Latest news with #Disruptor50
Yahoo
24-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Meta Tried to Buy Runway Before $14B Scale AI Bet
June 24 - Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) held early talks with artificial intelligence startup Runway about a possible acquisition earlier this year, according to a Monday report confirmed by CNBC. Runway, known for its AI-driven video tools, was also recently featured on the Disruptor 50 list. However, discussions between the two companies did not move beyond the initial stage and ultimately fell through, a person familiar with the matter told the outlet. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 4 Warning Sign with META. The approach came before Meta committed $14.3 billion to Scale AI in June. That deal gave Meta a 49% stake in the company, and it brought on Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang and several team members to work on Meta's internal AI products. Meta has also held similar acquisition talks with Safe Superintelligence and Perplexity AI in recent months. Although those efforts didn't result in full takeovers, some executives from those firmsincluding Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross and former GitHub chief Nat Friedmanare now joining Meta's AI unit. Meta declined to comment on the reported Runway discussions. This string of outreach underlines Meta's broader strategy to scale its AI capabilities across product areas as competition intensifies among tech giants. This shows Meta's AI expansion playbook relies as much on partnerships and personnel shifts as it does on major investments. This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
Yahoo
24-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Meta Tried to Buy Runway Before $14B Scale AI Bet
June 24 - Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) held early talks with artificial intelligence startup Runway about a possible acquisition earlier this year, according to a Monday report confirmed by CNBC. Runway, known for its AI-driven video tools, was also recently featured on the Disruptor 50 list. However, discussions between the two companies did not move beyond the initial stage and ultimately fell through, a person familiar with the matter told the outlet. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 4 Warning Sign with META. The approach came before Meta committed $14.3 billion to Scale AI in June. That deal gave Meta a 49% stake in the company, and it brought on Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang and several team members to work on Meta's internal AI products. Meta has also held similar acquisition talks with Safe Superintelligence and Perplexity AI in recent months. Although those efforts didn't result in full takeovers, some executives from those firmsincluding Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross and former GitHub chief Nat Friedmanare now joining Meta's AI unit. Meta declined to comment on the reported Runway discussions. This string of outreach underlines Meta's broader strategy to scale its AI capabilities across product areas as competition intensifies among tech giants. This shows Meta's AI expansion playbook relies as much on partnerships and personnel shifts as it does on major investments. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Sign in to access your portfolio
CNBC
23-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Meta approached AI startup Runway about a takeover bid before Scale deal
Meta spoke with artificial intelligence startup Runway about a potential takeover ahead of its multibillion-dollar investment in Scale AI, CNBC confirmed on Monday. Runway is best known for its AI video generation tools and earned a spot on CNBC's Disruptor 50 list earlier this month. The deal talks between Meta and Runway did not progress far and dissolved, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to the confidential nature of the discussions. Bloomberg earlier reported the talks. Meta declined to comment. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been aggressively pushing to bolster his company's AI efforts in recent months. The social media giant invested $14.3 billion into Scale AI in June, and it has also approached the startups Safe Superintelligence and Perplexity AI about potential acquisitions this year. Meta agreed to a 49% stake in Scale AI and hired away founder Alexandr Wang, along with a small number of other employees from the company. And while Meta was unsuccessful in its efforts to buy Superintelligence outright, Daniel Gross, the company's CEO, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman are joining Meta's AI efforts, where they will work on products under Wang.
