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ChartHop CEO Ian White

ChartHop

ChartHop CEO Ian White breathed a major sigh of relief in late January after his cloud software startup raised a $20 million funding round. He’d started the process six months earlier during a brutal period for tech stocks and a plunge in venture funding. 

For ChartHop’s prior round in 2021, it took White less than a month to raise $35 million. The market turned against him in a hurry.

“There was just a complete reversal of the speed at which investors were willing to move,” said White, whose company sells cloud technology used by human resources departments. 

Whatever comfort White was feeling in January quickly evaporated last week. On March 9 — a Thursday — ChartHop held its annual revenue kickoff at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Tempe, Arizona. As White was speaking in front of more than 80 employees, his phone was blowing up with messages.

White stepped off stage to find hundreds of panicked messages from other founders about Silicon Valley Bank, whose stock was down more than 60% after the firm said it was trying to raise billions of dollars in cash to make up for deteriorating deposits and ill-timed investments in mortgage-backed securities. 

Startup executives were scrambling to figure out what to do with their money, which was locked up at the 40-year-old firm long known as a linchpin of the tech industry. 

“My first thought, I was like, ‘this is not like FTX or something,'” White said of the cryptocurrency exchange that imploded late last year. “SVB is a very well-managed bank.” 

But a bank run was on, and by Friday SVB had been seized by regulators in the second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history. ChartHop banks with JPMorgan Chase, so the company didn’t have direct exposure to the collapse. But White said many of his startup’s customers held their deposits at SVB and were now uncertain if they’d be able to pay their bills. 

The government response to SVB was radically different than 2008, says Altimeter 's Brad Gerstner

While the deposits were ultimately backstopped last weekend and SVB’s government-appointed CEO tried to reassure clients that the bank was open for business, the future of Silicon Valley Bank is very much uncertain, further hampering an already troubled startup funding environment.

SVB was the leader in so-called venture debt, providing loans to risky early-stage companies in software, drug development and other areas like robotics and climate-tech. Now it’s widely expected that such capital will be less available and more expensive. 

White said SVB has shaken the confidence of an industry already grappling with rising interest rates and stubbornly high inflation.

Exit activity for venture-backed startups in the fourth quarter plunged more than 90% from a year earlier to $5.2 billion, the lowest quarterly total in more than a decade, according to data from the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. The number of deals declined for a fourth consecutive quarter. 

In February, funding was down 63% from $48.8 billion a year earlier, according to a Crunchbase funding report. Late-stage funding fell by 73% year-over-year, and early-stage funding was down 52% over that stretch.

‘World was falling apart’

CNBC spoke with more than a dozen founders and venture capitalists, before and after the SVB meltdown, about how they’re navigating the precarious environment.

David Friend, a tech industry veteran and CEO of cloud data storage startup Wasabi Technologies, hit the fundraising market last spring in an attempt to find fresh cash as public market multiples for cloud software were plummeting. 

Wasabi had raised its prior round a year earlier, when the market was humming, IPOs and special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) were booming and investors were drunk on low interest rates, economic stimulus and rocketing revenue growth.

By last May, Friend said, several of his investors had backed out, forcing him to restart the process. Raising money was “very distracting” and took up more than two-thirds of his time over nearly seven months and 100 investor presentations.

“The world was falling apart as we were putting the deal together,” said Friend, who co-founded the Boston-based startup in 2015 and previously started numerous other ventures including data backup vendor Carbonite. “Everybody was scared at the time. Investors were just pulling in their horns, the SPAC market had fallen apart, valuations for tech companies were collapsing.” 

Friend said the market always bounces back, but he thinks a lot of startups don’t have the experience or the capital to weather the current storm. 

“If I didn’t have a good management team in place to run the company day to day, things would have fallen apart,” Friend said, in an interview before SVB’s collapse. “I think we squeaked through, but if I had to go back to the market right now and raise more money, I think it’d be extremely difficult.”

In January, Tom Loverro, an investor with Institutional Venture Partners, shared a thread on Twitter predicting a “mass extinction event” for early and mid-stage companies. He said it will make the 2008 financial crisis “look quaint.”

Loverro was hearkening back to the period when the market turned, starting in late 2021. The Nasdaq hit its all-time high in November of that year. As inflation started to jump and the Federal Reserve signaled interest rate hikes were on the way, many VCs told their portfolio companies to raise as much cash as they’d need to last 18 to 24 months, because a massive pullback was coming.  

In a tweet that was widely shared across the tech world, Loverro wrote that a “flood” of startups will try to raise capital in 2023 and 2024, but that some will not get funded. 

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell arrives for testimony before the Senate Banking Committee March 7, 2023 in Washington, DC.

