Near acquires the location data company formerly known as UberMedia

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Near acquires the location data company formerly known as UberMedia

Anthony Ha

Data intelligence company Near is announcing the acquisition of another company in the data business — UM.

In some ways, this echoes Near’s acquisition of Teemo last fall. Just as that deal helped Singapore-headquartered Near expand into Europe (with Teemo founder and CEO Benoit Grouchko becoming Near’s chief privacy officer), CEO Anil Mathews said that this new acquisition will help Near build a presence in the United States, turning the company into “a truly global organization,” while also tailoring its product to offer “local flavors” in each country.

The addition of UM’s 60-person team brings Near’s total headcount to around 200, with UM CEO Gladys Kong becoming CEO of Near North America.

At the same time, Mathews suggested that this deal isn’t simply about geography, because the data offered by Near and UM are “very complementary,” allowing both teams to upsell current customers on new offerings. He described Near’s mission as “merging two diverse worlds, the online world and the offline world,” essentially creating a unified profile of consumers for marketers and other businesses. Apparently, UM is particularly strong on the offline side, thanks to its focus on location data.

“UM has a very strong understanding of places, they’ve mastered their understanding of footfalls and dwell times,” Mathews added. “As a result, most of the use cases where UM is seeing growth — in tourism, retail, real estate — are in industries struggling due to the pandemic, where they’re using data to figure out, ‘How do we come out of the pandemic?’ ”

TechCrunch readers may be more familiar with UM under its old name, UberMedia, which created social apps like Echofon and UberSocial before pivoting its business to ad attribution and location data. Kong said that contrary to her fears, the company had “an amazing 2020” as businesses realized they needed UM’s data (its customers include RAND Corporation, Hawaii Tourism Authority, Columbia University and Yale University).

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Data is the world's most valuable (and vulnerable) resource | TechCrunch

Data is the world’s most valuable (and vulnerable) resource

I believe generational startups will be created from 2020’s reckoning with cybersecurity, just as they’ve been created coming out of market disruptions in the past.

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And the year was capped by connecting with Near and realizing that the two companies have “a lot of synergies.” In fact, Kong recalled that UM’s rebranding last month was partly at Mathews’ suggestion: “He said, ‘Why do you have media in your name when you don’t do media?’ And we realized that’s probably how the world saw us, so we decided to change [our name] to make it clear what we do.”

Founded in 2010, UM raised a total of $34.6 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Near acquires Teemo to expand its data business into Europe | TechCrunch

Near acquires Teemo to expand its data business into Europe

Two companies in the data business are teaming up, with Near announcing that it has acquired French startup Teemo. Near founder and CEO Anil Mathews told me that his company processes data around the online and offline behavior of 1.6 billion consumers each month: “We marry these two worlds and fill in the gap.” Teemo, … Continue reading Near acquires Teemo to expand its data business into Europe

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Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City.

You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailing anthony.ha@techcrunch.com.

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AI

China blocks Meta’s $2B Manus deal after months-long probe

Kate Park

China’s top economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said on Monday it has blocked Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus, an agentic AI startup founded by Chinese engineers that relocated to Singapore before Mark Zuckerberg scooped it up late last year.

The move marks one of China’s most significant interventions in a cross-border deal, one that extends well beyond U.S.-China tensions and into the broader AI industry. For Meta, it could deal a serious blow to its ambitions in the fast-moving AI agents space.

With no explanation offered, China’s NDRC ordered both parties to unwind the deal entirely.

“The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has made a decision to prohibit foreign investment in the Manus project in accordance with laws and regulations, and has required the parties involved to withdraw the acquisition transaction,” it said.

But the situation is far from straightforward. Around 100 Manus employees have already moved into Meta’s Singapore offices as of March, with founders taking on executive roles. CEO Xiao Hong now reports directly to Meta COO Javier Olivan. Manus CEO Hong and Chief Scientist Yichao Ji are reportedly under exit bans, preventing them from leaving mainland China.

“The transaction complied fully with applicable law. We anticipate an appropriate resolution to the inquiry,” a spokesperson at Meta told TechCrunch.

Founded in 2022 by Hong, Ji, and Tao Zhang, Manus relocated its headquarters from China to Singapore around mid-2025. Just months later, Meta came knocking. The company announced its acquisition of Manus in December 2025 for roughly $2 billion to $3 billion, with plans to fold its agent technology directly into Meta AI.

