Seed rounds no more

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Tech Across the Globe

ByteDance’s good deal: The Chinese parent of TikTok won with the deal that lets the popular video app remain in use in the US. ByteDance retains a stake in the new US joint venture, as well as control of several revenue streams, while offloading the potentially dicey burden of data policing onto Oracle.

Ericsson’s strong results: The Swedish telecommunications equipment maker proposed its first-ever buyback after better-than-expected quarterly earnings were boosted by the company’s efforts to cut costs and raise margins.

Samsung’s winning memory: Nvidia is close to certifying Samsung’s HBM4 AI memory, which would give South Korea’s most valuable company a huge boost in the chase to close the gap on SK Hynix.

Revalued

Smart ring maker Oura Health is working on a tender offer for existing investors at a roughly 25% discount to its latest round last year when it raised funds at an $11 billion valuation. The firm, which has no plans to go public soon, follows other prominent startups that have arranged private transactions to offer shareholders a way to cash in without an initial public offering.

Must Read

Seed funding — typically the first institutional checks written for a startup — have exploded in size, spurring the search for a new term, Ed Ludlow reports in today’s Tech In Depth. The idea of seeding a startup so it can grow seems obsolete when companies emerge with debut funding rounds in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So, coconut round, perhaps?

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This Week in Soundbite

Ashley Carman reports exclusively in this week’s Soundbite on Edison Research’s latest ranking of the top 50 podcasts in the US. In a first, The Diary of a CEO breaks into this upper echelon after having been among the top three shows on Edison’s UK ranking for quite a while, she writes.

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