The Hims app arranged on a smartphone in New York on Feb. 12, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Hims & Hers Health shares closed up 5% on Tuesday after the company announced patients can access Eli Lilly‘s weight loss medication Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro, as well as the generic injection liraglutide, through its platform.
Zepbound, Mounjaro and liraglutide are part of the class of weight loss medications called GLP-1s, which have exploded in popularity in recent years. Hims & Hers launched a weight loss program in late 2023, but its GLP-1 offerings have evolved as the company has contended with a volatile supply and regulatory environment.
Lilly’s weekly injections Zepbound and Mounjaro will cost patients $1,899 a month, according to the Hims & Hers website. The generic liraglutide will cost $299 a month, but it requires a daily injection and can be less effective than other GLP-1 medications.
“As we look ahead, we plan to continue to expand our weight loss offering to deliver an even more holistic, personalized experience,” Dr. Craig Primack, senior vice president of weight loss at Hims & Hers, wrote in a blog post.
A Lilly spokesperson said in a statement that the company has “no affiliation” with Hims & Hers and noted that Zepbound is available at lower costs for people who are insured for the product or for those who buy directly from the company.
In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 weight loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The offering was immensely popular and helped generate more than $225 million in revenue for the company in 2024.
But compounded drugs can traditionally only be mass produced when the branded medications treatments are in shortage. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in February that the shortage of semaglutide injections products had been resolved.
That meant Hims & Hers had to largely stop offering the compounded medications, though some consumers may still be able to access personalized doses if it’s clinically applicable.
During the company’s quarterly call with investors in February, Hims & Hers said its weight loss offerings will primarily consist of its oral medications and liraglutide. The company said it expects its weight loss offerings to generate at least $725 million in annual revenue, excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide.
But the company is still lobbying for compounded medications. A pop up on Hims & Hers’ website, which was viewed by CNBC, encourages users to “use your voice” and urge Congress and the FDA to preserve access to compounded treatments.
With Tuesday’s rally, Hims and Hers shares are up about 27% in 2025 after soaring 172% last year.
WATCH: Hims & Hers shares tumble over concerns around weight-loss business
The auto industry witnessed a different kind of March madness last month as buyers flocked to dealerships to lock in deals before President Trump’s auto tariffs lift prices by thousands of dollars, several carmakers said.
“This past weekend was by far the best weekend I’ve seen in a very long time,” Randy Parker, the chief executive of Hyundai Motor North America, told reporters on Tuesday. The company reported a 13 percent increase in March sales on Monday compared with a year earlier.
Ford Motor said Monday that its March sales at dealerships rose 19 percent. However, Ford’s sales during the overall quarter slipped 1 percent, to about 500,000 vehicles, because of a decline in sales to fleet customers, the company said.
General Motors did not provide a separate figure for March, but reported that sales in the first quarter rose 17 percent from a year earlier, to 693,000 vehicles.
Mr. Trump said last week that he would impose 25 percent tariffs on imported vehicles, effective Thursday. The tariffs will be extended to imported auto parts on May 3. Many cars made in U.S. factories contain parts made abroad, frequently exceeding 50 percent of the vehicle’s value. Analysts estimate that carmakers will have to increase prices of some models by more than $10,000 to compensate for the new levies.
G.M., Ford and Hyundai reported increases in sales of electric vehicles and hybrids. G.M. said its sales of vehicles powered solely by batteries had almost doubled, to 32,000 cars, as the electric version of the Equinox sport utility vehicle became widely available. With a starting price of about $35,000, the Equinox is one of the most affordable electric vehicles available in the United States.
Ford said that sales of hybrid vehicles had risen 33 percent and that sales of electric vehicles like the Mustang Mach-E had risen 12 percent. Sales of cars with internal combustion engines during the quarter fell 5 percent.
Hyundai said sales of hybrids had soared 68 percent while sales of pure electric vehicles had risen 3 percent.
Mr. Parker of Hyundai said he could not estimate what impact tariffs would have on the company’s prices. Hyundai and its sister company, Kia, have factories in Georgia and Alabama, but they import substantial numbers of vehicles from South Korea.
