Tech
Anthropic acquires computer-use AI startup Vercept after Meta poached one of its founders
Anthropic on Wednesday announced that it has acquired Vercept, an AI startup with deep roots to some of the biggest names in Seattle’s tech scene. The acquisition marks the latest after Anthropic acquired coding agent engine Bun in December to help scale Claude Code.
Vercept had created tools for more complex agentic tasks, including its product Vy, a computer-use agent in the cloud that could operate a remote Apple MacBook. Vercept is one of the many startups working on re-imagining the personal computer for the age of AI agents. As part of the deal, Anthropic is shuttering Vercept’s product on March 25.
The startup was a grad of Seattle’s AI-focused incubator A12, which spawned from the longstanding Allen Institute for AI. Vercept’s co-founders had roots with the Allen Institute, as well, and were previously researchers there. One co-founder, Matt Deitke, made news last year as one of the AI researchers who negotiated a monster $250 million salary from Meta to join its Superintelligence Lab. On Wednesday, Deitke congratulated his former colleagues in a post on X.
Vercept was a relatively high-profile AI startup in the region. In a LinkedIn post announcing the acquisition by Anthropic, Vercept CEO Kiana Ehsani said the startup had raised a total of $50 million. She called out A12’s Seth Bannon, a board member, as the lead investor. Vercept previously announced it had raised a $16 million seed round last January.
The list of angel investors was impressive, too, and included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, GeekWire reported.
In Anthropic’s announcement of the acquisition, the company named co-founders Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick as some of the team brought on to join Anthropic in the acquisition. However, not all of Vercept’s co-founders are joining the Claude maker.
Oren Etzioni, who has previously been named as a co-founder of Vercept and investor in the startup, is well known in Seattle as the founding leader of the Allen Institute for AI. Along with Deitke, he is also not joining Anthropic, and was vocally less pleased about the acqui-hire. He posted on LinkedIn: “After a little bit more than a year, Vercept is throwing in the towel and giving their customers 30 days to get off the platform. Sad. A fantastic team is joining Anthropic. I wish them the very best!”
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Etzioni is also a professor at the University of Washington and known for other startups he’s founded and backed as a VC. He did not respond to a request for comment.
On Etzioni’s LinkedIn post, he accused Bannon, the Vercept lead investor, of being “partly responsible” for Vercept not hiring the correct business people. A back and forth ensued between the investors, with Bannon condemning Etzioni’s remarks: “… you disparaged the heroic work of the founders for achieving an outcome most could only dream of,” Bannon replied in the LinkedIn string. They also accused each other of other less savory things like lying and legal threats.
While public spats between investors are entertaining, and essentially meaningless, the underlying motivation is notable. The stakes are high to build the next big AI winner, and now a promising startup that raised a decently sized war chest will be tucked into Anthropic.
While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Etzioni says he got a return on his money. Anthropic clearly wanted these researchers (perhaps — especially — with another of them at Meta).
Still, Etzioni told GeekWire that he remains bummed. “I’m pleased to have gotten a positive return but obviously disappointed that after just a little over a year with so much traction, and such a fantastic team, we’re basically throwing in the towel,” he said.
The founders joining Anthropic, however, appear happy, according to CEO’s Ehsani’s LinkedIn post. “The choices were clear: we could build independently and work toward the same vision as two separate versions of it, or join forces with an incredible team and accelerate that vision into reality. The decision became an easy choice,” she said of joining Anthropic.
Tech
Revolut eyes valuation of up to $200B in eventual IPO
British neobank Revolut seems to be eyeing a major valuation bump when it eventually goes public. The company is targeting a market cap between $150 billion and $200 billion in an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous investor sources.
The fintech giant, which secured a full banking license in the United Kingdom in March after years of waiting, was most recently valued at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, in a secondary share sale that made it one of Europe’s most valuable private tech companies.
Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, last week said that the company’s IPO was at least “two years away,” according to Bloomberg.
According to PitchBook and the Financial Times, the company is working on another secondary share sale, scheduled for the second half of 2026, that would value it at more than $100 billion.
As of November 2025, the company had raised a total of $5.89 billion, according to PitchBook. Revolut reported revenue of $6 billion in the financial year ended December 31, 2025, up from $4 billion in 2024. The company’s net profit grew to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion in 2024, and counted 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025.
Revolut declined to comment.
Founded in 2015, Revolut offers a range of services spanning multi-currency accounts, payment and transfer services, crypto products, insurance, and more. The neobank has been pouring truckloads of cash into expanding its operations internationally, and recently applied for a banking license in the United States.
Besides the U.K., Revolut has a banking license in the European Union, and it operates in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.S. Revolut launched operations in India last October, is about to start operating in Colombia this year, and has received a banking license in Mexico.
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Tech
Amazon taps Sweden’s Einride for its electric big rigs
Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. Einride will also provide charging infrastructure across five locations in the United States, under the agreement announced Tuesday.
Amazon isn’t buying or operating the electric trucks. Instead, Einride will own and manage (using its own Saga AI software) the trucks, which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers can use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.
Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli, who took over as chief nearly a year ago, said working with Amazon is a powerful validation of the startup’s technology and strategic vision.
“By deploying our intelligent platform within one of the world’s most sophisticated logistics networks, we are accelerating growth, while continuing to build industry-leading operational expertise,” he said in a statement.
Einride has gained attention and investment for its two-pronged approach to freight. The company has developed and now operates a fleet of about 200 heavy-duty electric trucks for companies like Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the UAE. It has also developed autonomous pod-like trucks, which stand out for their cab-less design.
The agreement with Amazon doesn’t include the autonomous pods.
Einride has landed this agreement at a critical time: The startup is finalizing a merger with blank-check company Legato Merger Corp. and is expected to go public soon.
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While the agreement might not carry the same weight for Amazon, which has a market cap of $2.7 trillion, it does contribute to its low-carbon goals. Amazon has said it wants to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.
“This rollout is an important step forward in addressing one of the toughest challenges we face in decarbonizing our transportation network — electrifying heavy-duty trucking,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’re excited to continue to collaborate with Einride and learn from these operations as the trucks hit the road.”
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Tech
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.
The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.
Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.
The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.
Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.
Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.
Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.
In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.
Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.
The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”
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