CNBC
18-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Oura, Maven Clinic team up to bring biometric data into clinical care
Women's and family health platform Maven Clinic is partnering with smart ring maker Oura, a step forward in the integration of the increasing amount of data being collected by wearable devices and clinical care. As part of the partnership, eligible Maven members will be able to sync the data that their Oura Ring collects with the Maven platform, allowing members of the Maven care team to comb over the Oura-collected data like sleep, stress and activity to provide enhanced health guidance. Maven Clinic, a three-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company, is the largest virtual clinic for women's and family health with more than 2,000 employers and health plans using its platform. The company, which raised a $125 million funding round valuing it at $1.7 billion in October 2024, offers programs that range from fertility and family building to maternity and newborn care to menopause and midlife health. Kate Ryder, CEO and founder of Maven Clinic, said that we're in a "reinvigorated era of consumer health," a period that is being defined by the amount of data being collected via wearables and the desire of people to use those diagnostics to seek treatment and advice. Ryder said that a recent survey of Maven Clinic members found that nearly three out of four members are tracking their health regularly with some sort of device, and consumers are asking, "How do I take my health into my own hands with all these tools and areas of wellness at my fingertips to try to live a healthier life?" That shift prompted Maven's new partnership with Oura, also a three-time Disruptor 50 company, which was ranked No. 23 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list and has been on its own path of wellness and preventive health via its eponymous Ring in recent years. While Oura's initial focus centered on tracking sleep and recovery metrics, its scope has widened significantly in recent years to broader healthcare and personal health issues. As Oura CEO Tom Hale said in a recent CNBC interview, "the vision for the future of Oura has to do with the doctor in your pocket." That includes a wide variety of metrics, features and health indicators tracked by the Oura Ring and parsed by the company's AI and analytics to offer wearers' health insights, including a variety of female-focused features around menstrual, period and pregnancy cycles. "One of our key theses is that women have been overlooked in science, and in health understudied and overlooked, but we believe that they expect the same level of personalization, transparency and immediacy from their healthcare," said Oura chief commercial officer Dorothy Kilroy. "This is what they want, and traditional healthcare hasn't really kept up with that for women and their families." Kilroy said that the partnership between the two companies aims to deliver that, offering "smart, connected personalized care that'll fit into their lives and not the other way around, which is kind of what the old healthcare systems have provided." The ultimate goal is to improve health outcomes through the utilization of the data collected by the Oura Ring, allowing for more personalized recommendations, the ability to catch issues sooner and be more proactive, and layering in expert medical care at critical points. "Tracking is the first step, but really it's not just about surfacing health data," Ryder said, noting that Maven Clinic is the first virtual care platform to turn Oura's health signals into expert care. "We really want to act on it to actually drive better outcomes." One example of how the data could be utilized would be in the case of a pregnant Maven member diagnosed with gestational diabetes. That person could work with a Maven nutritionist or support coach to help regulate their glucose levels, while using Oura's physical activity tracking and meals and glucose features to monitor their progress. Oura is increasingly working with a variety of partners in the healthcare sector to use the biometric data collected by its Rings, Kilroy said, allowing it to be "paired with clinical care and creating that kind of seamless experience where the members can both understand what's going on in their body but they can actually use that to get expert care all in one place." Ryder said that she sees the convergence of this sort of biometric tracking and the clinical side as leading towards much more effective preventative care, leading to "much better outcomes," especially among high-risk patients where this sort of reporting and engagement can result in significant improvements in health. Maven Clinic will start to integrate the Oura data into its platform starting later this summer, with a goal of having it reach all members who want to opt in by the winter. Maven members will also receive exclusive pricing on the purchase of an Oura Ring. "We have to shift our healthcare system into prevention and invest more in wellness and wellbeing," Ryder said. "There's a lot of exciting stuff that this partnership can do to take the step forward, be innovative and show the outcomes on the back end."
CNBC
17-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Canva expands from design into analytics with acquisition of MagicBrief
Canva has grown into a $32 billion startup through its popular design tools used for easily creating images, marketing material and presentations. Now the company, with its 12th acquisition, is buying its way into the analytics market. Canva said on Tuesday that it's buying MagicBrief, whose technology is used for analyzing ad performance, for an undisclosed sum. With MagicBrief, companies can track spending and engagement on their ads and see what's working well for competitors. Around 240 million people use Canva's products, which compete with offerings from Adobe's Creative Cloud. The company has been deepening its capabilities in artificial intelligence, incorporating it into photo editing, coding and by incorporating chatbots. "We feel like, especially with AI, we can really democratize marketing and allow marketers to do a lot more with less," Cliff Obrecht, Canva's co-founder and chief operating officer, said in an interview. Canva, which ranked fifth on CNBC's latest Disruptor 50 list, has raised over $560 million, and was valued most recently at $32 billion, though that's a step down from its peak of $40 billion in 2021, when private markets were at their frothiest. Obrecht said the company has $1 billion in the bank. Canva plans to incorporate MagicBrief into a broader product that it will announce later this year, Obrecht said. In October, Adobe announced the availability of a tool for creating ads with AI and then tracking performance. Meanwhile, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Reddit are all pushing generative AI systems to boost the reach of online ads. Some marketers have used Meta's offerings to tweak the visual appearance of their ads with hopes of gaining traction with certain audiences, CNBC reported in December. Founded in 2022, MagicBrief has 14 employees and is based in Canva's hometown of Sydney, Australia. In 2023, the company announced a $2 million funding round, with investments from Archangel and Blackbird, which was Canva's first investor. The startup has tens of millions of dollars in annualized revenue, Obrecht said. Canva, which started up in 2013, has 5,500 employees, with over $3 billion in annualized revenue. It's one of the companies that venture capitalists are most excited about as an IPO candidate, but Obrecht said there won't be an offering this year. The focus, he said, is winning "over the next 10 years," and not just hitting quarterly numbers. "We feel that's very short-sighted, and public markets do gravitate you more to quarter-on-quarter performance," he said.
