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Big technology companies are consuming as much data as possible to become winners in artificial intelligence — but that’s not necessarily what will define winners, according to the boss of software giant Appian.

Matt Calkins, CEO and co-founder of Appian, said that though internet giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are spending billions on the tech, ensuring success in AI is “not just about money.”

“AI is not a place where money makes more money,” Calkins told CNBC in an interview at its London bureau on Tuesday.

Calkins was referring to the high-profile deals companies like Microsoft and Amazon are agreeing with ambitious and fast-growing foundational AI model makers, like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Microsoft has invested a total of $13 billion in OpenAI, a deal that entails Microsoft getting a stake in OpenAI and the latter adding its GPT language models to the Redmond, Washington-based technology giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.

Microsoft has struck a similar deal with Mistral, taking a 15 million euro ($16 million) stake in the French AI firm.

AI revolution being 'held up a little bit by fear,' Appian CEO says

In OpenAI’s case, Microsoft has a non-voting observer sitting on the firm’s board.

That happened after a shocking series of events last year that saw the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, temporarily ousted, before later returning after hundreds of OpenAI employees threatened a coup to join Altman at Microsoft.

Separately, Amazon has invested a whopping $4 billion into U.S. AI firm Anthropic, which is behind the Claude AI system. Amazon holds a minority stake in Anthropic but no board seat.

Google, too, has committed billions of funding to Anthropic, agreeing last year to invest up to $2 billion.

Scrutiny from UK regulators

British regulators are assessing whether deals agreed by Microsoft and Amazon with foundation AI model startups may constitute effective mergers that could lead to a substantial reduction of competition.

Microsoft denies its deal with OpenAI and Mistral and hiring from Inflection constituted mergers. Amazon says its partnership with Anthropic constitutes a limited corporate investment, not a merger.

This is a market for the clever. The fact that you’ve got enough money to buy, or buy a piece of, Anthropic or Mistral or any of that, that’s impressive. But AI may not be a ‘winner take all’ market.

Matt Calkins

CEO, Appian

For Calkins, whether or not those deals qualify as mergers that threaten competition in AI, there will be room for innovators to thrive.

“If coalitions won the AI race, Google would have won by now,” he said, calling out the U.S. tech giant’s $500 million takeover of British AI lab DeepMind.

Global Music Artist will.i.am: Over-regulating AI will stop innovation

Far from it, Calkins argues — instead, he thinks Google lost out to Microsoft early on when it comes to generative AI, which threatens to upend the fabric of Google’s search business.

It follows a blunder that saw Google’s Gemini text-to-image generator produce inaccuracies in historical pictures that went viral online. Google paused image generation of people to refine the tool. CEO Sundar Pichai called the debacle “unacceptable,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC in February.

Google was not immediately available for comment and contacted by CNBC.

“This is a market for the clever,” Calkins said. “The fact that you’ve got enough money to buy, or buy a piece of, Anthropic or Mistral or any of that, that’s impressive. But AI may not be a ‘winner take all’ market.”

“There’s going to be different AI algorithms for different purposes, and they are going to be much more or less valuable, depending on whether and how you’ve loaded your own data into it,” he added.

Calkins said that the only way for AI systems to become truly clever and useful is by being capable of understanding what we want from them for use in our everyday lives.

“The best AI will be the AI you put your data into, not whoever bought the biggest stack,” he said.

Europe has ‘head start’ with regulation

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StubHub’s stock opens at $25.35 in NYSE debut after ticket seller’s long-awaited IPO

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StubHub's stock opens at .35 in NYSE debut after ticket seller's long-awaited IPO

Eric Baker, co-founder and CEO of Ticket reseller StubHub, rings the opening bell during his company’s IPO at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., September 17, 2025.

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

StubHub shares opened at $25.35 in their New York Stock Exchange debut on Wednesday after the online ticket seller priced its IPO in the middle of its expected range.

The pricing late Tuesday at $23.50 per share raised $800 million for the company, now trading under ticker symbol “STUB.”

StubHub’s long-awaited IPO comes after the company paused its plans in April, when President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs sent the stock market into a tailspin. It was the second such delay, after market volatility forced StubHub to temporarily shelve its IPO plans in July 2024.

The IPO is the latest in a flurry of tech offerings as the market rebounds from a dismal few years. Swedish buy now, pay later firm Klarna and Gemini, the crypto firm founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, rose in their respective debuts last week. Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle have also hit the market in recent months.

StubHub has been through a number of transactions in its 25-year history to get to this point. It was purchased by eBay for $310 million in 2007, but was reacquired by its co-founder Eric Baker in 2020 for roughly $4 billion through his new company Viagogo.

Read more CNBC tech news

StubHub has benefited from a resurgence in the live events market in the years following the Covid lockdowns. Sales have also boomed from massively popular shows like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour, as well as sporting events like the Super Bowl.

The company said in its updated prospectus filed last month that those sorts of events can also make StubHub’s revenues lumpy and difficult to predict.

In the first quarter, StubHub reported revenue growth of 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. Its net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago. Gross merchandise sales, which represent the total dollar value paid by ticket buyers, reached $2.08 billion in the three months ended March 31.

StubHub primarily generates revenue from connecting buyers with ticket resellers. More than 40 million tickets were sold on StubHub’s marketplace last year from roughly one million sellers, the company said in August.