Meta has agreed to acquire Singapore-based AI startup Manus, with the deal requiring a full exit from Chinese ownership and operations, per Nikkei Asia. But the company’s origins trace back to China. Manus’ founders previously established its parent company, Butterfly Effect, in Beijing in 2022 before relocating to Singapore. That background has drawn scrutiny in Washington, where Senator John Cornyn has already raised concerns about Benchmark’s investment in the company, questioning whether American capital should be flowing to a Chinese-linked firm, TechCrunch pointed out, citing Cornyn’s post on X.

Manus did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

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Kate Park is a reporter at TechCrunch, with a focus on technology, startups and venture capital in Asia. She previously was a financial journalist at Mergermarket covering M&A, private equity and venture capital.

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Hardware

What Tim Cook built

Anthony Ha
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Equity

Apple's new CEO, and why Elon Musk wants to buy Cursor for $60B

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After 15 years as Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook will be stepping down from the role in September. 

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed Apple’s big announcement. We reflected on how Apple has changed since Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, and what challenges incoming CEO John Ternus will be facing.

“If you look at a certain camp, it is very much like, ‘John Ternus is a product guy and this is going to be amazing’ and it’s very nostalgic and going back to Steve Jobs,” Kirsten said. “But I think what people forget is that Tim Cook actually made another product, which was completely around operations.”

Similarly,  Sean noted that Cook has given Ternus a strong “running start” as “the company’s numbers just sort of keep going up.” But a running start doesn’t guarantee victory: “How much volatility is around the corner? Are we really looking at a situation [with] the breaking apart of a global economy, along with the rise of artificial intelligence changing how business gets done?”

Keep reading for a preview — edited for length and clarity — of our full conversation.

Anthony: The decisions that Apple makes also trickle down to a bunch of other companies, because there are all kinds of startups that maybe don’t build their entire business on the iOS platform, but certainly a significant part of their business comes on the iPhone.

Kirsten: I think it’s been really interesting to see the different pockets of the tech world responding to whether this is a good or bad move and [asking] what were the successes of Tim Cook and what does Apple need now?

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If you look at a certain camp, it is very much like, “John Ternus is a product guy and this is going to be amazing” and it’s very nostalgic and going back to Steve Jobs. But I think what people forget is that Tim Cook actually made another product, which was completely around operations. And there has been some really interesting coverage, in even books that have done deep dives into this. His operations strategy is an Apple product. And it changed whole economies. 

The question to me is: What happens when a strategist and operations guy leaves? Who is filling that void? Because you can make great products, and that’s very important in the Apple universe for sure. But you need to have an operations strategy. And the world is changing, it isn’t the same as it was when Tim Cook was first building this out.

Sean: It isn’t, but  it’s hard to imagine a better running start to get as a new CEO than the company that Tim Cook has built. 

As much as people complain about some of Apple’s products stagnating, the iPhone hasn’t really changed the design in many generations, whatever new products you do get are very kind of niche and overthought, like the Vision Pro — for all of that, the company’s numbers just sort of keep going up. They’re bringing in a ton of revenue. They make an incredible amount of money from the services business that Tim Cook spun up. 

They’re doing, in some ways, better brand-building than in a while, by even going out and making content, like winning an Oscar for a movie, there’s just so much going on. And it seems like such a sturdy business, even in turbulent times, that Ternus can not have to worry about what the first year looks like. 

We should say: Tim Cook is resigning as CEO in September this year. He’s also going to be executive chairman. So I think the idea here is, Tim Cook’s not going away and he’s still going to be your sort of shield against, and also sort of partner with, the Trump administration. Because he certainly has proved his ability to do that — sacrificing, I think, what many people would argue are some of Apple’s values in the process, in order to make sure those relationships are durable enough. Donald Trump even put a Truth Social post out about how Tim Cook kisses his ass all the time, in response to this news. 

So the question, with all that said, is: As comfortable a start as this probably is for Ternus, how much volatility is around the corner? Are we really looking at a situation [with] the breaking apart of a global economy, along with the rise of artificial intelligence changing how business gets done? Is that something that’s really going to be easy for him to handle? And who is he going to put alongside him to make sure he’s able to handle it?

Anthony: And I think related to that is the question [is,] Apple seems to have a very durable business right now, both on the hardware side and increasingly on the service side, but to what extent can it continue to have that business just playing the old hits? At what point does it actually need to create a new product category?

I don’t know the exact answer to that. And maybe the iPhone [and] the creation of the smartphone category, in particular, is a once-in-a-generation kind of thing, you can’t really expect that to happen every 10 years or more.

I think there’s also this interesting question around AI. It seems like that is not a category that Apple has had a lot of success in, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe whatever products end up breaking through there, that’s just software on your iPhone, on your MacBook, and Apple is fine not having to build all of that [and] instead doing these partnerships like it’s doing. 

