note that Flow's rapid adoption underscores not only the rising role of generative AI in creative industries but also signals intensifying competition among tech giants racing to dominate the AI video space. This milestone represents a significant shift in how digital content is created and consumed, with AI tools becoming increasingly sophisticated and accessible to mainstream users.
Deel Launches AI Agents to Tackle Global HR Staffing Crisis
Deel has unveiled its new AI Workforce, a suite of seven specialized AI agents designed to address the mounting HR staffing crisis by automating critical HR and payroll functions across more than 150 countries. With industry reports revealing that over half of HR teams are currently understaffed, Deel's agents-such as The Hiring Guru, PTO Fairy, Border Buddy, and Payroll Detective-are engineered to relieve administrative burdens.
These smart agents accelerate time-consuming processes like recruitment, compliance, and offboarding, and flag potential errors before they occur. Embedded directly within Deel's platform, they allow companies to scale operations, reduce manual workloads, and enable HR professionals to focus on strategic initiatives instead of routine tasks.
Deel's innovative approach reflects a broader industry move toward integrating AI-driven solutions, promising to transform workforce management and provide measurable efficiency for global organizations facing unprecedented HR challenges.
Meta Restructures AI Division for the Fourth Time in Six Months Amid Superintelligence Push
Meta has reorganized its AI division for the fourth time in six months, splitting its newly formed Superintelligence Labs into four specialized teams focused on AI research, product development, infrastructure, and large language models. This latest shakeup, driven by CEO Mark Zuckerberg's goal to accelerate the company's pursuit of advanced AI capabilities and "superintelligence," aims to streamline operations and spur innovation.
The restructuring is accompanied by internal changes, including leadership turnover, potential downsizing, and a strategic openness to adopting third-party AI models. Amidst soaring capital expenditures projected at up to $72 billion this year and an aggressive recruitment spree targeting top AI talent, Meta is betting big on both infrastructure and expertise to claim a leadership role in the evolving AI landscape.
This represents Meta's most aggressive push yet into AI development, as the company faces escalating challenges from rivals like OpenAI and Google in the race to develop the most advanced artificial intelligence systems.
DeepSeek Unveils V3.1 AI Model with Expanded Context Window and Landmark Upgrades
DeepSeek has launched its V3.1 AI model, setting a new benchmark with an expanded context window of up to 1 million tokens-allowing the model to process and reason over much larger documents, conversations, and codebases without losing contextual understanding. V3.1 also delivers a 43% improvement in multi-step reasoning, 38% fewer hallucinations, and supports over 100 languages.
Technically, DeepSeek V3.1 features a transformer-based architecture with 560 billion parameters, multi-modal capabilities spanning text, code, and images, and is optimized for faster, more reliable inference. These breakthroughs make the model especially powerful for use cases in software development, scientific research, personalized education, and business analysis.
As part of its open research philosophy, DeepSeek is also releasing a 7-billion-parameter version of V3.1 as open source for the AI community to build upon, demonstrating the company's commitment to advancing AI research accessibility.
Databricks CEO Says Fresh $1B Will Help Attack New AI Database Market
Databricks is closing a fresh $1 billion funding round, pushing its valuation to around $100 billion, with the capital earmarked to drive innovation in a new and rapidly evolving AI database market. CEO Ali Ghodsi highlighted that traditional databases have remained static for decades, but a new class of users-AI agents-is now creating the majority of new databases.
To capitalize on this, Databricks launched Lakebase, an enterprise-grade, Postgres-compatible database optimized for AI agents through a separated compute and storage architecture that allows cost-effective scaling as AI agents spin up numerous databases much faster than humans. Additionally, Databricks is investing heavily in its AI agent platform, Agent Bricks, designed to automate everyday organizational tasks.
The fresh funds will also support talent acquisition amid fierce competition for AI expertise, as Databricks positions itself as the leading platform for AI-driven database management and automation.
Capsule Raises $12M to Advance AI-Powered Video Editing Platform
Capsule has secured $12 million in a Series A funding round to develop the next generation of its AI-powered video editor, tailored for marketing, sales, and media teams. The upcoming version will introduce an AI co-producer that provides intelligent editing suggestions and supports real-time collaboration, empowering brands to craft more engaging video stories with greater ease.
