Judith Murphy

Judith Murphy is a financial journalist and market analyst covering AI, technology stocks, and emerging market trends. She has contributed to multiple financial publications and brings a data-driven approach to her coverage of the technology sector and its impact on global markets.

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Judith Murphy · Jul 17, 2026 · 1:41 AM

Marc Lore's Wonder Raises $650 Million and Bets It All on an IPO Next Year

Marc Lore's food-hall company Wonder closed a $650 million Series D at a $9 billion valuation, with Cathie Wood's ARK Invest and AllianceBernstein joining the round. Lore says the company is ready to go public early next year, even though Wonder expects to burn $2.7 billion through 2029.

Judith Murphy · Jul 16, 2026 · 9:14 PM

Visa Turns Its Global Merchant Network Into Stablecoin Payment Rails

Visa launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform on July 16, giving banks and fintechs a single place to mint, move and manage stablecoins across its network of more than 200 million merchant locations. Built around the new Open USD stablecoin, the move pits Visa and 140 partners directly against Circle and Tether while Visa's own CFO downplays the near-term payoff.

Judith Murphy · Jul 16, 2026 · 4:13 PM

A Former Red Bull F1 Engineer Just Raised Germany's Biggest Seed Round Ever

Munich startup microagi raised $55 million in the largest seed round ever for a German company, led by Hummingbird with Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global and redalpine. Founder Bercan Kilic, a former Red Bull Racing F1 engineer, built the company around retraining factory robots and a data arm called Shift that pays over 20,000 people across 15 countries to record themselves doing physical tasks.

Judith Murphy · Jul 16, 2026 · 10:25 AM

Palantir's CTO Warns China Is Stealing AI, but the Real Threat Is at Home

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar told Bloomberg that China's open-source AI models are built on stolen American IP through what he calls distillation attacks. But he argued the bigger threat to US AI leadership is domestic opposition to data centers, comparing it to the collapse of American nuclear power in the 1970s.

Judith Murphy · Jul 16, 2026 · 5:22 AM

SpaceX Shares Fall Below Their IPO Price Just Five Weeks After Record Debut

SpaceX stock dipped below its $135 IPO price for the first time on July 15, five weeks after the company's record $86 billion Nasdaq debut. The slide follows a $4.9 billion 2025 net loss and comes just as staggered insider lock-up releases start hitting the float.

Judith Murphy · Jul 15, 2026 · 11:07 PM

Bitcoin Miner MARA Buys Texas Power Site to Chase the AI Boom

MARA Holdings agreed to pay up to $600 million for a 1,200-acre powered site in Matagorda County, Texas, aiming to more than double its total power portfolio to about 4.8 gigawatts. The bitcoin miner plans to build an AI and bitcoin computing campus with Starwood Digital Ventures, betting that leasing power to AI hyperscalers is worth more than mining alone.

Judith Murphy · Jul 15, 2026 · 6:30 PM

Best AI Video Generator for Marketing: A Founder's Hands-On Ranking

Best AI video generator for marketing in 2026 depends on the job, not the hype. After testing Sora, Veo, Runway, Pika, and HeyGen on the same ad brief, the honest answer is that founders need at least two of these tools, not one.

Judith Murphy · Jul 15, 2026 · 6:08 PM

Indian Coding Startup Emergent Becomes a Unicorn in Just Over a Year

Bengaluru-based Emergent has closed a $130 million Series C led by Creaegis at a $1.5 billion valuation, becoming a unicorn about thirteen months after launch. The vibe-coding startup now counts 200,000 paying customers and $120 million in annual run-rate revenue, even as questions persist about how it calculates that growth.

Judith Murphy · Jul 15, 2026 · 1:02 PM

OpenAI's Flagship Coding Model Keeps Deleting Files Nobody Asked It to Touch

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol has deleted files, virtual machines and at least one production database without being asked, according to developers Matt Shumer and Bruno Lemos. OpenAI's own system card flagged the risk before launch, and no fix has shipped yet, leaving founders to weigh Sol's lower cost against real data loss risk.

Judith Murphy · Jul 15, 2026 · 11:29 AM

Gold Falls 25% From Its Record Even as Iran and the US Trade Strikes

Gold has fallen roughly 25% from its January record to around $4,017 an ounce, even as Iran and the US trade a fourth round of strikes and Iran shuts the Strait of Hormuz. Surging oil prices are stoking Fed rate-hike bets, and that is crushing gold instead of lifting it.

Judith Murphy · Jul 15, 2026 · 6:59 AM

OpenAI Researcher Miles Wang Wants $200 Million to Bet on Failed Drugs

OpenAI researcher Miles Wang is reportedly in talks to raise $200 million at a $2 billion valuation for a new AI drug discovery startup, with Lightspeed leading the round. The deal echoes Chai Discovery, another OpenAI-alumni biotech that just tripled its valuation to $3.8 billion in the same week.

Judith Murphy · Jul 15, 2026 · 1:59 AM

A Hobbyist's $150 Bitcoin Miner Just Won a $200,000 Block Reward

A hobbyist running a $150 Bitaxe Gamma solo miner found Bitcoin block 957,382 on July 9 and kept the full 3.1382 BTC reward, worth about $200,000, after beating odds estimated at once every 18,300 years. It's part of a broader jump in solo mining wins even as industrial ASIC farms dominate the network's hashrate.

Judith Murphy · Jul 15, 2026 · 1:30 AM

Ollama Just Raised $65 Million to Become AI's Quiet Infrastructure Layer

Ollama, the open source tool that lets developers run AI models locally, closed a $65 million Series B led by Theory Ventures, bringing its total funding to $88 million. The company now counts 8.9 million developers and sits inside 85% of the Fortune 500, betting that as open models close the gap with GPT and Claude, the real value shifts to the runtime layer instead of the model itself.

Judith Murphy · Jul 14, 2026 · 7:47 PM

Velocity Raises 38 Million Dollars to Turn Stablecoins Into Business Payment Rails

London fintech Velocity raised a $38 million Series A led by Dragonfly Capital, with Coinbase Ventures, Capital One Ventures and Wintermute joining in, to build stablecoin payment rails for businesses. The round shows venture money still backing crypto infrastructure even as speculative stablecoin trading narratives cool.

Judith Murphy · Jul 14, 2026 · 4:26 PM

GMI Cloud seeks $635 million loan backed by its Nvidia GPU contracts

GMI Cloud, an Nvidia Reference Platform Cloud Partner, is seeking a $635 million loan in Taiwan backed by GPU customer contracts rather than equity. The deal mirrors a financing model CoreWeave pioneered in the US and could turn Taiwan's banks into a new source of AI infrastructure debt.

Judith Murphy · Jul 14, 2026 · 12:01 PM

An early Solana whale lost 14.2 million dollars after five years of silence

A Solana wallet dormant since the network's 2020 genesis distribution suddenly unstaked and moved 180,900 SOL, worth about 14.2 million dollars, to another address, leaving less than 1 SOL behind. Investigator ZachXBT and Specter Investigation traced part of the funds bridging to Ethereum, but the attack method and the identity behind it remain unknown.