But I don’t think that’s guaranteed. I think there’s probably a lot of stress and concern about what that future looks like.

Kirsten: Just really quickly, I was going to say that also Apple can and does have the cash on hand to make some big bets and acquisitions. And I’ll be really curious to see how John [Ternus] executes on that.

I mean, one of the places where I reported on Apple was the special projects team, Project Titan, the supposed Apple car, and that seems to have petered out and a lot of money was spent on that. Is he going to make any big bets? 

You guys were talking about cash on hand, and I think it’s more than $45 billion at the end of 2025. So they have a lot of money to play around with. Is he going to do anything with it in the near term?

Sean: The other thing I think we should point out is, as we talk about Apple having a durable business, the App Store is also really crushing it lately. Sarah Perez wrote a really good story for us about all the different ways that numbers are up in the App Store — installs, new releases to the App Store, it’s just a really fascinating look for anybody who wants to dig into some data of one of the biggest sort of software marketplaces in the world.

In a world where everybody’s talking about how your ability to vibe-code anything is going to remove the need for distributed software, [the App Store] is clearly proving that wrong.

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Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City.

You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailing anthony.ha@techcrunch.com.

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AI

OpenAI ends Microsoft legal peril over its $50B Amazon deal

Julie Bort

On Monday, Microsoft and OpenAI announced that they have, once again, renegotiated the deal binding the two companies. Despite some opinions on X that frame it as a victory for the ChatGPT maker over the Windows giant, both sides are walking away winners.

Most importantly, the new terms solve an issue that was hanging over OpenAI’s head since it signed its up-to-$50-billion deal with Amazon.

With this new deal, instead of Microsoft having exclusive access to all of OpenAI’s products and IP until the magical day when OpenAI produces AGI, its partnership has a definitive timeline. This contract gives Microsoft a nonexclusive license to OpenAI IP for models and products through 2032.

The two companies are still calling Microsoft OpenAI’s “primary cloud partner,” meaning that the bulk of OpenAI’s cloud will likely be served by Azure for the six years this deal covers, even as OpenAI rushes to build its own data centers with other partners. In October, OpenAI agreed to buy an additional $250 billion worth of Microsoft’s cloud. This line is a message to Microsoft shareholders that OpenAI will still be an enormous Azure customer.

OpenAI products will ship “first on Azure, unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities,” the companies say. But, critically, “OpenAI can now serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider.”

Again, “first” is not defined clearly in this announcement, whether that means exclusive on Azure only for some time period or just that Microsoft will also be among the vendors carrying OpenAI’s latest products.

But the most important part of this term: It solves the possibility that Microsoft could sue OpenAI over the AI lab’s deal with Amazon.

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To recap that messiness: In February, OpenAI announced that Amazon was investing up to $50 billion in the model maker, comprised of a $15 billion initial investment and another $35 billion “in the coming months when certain conditions are met,” the companies said, without specifying what those conditions were.

In exchange, OpenAI agreed to co-develop a “stateful runtime technology” on AWS Bedrock (the AWS service that serves up various AI models and services). Stateful runtime is the tech that supports AI agents, allowing them to remember tasks and contexts for long periods of time.

OpenAI also promised that AWS would have exclusive rights to serve up OpenAI’s new agent-making tool, Frontier. And there’s the rub.

OpenAI’s initial agreement with Microsoft prevented OpenAI from selling Frontier exclusively on AWS, and possibly prevented AWS from selling it at all.

While Microsoft had previously agreed to let OpenAI run certain select products, like consumer ChatGPT, on other cloud providers, it retained exclusive rights to any OpenAI product accessed through an API, such as Frontier.

In fact, the same day that OpenAI announced its AWS deal, Microsoft publicly refuted the AWS-exclusive terms, writing (emphasis Microsoft’s):

Microsoft maintains its exclusive license and access to intellectual property across OpenAI models and products. … Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider of stateless OpenAI APIs. … Any stateless API calls to OpenAI models that result from a collaboration between OpenAI and any third party — including Amazon — would be hosted on Azure. … OpenAI’s first party products, including Frontier, will continue to be hosted on Azure.

Microsoft also emphasized that its terms were in effect until OpenAI achieved AGI. The Financial Times reported that Microsoft even contemplated legal action if it had to enforce these contract terms.

So, the new agreement eliminates Microsoft’s exclusive rights and solves the AWS legal peril. In a post on X, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy celebrated the deal, adding that it meant OpenAI’s models would become available to customers on AWS Bedrock.