It competes with Vivid Seats, which was taken public via a special purpose acquisition company in 2021, SeatGeek and Ticketmaster parent Live Nation Entertainment.

The Federal Trade Commission is in the advanced stages of probing Ticketmaster over whether it’s done enough to keep automated bots from circumventing its per-person ticket limits for popular events, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The FTC in May sent a warning letter to StubHub saying it must comply with the agency’s “junk fees” rule and alleging some of its ticket listings failed to display the total price, including all mandatory fees and charges.

Madrone Partners is StubHub’s largest investor with ownership of 24.5% of Class A shares prior to the offering. WestCap is second at 12.3%, followed by Bessemer Venture Partners at 8.8%.

WATCH: StubHub CEO on IPO

StubHub CEO: FTC change to all-in, transparent ticket pricing has leveled the playing field

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Ten years after selling Periscope to Twitter, startup’s co-founder raises $40 million for Macroscope

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Ten years after selling Periscope to Twitter, startup's co-founder raises  million for Macroscope

Macroscope employees.

Macroscope

It’s been a decade since Kayvon Beykpour sold Periscope to Twitter for a reported $100 million, allowing the social media site to jump into livestreaming.

Twitter shuttered Periscope in 2021, and the parent company, now called X and owned by Elon Musk, gravitated to a live events product called Spaces.

Meanwhile, Beykpour, who spent seven years at Twitter after the acquisition, is back with Macroscope. He said on Wednesday that he’s raised $40 million from venture investors, including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital.

While Periscope targeted a consumer audience, Macroscope is going squarely after businesses. Beykpour’s idea is to help software developers easily spot issues in their code, and show managers what their engineers are doing.

Beykpour said the lack of transparency in the software development process was a big problem in his former gig.

“So much of my job as the head of product at Twitter was just understanding what the hell was happening,” Beykpour, said in an interview. “You have all these engineers at the company and all these very important things that we need to get done with absolute opaqueness around, like, What progress did we make? What are all these people working on?”

He said the startup set out to help product leaders first and added features for programmers later.

Macroscope integrates with Microsoft-owned GitHub’s source code repositories and project management software from Atlassian and Linear. Its technology connects to artificial intelligence models from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI that can propose alternative code and answer questions from developers and product executives.

Products like GitHub Copilot and Cursor’s BugBot already can review code with help from AI. Beykpour said that in testing Macroscope outperformed competitors when it came to correctly identifying known software bugs.

And when it comes to tools to help managers stay on top of developers’ activity, there’s not much available, Beykpour said.

“They’re solving it with meetings,” he said. “If we cannot surpass the bar of, people call a meeting to ask a bunch of engineers what’s happening, we’ve failed miserably.”

Macroscope costs $30 per developer per month, which includes the status-checking components for bosses, while Cursor is priced at $32 per month when purchased annually.

Early users include film studio A24, online learning startup Class and probiotics company Seed Health.

Beykpour started Macroscope in 2023 with Periscope co-founder Joseph Bernstein and Rob Bishop, founder of AI startup Magic Pony, which Twitter acquired in 2016. The company has 17 employees and is based in San Francisco.

WATCH: AI startups raise $104 billion so far in 2025 but most investors are still waiting for a payout

AI startups raise $104 billion so far in 2025 but most investors are still waiting for a payout

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StubHub CEO says recent change to all-in ticket prices will dent revenue

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StubHub CEO says recent change to all-in ticket prices will dent revenue

StubHub CEO: FTC change to all-in, transparent ticket pricing has leveled the playing field

StubHub CEO Eric Baker said Wednesday that recently introduced federal regulations around transparent ticket pricing will cause a “one-time” hit to its financial results.

Revenue is expected to dip year over year as consumers digest the new rules, Baker told CNBC, which require online ticket sellers to prominently show the total cost upfront.

“We’ve seen this in states like New York that have done it. You have a drop off and it hits about 10%. … Then it’s just back to normal,” Baker said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “You’re growing off the base because you now normalized it. So it’s just a one-time hit to conversion, resets the market, and then onward and upward you go.”

The online ticket marketplace is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday under the symbol “STUB.”

StubHub late Tuesday priced its IPO at $23.50, landing at the midpoint of the expected range it gave last week of $22 to $25. The share sale values the company at $8.6 billion.

Read more CNBC tech news

Online ticket sellers such as StubHub, Live Nation’s Ticketmaster and Vivid Seats have had to adjust to the Federal Trade Commission’s “junk fees” rule that took effect in May.

The rule “prohibits bait-and-switch pricing and other tactics used to hide total prices and mislead people about fees in the live-event ticketing and short-term lodging industries,” the agency said.

D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued StubHub last August for “predatory drip pricing,” or deceptively advertising low prices for tickets, while a countdown clock creates a false sense of urgency and the total cost at checkout climbs “vastly higher than the originally advertised ticket price.”

Baker said the company has advocated for ticket providers to have “all-in pricing.”

“If you’re the only person in the market doing it for the reasons I said, you end up with a problem,” Baker said. “So now that everyone’s doing it, everyone’s happier, and you have a level playing field.”

The San Francisco-based company was co-founded by Baker in 2000, and was acquired by eBay for $310 million seven years later. Baker reacquired StubHub in 2020 for roughly $4 billion through his new company Viagogo.

StubHub delayed its planned IPO in April as President Donald Trump‘s sweeping tariffs jolted markets.

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