Top Stories — Tuesday, September 9, 2025
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- Netskope follows Rubrik as a rare cybersecurity IPO, both backed Lightspeed — TechCrunch
- Rick Davies, Singer and Co-Founder of Supertramp, Dies at 81 — nyt News
- Sam Altman says that bots are making social media feel 'fake' — TechCrunch
Netskope follows Rubrik as a rare cybersecurity IPO, both backed Lightspeed
Source: TechCrunch • Published: 9/9/2025, 4:05:58 AM
Netskope follows Rubrik as a rare cybersecurity IPO, both backed Lightspeed
Cybersecurity is a massive sector, but startups in the category are more likely to be acquired than go public. Even Wiz, which for a time held the title of the fastest-growing startup, abandoned its IPO ambitions when it agreed to sell to Google earlier this year.
In the past few years, there have been scant few significant cybersecurity debuts such as SentinelOne in 2021, and Rubrik last year.
Next week, the sector is expected to add one more public company: the cloud cybersecurity platform Netskope. The 13-year-old startup also shares its earliest and largest investor with Rubrik: Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The large Silicon Valley firm had a 23.9% ownership of Rubrik when it went public at $6.6 billion last year. In the case of Netskope, Lightspeed owns 19.3% of the company that aims to achieve a valuation of as much as $6.5 billion, according to the updated S1 filing.
Lightspeed first backed Netskope in 2013, leading the company's $21 million Series B.
The company set its IPO price between $15 and $17 per share, and at the upper end of that range, it would be valued at $6.5 billion, giving Lightspeed an approximately $1.1 billion windfall, in terms of the value of its stake.
The Netskope's other major investors include ICONIQ Growth, which holds 19.2% of the company's stock, followed by Accel with a stake of nearly 9%.
The company was last valued at $7.5 billion, when it raised a $300 million Series H led by ICONIQ Growth in 2021, the height of the ZIRP era. It also took on a $401 million convertible note in 2023.
But those capital infusions weren't enough to get Netskope to profitability. For the first half of the year, Netskope's revenue grew to $328.5 million from $251.3 million a year ago. During that time, its net loss narrowed to $169.5 million from $206.7 million, the filing shows.
If Netskope goes public at a valuation of $6.5 billion, the company would be among a number of VC-backed companies that have recently debuted below their final private market valuation.
Other companies that went public below their latest private valuations include Chime and Hinge Health. But not all new listings are being met with caution. Some recent IPOs, like Figma and Circle, have soared on the first day of trading.
Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she wrote about VC for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned a CFA charterholder designation.
You can contact or verify outreach from Marina by emailing marina.temkin@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at +1 347-683-3909 on Signal.
Read the full story at TechCrunch.
Rick Davies, Singer and Co-Founder of Supertramp, Dies at 81
Source: nyt News • Published: 9/9/2025, 3:59:58 AM
Rick Davies, the founder of the British rock band Supertramp, who helped transform it from a faltering English progressive rock act into a prog-pop juggernaut whose 1979 album "Breakfast in America" sold more than 18 million copies, died on Saturday at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 81.
The cause was complications of multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, which he learned he had more than a decade ago, according to his wife and manager, Sue Davies, who is his only immediate survivor.
Like the Beatles and a thousand other bands, Supertramp was fueled by the creative tension between two strong and highly distinct personalities: Mr. Davies and the band's other creative force, the vocalist and songwriter Roger Hodgson.
Mr. Davies grew up working class in Swindon, England, and tended toward an acerbic, world-weary tone, reminiscent of John Lennon, in both interviews and lyrics.
He and Mr. Hodgson shared songwriting credits, but it was Mr. Davies who wrote and sang the group's first hit, "Bloody Well Right," a sharp-tongued rebuke of Britain's privileged class. It rose to No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1975. Then came the FM radio staple "Goodbye Stranger," which climbed to No. 15 in 1979. Mr. Davies's intricate stylings on the Wurlitzer electric piano were a bedrock of the Supertramp sound.
