Visitors look at Apple Inc. iPhones and iPads on display at the SK Telecom Co. T Factory flagship store in Seoul, South Korea, June 11, 2021.
SeongJoon Cho | Bloomberg | Getty Images
South Korea has become the first country to impose curbs on Google and Apple’s payment policies that force developers to only use the tech giants’ proprietary billing systems.
Those policies usually require developers to pay Google and Apple a commission as high as 30% in every transaction.
The South Korean parliament approved a bill on Tuesday that will ban major app store operators — like Google and Apple — from requiring developers to use their payment systems to process the sale of digital products and services.
It means that developers can avoid paying commission to Google and Apple by directing users to pay via alternate platforms.
A Google spokesperson said its service fee “helps keep Android free, giving developers the tools and global platform to access billions of consumers around the world.”
“We’ll reflect on how to comply with this law while maintaining a model that supports a high-quality operating system and app store, and we will share more in the coming weeks,” the Google spokesperson added.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The law, sometimes referred to as the Anti-Google Law, was submitted to parliament last August, according to Yonhap News.
Some 180 lawmakers out of 188 voted in favor of passing amendments made to the Telecommunications Business Act, Reuters reported.
Media reports last week said the legislation and judiciary committee of the National Assembly approved revisions of a bill aimed at stopping app store operators from forcing developers to use specific payment systems.
Regulatory scrutiny
Regulators worldwide are focusing more on the app stores and fees that Google and Apple are charging developers — and the ruling in South Korea will likely be the first step toward greater scrutiny, according to Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities.
“It’s a potential watershed moment,” Ives said on CNBC’ “Street Signs Asia” on Monday ahead of the decision in Seoul. “Not necessarily for what this means in itself, but for the ripple effect as it shows that they’re not just words, but actually actions.”
Ives added that while there might be monetization opportunity for others, such as telecommunication services providers, it ultimately depends on how consumers would respond.
“The question is what will consumers ultimately do? Because the path of least resistance is to go through Apple and go through Google – and that’s what consumers have gotten used to,” he said.
What happened?
Last year, Google said it was planning to enforce a policy requiring developers that distributed software on the Google Play Store — a digital service to download apps — to use its proprietary in-app payment system. That means other payment alternatives will not be allowed.
Google’s billing system takes a 30% cut for most in-app purchases, similar to what Apple does on its App Store.
The move was criticized by developers and regulators scrutinized Google’s and Apple’s hold over the smartphone operating systems and the price they charge programmers who develop apps for those platforms. Majority of the world’s smartphones either run on Google’s Android operating system or on Apple’s iOS platform.
Both companies have since said they would cut their commission rates for certain developers.
The iPhone maker last week also reversed course on another important App Store policy: It said developers on the App Store will be allowed to email users and encourage them to pay directly, instead of through Apple — a move that was previously prohibited.
However, if users continue to make payments through the App Store, developers will have to use Apple’s billing system and pay a commission.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Axel Springer building in Berlin on Oct. 17, 2023. He received the annual Axel Springer Award.
Ben Kriemann | Getty Images
Among the thousands of Microsoft employees who lost their jobs in the cutbacks announced this week were 830 staffers in the company’s home state of Washington.
Nearly a dozen game design workers in the state were part of the layoffs, along with three audio designers, two mechanical engineers, one optical engineer and one lab technician, according to a document Microsoft submitted to Washington employment officials.
There were also five individual contributors and one manager at the Microsoft Research division in the cuts, as well as 10 lawyers and six hardware engineers, the document shows.
Microsoft announced plans on Wednesday to eliminate 9,000 jobs, as part of an effort to eliminate redundancy and to encourage employees to focus on more meaningful work by adopting new technologies, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The person asked not to be named while discussing private matters.
Scores of Microsoft salespeople and video game developers have since come forward on social media to announce their departure. In April, Microsoft said revenue from Xbox content and services grew 8%, trailing overall growth of 13%.
