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A live-streamer at a 17LIVE event.

17LIVE

In a first for Singapore, shares of 17LIVE began trading Friday following the Asian livestreaming company’s merger with a special-purpose acquisition company.

Shares of 17LIVE fell 2.06% to 3.80 Singapore dollars ($2.84) after opening at SG$4.

This was Singapore’s first listing via a SPAC merger. SPACs, or blank-check firms, are shell companies that raise capital in an IPO and use the cash to merge with a private company in order to take it public.

“We may see more SPACs coming on board,” said Deloitte in a Nov. 16 report, referring to17LIVE’s merger with Vertex Technology Acquisition Corporation.

Singapore’s first SPAC, VTAC, was listed in January 2022. It is backed by Vertex Venture Holdings, the venture capital arm of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, Temasek Holdings.

Local SPACs have two years to acquire a company, with the option for a one-year extension, subject to certain conditions.

Ng Jing Shen, co-founder at 17LIVE, told CNBC on Friday that the company opted to list via a SPAC merger because the blank-check firm was headed by its longtime partner, Vertex. He added that a traditional IPO would have taken longer, while SPAC offered them capitalization early on.

“The more time we save, the more we can capitalize and capture the growth opportunities that we see right now in Southeast Asia.”

The number of digital natives in Southeast Asia is 'huge,' says livestreaming platform

“We see ourselves as a global livestreaming platform. Singapore is a global financial hub so we think it’s a great launchpad for us,” Ng told CNBC ahead of the listing.

The livestreaming platform allows users to interact in real-time with streamers and send them virtual gifts. About 16% of 17LIVE’s monthly active users spend money, with the average monthly revenue generated from each spending user at $302 a month, according to the firm.

“In our business model, we don’t make money from ads. Our business is not in views, it is in interactivity. So we make money off gifts that our users can buy from us,” said Ng.

“They buy these gifts and they give it to the streamers to support them in whatever goal or whatever competition that’s being run. And then we do a revenue share with the streamers,” said Ng, without revealing numbers.

The platform had about 87,000 contracted live streamers as of end June. These content creators are sourced from agencies or through talent scouting, with the contract duration ranging between one and seven years.

New IPOs fizzle out: What's behind the tumbles

“Once they sign with us, they actually go through a training program within our in-house talent management agency. So we teach them how to stream, how to use equipment, how to use the app. And then once they start, we have talent managers to watch their livestreams and guide them along the way,” said Ng.

Launched in 2015 in Taiwan, 17LIVE expanded into Japan in 2017 which now accounts for 70% of its revenue while the rest comes from Taiwan and Southeast Asia, according to the company.

The app also allows users to use their smartphones to upload an avatar and conduct virtual streaming.

The market size for virtual idol, or computer-generated characters designed to resemble real people, in Japan is expected to increase to $3.86 billion by 2027 from $630.7 million in 2022, according to the SPAC merger filing.

In 2022, 17Live generated operating revenue of $363.7 million and incurred a loss of $51 million, according to the filing.

Bid to boost listings market

In September 2021, the Singapore Exchange became Asia’s first major bourse to allow SPAC listings in a move aimed at attracting more firms to list in the city-state amid a stagnating IPO market.

Even before the pandemic, the exchange saw more delistings than listings. From 2009 to 2019, there were 302 delistings, while only 279 companies listed in Singapore, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who was minister in charge of Singapore’s central bank and is now the country’s president, said in 2020.

“We hope we are showing that there’s an alternative for companies which are fast growing, instead of directly listing in Hong Kong or the U.S.,” Vertex Holdings CEO Chua Kee Lock told CNBC.

Hong Kong has been trying to stimulate its IPO market, with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in September proposing measures to enhance its appeal for small- and medium-sized enterprises with high-growth potential.

In August, the Hong Kong government announced a task force to “enhance” stock market liquidity in order to bolster the development of its capital market.

17LIVE has listed amid macroeconomic uncertainties fueled by high inflation, interest rate hikes, and volatile markets. Unlike the stock frenzies of 2020 and 2021, several companies have delayed their listings since 2022, adopting a wait-and-watch approach.

SPAC IPOs fell 76% in the first half of 2023 compared with the same period a year earlier, according to a report by financial and risk advisory firm Kroll.

On why 17LIVE was listed amid an environment of economic uncertainty, Chua said: “I think the market will come back.”

“What is up can never go up forever, right? … What is down cannot be down forever, too.”

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Tesla shares climb as Musk pledges to be ‘super focused’ on companies ahead of Starship launch

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Tesla shares climb as Musk pledges to be 'super focused' on companies ahead of Starship launch

Elon Musk listens as reporters ask U.S. President Donald Trump and South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa questions during a press availability in the Oval Office at the White House on May 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

Tesla shares gained about 5% on Tuesday after CEO Elon Musk over the weekend reiterated his intent to home in on his businesses ahead of the latest SpaceX rocket launch.

The billionaire wrote in a post to his social media platform X that he needs to be “super focused” on X, artificial intelligence company xAI and Tesla as they launch “critical technologies” on the heels of a temporary outage.

“As evidenced by the uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” he wrote, adding that he would return to “spending 24/7” at work. “The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”

An outage over the weekend briefly shuttered the social media platform formerly known as Twitter for thousands of users, according to DownDetector. Earlier in the week, the platform suffered a data center outage. X has suffered a series of outages since Musk purchased the platform in 2022.

Read more CNBC tech news

Musk has previously indicated plans to step away from his political work and prioritize his businesses.