Mr. Hodgson, a product of British boarding schools, was known for his celestial tenor and his Paul McCartney-esque ear for melody. He composed and gave voice to hits like "Give a Little Bit," which climbed to No. 15 in the United States in 1977, as well as "The Logical Song" (No. 6) and "Take the Long Way Home" (No. 10), both from "Breakfast in America."
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Read the full story at nyt News.
Sam Altman says that bots are making social media feel 'fake'
Source: TechCrunch • Published: 9/9/2025, 3:54:42 AM
Sam Altman says that bots are making social media feel 'fake'
X enthusiast and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman had an epiphany on Monday: Bots have made it impossible to determine whether social media posts are really written by humans, he posted.
The realization came while reading (and sharing) some posts from the r/Claudecode subreddit, which were praising OpenAI Codex. OpenAI launched the software programming service that takes on Anthropic's Claude Code in May.
Lately, that subreddit has been so filled with posts from self-proclaimed Code users announcing that they moved to Codex that one Reddit user even joked: "Is it possible to switch to codex without posting a topic on Reddit?"
This left Altman wondering how many of those posts were from real humans. "I have had the strangest experience reading this: I assume it's all fake/bots, even though in this case I know codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real," he confessed on X.
He then live-analyzed his reasoning. "I think there are a bunch of things going on: real people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak, the Extremely Online crowd drifts together in very correlated ways, the hype cycle has a very 'it's so over/we're so back' extremism, optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement and the related way that creator monetization works, other companies have astroturfed us so i'm extra sensitive to it, and a bunch more (including probably some bots)."
To decode that a little, he's accusing humans of starting to sound like LLMs, even though LLMs — spearheaded by OpenAI — were literally invented to mimic human communication, right down to the em dash. And OpenAI's models definitely trained on Reddit, where Altman was a board member through 2022, and was disclosed as a large shareholder during the company's IPO last year.
He makes a valid point that fandoms, led by extremely, always-on social media users, do tend to behave in odd ways. Many groups can devolve into hatefests if overrun by those venting frustrations to their brethren.
But then Altman confesses that one of the reasons he thinks the pro-OpenAI posts in this subreddit might be bots is because OpenAI has also been "astroturfed." That typically involves posts by people or bots paid for by the competitor, or paid by some third-degree contractor, giving the competitor plausible deniability.
We have no evidence of astroturfing (though it is possible). But we did see how OpenAI subreddits turned on the company after it released GPT 5.0. Instead of waves of praise from the faithful over the new model, many angry posts were voted up. People took to Reddit and X to complain about everything from GPT's personality to how it burned through credits without finishing tasks.
A day after the bumpy release, Altman did a Reddit ask-me-anything session on r/GPT in which he confessed to rollout issues and promised changes. The GPT subreddit has never fully recovered its previous level of love, with users still posting regularly on how much they dislike the changes with GPT 5.0. Are they human? Or are they, as Altman seems to imply, fake in some way?
Altman surmises, "The net effect is somehow AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn't a year or two ago."
If that's true, who's fault is it? GPT has led models to become so good at writing, that LLMs have become a plague not just to social media sites (which have always had a bot problem) but to schools, journalism, and the courts.
While we don't know how many Reddit posts are written by bots, or are fictional accounts by humans using LLMs, it is likely a substantial number. Data security company Imperva reported that over half of all internet traffic in 2024 was non-human, largely due to LLMs. X's own bot Grok says: "The exact numbers aren't public, but 2024 estimates suggest hundreds of millions of bots on X."
Several cynics have suggested that Altman's lament was his first forays into marketing OpenAI's rumored social media platform. In April, the Verge reported that such a project to take on X and Facebook was at the earliest stages. This product may or may not exist. Altman may or may not have had ulterior motives for suggesting that social media is too fake these days.
But motives aside, if OpenAI is planning a social network, what are the odds that it would be a bot-free zone? And, funny enough, if it did the reverse and banned humans, the results likely wouldn't be different. Not only do LLMs still hallucinate facts, but when researchers at the University of Amsterdam built a social network composed entirely of bots, they found that the bots soon formed cliques and echo chambers for themselves, too.
Read the full story at TechCrunch.
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