Three weeks after Flexport founder Ryan Petersen fired Dave Clark as CEO and returned to run his supply chain software startup, the company has ousted its chief financial officer, and its human resources chief has resigned, CNBC has learned.
Flexport informed CFO Kenny Wagers last week that he was being let go, according to people familiar with the situation. His last day is Friday.
Stuart Leung, Flexport’s head of finance, is expected to be named CFO, said the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Leung has worked at Flexport for seven years in various operations, logistics and finance roles, and is viewed as a close confidant of Petersen’s.
Petersen, who founded Flexport a decade ago and built it into a Silicon Valley darling valued at $8 billion by prominent investors, reclaimed the top position at the company on Sept. 6, after he and the board forced Clark to resign. Clark, who spent 23 years at Amazon and became a top member of Jeff Bezos’ leadership team, was hired by Petersen a year ago, in part to help the company move towards an IPO, sources said.
Clark and Petersen worked as co-CEOs of Flexport starting last September, and Clark took over as the company’s sole CEO in March. Petersen became a venture partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, one of Flexport’s top backers.
Jennifer Boden, Flexport’s vice president of people tech and employee experience, is also leaving the company, the sources said. Boden took over the role earlier this month after her predecessor, Darcie Henry, was let go from Flexport.
A Flexport spokesperson confirmed the personnel moves, and said that Michael Brown will take on a new role as Head of Restructuring and CEO Initiatives, but declined comment on possible layoffs.
“Kenny Wagers made a tremendous impact at Flexport, and we are grateful for his contributions steering Flexport as one of the fastest-growing companies during his tenure. We wish Kenny the best as he pursues his next opportunities. Stuart Leung will become Flexport’s Chief Financial Officer and report to Ryan Petersen, CEO, effective immediately. Stuart has been with Flexport for nearly seven years having held vital senior leadership roles in finance, sales, and operations. As CFO, he will focus on leading Flexport’s return to profitability and growth.
“Michael Brown will take on the role of SVP, Head of Restructuring and CEO Initiatives. In this newly created role, he will focus on restructuring the business to be more customer-centric and leading our return to profitability. Jennifer Boden will be leaving Flexport to pursue new opportunities. We thank Jennifer for her leadership and wish her all the best in her future endeavors.”
Petersen has fired many of the executives Clark recruited from Amazon, including Henry, as well as Teresa Carlson, who was the company’s president; Tim Collins, who served as executive vice president of global operations; and Kelly Cheeseman, a vice president and chief of staff.
Flexport launched in 2013 as a digitally focused freight forwarder, and recently has moved to become an end-to-end supply chain services company, acquiring fulfillment provider Deliverr from Shopify in May. In addition to Founders Fund, the company has also raised capital from Andreessen Horowitz and SoftBank.
While Flexport’s business was thriving during the Covid e-commerce boom, it’s been hit hard over the past year as global economic tumult has led to a dramatic slump in global freight movements.
In a series of posts on X, many of which were subsequently deleted, Petersen publicly excoriated Clark and his plans for growth at the company. He said Flexport would rescind 55 offer letters, and look to lease out office space.
Prior to the Clark saga, executives had been working on an IPO timeline and were targeting a 2025 debut, according to an internal document viewed by CNBC. Now the company is in cost-cutting mode, and is expected to announce more layoffs in the coming weeks, the people said.
In January, Flexport laid off about 20% of the company’s workforce, or roughly 640 employees.
Workers cross a junction near the Bank of England (BOE) in the City of London, UK, on Tuesday, April 8, 2025.
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LONDON — Britain is at risk of losing budding fintech and cryptocurrency entrepreneurs to rival hubs if it doesn’t address pressing regulation and funding challenges, according to industry leaders.
Several crypto bosses told CNBC this week that the U.K. has created an unfavorable environment for fintech and crypto. They argued that the local regulator takes too strict an approach to registering new firms, and that pension funds managing trillions of pounds are too risk-averse
Whereas a decade ago the U.K. was seen as being at “the forefront in terms of promoting competitiveness and innovation,” today things “have shifted more towards prioritizing safety and soundness to an extent where growth has been held behind,” according to Jaidev Janardana, CEO of British digital bank Zopa.