During Tesla’s April earnings call he said that he would “significantly” reduce his time running President Donald Trump‘s Department of Government Efficiency.

In the last election cycle, Musk devoted time and billions of dollars to political causes and toward electing Trump in 2024. However, a story over the weekend from the Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the matter, said that Musk has grown disillusioned with politics and wants to return to managing his businesses.

Last week, Musk said in an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum that he planned to spend “a lot less” on campaign donations going forward.

The comments from Musk precede SpaceX’s Starship rocket Tuesday evening. Pressure is on for the company after two Starship rockets exploded in January and March.

Ahead of the launch, Musk announced an all hands livestream on X at 1 p.m.

Tesla is still facing fallout from Musk’s political foray, with protests at showrooms and other brand damage.

In April, Tesla sold 7,261 cars in Europe, down 49% from last year, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.

WATCH: Elon Musk: We have seen a major rebound in demand

Elon Musk: We have seen a major rebound in demand

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Trump advisor Hassett says ‘we don’t want to harm’ Apple with iPhone tariffs

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Trump advisor Hassett says 'we don't want to harm' Apple with iPhone tariffs

NEC Director Kevin Hassett on Trump's iPhone tariff threat: In the end, we don't want to harm Apple

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Tuesday that the Trump administration does not want to “harm Apple” with tariffs.

“Everybody is trying to make it seem like it’s a catastrophe if there’s a tiny little tariff on them right now, to try to negotiate down the tariffs,” Hassett told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday. “In the end, we’ll see what happens, we’ll see what the update is, but we don’t want to harm Apple.”

Hassett’s comments come after President Donald Trump said in a social media post that Apple will have to pay a tariff of 25% or more for iPhones made outside the U.S. Apple has historically manufactured its products in foreign countries including China, India and Vietnam.

“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump wrote in the post. “If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S. Thank your for your attention to this matter!”

By some estimates, a U.S.-made iPhone could cost as much as $3,500.

Read more CNBC tech news

“If you think that Apple has a factory some place that’s got a set number of iPhones that it produces and it needs to sell them no matter what, then Apple will bear those tariffs, not consumers, because it’s an elastic supply,” Hassett said.

Hasset’s comments continue the administration’s push to pressure companies to shoulder the cost burden of Trump’s tariffs, instead of raising prices for consumers.

Earlier this month, Trump told retail giant Walmart to “EAT THE TARIFFS” after the company warned it would have to pass those added costs on.

Shares of Apple were up more than 1% Tuesday.

Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

WATCH: NEC Director Kevin Hassett on Trump’s iPhone tariff threat: In the end, we don’t want to harm Apple

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Ambience announces OpenAI-powered medical coding model that outperforms physicians

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Ambience announces OpenAI-powered medical coding model that outperforms physicians

Dr. Priti Patel, CMIO at John Muir Health, uses Ambience before starting a patient encounter.

Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare

Artificial intelligence startup Ambience Healthcare on Tuesday announced a new medical coding model that outperforms doctors by 27%.

Ambience uses AI to draft clinical notes in real-time as doctors consensually record their visits with patients. The company used tools from OpenAI to build the new model.

The startup is part of a fiercely competitive market that has taken off as health-care executives search for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads. 

The company’s new model can listen to patient encounters and identify ICD-10 codes, which are internationally standardized classifications for different diseases and conditions. There are about 70,000 ICD-10 codes that are regularly updated and used to facilitate billing and other reporting processes in health care. 

Ambience said its new ICD-10 model can reduce billing mistakes and help clinicians and professional coders work more efficiently. The model notched a “27% relative improvement over physician benchmarks,” according to a release on Tuesday.  

“We’re not replacing doctors or coders,” Brendan Fortuner, Ambience’s head of engineering, told CNBC in an interview. “What we’re doing is we’re liberating them from administration, and we’re fixing mistakes that help make health care better, safer, more cost-effective.”

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Documenting ICD-10 codes has traditionally been a labor-intensive task in health care, but it’s a crucial way to track outcomes, mortalities and morbidities in a standardized way, said Dr. Will Morris, the chief medical officer of Ambience.

“If you think about it from a data perspective, it’s how you can compare and contrast clinician A to B, or health system A to B,” Morris said in an interview. “It’s the cornerstone for quality.”

Ambience’s technology is used at more than 40 health-care organizations, like Cleveland Clinic and UCSF Health. It has raised more than $100 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz and the OpenAI Startup Fund. 

The company is reportedly seeking fresh capital at a valuation of over $1 billion, according to a report from The Information. Ambience declined to comment on the report. 

Ambience trained its new AI model using OpenAI’s reinforcement fine-tuning technology. This technology allows companies to tune OpenAI’s best reasoning models for very specific domains, like health care. 

To validate the model, Ambience tested it against a “gold panel” set of labels, the company said. The labels were established by a group of expert clinicians who evaluated complex clinical cases and came to an agreement on what the right codes were. 

Ambience’s AI platform for compliant documentation, CDI, and coding.

Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare

The company then recruited 18 different board-certified doctors and compared their performance on ICD-10 coding accuracy to the model’s performance. That comparison showed the Ambience technology performed 27% better than the physician baseline. 

“It shows for the first time that an AI system can actually surpass clinician experts at a very, very important administrative task, especially in coding,” Fortuner said. 

Ambience already has similar capabilities available for other medical codes like Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes, and Fortuner said it’s exploring how to tackle other areas like prior authorizations, utilization management and clinical trial matching. 

The company’s new ICD-10 model will roll out to customers over the summer.

“Getting it right at the point of care is a fundamental change,” Morris said.

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