In sales, the company parted ways with 16 customer success account management staff members based in Washington, 28 in sales strategy enablement and another five in sales compensation. One Washington-based government affairs worker was also laid off.
Microsoft eliminated 17 jobs in cloud solution architecture in the state, according to the document. The company’s fastest revenue growth comes from Azure and other cloud services that customers buy based on usage.
CEO Satya Nadella has not publicly commented on the layoffs, and Microsoft didn’t immediately provide a comment about the cuts in Washington. On a conference call with analysts in April, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company had a “focus on cost efficiencies” during the March quarter.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 2, 2024.
Ann Wang | Reuters
Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra chips, the company’s next-generation graphics processor for artificial intelligence, have been commercially deployed at CoreWeave, the companies announced on Thursday.
CoreWeave has received shipments of Dell-built shipments based around Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 AI systems, Dell said on Thursday. It’s the first cloud provider to install systems based around Blackwell Ultra.
The Blackwell Ultra is Nvidia’s latest chip, expected to ship in volume during the rest of the year. The systems that CoreWeave is installing are liquid-cooled and include 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 Nvidia Grace CPUs. The systems are assembled and tested in the U.S., Dell said.
CoreWeave shares rose 6% during trading on Thursday, Dell shares were up about 2% and Nvidia rose less than 2%.
The announcement is a milestone for Nvidia.
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AI developers still clamor for the latest Nvidia chips, which have improvements that make them better for training and deploying models.
Nvidia said Blackwell Ultra can produce 50 times more AI content than its predecessor, Blackwell.
Investors closely watch how Nvidia manages the transition when it announces new AI chips to see if there are production issues or delays. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in May that Blackwell Ultra shipments would start in the current quarter.
It’s also a win for CoreWeave, a cloud provider that rents access to Nvidia GPUs to other clouds and AI developers. Although CoreWeave is smaller than the cloud services operated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, its ability to offer Nvidia’s latest chips first give it a way to differentiate itself.
CoreWeave historically has a close relationship with Nvidia, which owns a stake in the cloud provider. CoreWeave went public earlier this year, and the stock price has quadrupled since its IPO.
Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle Internet Group, the issuer of one of the world’s biggest stablecoins, and Circle Internet Group co-founder Sean Neville react as they ring the opening bell, on the day of the company’s IPO, in New York City, U.S., June 5, 2025.
NYSE
For over three years, venture capital firms have been waiting for this moment.
Tech IPOs came to a virtual standstill in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates, while big acquisitions were mostly off the table as increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe turned away potential buyers.
Though it’s too soon to say those days are entirely in the past, the first half of 2025 showed signs of momentum, with June in particular producing much-needed returns for Silicon Valley’s startup financiers. In all, there were five tech IPOs last month, accelerating from a monthly average of two since January, according to data from CB Insights.
Highlighting that group was crypto company Circle, which more than doubled in its New York Stock Exchange debut on June 5, and is now up sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of $42 billion. The stock got a big boost in mid-June after the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal framework for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins.
Venture firms General Catalyst, Breyer Capital and Accel now own a combined $8 billion worth of Circle stock even after selling a fraction of their holdings in the offering. Silicon Valley stalwarts Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital are set to soon profit from Figma’s IPO, after the design software vendor filed its public prospectus on Tuesday. Since its $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped in late 2023, Figma has been one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in startup land.
It’s “refreshing and something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said Eric Hippeau, managing partner at early-stage venture firm Lerer Hippeau, regarding the exit environment. “I’m not sure that we are confident that this can be a sustained trend yet, but it’s been very encouraging.”
Another positive sign for the industry the past couple months was the performance of artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in late March. The stock was relatively stagnant for its first month on the market but shot up 170% in May and another 47% in June.
For venture firms, long considered the lifeblood of risky tech startups, IPOs are essential in order to generate profits for the university endowments, foundations and pension funds that allocate a portion of their capital to the asset class. Without handsome returns, there’s little incentive for limited partners to put money into future funds.