“If I look at the speed of innovation, I do feel that the U.S. is ahead — although they have their own challenges. But look at Singapore, Hong Kong — again, you see much more rapid innovation,” Janardana told CNBC. “I think we are still ahead of the EU, but we can’t remain complacent with that.”
Tim Levene, CEO of venture capital firm Augmentum Fintech, said entrepreneurs face challenges attracting funding in the U.K. and could be tempted to start their founding journeys in other regions, like Asia and the Middle East.
“We’re scrambling around looking for pots of capital in the U.K., where currently it would be more fruitful to go to the Gulf, to go to the U.S., to go to Australia, or elsewhere in Asia, and that that doesn’t feel right,” Levene told CNBC.
Lisa Jacobs, CEO of business lending platform Funding Circle, said that the negative impacts of Brexit are still being felt by the U.K. fintech industry — particularly when it comes to attracting overseas talent.
“I think it is right that we’re paranoid about other locations,” she told CNBC. “It is right that we are trying to — as an industry, as government — make the U.K. still that great place to set up. We have all the ingredients there, because we’ve got the ecosystem, we do have this talent setting up new businesses. But it needs to continue. We can’t rest on our laurels.”
Crypto rules unclear
The U.K. is home to a vibrant financial technology sector, with firms like Monzo and Revolut among those scaling to become challengers to traditional banks.
Industry insiders attribute their rapid rise in part to innovation-friendly rules that allowed tech startups to apply for — and secure — licenses to offer banking and electronic money services with greater ease.
Businesses operating in the world of crypto are frustrated that the same hasn’t happened yet for their industry.
“Other jurisdictions have started to seize the opportunity,” Cassie Craddock, U.K. and Europe managing director at blockchain firm Ripple, told CNBC.
The EU, meanwhile, has led the way when it comes to laying out clear rules for the industry with its Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation.
“The U.S. is driving global tailwinds for the industry,” Craddock said, adding: “MiCA came into force in the EU at the end of last year, while Singapore, Hong Kong and the UAE are moving full steam ahead with pro-industry reforms,” she added.
The U.K. on Tuesday laid out draft proposals for regulating crypto firms — however, industry insiders say the devil will be in the detail when it comes to addressing more complex technical issues, such as reserve requirements for stablecoins.
Rules on stablecoins unclear
One area in particular where fintech and crypto leaders alike want to see more clarity is stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to that of a sovereign currency.
Mark Fairless, CEO of payments infrastructure firm ClearBank, told CNBC that his business has been looking to develop its own stablecoin — but it’s been held back from launching one because of a lack of regulatory clarity.
Stablecoins are “part of our medium-term, longer-term strategy,” Fairless told CNBC. “We see ourselves well set up for that.” However, he added that a ClearBank stablecoin will only be possible when there’s regulatory certainty in the U.K. The startup is awaiting approval from the Bank of England.
Crypto industry insiders also say the FCA has been too restrictive when it comes to approving registrations from digital asset firms. The FCA is the regulator responsible for registering firms that want to provide crypto services within the scope of money laundering regulations in the U.K.
Another issue faced by crypto companies is that of being “debanked” by high street banks, according to Keith Grose, head of U.K. at Coinbase.
“Debanking is a huge issue — you can’t get bank accounts if you’re a company or individual who works in crypto,” Keith Grose, Coinbase’s U.K. head, told CNBC. “You can’t build the future of the financial system here if we don’t have that level playing field.”
A survey by Startup Coalition, Global Digital Finance and the U.K. Cryptoasset Business Council of more than 80 crypto firms published in January found that half were denied bank accounts or had existing ones closed by major banks.
“I think the U.K. will get it right — but there is a risk if you get it wrong that you drive innovation to other markets,” Coinbase’s Grose told CNBC.
“This is such a fast developing space — stablecoins grew 300% last year. They’re already doing more volume than Visa and Mastercard,” he added. “I think if you deliver smart regulation here, stablecoins can be a foundational part of our payment ecosystem in the U.K. going forward.”
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg (L) speaks with Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella after posing for a family picture with guests who attend the “Tech for Good” Summit at the Elysee Palace in Paris, on May 23, 2018.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday said that as much as 30% of the company’s code is now written by artificial intelligence.