“We haven’t made any firm decisions yet,” Mr. Parker said. But he added, “Don’t wait to buy tomorrow what you can buy today.”
Washington — Soon after the revelation that the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic had inadvertently been added to a Signal chat with top Trump administration officials about Yemen attack plans, some of those officials began changing or deleting their Venmo accounts. At least one account remained public for a day after the Atlantic report.
Venmo, an Internet-based mobile payment service owned by PayPal that allows users to send and receive money quickly, also allows the public to view users’ contacts if they do not change their privacy settings.
National security experts contend the public information could be exploited by foreign intelligence services or other nefarious actors.
According to screenshots obtained by CBS News, White House national security adviser Michael Waltz’s friends list on Venmo was open to the public to view as late as Tuesday — a day after the Atlantic report about the Signal chat was published. On Wednesday, his account settings were changed to make his contacts private.
Waltz’s contacts on Venmo included journalists, government officials, active and retired service members and members of congress. There was no evidence Waltz had sent or received payments on the platform.
Susie Wiles, President Trump’s chief of staff, was listed on Waltz’s Venmo friends list, but her account is now no longer searchable. On Wednesday, Wired magazine reported on Waltz’ and Wiles’ Venmo accounts and said their respective accounts were made private after the publication contacted the White House.
“Venmo is a commonly used app, and Mike Waltz has made necessary updates for his personal privacy protection,” said NSC spokesman James Hewitt, after being contacted by CBS News Wednesday.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has faced a barrage of criticism this week for sharing details on the Signal chat about the March 15 U.S. strike on Iranian-backed Houthis, had an account in early March, but it has since been deactivated, CBS News has learned.
In February, reporters with The American Prospect, a progressive political and public policy magazine, found that Hegseth’s Venmo was previously left open for the public to view contacts he had in his cellphone who also had Venmo accounts. Among the contacts were defense contractors, UnitedHealth executives, fellow veterans and colleagues at Fox News.
The Pentagon has not responded to CBS News’ request for comment.
Joe Kent, who is Mr. Trump’s nominee to run the National Counterterrorism Center, was on the Signal chat as a point of contact for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and his Venmo account was open for the public to view as of Thursday morning.
The office of the director of national intelligence has not replied to a request for comment.
Der Spiegel reported Wednesday that private contact details for Waltz, Gabbard and Hegseth had been leaked online. Reporters from the German news publication were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to the senior Trump officials with most of the numbers and email addresses still in use.
On Wednesday, Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe defended their participation in the group chat in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee at a hearing focused on the global security threats facing the United States.
Gabbard acknowledged the conversation was “sensitive” but denied that classified information was shared in the chat. “There were no sources, methods, locations or war plans that were shared,” she told lawmakers. On Tuesday, Gabbard and Ratcliffe both said they were not aware of any information that was shared in the chat regarding weapons packages, targets or timing. The Atlantic on Wednesday released more of the texts on those topics after officials on the chat stated repeatedly that nothing disclosed in the Signal group was classified.
The messages showed Hegseth provided detailed information to the group of senior Trump officials about the strikes targeting Houthi rebels earlier this month, including a timeline of when fighter jets would take off and what kind of weapons would be used.
Multiple U.S. intelligence officials and members of the U.S. military who have spoken to CBS News this week have all contended that this type of information is always classified, but even if the information was somehow unclassified, it would still be a violation of cybersecurity and operational security protocols.
CBS News on Tuesday published unclassified internal documents from a National Security Agency bulletin warning of vulnerabilities in using the Signal app, even though it is encrypted. The NSA bulletin was widely distributed to NSA employees a month before the Signal chatroom was created by Waltz.
The bulletin also underscored to NSA employees that third-party messaging applications such as Signal and Whatsapp are permitted for certain “unclassified accountability/recall exercises” but not for communicating more sensitive information.
NSA employees were also warned to not send “anything compromising over any social media or Internet-based tool or application,” and to not “establish connections with people you do not know.”
Fin Daniel Gómez and
Caitlin Yilek
contributed to this report.
James LaPorta
James LaPorta is a national security coordinating producer in CBS News’ Washington bureau. He is a former U.S. Marine infantryman and veteran of the Afghanistan war.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, speaking at a fintech event in London on Monday, April 4, 2022.
Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg via Getty Images
LONDON — After 20 years in the role as Klarna’s CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski is about to face his toughest test yet as the financial technology firm prepares for its blockbuster debut in New York.
Siemiatkowski, 43, co-founded Klarna in 2005 with fellow Swedish entrepreneurs Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson with the aim of taking on traditional banks and credit card firms with a more user-friendly online payments experience.
Today, Klarna is synonymous with “buy now, pay later” — a method of payment that allows people to buy things and either defer payment until the end of the month or pay off their purchases over a series of equal, interest-free monthly installments.
But while Siemiatkowski has grown Klarna into a fintech powerhouse, his entrepreneurial journey hasn’t been without its challenges — from facing rising competition from rivals such as PayPal, Affirm and Block‘s Afterpay, to an 85% valuation plunge.
Nevertheless, Siemiatkowski hasn’t taken those challenges lying down and the outspoken co-founder isn’t shy to challenge criticisms in the run up to an IPO that could value it at $15 billion.
‘Crazy enough’
In October 2024, CNBC met with Siamiatkowski during a visit the Swedish entrepreneur made to London. For a businessman who’s faced a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs over his two-year CEO tenure, Klarna’s chief has a calm air to him.
“Independently of all the cycles and everything we’ve gone through with the company, at any point in time I ask myself, do I still think that Klarna can become the next Google in size, that we can become a hundreds of billions dollar market company, or a trillion dollars,” Siemiatkowski told CNBC. “I still am crazy enough to think that’s achievable.”
Once a pandemic-era darling valued at $46 billion in a SoftBank-led funding round, Klarna saw its valuation plummet 85% in 2022 to $6.7 billion as rising inflation and interest rates dented investor sentiment on high-growth technology firms.
But the firm has attempted to rebuild that eroded value in the years that have followed.
Klarna makes money predominantly from fees it charges merchants for providing its payment services, in addition to income from interest-bearing financing plans and advertising revenue.
Financials disclosed in its IPO filing show that Klarna reported revenue of $2.8 billion last year, up 24% year-over-year, and a net profit of $21 million — up from a net loss of $244 million in 2023.
Bullish on AI
After the launch of OpenAI’s generative AI ChatGPT in November 2022, Siemiatkowski quickly pivoted Klarna’s focus to embracing the technology, and especially in a way that could slash costs and enhance the firm’s profitability.
However, Siemiatkowski’s strategy and his comments on AI have also attracted controversy.
Klarna imposed a freeze on hiring in 2023 as it looked to tighten costs. The following year, the company said that its AI chatbot was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service jobs.
Klarna’s CEO then said in August that his company was able to reduce its overall workforce to 3,800 from 5,000 thanks in part to its application of AI in areas such as marketing and customer service.
“By simply not hiring … the company is kind of becoming smaller and smaller,” he told Reuters news agency, adding that jobs were disappearing due to attrition rather than layoffs.
Asked by CNBC about his views on AI and the upset they have caused, Siemiatkowski suggested he was “done apologizing,” echoing comments from Mark Zuckerberg about the Meta CEO’s “20-year mistake” of taking responsibility for issues for which he believed his company wasn’t to blame.
Doubling down, Siemiatkowski added that AI “already today can do a lot of the jobs that people do — but I don’t want to be one of the tech leaders that stands on a stage and says, ‘Don’t worry about it, there’s going to be new jobs,’ because I don’t know what those new jobs are.”
“I just want to be transparent and honest with what I think is happening, and I’d rather be open about that, because I know what these people, the tech leaders are saying when they’re not on public stages, and they’re not saying the exact same things,” he told CNBC in October.
An outspoken CEO
Siemiatkowski is no stranger to defending his company in response to criticisms, especially when challenged over Klarna’s business model of offering short-term financing for all kinds of things from clothing to online takeout.
Last week, Klarna announced a tie-up with DoorDash to offer its flexible payment options on the U.S. food delivery app. However, the move was met with backlash from internet users, who said it risks saddling struggling consumers with more debt.
