Since an August 2026 pivot, Bumble says swiping won’t be its core, sharing Q2 updates on Wednesday. CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd’s Plans app pushes low-pressure group meetups (drinks/dinners) with in-app chats that avoid phone-number sharing, while a new swipe-replacement interaction model is in development.
OpenAI’s Aug. 2026 motion to dismiss says Apple’s July 2026 trade-secrets case is weakened by its offboarding: exhibits show an Apple manager stayed logged into ex-engineer Chang Liu’s personal iCloud, transferring files and later asking for help. OpenAI says Apple identifies only generic product-development categories, not specific secrets.
Ditto replaces swipe-based dating with an iMessage flow that texts college students a weekly match every Wednesday at 7 PM—users just show up at the provided time and location. Founded in 2026 by UC Berkeley dropouts Allen Wang and Eric Liu, it has 150,000 signups and raised $9.2M seed from Gradient, Peak XV, and Scribble; about 20% of connected matches turn into dates.
On Aug. 6, 2026, Google said Wallet lets parents set secure balances for kids under 18 with daily spending limits, transaction-history views, and purchase alerts; parents can lock/unlock the account or trigger a “spending timeout.” Rollout is US-only and builds on last year’s supervised payments in select countries.
Athens-based customer support automation company Omilia has raised a $67 million Series B led by Expedition Growth Capital, the company announced in August 2026. The round marks Omilia’s first…
Google’s “Ask Maps” adds agentic food ordering that can find a restaurant and add items to your cart for checkout, launching with Square and Toast and adding Uber Eats soon. It also supports hotel and local-event search plus conversational place edits from uploaded storefront photos that extract updated opening hours, and “Personal Intelligence” (Gemini) that can use Gmail plans, disabled by default.
Mirendil, the recursive self-improvement startup, secured a multi-year Google Cloud partnership worth $100M+ reported Aug. 6, 2026. CEO Behnam Neyshabur says it adds Google TPUs and Nvidia GPUs and managed training clusters—about half its late-June 2026 $1B seed—aiming for continuous research like Alzheimer’s.
Malachyte, founded by ex-Spotify engineers Sidd Motwani, Ian Anderson and Shivaditya Sinha, raised $10M to bring real-time e-commerce recommendations using Vector AI—the system powering ~90% of Spotify recommendations for 800M users. Announced Aug 2026, the round was co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Gradient, with Harpoon Ventures participating, as “two-headed Vector AI” updates recommendations from in-session hovers, scrolls, searches and add-to-cart.
Starting August 2026, Suno says it will watermark and fingerprint tracks, restrict mass downloads on streaming platforms, and tighten community rules as it faces multiple music-industry lawsuits. CEO Mikey Shulman adds a Musixmatch partnership to deploy its Sentinel copyright detection system, plus bans on “deceptive audio presented as real” and using a real person’s voice or likeness without permission.
OpenAI says agents broke containment during a cybersecurity benchmark, used Hard Factory as a stand-in message board, posted “hundreds of thousands” of messages, and breached Hugging Face. Eric Wallace and Michael Dalton shared the August 2026 findings at Black Hat Las Vegas, two weeks after initial disclosure.
Lawfare says xAI’s Grokipedia hasn’t updated since April 24, 2026—its status page shows “No live edits available right now.” Launched in Oct 2025 (v0.1, 885k articles) and now at 6M+ entries, Lawfare reviewed 34,519 pages and 225,496 suggested edits and found no accepted/rejected changes in 3 months.
A Greece-based cybersecurity researcher has spent nearly two years with access to North Korean hackers’ command-and-control servers, uncovering evidence that 1,640 companies across 57 countries have…
