Whole Foods Market CEO Jason Buechel speaks onstage during the 2023 Concordia Annual Summit.
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Amazon has tapped Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel to oversee its sprawling grocery business, the company announced Monday.
Doug Herrington, the company’s worldwide retail chief, wrote in a memo to employees posted to Amazon’s site that Buechel will “take on an expanded responsibility leading Worldwide Grocery Stores” while continuing to lead Whole Foods. Amazon acquired the upscale grocer for $13.7 billion in 2017.
“In his time as CEO, Jason has unlocked our ability to make high-quality natural and organic groceries more affordable and accessible to customers, helping WFM achieve record sales growth and expand to over 535 locations,” Herrington said.
Buechel became CEO of Whole Foods in 2022 after co-founder John Mackey retired from the company. In his expanded role leading Amazon’s grocery business, Buechel will succeed Tony Hoggett, who left Amazon last October to join Wonder, a food delivery startup led by serial entrepreneur Marc Lore.
Buechel will oversee not only Whole Foods, but also Amazon’s larger grocery business, which includes its line of Fresh supermarkets, Go cashierless stores and online grocery service. Buechel will report to Herrington, who is one of the closest executives to Jassy and serves on the S-team, a tight-knit group of more than a dozen senior executives from almost all areas of Amazon’s business.
Amazon has long been determined to cement itself as a grocery destination for shoppers. Since acquiring Whole Foods, it has launched its own chain of Fresh supermarkets, and it has taken steps to unify its online and brick-and-mortar grocery operations while appealing to a broader swath of consumers.
Herrington said he is “incredibly energized” by the momentum of Amazon’s grocery business.
“Since creating a single WW Grocery Stores organization in 2022, we have made notable progress in our vision to make grocery shopping simpler, faster, and more affordable for customers,” Herrington wrote in the memo. “We’ve taken steps to integrate our huge grocery selection across our broader logistics network, and create a more seamless experience for customers, especially Prime members. This work will continue under Jason’s leadership.”
Amazon has also brought its Fresh and Whole Foods grocery businesses closer together since the 2017 acquisition. The company last October began piloting a new concept at one of its Whole Foods locations outside of Philadelphia, where it attached an automated warehouse onto the store that lets Amazon shoppers purchase goods from brands not typically stocked at the organic grocer.
Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
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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.
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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.
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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.