One X user posted a meme showing personal finance pundit Dave Ramsey with the caption, “what do you mean you have $11k in ‘doordash debt’.”
Siemiatkowski took to X to defend the move, saying that Klarna “offers many payment methods” including the ability to pay in full instantly or defer payment until the end of the month in addition to monthly installments.
“DoorDash offers many products beyond food!” Klarna’s boss said on X in response to the criticisms. “I know we are most famous for pay in 4. But you can use a credit card at DoorDash as well.”
In 2022, the outspoken entrepreneur stressed his company was “superior” to credit cards and “extremely recession-proof” after the firm laid off 10% of its workforce.
As Klarna approaches its stock market debut, investors will likely be scrutinizing his track record and whether he’s still the right person to lead the company longer term.
Lena Hackelöer, CEO of Stockholm-based fintech startup Brite Payments, is someone who’s worked under Siemiatkowski’s leadership, having worked for the company for seven years between 2010 and 2017 in various marketing functions.
She expressed admiration for the Klarna co-founder — and pushed back on suggestions that leadership mismanaged the business during the pandemic era.
“I never thought that they had mismanaged, which is somehow how it was reported,” Hackelöer told CNBC in a November interview. “I think that they were just very much focusing on growth — because that was the direction that investors were giving.”
Rollercoaster ride
Siemiatkowski admits the journey of building Klarna hasn’t always been rosy.
Asked about the biggest challenge he’s ever faced as CEO, Siemiatkowski said that, for him, laying off 10% of Klarna’s workforce in 2022 was the toughest thing he’s ever had to do.
“That was very difficult because I didn’t predict that investor sentiment would shift that fast and people would go from valuing companies like ours so high and then to something so low,” he said.
“That’s obviously very difficult because, then you realize like, ‘OK, s—, I’m going to have to make a change. It’s not going to be sustainable to continue, and I need to protect the consumers, who are stakeholders in the company, the employees, the investors — I need to [do] what’s right for all of my constituents,” Siemiatkowski continued.
Klarna is synonymous with the “buy now, pay later” trend of making a purchase and deferring payment until the end of the month or paying over interest-free monthly installments.
Nikolas Kokovlis | Nurphoto | Getty Images
“But unfortunately, it’s going to affect the smaller group, which happened to be about 10% of our employees.”
Like other tech firms, Klarna grew significantly over the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, the firm grew its gross merchandise volume or the total value of all sales processed through its platform, by 46% year-over-year, to $53 billion.
I think anyone who is a little bit sane, that’s not something you take light hearted, right? It’s a tough decision. It makes you cry. I’ve cried.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski
CEO, Klarna
The company also onboarded hundreds of new employees to capitalize and expand on the opportunity it saw from government lockdowns’ impact on consumer behavior and the broader acceleration of e-commerce adoption at that time.
“I think anyone who is a little bit sane, that’s not something you take lighthearted, right?” Klarna’s CEO said, referring to the layoffs. “It’s a tough decision. It makes you cry. I’ve cried.”
However, Siemiatkowski stood by his decision to lay off workers: “I felt like I had an obligation to my constituents, everyone, all of these stakeholders, the company, and I think it was a necessary decision at that point in time.”
The road to IPO
Now, Klarna’s CEO faces his biggest test yet — taking the business he co-founded two decades ago public.
“IPOs are risky for companies as share prices can fluctuate quickly,” Nalin Patel, director of EMEA private capital research at PitchBook, told CNBC via email. “They can be costly and lengthy to arrange with investment banks too.”
Klarna earlier this month filed its prospectus to list on the New York Stock Exchange. The company hasn’t yet set a date for when it will go public, nor has it priced shares.
If it succeeds, the outcome could catapult the net worth of Siemiatkowski and other shareholders including Sequoia Capital, Silver Lake, Mubadala Investment Company, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Sequoia is Klarna’s single-largest shareholder with a 22% stake. Siemiatkowski is the second-largest, owning 7% of the business.
A positive IPO outcome would also lift the value of Klarna employees’ stakes, and potentially boost morale after a turbulent few years for the company.