“I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software,” Nadella said during a conversation before a live audience with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The pair of CEOs were speaking at Meta’s inaugural LlamaCon AI developer event in Menlo Park, California. Nadella added that the amount of code being written by AI at Microsoft is going up steadily.
Nadella asked Zuckerberg how much of Meta’s code was coming from AI. Zuckerberg said he didn’t know the exact figure off the top of his head, but he said Meta is building an AI model that can in turn build future versions of the company’s Llama family of AI models.
“Our bet is sort of that in the next year probably … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI, as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there,” Zuckerberg said.
Microsoft and Meta together employ tens of thousands of software developers, but they’re the latest companies to discuss how AI is replacing some of the work written by human software developers.
Since OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, people have turned to AI for a number of tasks, including customer service work, generating sales pitches and software development itself.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai in October said that more than 25% of new code was written by AI. Earlier this month, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke told employees that they will have to prove AI cannot do a job before asking for more headcount. Similarly, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn on Monday announced in a memo that the language-teaching company will gradually turn to AI in lieu of human contractors.
Earlier this month CNBC and other outlets reported that OpenAI was in talks to acquire Windsurf, a startup with “vibe coding” software that spits out whole programs with a few words of input. The dream is that with machines helping to write code, organizations will be able to produce more and better software.
Photo illustration showing the Samsung Group company logo displayed on a smartphone screen.
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Samsung Electronics‘ operating profit and revenue beatanalysts’ estimates Wednesday, as sales of its flagship Galaxy S25 smartphones as well as memory chips rose.
The South Korean company posted a record quarterly revenue, up 10% from a year earlier, while its first-quarter operating profit climbed 1.5%.
Here are Samsung’s first-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimates, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:
Revenue: 79.1 trillion Korean won ($55.4 billion) vs. 78.1 trillion Korean won
Operating profit: 6.7 trillion Korean won vs. 6.4 trillion Korean won
First-quarter revenue marginally topped Samsung’s forecast of 79 trillion Korean won, while operating profit also came in higher than the company’s expectations of 6.6 trillion Korean won.
Samsung is a leading manufacturer of memory chips, which are utilized in devices such as laptops and servers, and is also the world’s second-largest smartphone maker.
The company flagged macroeconomic uncertainties due to trade tensions and a slowdown in global growth. Samsung expects performance to improve in the second half of the year, “assuming that the uncertainties are diminished.”
South Korea-listed shares of Samsung Electronics were trading down about 0.4%.
Memory business
Samsung Electronics’ chip business posted an operating profit of 1.1 trillion Korean won in the first quarter, down from the previous quarter and the same period last year, though revenue rose year on year.
“For the Memory Business, revenue was driven by expanded server DRAM sales and the addressing of additional NAND demand amid a perceived bottoming out of the market price,” the company said.
DRAM and NAND are types of semiconductor memory found in PCs, workstations and servers. Demand for such memory chips has surged on the back of the artificial intelligence boom.
However, overall earnings were impacted by a decrease in average selling prices and sales impacted by U.S. export controls on AI chips, Samsung said.
Long a leader in memory chips, Samsung has recently been falling behind its local competitor, SK Hynix, which has been better positioned to benefit from AI development.
A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month said that SK Hynix had overtaken Samsung in overall DRAM market revenue for the first time, with a 36% global market share as compared to Samsung’s 34%.
The report added that this had resulted, in part, from SK Hynix’s dominance in high bandwidth memory or HBM — a type of DRAM used in artificial intelligence servers in which chips are vertically stacked to save space and reduce power consumption.
In its first quarter earnings, Samsung said it experienced deferred HBM demand from customers anticipating the rollout of its latest HBM products.
For the current quarter, Samsung anticipates continued strong demand for AI servers and will seek to strengthen its position in high-value-added products, including HBM.
Smartphones
Samsung’s mobile experience and networks businesses, tasked with developing and selling smartphones, tablets, wearables and other devices, reported a increase in sales and profit from the prior year and quarter.
The company credited the growth to the launch of its latest Galaxy S25 smartphone series, which includes AI features.
In the current quarter, the company plans to sustain sales through the launch of a new Galaxy S25 Edge smartphone and said it will continue to expand the AI-powered features offered on its smartphone lineup.
Correction: This story has been revised to reflect that operating profit in the chip segment declined both on a quarter-on-quarter as well as year-on-year basis.