Highlights for this morning: new unicorn, OpenAI deal, Salesforce beats forecasts

Meta has poached Apple's chief interface designer Alan Dye. Brevo has become the new unicorn in Europe, securing €500 million in funding to challenge Salesforce and HubSpot. These and other topics are in our review of key events for the morning of December 3.

OpenAI has decided to acquire Neptune, a startup for tracking and debugging AI model training. According to The Information, the deal will be worth less than $400 million in stock.

Neptune, which spun off from Deepsense in 2018 and raised more than $18 million, is working with Samsung, Roche and HP. The purchase strengthens OpenAI's own infrastructure before scaling GPT models, the publication notes.

Meta has poached Alan Dye, the longtime head of Apple's interface design team who was responsible for the look of the Vision Pro, iPhone X, Apple Watch and the latest versions of iOS, Bloomberg reports, citing sources.

At Meta, Dai will lead a new design division and become chief designer for hardware, software and AI integration. He will report to CTO Andrew Bosworth and will focus on updating consumer devices, including wearable gadgets and VR/AR products, with an emphasis on AI features.

Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, has raised €500 million and has a valuation of over $1 billion, strengthening its position in competition with HubSpot and Salesforce, TechCrunch writes. The company, which started in 2012 as an email marketing service, has grown to 600,000 customers. These include players such as Carrefour, eBay and H&M.

New investors General Atlantic and Oakley Capital each received 25% of the startup, while the team and employees retain the largest stake (26%), the publication points out. Existing investors Bpifrance and Bridgepoint each retained 24%, while Series A leader Partech completed its exit.

Salesforce reported quarterly earnings and revenue above Wall Street expectations and gave a stronger outlook for the fourth quarter, CNBC writes. Earnings per share came in at $3.25 versus expectations of $2.86, and revenue rose 8.6% to $10.26 billion.

In its fourth-quarter outlook, Salesforce expects revenue growth of 11-12%, including the contribution of its recent $8 billion purchase of Informatica.

At the same time, the weak segments - marketing and trading - remain. The company's shares have lagged the technology market this year due to fears that AI will displace some of its functions, the TV channel notes.

- Japan's broad Topix index rose 1.8%, while the Nikkei 225 jumped more than 2%.

- Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index was little changed, while mainland China's CSI 300 Index added 0.2 percent.

- In South Korea, the Kospi index fell 0.7 percent and the Kosdaq fell 0.4 percent.

- Australia's S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.3 percent.

- Futures on U.S. stock indexes were almost unchanged.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor