All posts tagged: Darling

Defense tech darling Mach Industries hits .8B valuation, a 4x jump in a year

Defense tech darling Mach Industries hits $1.8B valuation, a 4x jump in a year

Published by skeptic

Mach Industries, the three-year-old defense tech startup run by 22-year-old founder and CEO Ethan Thornton, has raised a $300 million Series C at a $1.8 billion valuation, the company announced on Monday. The raise nearly quadruples the valuation of the company in a year. In June 2025, Mach raised $100 million at a $470 million valuation. Other investors include Bedrock Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Khosla Ventures. The round was led by deep tech fund Infinite Capital and Ribbit Capital, known for fintech and lately in hot deals everywhere — from AI coding startups like Cognition to neoclouds like Crusoe. Since building autonomous weapons is a capital-intensive industry, Thornton began actively fundraising a couple of months ago, he told TechCrunch, and quickly discovered that the round would be popular with investors. “We went out to raise 200 [million dollars] and we were extremely oversubscribed at 200 and happy with the price, so we decided to push up to 300. We’re still oversubscribed at the 300 mark,” Thornton said of the fundraising efforts. Founded in 2023, Mach …

B AI chip darling Cerebras almost died early on, burning M a month

$60B AI chip darling Cerebras almost died early on, burning $8M a month

Published by skeptic

Today, Cerebras Systems is a public company that sells AI chips for inference to giants like OpenAI and AWS. It held a blockbuster IPO on Thursday, with both of its co-founders billionaires, and ended the week worth about $60 billion. But in 2019, when it was three years old, it came dangerously close to failure – incinerating a shocking amount of money. It was trying to solve a technical problem no one in the semiconductor industry thought could be done.  “We were spending about $8 million a month,” founder CEO Andrew Feldman told TechCrunch of that period. “At this point, we had incinerated nearly $200 million trying to solve one technical problem.”  Every few weeks, Feldman was forced to make the painful walk of shame to the board meeting to report another failure and more money burned.  But he had no choice. Without a solution, Cerebras was dead anyway. It was founded with an idea that was simple on paper. The microprocessor industry had spent its entire 50+ years making CPUs faster and cheaper by …

King Charles Remembers His “Darling Mama” on What Would Have Been Queen Elizabeth’s 100th Birthday

King Charles Remembers His “Darling Mama” on What Would Have Been Queen Elizabeth’s 100th Birthday

Published by Sam Flores

Charles also referred to the troubled world in which we live today and hinted at the challenging times ahead for the royal family. “Much about the times we now live in I suspect may have troubled her deeply, but I take heart from her belief that goodness will always prevail and that a brighter dawn is never far from the horizon,” he said. It is understood that he was making a reference to the wars blighting much of the Middle East as well as issues closer to home. The king also spoke about the huge amount of change his mother had witnessed over the seven decades of her reign, remarking, “Her near-century was one of remarkable change and yet, through each passing decade, through every transformation, she remained constant, steadfast, and wholly devoted to the people she served.” Catherine, Princess of Wales and Prince William, Prince of Wales talk with guests during a reception at Buckingham Palace. Pool/Getty Images Senior family members spent Tuesday attending engagements to celebrate the queen’s life. Prince William and Kate Middleton …

From OnlyFans mega-star to evangelical darling, Nala Ray now hopes to reach other models

From OnlyFans mega-star to evangelical darling, Nala Ray now hopes to reach other models

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Months after accepting an award in Miami recognizing her as one of OnlyFans’ highest-earning creators, Nala Ray was baptized at Fearless Church, a non-denominational Christian church in Los Angeles, and quit making the content that she says generated more than $14 million from 270,000 subscribers. “I made more money than most NFL players,” Ray said. “I could have anything I wanted. It’s a very big false sense of empowerment.” Ray, 28, left OnlyFans in 2024. She has since married her husband, Jordan Giordano, a former Marine whose Christian faith she credits as instrumental in her own return to church, and the couple recently moved to Nashville, Tennessee.  “God has this cleansing process, the sanctification, and it’s a beautiful thing,” Ray said. “Sometimes it hurts, and I’m going through that now.” A video recording of her baptism on Dec. 26, 2023 generated 8.1 million views on her Instagram. Ray has since rebranded her online persona toward faith-focused and lifestyle content, often posting brand deals with Bible apps, prayer rings, a vacuum and Magnolia Cinnamon …

Getting Ready (in Loewe) with Sorry, Baby’s Eva Victor, the Darling of the 2026 Golden Globes

Getting Ready (in Loewe) with Sorry, Baby’s Eva Victor, the Darling of the 2026 Golden Globes

Published by Sam Flores

On the Thursday before the 2026 Golden Globes, Eva Victor’s Loewe gown was a bit of a mystery to the both of us. The Spanish fashion house had told me, a Vanity Fair writer, almost nothing about the garment, other than that Victor was wearing it, in an effort to prevent any leaks before she stepped out onto the Golden Globes red carpet. It was not being dramatic: In March 2025, the Spanish house appointed Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the founders of Proenza Schouler, as its creative directors. This is their first awards season at Loewe, and therefore it’s the first time the public really gets to see their aesthetic vision for formalwear—making this a hot tip for fashion obsessives. Photo by Ryan Pfluger As for Victor? She just trusted the guys. Later that afternoon, she’d walk into her first fitting having only seen a sketch. “I see two masters of their craft, and I will do whatever they think they want to see, because this isn’t my lane! I love that I get …