A Google logo displays on a smartphone screen and the European flag on a computer screen.
Nikolas Kokovlis | Nurphoto | Getty Images
LISBON, Portugal — Ecosia and Qwant, two search engines competing with Google, announced a partnership Tuesday to build a European search index and reduce their dependence on U.S. Big Tech firms.
The two internet search firms agreed a joint venture, called the European Search Perspective or EUSP, with ownership split 50-50 between both firms. With a view to launch in France in early 2025, the venture aims to serve “improved” French and German language search results.
Ecosia is based in Berlin, while Qwant is headquartered in Paris. Qwant is a privacy-focused search engine that promises not to track users or resell their personal data. Ecosia’s search engine focuses on sustainability, pledging to plant one tree for every 50 searches on its platform.
Search infrastructure is what powers our access to the web, but it’s currently primarily controlled by Google, the dominant search engine with a more than 90% share of the global market. Even alternative search engines, such as Ecosia and Qwant, have to rely on existing tech from companies like Microsoft to deliver search results.
Christian Kroll, CEO of Ecosia, told CNBC the project had been made possible, in part, by new tech-focused competition rules in the European Union. The Digital Markets Act, which came into force earlier this year, requires Big Tech firms it calls “gatekeepers” to offer fair and reasonable access to their platforms.
In Google’s case, the company is required under the DMA to share data that would be useful for training a search model.
Why build a European search index?
Currently, alternative search engines like Ecosia, Qwant and DuckDuckGo don’t develop their own back-end infrastructure. The new venture will see them build their own search index from scratch, however, amassing results from a mix of different search engines. Ecosia last year switched to a mix of Google and Bing search results.
Ecosia and Qwant say their new search index will be “privacy-first,” using technologies from Qwant that were redesigned in 2023. Both companies will use the search index themselves but the tech will also be made available to other independent search engines and tech firms.
The launch comes as alternative search providers like Ecosia and Qwant are being forced to grapple with higher prices from Microsoft to access its Bing Search API (application programming interface), a piece of software that lets developers access the tech giant’s backend search infrastructure.
“We are European companies and we need to build technology that makes sure no third-party decision — for instance, Microsoft’s decision to increase costs to access their search API — could jeopardize our business,” Olivier Abecassis, CEO of Qwant, told CNBC.
“It is nothing against the U.S. or U.S. companies. It is all about the sovereignty of our business and companies,” he added. Abecassis will also serve as CEO of the new venture, which hasn’t yet raised funding from external investors.
Europeans are “very dependent on the United States for our technology,” Kroll said in an interview last week ahead of the launch. The election of Donald Trump as U.S. president could escalate geopolitical tensions, he added — and this could be a problem for Europe’s reliance on U.S. technology.
He pointed to the disruption to European energy supplies after Russia cut off gas to Europe following its invasion of Ukraine, saying this should serve as a warning for what can happen when an entire continent becomes too dependent on a single country for a key resource.
AI ‘paradigm shift’ in search
Part of Ecosia and Qwant’s push to build a search engine from scratch will be to offer a “transparent and secure data pool” for new AI technologies, according to the companies.
Search providers may get “more restrictive” in future, given the shift toward generative AI, Ecosia’s Kroll told CNBC.
“They know they’re sitting on a very important resource for this paradigm shift,” he said. “Yes, you need large language models to have good chatbots. But you also need access to a good index.”
The rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has put pressure on incumbent search giant Google, as people increasingly turn to the viral chatbot to search for information.
Meanwhile, a slew of new search engines, such as Perplexity, have also entered the market, offering their own generative-AI-based alternatives to Google.
Google has fought back with its own generative AI search product, integrating its Gemini large language model into search results.
Lisbon , Portugal – 12 November 2024; Dan Rogers, CEO, LaunchDarkly, on SaaS Summit stage during day one of Web Summit 2024 at the MEO Arena in Lisbon, Portugal.
Harry Murphy | Sportsfile | Getty Images
Collaboration software maker Asana said Wednesday it has chosen former Rubrik and ServiceNow executive Dan Rogers to be its new CEO, replacing co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
Rogers will start at San Francisco-based Asana on July 21, the company announced. Rogers will leave his post as CEO of LaunchDarkly, a startup with software for carefully releasing code updates. Rogers joined LaunchDarkly in 2023.
Moskovitz co-founded Facebook parent Meta before leaving to start Asana in 2008. In March, Asana said he would retire. Moskovitz will continue as chair of Asana’s board of directors as the company works to diversify with artificial intelligence tools. Asana’s AI Studio software generated over $1 million in annualized revenue during the April quarter.
“This moment represents an unprecedented opportunity for AI to evolve the way people work, and Dan is the leader with the experience, vision, and expertise needed to guide Asana into its next chapter,” Moskovitz said in a statement. “I am excited to support Dan.”
Moskovitz, whom Bloomberg estimates is worth over $11 billion, has received $5 in total compensation for the past five fiscal years. Rogers, by contrast, will receive a $650,000 base salary and $35 million in restricted stock units. Rogers will also be eligible for a $650,000 annual target bonus.
Before joining LaunchDarkly, Rogers ran marketing at ServiceNow and Symantec, and he held roles at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Salesforce. He arrived at LaunchDarkly after spending three years as president of data management software company Rubrik.
After going public through a direct listing in 2020, Asana saw shares rise during the pandemic, alongside other software stocks. The stock price gradually drifted downward, and Moskovitz bought up more and more of the company. On Wednesday, the stock closed at $12.93 per share, down from its record close of $142.68 in November 2021. Moskovitz owns about 39% of outstanding Asana shares, according to FactSet.