“It’s a balance between finding a fair value for existing investors looking to cash out and new investors seeking a stake in Klarna at a fair price. Overvaluing the company could lead to its valuation falling in the future. While undervaluing it may mean money has been left on the table for those exiting,” Patel said.
The idea of getting her eldest child a smartphone had long felt inevitable, said Daisy Greenwell. But by early last year, when her daughter was 8 years old, it filled her with dread. When she talked to other parents, “everyone universally said, ‘Yes, it’s a nightmare, but you’ve got no choice,’” recalled Ms. Greenwell, 41.
She decided to test that. A friend, Clare Fernyhough, had shared her concerns about the addictive qualities of smartphones and the impact of social media on mental health, so they created a WhatsApp group to strategize. Then Ms. Greenwell, who lives in rural Suffolk, in the east of England, posted her thoughts on Instagram.
“What if we could switch the social norm so that in our school, our town, our country, it was an odd choice to make to give your child a smartphone at 11,” she wrote. “What if we could hold off until they’re 14, or 16?” She added a link to the WhatsApp group.
The post went viral. Within 24 hours the group was oversubscribed with parents clamoring to join. Today, more than 124,000 parents of children in more than 13,000 British schools have signed a pact created by Smartphone Free Childhood, the charity set up by Ms. Greenwell, her husband, Joe Ryrie, and Ms. Fernyhough. It reads: “Acting in the best interests of my child and our community, I will wait until at least the end of Year 9 before getting them a smartphone.” (Year 9 is equivalent to the American eighth grade.)
The movement aligns with a broader shift in attitudes in Britain, as evidence mounts of the harms posed to developing brains by smartphone addiction and algorithm-powered social media. In one survey last year the majority of respondents — 69 percent — felt social media negatively affected children under 15. Nearly half of parents said they struggled to limit the time children spent on phones.
Meanwhile the police and intelligence services have warned of a torrent of extreme and violent content reaching children online, a trend examined in the hit TV show Adolescence, in which a schoolboy is accused of murder after being exposed to online misogyny. It became Britain’s most watched show, and on Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer met with its creators in Downing Street, telling them he had watched it with his son and daughter. But he also said: “This isn’t a challenge politicians can simply legislate for.”
Other governments in Europe have acted to curb children’s smartphone use. In February, Denmark announced plans to ban smartphones in schools, while France barred smartphones in elementary schools in 2018. Norway plans to enforce a minimum age on social media.
So far Britain’s government has appeared wary of intervening. Josh MacAlister, a Labour lawmaker, attempted to introduce a legal requirement to make all schools in England smartphone free. But the bill was watered down after the government made clear it would not support a ban, arguing that principals should make the decision.
Some parents feel the need to act is urgent, especially as technology companies, including Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and X, formerly Twitter, have ended fact-checking operations, which many experts say will allow misinformation and hate speech to flourish.
“We don’t have years for things to change,” said Vicky Allen, 46, a mother from Henfield in southern England. “It does feel like it needs to be us.”
She and a friend, Julia Cassidy, 46, successfully campaigned for their children’s elementary school to limit phone use after Ms. Cassidy watched a Channel 4 documentary about smartphones in schools, and then came across Smartphone Free Childhood. Ms. Cassidy was going to give her son a phone when he turned 11, but said, “I’ve just done a very big U-turn.” Now, she plans to give him a phone that can be used only for calls and texts.
The power of parents collectively delaying smartphones is key, Ms. Greenwell said, because it insulates children from peer pressure. “This problem isn’t that complicated,” she said. “If you have other people around you who are also doing the same thing, it’s actually amazingly, beautifully simple.”
‘Most people just want to keep their children safe’
On a recent Friday morning, dozens of parents gathered in the auditorium of Colindale Primary School in north London for a presentation by Nova Eden, a regional leader for Smartphone Free Childhood.
She described startling data — that the average 12-year-old in Britain spends 21 hours a week on a smartphone, for example, and that 76 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds spend most of their free time on screens. She also talked about emerging research on the impact of smartphone use.
Ms. Eden cited studies showing rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm among teenagers spiking dramatically since social media was introduced. “These children are struggling and they need our help,” Ms. Eden said. “I know how hard it is, but we need to be the ones that stand up and say, this is not good for you.”
