Sunday, May 18, 2025

AI startup Cohere acquires Ottogrid

Sunday, May 18, 2025

Image Credits: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

AI startup Cohere may have some challenges of its own, but it's also making deals — market research tooling startup Ottogrid announced Friday that it's being acquired by Cohere.

What challenges? The Information reports that Cohere fell short of revenue targets by 85% last year, and the company acknowledged that it's shifted focus to private AI deployments in sectors like healthcare, government, and finance.

As for Ottogrid, it sounds like the existing product will be shut down, while Cohere integrates its technology into North, the company's ChatGPT-style tool for summarizing documents. In a statement, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said the company is "bringing enterprises a new way to tackle research with smart tables, helping make employees' day-to-day work more enjoyable and productive."

Keep reading to see what else TechCrunch is covering this weekend.

Weekend news and opinion

Image Credits: Patreon

Apple makes Patreon change its app: The fallout from the Apple-Epic court ruling continues, with Patreon recently updating its app to allow its users to pay via the web. It seems, however, that Apple still has opinions about how that flexibility is implemented, with the company instructing Patreon to move payments to an external browser.

SEC account hacker sentenced to prison: You may remember that the X account belonging to the Securities and Exchange Commission was hacked last year to falsely announce regulatory approval of Bitcoin exchange traded funds. Now the man behind the hack has been sentenced to 14 months in prison.

What else we're reading 📗

Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram are facing an "epidemic of scams," according to The Wall Street Journal, with the company supposedly accounting for nearly half of all the reported scams on Zelle for JPMorgan. But the company is reportedly hesitant to become too aggressive in policing its ad business.

Also, Defector says Netflix keeps ruining action movies.