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AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Financial technology startup Nium told CNBC Wednesday it raised $50 million in new funds from investors, and is targeting an initial public offering in the next 18 months.

The fundraising round was led by an undisclosed Southeast Asian sovereign wealth fund and backed by venture capital firms BOND, NewView Capital, and Tribe Capital.

It places Nium’s valuation at $1.4 billion. That marks a 30% discount to its previous valuation of $2 billion, which the firm notched in 2022 when it last raised external venture capital.

Prajit Nanu, Nium’s CEO and founder, said the firm would use the fresh capital to double down on mergers and acquisitions, targeting other growth-stage payment firms.

Nanu said his company’s down round was the result of a broader depression in public market valuations of fintech companies.

Fintechs have seen their stock prices slashed in recent years as a result of macroeconomic pressures, including high inflation and rising interest rates.

“Being realistic, when we raised in early 2022, public markets were killing it,” Nanu said. “The public markets have not been kind to fintech.”

IPO in 18 months

Nanu said that, despite the lower valuation, he is still bullish on the growth story for Nium and is confident the company will go public in the next 18 months, targeting a flotation in the third or fourth quarter of 2025.

He added that valuation isn’t a concern for him and that it won’t matter what value the company prices its shares as markets are volatile by nature.

“Whether you go public at $1 billion, $5 billion, it doesn’t matter. Because the valuation is only when you get bought, or when you go through an IPO,” he said.

He noted the example of Stripe, which raised a $95 billion valuation in the heady days of 2021 before slashing its value to $50 billion and then boosting its valuation to $65 billion in secondary share transactions.

Not interested in crypto

Nanu said he’s not interested in acquiring companies in the cryptocurrency space as he doesn’t yet see merchant demand for crypto as a payment method.

“It’s on the very early side of infrastructure,” Nanu said. “Nium in the end is a layer on top of a lot of banks in the world.”

“Banks have gone from, crypto is hot, to not crypto, to crypto,” he added. “It’s not one shoe fits all.”

That’s despite a huge rise in prices of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, which have rallied off the back of renewed investor interest following the approval of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the U.S.

Bitcoin has seen its price climb roughly 150% in the last 12 months.

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.

Steve Nesius | Reuters

United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.

With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.

“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”

The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.

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Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.

Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.

Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.

Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.

The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.

“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”

Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.

Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.

As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.

Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.” 

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

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AMD shares rise 9% after analysts say they expect a ‘snapback’ for chipmaker

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AMD shares rise 9% after analysts say they expect a 'snapback' for chipmaker

AMD CEO Lisa Su unveils the AMD vision for Advancing Al.

Courtesy: AMD

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices rose nearly 9% on Monday after analysts at Piper Sandler lifted their price target on the stock on optimism about the chipmaker’s latest product announcement.

The analysts said they see a snapback for AMD’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, in the fourth quarter. That’s when they expect the chipmaker to be through the bulk of the $800 million in charges that AMD said it would incur as a result of a new U.S. license requirement that applies to exports of semiconductors to China and other countries. 

Last week, AMD revealed its next-generation artificial intelligence chips, the Instinct MI400 series. Notably, the company unveiled a full-server rack called Helios that enables thousands of the chips to be tied together. That chip system is expected to be important for AI customers such as cloud companies and developers of large language models. 

AMD CEO Lisa Su showed the products on stage at an event in San Jose, California, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said they sounded “totally crazy.”

“Overall, we are enthused with the product launches at the AMD event this week, specifically the Helios rack, which we think is pivotal for AMD Instinct growth,” the analysts wrote in their note. 

Piper Sandler raised its price target for AMD’s share price from $125 to $140.

The stock jumped past $126 on Monday to close at its highest level since Jan. 7, before President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs and AMD warned of the chip control charges.

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