Ms. Eden, 44, described struggling to find the right balance for her own children, ages 5, 10 and 13. She said it was the campaigning of Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life after viewing suicide-related content on Instagram and other social media sites, that drove her to get involved. She had just given her own 13-year-old a phone.
“At that time, I was going through this with my child, and seeing the change in him and his friends,” she said.
Jane Palmer, the principal of the Colindale school, acknowledged that some parents have been skeptical of limiting smartphone use, or of banning the devices from school entirely, as her school will do from September.
Some argue the devices can provide social independence and allow them to contact their children in an emergency. Others feel parental controls go far enough in ensuring safety online.
But the conversations among parents had begun to make way for change, Ms. Palmer said. During the presentation, she described how a former student had died by suicide after being bullied online.
“It can be tricky, and of course not everyone is going to support it,” she said of the ban. “But at the end of the day, I think most people just want to keep their children safe.”
Colindale is in the borough of Barnet, which in February announced plans to become the first borough in Britain to ban smartphones in all its public schools. The initiative will affect some 63,000 children.
Eton, one of Britain’s most elite private schools, announced last year that new students would be banned from bringing smartphones and would instead be issued with Nokia handsets that can only text and make calls.
In Suffolk, the founders of the Smartphone Free Childhood initiative are aware that their success in attracting parents to their cause is partly thanks to social media and messaging apps on which they have spread the word.
“There are loads of positive things about this technology,” Mr. Ryrie said. “We’re not trying to say that technology is bad, just that we need to have a conversation as a society about when it’s appropriate for children to have unrestricted access to this stuff.”
CBS Reports – City Under<br>
Surveillance – CBS News
Watch CBS News
The Detroit Police Department is using facial recognition technology and a network of surveillance cameras to combat the city’s high crime rates. But critics say the technology has racial bias built into it and has even landed innocent people behind bars. In this documentary, CBS Reports explores the debate over high-tech policing that promises to make our communities safer yet at the same time threatens our civil liberties.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
LightSource cofounders: CTO Idan Mintz and CEO Spencer Penn
Courtesy: LightSource
With President Donald Trump set to impose sweeping tariffs on a wide swath of U.S. trading partners this week, corporate America is awash in uncertainty.
LightSource, a San Francisco startup whose software helps companies manage their procurement process, costs and vendor relationships, didn’t know what the president’s tariffs plan would look like before raising its first funding round. But the timing didn’t hurt.
LightSource has just closed a $33 million financing, led by Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from J2 Ventures.
“Tariffs and trade winds are shifting so fast, it’s enough to make your head spin,” said Ajay Agrawal, a partner at Bain and now a board member at LightSource. “For a company with hundreds or thousands of different parts and suppliers — even just understanding what the impact will be on their whole enterprise is unbelievable.”
President Trump’s plans to slap “reciprocal tariffs” on all countries with duties on U.S. goods is set to be announced on Wednesday. Concerns surrounding the impact of those moves pushed the Nasdaq down more than 10% in the first quarter, the index’s biggest drop for any period since 2022.
Trump has already said he would impose 25% tariffs on “all cars that are not made in the United States.” Autos is a market that co-founder and CEO Spencer Penn knows well.
LightSource was started in 2021 by Penn and CTO Idan Mintz, while the two were working in different parts of Alphabet. Penn was at robotaxi unit Waymo, and Mintz was in the Google X “moonshot factory.”
Prior to Waymo, Penn worked at Tesla when the electric vehicle maker was starting to mass produce its popular Model 3 sedans. He said that finance, sourcing and engineering professionals have to work together to find, or sometimes custom order, high-quality parts. They also have to maintain their best supplier relationships while evaluating new potential vendors and negotiating fair prices.
Often these teams rely on “hundreds of disparate processes and information that’s stuck in thousands of emails, spreadsheets and randomly formatted invoices and contracts,” Penn said.
LightSource, which has about 30 employees, connects a company’s procurement-related information sources and systems to streamline that complex work. The aim is to speed up a company’s procurement process, saving the business time, money and pain while working with suppliers.
Mintz describes LightSource’s offering as a kind of “operating system” for procurement. Penn says it has the potential to do for procurement what Salesforce did for customer relationships.