Win Mcnamee | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Next month will mark 18 months since the Nasdaq peak, and there are few signs that investors are ready to hop back into risk. There hasn’t been a notable venture-backed tech IPO since late 2021, and none appear to be on the horizon. Meanwhile, late-stage venture-backed companies like Stripe, Klarna and Instacart have been dramatically reducing their valuations.

In the absence of venture funding, money-losing startups have had to cut their burn rates in order to extend their cash runway. Since the beginning of 2022, roughly 1,500 tech companies have laid off a total of close to 300,000 people, according to the website Layoffs.fyi.

Kruze Consulting provides accounting and other back-end services to hundreds of tech startups. According to the firm’s consolidated client data, which it shared with CNBC, the average startup had 28 months of runway in January 2022. That fell to 23 months in January of this year, which is still historically high. At the beginning of 2019, it sat at under 20 months. 

Madison Hawkinson, an investor at Costanoa Ventures, said more companies than normal will go under this year. 

“It’s definitely going to be a very heavy, very variable year in terms of just viability of some early-stage startups,” she told CNBC. 

Hawkinson specializes in data science and machine learning. It’s one of the few hot spots in startup land, due largely to the hype around OpenAI’s chatbot called ChatGPT, which went viral late last year. Still, being in the right place at the right time is no longer enough for an aspiring entrepreneur. 

Will ChatGPT replace your travel agent? Maybe...and maybe not

Founders should anticipate “significant and heavy diligence” from venture capitalists this year instead of “quick decisions and fast movement,” Hawkinson said. 

The enthusiasm and hard work remains, she said. Hawkinson hosted a demo event with 40 founders for artificial intelligence companies in New York earlier this month. She said she was “shocked” by their polished presentations and positive energy amid the industrywide darkness. 

“The majority of them ended up staying till 11 p.m.,” she said. “The event was supposed to end at 8.” 

Founders ‘can’t fall asleep at night’

But in many areas of the startup economy, company leaders are feeling the pressure.

Matt Blumberg, CEO of Bolster, said founders are optimistic by nature.  He created Bolster at the height of the pandemic in 2020 to help startups hire executives, board members and advisers, and now works with thousands of companies while also doing venture investing.

Even before the SVB failure, he’d seen how difficult the market had become for startups after consecutive record-shattering years for financing and an extended stretch of VC-subsidized growth. 

“I coach and mentor a lot of founders, and that’s the group that’s like, they can’t fall asleep at night,” Blumberg said in an interview. “They’re putting weight on, they’re not going to the gym because they’re stressed out or working all the time.”

VCs are telling their portfolio companies to get used to it. 

Bill Gurley, the longtime Benchmark partner who backed Uber, Zillow and Stitch Fix, told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang last week that the frothy pre-2022 market isn’t coming back. 

“In this environment, my advice is pretty simple, which is — that thing we lived through the last three or four years, that was fantasy,” Gurley said. “Assume this is normal.”

Laurel Taylor recently got a crash course in the new normal. Her startup, Candidly, announced a $20.5 million financing round earlier this month, just days before SVB became front-page news. Candidly’s technology helps consumers deal with education-related expenses like student debt.

Taylor said the fundraising process took her around six months and included many conversations with investors about unit economics, business fundamentals, discipline and a path to profitability. 

As a female founder, Taylor said she’s always had to deal with more scrutiny than her male counterparts, who for years got to enjoy the growth-at-all-costs mantra of Silicon Valley. More people in her network are now seeing what she’s experienced in the six years since she started Candidly.

“A friend of mine, who is male, by the way, laughed and said, ‘Oh, no, everybody’s getting treated like a female founder,'” she said. 

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to show that ChartHop held its annual revenue kickoff at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Tempe, Arizona, on Thursday, March 9.

WATCH: Cash crunch could lead to more M&A and quicker tech IPOs

Cash crunch could lead to more M&A and quicker tech IPOs

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China’s Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

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China's Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

Honor launched the Honor Magic V5 on Wednesday July 2, as it looks to challenge Samsung in the foldable space.

Honor

Honor on Wednesday touted the slimness and battery capacity of its newly launched thin foldable phone, as it lays down a fresh challenge to market leader Samsung.

The Honor Magic V5 goes will initially go on sale in China, but the Chinese tech firm will likely bring the device to international markets later this year.

The company, which spun off from Chinese tech giant Huawei in 2020, is looking to stand out from rivals with key features of the Magic V5, like artificial intelligence, battery and size.

Honor said the Magic V5 is 8.8 mm to 9mm when folded, depending on the color choice. The phone’s predecessor, the Magic V3 — Honor skipped the Magic V4 name — was 9.2 mm when folded. Honor said the Magic V5 weighs 217 grams to 222 grams, again, depending on the color model. The previous version was 226 grams.

