Ma ”Pony” Huateng, chairman and chief executive officer of Tencent Holdings Ltd., speaks during the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Forum in Hong Kong, China, on Tuesday, June 20, 2017. In an unusual move, Ma has chosen to convene a summit of government academics and business chieftains in Hong Kong days before the 20th anniversary of its return to China.
Paul Yeung | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tencent’s Riot Games unit said Monday it’s eliminating 11% of its workforce, or about 530 jobs, and scaling back on its division that publishes games from small developers.
“We’re changing some of the bets we’ve made and shifting how we work across the company to create focus and move us toward a more sustainable future,” Riot CEO Dylan Jadeja told employees in a letter published on the company’s blog.
The downsizing follows job cuts across the media and technology world in recent weeks, and continues a trend from last year, when companies went into belt-tightening mode to meet more challenging economic conditions. Amazon and Google are among tech companies that have confirmed layoffs so far in 2024.
Riot, publisher of the League of Legends and Valorant video games, said it will lower headcount for its Legends of Runeterra title released in 2020.
“We’ve been subsidizing the cost of development on LoR through our other games, but at this point, that’s just not a viable option,” wrote Jadeja, who spent six years as Riot’s president before taking over from Nicolo Laurent as CEO in September.
Eric Shen will become Legends of Runeterra’s executive producer, replacing Dave Guskin, accroding to a blog post from Guskin, who said he’ll work on other Riot games.
Riot is also pulling back in its Forge division, which publishes games from indie developers.
“We’re proud of what we’ve done together to bring these stories to life, but it’s time to refocus our efforts on the ambitious projects underway internally at Riot,” Jadeja wrote in the letter.
Tencent, based in China, invested in Riot Games in 2011 and became its outright owner four years later. Riot is headquartered in Los Angeles.
When Microsoft announced its plan to acquire Activision Blizzard in 2022, the software company said the deal would make it the third-largest gaming company in the world, behind Tencent and Sony. Last year Microsoft cut 10,000 employees as it faced slowing revenue growth.
Tencent, which also owns the WeChat app with broad usage in China, has encountered challenges lately. It has seen revenue increase in the single digits or decline for the past seven quarters after a pandemic-era growth spurt. In September, Tencent-backed Epic Games announced it was cutting 16% of its staff. Shares slid 12% in late December after China announced new rules designed to limit excessive gaming.
Pony Ma, Tencent’s co-founder and CEO, told analysts in November that the company is shifting “away from less scalable activities” and boosting investments in artificial intelligence.
Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.
The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.
“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.
He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.
Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.
“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”
Undecided on location
Founded in 2022 by Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup that competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
The company divides its business into three main camps: consumer-facing voice assistants, integrations with corporates such as Cisco, and tailor-made applications for specific industries like health care.
Staniszewski said the firm hasn’t yet decided where it could list, but that this decision will largely rest on where most of its users are located at the time.
“If the U.K. is able to start accelerating,” ElevenLabs will consider London as a listing destination, Staniszewski said.
The city has faced criticisms from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that its stock market is unfavorable toward high-growth tech firms.
Meanwhile, British money transfer firm Wiselast month said it plans to move its primary listing location to the U.S.,
Fundraising plans
ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.
Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.
Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday.
“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement.
The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China.
The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.