The round was led by Innovation Endeavors, with participation from HubSpot Ventures and prominent angel investors, bringing Capsule’s total funding to nearly $20 million. The new capital will be used to enhance AI-driven collaboration features and expand the team, accelerating the company's growth and product innovation.
Featured Technology Stories
Aalo Atomics Raises $100M for Nuclear Data Centers
Aalo Atomics, an Austin-based nuclear startup, has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round led by Valor Equity Partners to accelerate the construction of its first pilot microreactor, the 50-megawatt Aalo-X, targeted for completion in summer 2026.
The company's innovative approach integrates mass-manufactured small modular reactors designed specifically to power data centers, addressing the surging energy demands from the AI boom, with the Aalo-X prototype including an experimental data center adjacent to the reactor.
Firecrawl AI Web Crawler Raises $14.5M
Firecrawl, an AI-driven open-source web crawler, has raised $14.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners. The company's web crawling platform is widely used by over 350,000 developers and powers AI applications for clients including Shopify, Replit, Zapier, and major hedge funds.
Despite profitability and rapid growth, Firecrawl is innovating further by exploring hiring AI agents as employees-offering salaries and resources for agents to perform tasks autonomously-though it has yet to finalize any hires and is now searching for an AI chief of staff to manage agent workforce integration.
Nvidia Developing New AI Chip for Chinese Market
Nvidia is reportedly developing a new AI chip specifically for the Chinese market, based on its latest Blackwell architecture. This chip, tentatively named B30A, is expected to be more powerful than the current H20 GPUs allowed for sale in China.
Unlike the dual-die design of the B300, the B30A will use a single-die architecture while retaining features like high-bandwidth memory and Nvidia's NVLink for fast data transmission, though U.S. regulatory approval remains uncertain.
AI and Technology Updates
OpenAI ChatGPT Go India: OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Go, a new affordable subscription plan exclusively for India priced at ₹399 per month, significantly lower than the existing ₹1,999 Plus plan, with India being OpenAI's second-largest market by user base.
AI-Powered Stuffed Animals: AI-powered stuffed animals like Grem and Grok from startup Curio are marketed as screen-time alternatives for children, offering interactive storytelling and adaptive learning through embedded chatbots, though critics warn they might replace genuine human interaction.
Market and Platform Updates
X Platform Challenges: Elon Musk's social media platform X is facing significant challenges with its Android app, as new installs on Google Play dropped by 44% year-over-year worldwide in July 2025, contributing to a 26% decrease in total mobile downloads.
Eight Sleep Sleep Agent: Eight Sleep is developing Sleep Agent, which leverages large language models to create thousands of digital twins of users to predict and optimize nightly recovery, transitioning from reactive to proactive sleep health management.
Keychain CPG Platform: Keychain, a U.S.-based startup that connects CPG brands with manufacturing partners, has raised $30 million in Series B funding and is developing KeychainOS, an AI-powered operating system designed to help manufacturers manage compliance, procurement, inventory, and production more efficiently.
Emerging Technology Trends
Nuclear-Data Center Synergy: Aalo Atomics' approach represents a new synergy between nuclear power and digital infrastructure, with the company aiming to lower energy costs to around three cents per kilowatt-hour, making nuclear power competitive with natural gas and solar.
Sleep Technology Innovation: Eight Sleep's expansion into health monitoring with features like Health Check demonstrates the growing convergence of consumer technology and healthcare, as companies seek to provide comprehensive wellness solutions beyond traditional product categories.
Regulatory and Policy Developments
AI Export Controls: Nvidia's development of the B30A chip for China demonstrates the ongoing challenges of balancing commercial interests with national security concerns, as the company seeks to retain China as a key market amidst competition from local rivals.
Data Privacy in AI Toys: AI-powered stuffed animals raise privacy concerns regarding data collection and usage from children's conversations, with experts recommending that AI toys should complement, not replace, traditional play and face-to-face interaction.
Consumer Technology Trends
Social Media Evolution: TikTok's Campus Verification feature represents a shift toward more localized, community-focused social networking, potentially creating new opportunities for targeted advertising and user engagement in the competitive social media landscape.