In China, Honor will launch a special 1 terabyte storage size version of the Magic V5, which it says will have a battery capacity of more than 6000 milliampere-hour — among the highest for foldable phones.

Honor has tried hard to tout these features, as competition in foldables ramps up, even as these types of devices have a very small share of the overall smartphone market.

Honor vs. Samsung

Foldables represented less than 2% of the overall smartphone market in 2024, according to International Data Corporation. Samsung was the biggest player with 34% market share followed by Huawei with just under 24%, IDC added. Honor took the fourth spot with a nearly 11% share.

Honor is looking to get a head start on Samsung, which has its own foldable launch next week on July 9.

Francisco Jeronimo, a vice president at the International Data Corporation, said the Magic V5 is a strong offering from Honor.

“This is the dream foldable smartphone that any user who is interested in this category will think of,” Jeronimo told CNBC, pointing to features such as the battery.

“This phone continues to push the bar forward, and it will challenge Samsung as they are about to launch their seventh generation of foldable phones,” he added.

The thinness of a foldable phone has become a battleground for smartphone makers to appeal to consumers who want the large screen size the device has to offer without extra weight.

At its event next week, Samsung is expected to release a foldable that is thinner than its predecessor and could come close to challenging Honor’s offering by way of size, analysts said. If that happens, then Honor will be facing more competition, especially against Samsung, which has a bigger global footprint.

“The biggest challenge for Honor is the brand equity and distribution reach vs Samsung, where the Korean vendor has the edge,” Neil Shah, co-founder of Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

Honor’s push into international markets beyond China is still fairly young, with the company looking to build up its brand.

“Further, if Samsung catches up with a thinner form-factor in upcoming iterations, as it has been the real pioneer in foldables with its vertical integration expertise from displays to batteries, the differentiating factor might narrow for Honor,” Shah added.

Vertical integration refers to when a company owns several parts of a product’s supply chain. Samsung has a display and battery business which provides the components for its foldables.

Honor talks up AI

Smartphone players, including Honor, have also looked to stand out via the AI features available on their device.

In March, Honor pledged a $10 billion investment in AI over the next five years, with part of that going toward the development of next-generation agents that are seen as more advanced personal assistants.

Honor said its AI assistant Yoyo can interact with other AI models, such as those created by DeepSeek and Alibaba in China, to create presentation decks.

The company also flagged its AI agent can hail a taxi ride across multiple apps in China, automatically accepting the quickest ride to arrive? and cancelling the rest.

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AI virtual personality YouTubers, or ‘VTubers,’ are earning millions

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AI virtual personality YouTubers, or ‘VTubers,’ are earning millions

One of the most popular gaming YouTubers is named Bloo, and has bright blue wavy hair and dark blue eyes. But he isn’t a human — he’s a fully virtual personality powered by artificial intelligence.

“I’m here to keep my millions of viewers worldwide entertained and coming back for more,” said Bloo in an interview with CNBC. “I’m all about good vibes and engaging content. I’m built by humans, but boosted by AI.”

Bloo is a virtual YouTuber, or VTuber, who has built a massive following of 2.5 million subscribers and more than 700 million views through videos of him playing popular games like Grand Theft Auto, Roblox and Minecraft. VTubers first gained traction in Japan in the 2010s. Now, advances in AI are making it easier than ever to create VTubers, fueling a new wave of virtual creators on YouTube.

The virtual character – whose bright colors and 3D physique look like something out of a Pixar film or the video game Fortnite – was created by Jordi van den Bussche, a long time YouTuber also known as kwebbelkop. Van den Bussche created Bloo after finding himself unable to keep up with the demands of content creation. The work no longer matched the output.

“Turns out, the flaw in this equation is the human, so we need to somehow remove the human,” said van den Bussche, a 29-year old from Amsterdam, in an interview. “The only logical way was to replace the human with either a photorealistic person or a cartoon. The VTuber was the only option, and that’s where Bloo came from.”

Jordi Van Den Bussche, YouTuber known as Kwebbelkop.

Courtesy: Jordi Van Den Bussche

Bloo has already generated more than seven figures in revenue, according to van den Bussche. Many VTubers like Bloo are “puppeteered,” meaning a human controls the character’s voice and movements in real time using motion capture or face-tracking technology. Everything else, from video thumbnails to voice dubbing in other languages, is handled by AI technology from ElevenLabs, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. Van den Bussche’s long-term goal is for Bloo’s entire personality and content creation process to be run by AI.

Van den Bussche has already tested fully AI-generated videos on Bloo’s channel, but says the results have not yet been promising. The content doesn’t perform as well because the AI still lacks the intuition and creative instincts of a human, he said. 

“When AI can do it better, faster or cheaper than humans, that’s when we’ll start using it permanently,” van den Bussche said.

The technology might not be far away.