The stock was unchanged after hours following the CEO announcement.
LaunchDarkly said its chief revenue officer, Marcus Holm, is becoming the startup’s president, and co-founder and former CEO, will be more involved day to day as the board conducts a CEO search.
“”We’re grateful for the leadership Dan has brought to LaunchDarkly and the role he’s played in helping scale the business,” a spokesperson said.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is seen on stage next to a small robot during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that, other than artificial intelligence, robotics represents the chipmaker’s biggest market for potential growth, and that self-driving cars would be the first major commercial application for the technology.
“We have many growth opportunities across our company, with AI and robotics the two largest, representing a multitrillion-dollar growth opportunity,” Huang said on Wednesday, at Nvidia’s annual shareholders meeting, in response to a question from an attendee.
A little over a year ago, Nvidia changed the way it reported its business units to group both its automotive and robotics divisions into the same line item. In May, Nvidia said that the business unit had $567 million in quarterly sales, or about 1% of the company’s total revenue. Automotive and robotics was up 72% on an annual basis.
Nvidia’s sales have been surging over the past three years due to unyielding demand for the company’s data center graphics processing units (GPUs), which are used to build and operate sophisticated AI applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Total sales have soared from about $27 billion in its fiscal 2023 to $130.5 billion last year, and analysts are expecting nearly $200 billion in sales this year, according to LSEG.
The stock climbed to a record on Wednesday, lifting Nvidia’s market cap to $3.75 trillion, putting it just ahead of Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world.
While robotics remains relatively small for Nvidia at the moment, Huang said that applications will require the company’s data center AI chips to train the software as well as other chips installed in self-driving cars and robots.
Huang highlighted Nvidia’s Thrive platform of chips, and software for self-driving cars, which Mercedes-Benz is using. He also said that the company recently released AI models for humanoid robots called Cosmos.
“We’re working towards a day where there will be billions of robots, hundreds of millions of autonomous vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of robotic factories that can be powered by Nvidia technology,” Huang said.
Nvidia has increasingly been offering more complementary technology alongside its AI chips, including software, a cloud service, and networking chips to tie AI accelerators together. Huang said Nvidia’s brand is evolving, and that it’s better described as an “AI infrastructure” or “computing platform” provider.
“We stopped thinking of ourselves as a chip company long ago,” Huang said.
At the annual meeting, shareholders approved the company’s executive compensation plan and reelected all 13 board members. Outside shareholder proposals to produce a more detailed diversity report and change shareholder meeting procedure did not pass.
Republic, a New York-based investment startup, is offering users exposure to SpaceX by issuing a “tokenized” representation of its shares.
The company will begin selling the digital tokens this week and eventually plans to expand the offering to other private companies like artificial intelligence darlings OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Stripe, X, Waymo, Epic Games and more. The Wall Street Journal first reported the story Wednesday.
“We’re talking about delivering products to retail investors that they’ve have been held out of previously,” Republic co-CEO Andrew Durgee told CNBC. “The fact that retail investors couldn’t own pre-IPO SpaceX has always been crazy to us. Now that’s going to be attached to the upside of these pre-IPO businesses. The businesses that we target out of the gate we want to have a retail focus, or at least significant retail following.”
In the crypto world, tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The move comes as the U.S. crypto industry is testing new regulatory boundaries under President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto administration. Since he took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission has moved swiftly to loosen the restraints left on the crypto industry by the previous administration, ending an enforcement case against Coinbase; closing investigations into Robinhood Crypto, Uniswap, Gemini and Consensys without enforcement action; scaling back its crypto enforcement unit; declaring meme coins are not securities and launching a Crypto Task Force that’s been holding a series of roundtables on crypto asset regulation.
“If you take a step back and look at what the last four to eight years looked like in the space, innovation was very stifled,” Durgee said. “The reality is the space was just difficult for most to understand and consume. Now we’ve gotten to a point where it’s certainly become more mainstay.”
“We’ve moved from what was ultimately … nothing but headwinds,” he added. “And now we’re finally in a place industrywide, where we actually have tailwinds and we have some room to really innovate.”
Republic will allow investors to invest between $50 and $5,000 in the tokens. Typically, those wanting to invest in private companies are required to meet a minimum closer to $10,000 and need to meet specific income or net-worth requirements. Shares of private company can be exchanged by accredited investors in secondary markets; Republic will initially price SpaceX tokens based on how the company’s shares are performing there.
Tokenized private equity is new territory for regulators and the underlying companies being digitally represented. There are outstanding questions about the legality of the tokens, how Republic will give financial information to investors as required, and how selling private investments to retail investors could provoke stress in the financial markets.
“We don’t need a company’s approval to be able to do these types of offerings, and I do think there will be some companies that will want more control over something like that,” Durgee said. “The reality is the structure that we’re using, which was built on securities law from the 1930s, in a lot of instances allows us the leeway to give these types of offerings. People are going to really have to start to question how they’re going to approach some of these innovations, and how far they will want to push that risk envelope.”
Financial institutions are becoming increasingly interested in tokenizing traditional assets because of the often-touted benefits of blockchain technology: lower costs, faster settlement times, greater transparency about ownership and performance and programmable terms, as well as increased accessibility for retail investors and global reach.
The announcement comes about a week after Coinbase said it’s pushing for SEC approval to offer trading of tokenized public stocks, which would give the crypto services provider an additional revenue stream and put it in closer competition with brokerages like Robinhood and eToro.
Competing crypto exchange Kraken recently said it’ll offer tokens of U.S. stocks for 24/7 trading in unspecified markets abroad.