After a record year in 2021, which saw 155 U.S. venture-backed IPOs raise $60.4 billion, according to data from University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter, every year since has been relatively dismal. There were 13 such offerings in 2022, followed by 18 in 2023 and 30 last year, collectively raising $13.3 billion, Ritter’s data shows.
The slowdown followed the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in 2022, meant to slow crippling inflation. As the lower-growth environment extended into years two and three, venture firms faced increasing pressure to return cash to investors.
‘Backlog of liquidity’
In its 2024 yearbook, the National Venture Capital Association said that even with a 34% increase in U.S. VC exit value last year to $98 billion, that number is 87% below the 2021 peak and less than half the average for the four years from 2017 through 2020. It’s a troubling dynamic for the 58,000 venture-backed companies that have raised a total of $947 billion from investors, according to the annual report, which is produced by the NVCA and PitchBook.
“This backlog of liquidity drought risks creating a ‘zombie company’ cohort — businesses generating operational cash flow but lacking credible exit prospects,” the report said.
Other than Circle, the latest crop of IPOs mostly consists of smaller and lesser-known brands. Health-tech companies Hinge Health and Omada Health are valued at about $3.5 billion and $1 billion, respectively. Etoro, an online trading platform, has a market cap of just over $5 billion. Online banking provider Chime Financial has a higher profile due largely to a years-long marketing blitz and is valued at close to $11.5 billion.
Meanwhile, the highest valued private companies like SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks remain on the sidelines, and AI highfliers OpenAI and Anthropic continue to raise massive amounts of cash with no intention of going public anytime soon.
Still, venture capitalists told CNBC that there are plenty of companies with the financial metrics to be public, and that more of them are readying for the process.
“The IPO market is starting to open and the VC world is cautiously optimistic,” said Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark in New York. “We are preparing companies for the next wave of public offerings.”
There are other ways to make money in the meantime. Secondary sales, a process that involves selling private shares to new investors, are on the rise, allowing early employees and investors to get some liquidity.
And then there’s what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, as he tries to position his company at the center of AI innovation and development.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Last month, Meta announced a $14 billion bet on Scale AI, taking a 49% stake in the AI startup in exchange for poaching founder Alexandr Wang and a small group of his top engineers. The deal effectively bought out half of the stock owned by investors, leaving them with the opportunity to make money on the rest of their holdings, should a future acquisition or IPO take place.
The deal is a big win for Accel, which led Scale AI’s Series A round in 2017, and is poised to earn more than $2.5 billion in the transaction. Index Ventures led the Series B in 2018, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the Series C the following year at a valuation of over $1 billion.
Investors now hope the Federal Reserve will move toward a rate-cutting campaign, though the central bank hasn’t committed to one. There’s also ongoing optimism that regulators will make going public less burdensome. Last week, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that U.S. stock exchanges and the SEC have discussed loosening regulations to make IPOs more enticing.
Mike Bellin, who heads consulting firm PwC’s U.S. IPO practice, said he anticipates a diversity of IPOs across sectors in the second half of the year. According to data from PwC, pharma and fintech were among the most active sectors for deals through the end of May.
While the recent trend in IPO activity is an encouraging sign for investors, potential roadblocks remain.
Tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty delayed IPO plans from companies including Klarna and StubHub in April. Neither has provided an update on when they plan to debut.
FirstMark’s Heitzmann said the path forward is “not at all clear,” adding that he wants to see a strong quarter of economic stability and growth before confidently saying that the market is wide open.
Additionally, other than CoreWeave and Circle, recent tech IPOs haven’t had big pops. Hinge Health, Chime and eToro have seen relatively modest gains from their offer price, while Omada Health is down.
But virtually any activity beats what VCs were experiencing the last few years. Overall, Hippeau said recent IPO trends are generally encouraging.
“There’s starting to be kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Hippeau said.