Startup Hedra offers a product that uses AI technology to generate videos that are up to five minutes long. It raised $32 million in a funding round in May led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Infrastructure fund.

Hedra’s product, Character-3, allows users to create AI-generated characters for videos and can add dialogue and other characteristics. CEO Michael Lingelbach told CNBC Hedra is working on a product that will allow users to create self-sustaining, fully-automated characters.

Hedra’s product Character-3 allows users to make figures powered by AI that can be animated in real-time.

Hedra

“We’re doing a lot of research accelerating models like Character-3 to real time, and that’s going to be a really good fit for VTubers,” Lingelbach said. 

Character-3’s technology is already being used by a growing number of creators who are experimenting with new formats, and many of their projects are going viral. One of those is comedian Jon Lajoie’s Talking Baby Podcast, which features a hyper-realistic animated baby talking into a microphone. Another is Milla Sofia, a virtual singer and artist whose AI-generated music videos attract thousands of views. 

Talking Baby Podcast

Source: Instagram | Talking Baby Podcast

These creators are using Character-3 to produce content that stands out on social media, helping them reach wide audiences without the cost and complexity of traditional production.

AI-generated video is a rapidly evolving technology that is reshaping how content is made and shared online, making it easier than ever to produce high-quality video without cameras, actors or editing software. In May, Google announced Veo 3, a tool that creates AI-generated videos with audio.

Google said it uses a subset of YouTube content to train Veo 3, CNBC reported in June. While many creators said they were unaware of the training, experts said it has the potential to create an intellectual property crisis on the platform.

Faceless AI YouTubers

Creators are increasingly finding profitable ways to capitalize on the generative AI technology ushered in by the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.

One growing trend is the rise of faceless AI channels. These are run by creators who use these tools to produce videos with artificially generated images and voiceover that can sometimes earn thousands of dollars a month without them ever appearing on camera.

“My goal is to scale up to 50 channels, though it’s getting harder because of how YouTube handles new channels and trust scores,” said GoldenHand, a Spain-based creator who declined to share his real name.

Working with a small team, GoldenHand said he publishes up to 80 videos per day across his network of channels. Some maintain a steady few thousand views per video while others might suddenly go viral and rack up millions of views, mostly to an audience of those over the age of 65.

GoldenHand said his content is audio-driven storytelling. He describes his YouTube videos as audiobooks that are paired with AI-generated images and subtitles. Everything after the initial idea is created entirely by AI.

He recently launched a new platform, TubeChef, which gives creators access to his system to automatically generate faceless AI videos starting at $18 a month.

“People think using AI means you’re less creative, but I feel more creative than ever,” he said. “Coming up with 60 to 80 viral video ideas a day is no joke. The ideation is where all the effort goes now.”

AI Slop

As AI-generated content becomes more common online, concerns about its impact are growing. Some users worry about the spread of misinformation, especially as it becomes easier to generate convincing but entirely AI-fabricated videos.

“Even if the content is informative and someone might find it entertaining or useful, I feel we are moving into a time where … you do not have a way to understand what is human made and what is not,” said Henry Ajder, founder of Latent Space Advisory, which helps business navigate the AI landscape.

Others are frustrated by the sheer volume of low-effort, AI content flooding their feeds. This kind of material is often referred to as “AI slop,” low-quality, randomly generated content made using artificial intelligence. 

Google DeepMind Veo 3.

Courtesy: Google DeepMind

“The age of slop is inevitable,” said Ajder, who is also an AI policy advisor at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. “I’m not sure what we do about it.”

While it’s not new, the surge in this type of content has led to growing criticism from users who say it’s harder to find meaningful or original material, particularly on apps like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

“I am actually so tired of AI slop,” said one user on X. “AI images are everywhere now. There is no creativity and no effort in anything relating to art, video, or writing when using AI. It’s disappointing.”

However, the creators of this AI content tell CNBC that it comes down to supply and demand. As the AI-generated content continues to get clicks, there’s no reason to stop creating more of it, said Noah Morris, a creator with 18 faceless YouTube channels.

Some argue that AI videos still have inherent artistic value, and though it’s become much easier to create, slop-like content has always existed on the internet, Lingelbach said.

“There’s never been a barrier to people making uninteresting content,” he said. “Now there’s just more opportunity to create different kinds of uninteresting content, but also more kinds of really interesting content too.”

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Elon Musk’s X is down for some users

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Elon Musk's X is down for some users

The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Elon Musk‘s social media platform X was hit with an outage on Wednesday, leaving some users unable to load the site.

More than 15,000 users reported issues with the platform at around 9:53 a.m. ET, according to analytics firm Downdetector, which gathers data from users who spot glitches and report them to service.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by 10:30 a.m., though some users continue to report disruptions with the platform.

The site has suffered from multiple disruptions in recent months.

Representatives from X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the outage.

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