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Sep 04, 2025
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Happy Thursday! Apple is working on an AI-powered search engine. OpenAI increases the size of its employee share sale to $10.3 billion. The CFO of Elon Musk’s xAI leaves the company after just a few months on the job.
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Apple is working on a web-search engine powered by artificial intelligence, similar to products offered by AI rivals Perplexity and OpenAI, Bloomberg reported. The tool will integrate into Apple’s Siri voice assistant, and potentially its Safari web browser and Spotlight search tool. The company is planning to release the web-search feature alongside its delayed Siri revamp in the spring of next year, Bloomberg also reported. With the search tool, Siri would be more capable of looking up information across the web without linking to external services. Currently, for more complex queries, Siri has to link out to either Google search or OpenAI’s ChatGPT for answers. Apple will likely still have to rely on external partnerships to deliver the new AI features. Apple is talking to Google about providing the AI model
that powers the new version of Siri, Bloomberg reported. In the past, it has also held conversations with AI upstarts Anthropic and OpenAI.
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OpenAI has increased the size of its employee share sale to roughly $10.3 billion at a $500 billion valuation, according to a person close to the company. That’s up from about $8 billion, as The Information previously reported. The boost in size was to accommodate increased investor demand, according to the same person. The more-than $10 billion share sale will amount to more than the entire volume of shares sold by startup employees and investors last year. Some current and former employees can sell up to $30 million each, according to the person and another person with knowledge of the share sale. OpenAI is currently in the process of raising a $41 billion round, with SoftBank committed to invest $22.5 billion by the end of the year, provided OpenAI successfully restructures itself. Employee share sales have become more common as late-stage startups, such as SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks delay going public. In particular, for AI companies, share sales are a way to reward employees that could be recruited by competitors. For instance, Anthropic allowed current and former
employees to sell up to $2 million each at a $61.5 billion valuation in May.
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The chief financial officer of Elon Musk’s xAI left the company after just a few months on the job, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Mike Liberatore had joined xAI as CFO in April and left in July, according to the report. Liberatore, who was a longtime finance executive at Airbnb before he joined xAI, had been involved with xAI’s
fundraising efforts, as well as its data center expansion in the Memphis area, the Journal reported. Liberatore did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday and appeared to have removed references to xAI from his LinkedIn profile. Several other high-profile staffers have left xAI in recent months, including co-founder and senior researcher Igor Babuschkin and head of infrastructure engineering Uday Ruddarraju.
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Lambda, a San Jose, Calif.,-based cloud provider that rents out Nvidia graphics chips to AI companies, has hired Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Citi to prepare for an initial public offering in the U.S. as soon as the first half of next year, according to people with direct knowledge of the talks. The listing would follow the public debut of Coreweave, another cloud company whose fortunes have soared on demand from AI developers. The 13-year-old company’s revenue rose nearly 60% to more than $140 million in the second quarter, according to documents viewed by The Information. The company lost around $16 million in the second quarter. Lambda’s rival CoreWeave had revenue more than tripled to $1.2 billion in the second quarter. While CoreWeave’s business is roughly 10 times the size of Lambda’s, its losses are
also 20 times higher. Still, Lambda’s public debut would test the appetite of public market investors for another, and perhaps leaner, AI IPO.
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Salesforce revenue rose 10% to $10.2 billion in the fiscal quarter that ended in July, breaking a streak of 8% revenue growth in the prior four quarters that had drawn concerns about its future growth prospects in the artificial intelligence era. But the customer management software giant also said in a call with analysts that the faster growth was driven primarily by a one-time recognition of licensing and professional services revenue. Revenue growth in the current fiscal quarter will tick down to between 8% and 9% year over year, the company said. And while Salesforce also improved its operating profit margin in the July quarter to 22.8%, or nearly 3 percentage points higher than in the April quarter, it projected an operating margin in the current fiscal quarter of 21.2% compared to the 21.6% operating margin it
projected for the fiscal year that ends in January. That means it may have trouble hitting the full-year margin target. Shareholders have long paid attention to the company’s margins, which have historically lagged those of other software firms. Shares fell 5% in after-hours trading after falling 22% so far this year, as it hadn’t shown a revenue boost from AI the way some of its peers have. The company’s Agentforce AI business has gotten off to a slow start.
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Figma’s June quarter revenue grew 41% to $249.6 million, the newly public company said Wednesday, as customers spent more on its AI-powered design software. The company’s free cash flow was $60 million in the quarter, which was its first quarter as a publicly traded company, up from negative free cash flow of $179.8 million in the same quarter a year prior. The company forecast that its revenue growth would decelerate to 33% in the current quarter and 37% for the full year. Figma’s stock fell 15% in after hours trading, and by Wednesday evening Figma’s stock was trading 44% lower than its initial public offering in August. CEO Dylan Field told shareholders on Wednesday that the company plans to speed up revenue growth by developing more AI design products and charging enterprise customers for them in the
coming quarter, but warned that the company’s margins may fall as it builds those products. “We’re focused on building a durable, long term business that serves the needs of our customers … we expect margins to come down in the near term as we invest in the long term,” Field said. “We know that approach won’t resonate with everyone, but we believe we have an incredible opportunity.”
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