Whether it’s a global pandemic, a natural disaster cutting off a shipping route, or a major shift in tariffs and trade policy, Mintz said, any supply chain disruption can make a huge difference to a company’s profit margins and its ability to deliver a product on time.
Current customers include consumer packaged goods companies, aerospace ventures, e-commerce companies and automotive giants.
Over the last 12 months, Google’s efforts to use artificial intelligence to accelerate drug design have achieved breakthroughs in mimicking human biology and won its top scientists the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Now Isomorphic Labs, the division within the software giant meant to develop and commercialize the technology, is taking another big step: raising money from an outside investor.
Isomorphic announced on Monday that it had raised $600 million, led by Thrive Capital, the venture capital firm that has bet big on A.I. companies including OpenAI. GV, Google’s venture capital arm, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, also invested.
The announcement underscores Google’s ambitions for Isomorphic, which was spun out of the company’s DeepMind lab to focus on drugs discovery. It is built on software that DeepMind, a central intelligence lab in London, has developed. That includes AlphaFold, which can predict the structure of millions of proteins and more.
AlphaFold, which in its third iteration can now predict the complex behavior of DNA and RNA, has promised to slash the development time of new drugs. Such is its promise that Demis Hassabis, a co-founder of Isomorphic and DeepMind, and John M. Jumper, a DeepMind researcher, shared half of the Nobel in chemistry last year.
The goal, according to Mr. Hassabis, is to eventually conduct most of the drug discovery process via computers, rather than traditional labs that require biological materials, strict safety requirements — and lots of time.
“This is the No. 1 most beneficial application of A.I. out there,” Mr. Hassabis said in an interview. He added, “Our mission, one day, is to solve all disease” with A.I.
Isomorphic is researching potential treatments, including those focused on cancer and immune disorders. Last year, it signed research partnerships with two major drug makers, Eli Lilly and Novartis, that could yield billions in payouts via promising drugs breakthroughs.
But as with many things related to A.I., the work, and the hiring of top research talent to perform it, is expensive. Mr. Hassabis said that Isomorphic didn’t need capital — its parent company reported more than $100 billion in profit last year — but that it made sense to bring in an outside partner.
By Mr. Hassabis’s thinking, doing so had long been a possibility. But he added that he had wanted a backer fixed on the long term that was also deeply focused on life sciences.
The additional money will help Isomorphic expand its stable of research models like AlphaFold, as well as recruit top talent across scientific disciplines.
“The ambition of the company is to be a full stack life science company, so that requires more capital to create more drugs while also investing in the technology platform,” said Vince Hankes, a Thrive partner who has led many of the firm’s A.I. investments.
Mr. Hassabis added that he wanted to be selective in Isomorphic’s partners; formal talks with Thrive took place over a matter of months.
The fund-raising is another major bet by the 15-year-old Thrive, which has minted money investing in companies like Instagram and the payments processor Stripe. Of late, it has centered on A.I. companies, including leading a recent round in OpenAI that nearly doubled its valuation to $157 billion, as well as the analytics provider Databricks and the programming start-up Anysphere.
“Our hope is that A.I. radically changes the way drugs are created and discovered,” said Joshua Kushner, Thrive’s founder and managing partner. “Isomorphic is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in small-molecule drug discovery.”
Over the next year or so, Isomorphic hopes to have made more breakthroughs in computational models like AlphaFold and perhaps have drug candidates get close to preclinical trials, Mr. Hassabis said.
Isomorphic will probably raise money from more outside investors, he added. The goal is for the company to be an independent business.
“This will be one of the most consequential companies around,” he said. “We want it to be a real powerhouse in the industry.”
United Airlines will soon provide free Wi-Fi to passengers on flights after inking a deal with Starlink, the satellite constellation internet provider from Elon Musk-owned SpaceX.
The offering will set a new standard for in-flight Wi-Fi, which can often be costly and unreliable for passengers, the airline said in a statement Friday.
Starlink services will be available on United Airlines’ fleet of 1,000 aircraft, enabling customers to stream movies and television without buffering or requiring them to download content in advance. It will also let them browse the internet, upload and download files at fast speeds, and play online games.