While this deal is good for OpenAI, Microsoft walked with some wins, too. The new deal now allows Microsoft to stop paying a revenue share to OpenAI, while OpenAI will continue to pay a revenue share to Microsoft through 2030, although this is now subject to a cap.

Exactly how much cash will flow to Microsoft is hard to tell, but it’s likely in the billions. Last quarter, Microsoft reported that it made $7.5 billion in a single quarter from its investment in OpenAI.

The kicker is that Microsoft remains a major shareholder in OpenAI, owning about 27% of the for-profit entity, it said in October. It financially benefits from OpenAI’s growth, even the sales it makes on AWS.

The downside, of course, is that Microsoft loses out on any extra cloud services it would be able to sell as a result of an exclusive deal with OpenAI.

That may not matter much. Just like OpenAI has been courting Microsoft’s biggest competitors, Microsoft has a new, cozy relationship with OpenAI rival Anthropic for the cloud giant to use its Claude AI to power agentic products.

The biggest winners here are enterprises, which get to choose their models and their clouds while the giants compete with each other to serve them.

Here’s a timeline of the recent changes in Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI:

In October, Microsoft and OpenAI announced a new agreement to help OpenAI fend off the lawsuit from Elon Musk about its corporate structure that gives OpenAI the ability to run non-API-accessed products on other clouds.

In November, OpenAI and Amazon signed their first multi-year agreement, in which OpenAI contracted for $38 billion worth of AWS cloud.

In February, Amazon announced an up-to-$50-billion investment in OpenAI, pending “certain conditions,” including the exclusive tech development and hosting deal for Frontier and stateful tech. On the same day, Microsoft refuted that AWS will have that tech exclusively.

In March, the Financial Times published that Microsoft is considering legal action.

In April, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a new deal, that includes a calendar-end date for their exclusive partnership and allows OpenAI to run all of its products on other clouds. Microsoft no longer has to pay OpenAI revenue share. Microsoft remains a major shareholder in OpenAI.

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Julie Bort is the Startups/Venture Desk editor for TechCrunch.

You can contact or verify outreach from Julie by emailing julie.bort@techcrunch.com or via @Julie188 on X.
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Climate

Data center demand drives 66% surge in natural gas power plant costs

Tim De Chant

Tech companies, including Microsoft and Meta, have been falling in love with natural gas lately, rushing to build power plants fed by the fossil fuel to drive their data centers. But their embrace might be a little too tight — the cost to build one of the facilities has spiked 66% in the last two years, according to a new report from BloombergNEF.

While natural gas prices remain low in the U.S. despite the ongoing war in Iran, the price to build a new combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plant has risen from less than $1,500 per kilowatt of generating capacity in 2023 to $2,157 last year, the report said. What’s more, it now takes 23% longer to complete a new facility.

Data centers are one of the main drivers of a surge in demand for electricity, pushing not just tech companies to invest in natural gas, but utilities as well. Data center operators have been urged by the Trump administration to “bring their own power,” but utilities tend to pass on the cost of new generation to customers. That has led to a growing backlash to data centers among the general public.

While data centers aren’t the only driver of new demand for electricity, they are one of the fastest-growing users. New additions are expected to reach 2.7x current demand, pushing it up from 40 gigawatts today to 106 gigawatts by 2035. Part of the driver is the sheer scale of new data centers. Today, only 10% of facilities are 50 megawatts or larger. Over the next decade, the average data center will be larger than 100 megawatts.

Planned data centers are significantly larger than those currently in operationImage Credits:BloombergNEF

Until recently, tech companies have favored grid-connected data centers backed by power purchase agreements for wind, solar, and batteries. But rising demand for electricity, driven by AI and public animus toward data centers, has pushed more new natural gas projects.

The scramble for natural gas power plants has caused a shortage of gas turbines. By the end of this year, prices for the equipment, which constitutes up to 30% of a new power plant’s cost, are expected to be up 195% over 2019 prices. The manufacturing technique required to make gas turbines doesn’t lend itself to scaling quickly, either. As a result, waitlists are stretching into the early 2030s.

Not everyone is all in on natural gas, though.

Google has started to outline a new approach to adding generating capacity to the grid that relies on renewables paired with long-duration energy storage, including Form Energy’s massive iron-air batteries, which can release electricity over the course of 100 hours. Unlike gas turbines, solar panels and batteries have gotten cheaper over time, offering an alternative to sky-high costs for natural gas power plants.

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Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor.

De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.

You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.dechant@techcrunch.com.

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