United passengers will also be able to connect multiple mobile devices to the internet once, the companies said Friday. In the era of remote work, the service will allow United passengers to work from locations that wouldn’t typically offer connectivity. United is still working out details of the plan, and has not yet indicated if passengers must be MileagePlus members to access the free service.
The same technology is currently available to Hawaiian Airlines passengers on select flights. Currently, United provides paid Wi-Fi options to customers through four different providers. The service costs MileagePlus members $8, and nonmembers $10 to log on. On a press call Friday, United said that charging a nominal fee for internet prevents the network from being overloaded, and allows it to function relatively smoothly.
The Starlink service will further upgrade the in-flight Wi-Fi experience, United said.
“It’s not enough anymore just to say you have Wi-Fi on the plane,” an airline spokesperson said on the press call, adding that in order for it to be valuable to customers it has to be reliable and fast. “Starlink checks all those boxes and more.”
“Now that we know we have more than enough capacity we are really thrilled to be able to offer it to all of our customers, for free,” the spokesperson added, referring to the new service, which is expected to be on commercial flights by the end of 2025.
United will start testing the use of Starlink internet services in 2025.
SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn crew conducts first-ever private spacewalk
00:58
“Everything you can do on the ground, you’ll soon be able to do onboard a United plane at 35,000 feet, just about anywhere in the world,” United CEO Scott Kirby said in a statement Friday. “This connectivity opens the door for an even better in-flight entertainment experience, in every seatback — more content, that’s more personalized. United’s culture of innovation is, once again, delivering big for our customers.”
Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer at SpaceX, said the partnership will “transform” flying.
“With Starlink onboard your United flight, you’ll have access to the world’s most advanced high-speed internet from gate to gate, and all the miles in between,” she said.
Starlink is enabled by low Earth orbit satellites that let it deliver low-latency internet in remote areas where cell or Wi-Fi signals aren’t typically available, like over oceans, according to the announcement.
Passengers have increasingly come to expect to be able to access the internet during flights. Nearly 80% of flight passengers connect to Wi-Fi when it’s made available to them, according to mobile satellite services provider Inmarsat.
The new deal could even let passengers take Zoom calls from the skies, once again redefining what remote work looks like.
Megan Cerullo
Megan Cerullo is a New York-based reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering small business, workplace, health care, consumer spending and personal finance topics. She regularly appears on CBS News 24/7 to discuss her reporting.
Tesla plans to install 20,000 electric vehicle charging stations across 2,000 Hilton properties in the U.S., Mexico and Canada beginning next year, the companies said Thursday.
For Tesla, the buildout of wall connectors is another way to increase mass adoption by offering more convenient charging locations. The company’s Universal Wall Connector can charge any North American vehicle model, not just Tesla vehicles. For Hilton, it’s about meeting demand from leisure and business travelers.
“We’re seeing a rapid and steep increase in the number of requests for EV charging. We’re trying to meet our guests’ needs with this new agreement with Tesla,” Matt Schuyler, Hilton’s chief brand officer, told CNBC.
The announcement coincides with the beginning of business travel season, as more executives will be attending conferences such as the APEC Summit, Communacopia and Dreamforce, offering an opportunity for hotel operators to drive revenue. Over the summer, U.S. hotel rates fell as more Americans headed overseas to enjoy time in Europe. This fall, Wall Street analysts will want to see if hotel brands can get business travel bookings in the U.S. back to pre-pandemic levels.
Schuyler says the availability of EV charging stations is playing a significant role in driving hotel bookings.
“The number-one search attribute for our hotels is shuttle access for airports. That’s No. 1. No. 2 is EV charging. And that’s a dramatic change that wasn’t even on the radar just a few years ago,” said Schuyler.
Hilton will work with its owners to identify properties alongside roadways and in other key urban locations that would make most sense for Tesla to install its charging stations. The additions will make Hilton’s charging network the largest of any hospitality player, says the company.
Deepwater Asset Management’s managing partner Gene Munster predicts electric car adoption in the U.S. will steadily increase in the coming years, from 2% in 2020 to 22% by 2025.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
