Near acquires the location data company formerly known as UberMedia

Anthony Ha

6:00 AM PDT · April 28, 2021

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on LinkedInShare on RedditShare over EmailCopy Share Link

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).

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

Everyone wants a piece of the enterprise AI pie | Equity Podcast

0 seconds of 31 minutes, 2 secondsVolume 0%

Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard ShortcutsEnabledDisabled

Shortcuts Open/Close/ or ?

Play/PauseSPACE

Increase Volume↑

Decrease Volume↓

Seek Forward→

Seek Backward←

Captions On/Offc

Fullscreen/Exit Fullscreenf

Mute/Unmutem

Decrease Caption Size-

Increase Caption Size+ or =

Seek %0-9

Live

This video file cannot be played.(Error Code: 232011)

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.

TechCrunch](/content/site-root.html)

  • WordPress Embed
  • HTML Embed

Copy and paste this URL into your WordPress site to embed

Copy and paste this code into your site to embed

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

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

TechCrunch](/content/site-root.html)

  • WordPress Embed
  • HTML Embed

Copy and paste this URL into your WordPress site to embed

Copy and paste this code into your site to embed

Topics

Advertising Tech, data, Enterprise, Mergers and Acquisitions, near, Startups, ubermedia

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Anthony Ha

Anthony Ha on BlueskyAnthony Ha on Linkedin

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.

View Bio

May 27

Athens, Greece

StrictlyVC Athens is up next. Hear unfiltered insights straight from Europe’s tech leaders and connect with the people shaping what’s ahead. Lock in your spot before it’s gone.

REGISTER NOW

Most Popular

Everyone wants a piece of the enterprise AI pie | Equity Podcast

0 seconds of 31 minutes, 2 secondsVolume 0%

Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard ShortcutsEnabledDisabled

Shortcuts Open/Close/ or ?

Play/PauseSPACE

Increase Volume↑

Decrease Volume↓

Seek Forward→

Seek Backward←

Captions On/Offc

Fullscreen/Exit Fullscreenf

Mute/Unmutem

Decrease Caption Size-

Increase Caption Size+ or =

Seek %0-9

Live

This video file cannot be played.(Error Code: 232011)

Keep reading

Image Credits: Brandon Dill for The Washington Post / Getty Images

AI

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on LinkedInShare on RedditShare over EmailCopy Share Link

We’re feeling cynical about xAI’s big deal with Anthropic

Anthony Ha

8:34 AM PDT · May 10, 2026

Megaphone Embeddable Player

Equity

The 'people’s airline,' SpaceXAI, and the Enterprise AI Race

00:00:00

Forward 15 seconds

Back 15 seconds

00:00:00

Save to Spotify

Subscribe

Description

Share Equity

Share this episode with your friends

Share via FacebookShare via Twitter

Download episode

Subscribe to Equity

Keep up to date by subscribing to this podcast

Subscribe via Spotify

Description

Everyone wants a piece of the enterprise AI pie, and this week, we saw a string of companies making their moves. From Anthropic and OpenAI announcing new joint ventures targeting enterprise AI deployment to SAP dropping $1B on German AI startup Prior Labs, it's becoming clear that if you're a startup building enterprise tools, you're likely an acquisition target.

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the week's enterprise AI deals, the xAI-Anthropic compute arrangement, and what it all means ahead of what could be a big IPO season.

Listen to the full episode to hear about:

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:31 Spirit Airlines & the crowdfunded "people's airline"

03:25 xAI x Anthropic deal: is xAI becoming a NEO cloud?

13:47 Haun Ventures & a16z's crypto comeback

17:48 Aurora Innovation lands a commercial trucking contract

19:27 A big week for enterprise AI: who's actually making money?

26:45 The Pentagon's AI spending spree

31:04 Outro

Listen onApple Podcasts Listen onSpotify

Anthropic and xAI announced a big partnership this week, with Anthropic buying all the compute capacity at xAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what the deal might mean for xAI’s parent company SpaceX, as SpaceX prepares to go public and apparently plans to dissolve xAI as a separate organization.

Kirsten did her best to offer “a positive view” on the partnership — after all, it’s a new way for xAI to make money. But she also noted that this suggests xAI isn’t doing much when it comes to training its own frontier AI models, and it’s harder for the company to position itself as a “forward-looking, innovative” business when that’s the case.

Then Sean asked: “Why be positive when you can be cynical?” In his view, this seems like “a major heat check before the IPO.” Yes, becoming a neocloud might be “a more believable business in the near term,” but it’s less likely to get outside investors excited in the long term. (And then there’s the environmental lawsuit that xAI is facing over Colossus 1.)

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

Sean O’Kane: I always love a surprise, especially when everybody’s eyes [are] on another ball, a major trial that’s happening. Seemingly out of nowhere this week, SpaceX and therefore its AI subsidiary xAI — which apparently no longer exists now, or is imminently not about to exist, which we can get to — struck a deal with Anthropic.

Basically, the real version of the deal is that Anthropic’s essentially taking over all of the compute at the data center known as Colossus 1 in Memphis, Tennessee, to focus on Anthropic’s more enterprise-focused AI products. There’s been a lot of reporting about how [Anthropic’s] been looking for more compute … and it seems like an escape valve for them to be able to strike this deal and get access to all this compute.

Everyone wants a piece of the enterprise AI pie | Equity Podcast

0 seconds of 31 minutes, 2 secondsVolume 0%

Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard ShortcutsEnabledDisabled

Shortcuts Open/Close/ or ?

Play/PauseSPACE

Increase Volume↑

Decrease Volume↓

Seek Forward→

Seek Backward←

Captions On/Offc

Fullscreen/Exit Fullscreenf

Mute/Unmutem

Decrease Caption Size-

Increase Caption Size+ or =

Seek %0-9

Live

This video file cannot be played.(Error Code: 232011)

In the near term, for xAI and for SpaceX, yes, they are a neocloud now, in the sense that they had to do something with all this compute that they were building, because it certainly seems like they were not going to need it for Grok — which, outside of X, is not burning up the world as far as becoming the new hot consumer chat bot.

Kirsten Korosec: And we should say that in terms of what a neocloud is, for those who don't know, this is the idea of buying GPUs from Nvidia and the like, and renting those out as opposed to using those for their own AI, training their own AI models.

So this is a different kind of business, and the point that our AI editor, Russell Brandom, makes is that a lot of companies are building out data centers, but if given a choice between do they rent them out [or use them to train their own models], they are still prioritizing using this compute for their own internal AI model training. I think that's an important point and one that suggests that maybe xAI isn't doing so much on the AI model training [side].

Anthony Ha: Right, and as Sean was alluding to, most people would not necessarily think of Grok as — not only that it’s known for some pretty unpleasant, if not downright illegal, content, but also it's not necessarily super cutting edge. Especially if we start talking about enterprise AI, which I know we're gonna be getting into later in this episode, you don't hear a lot about people using Grok for work-critical tasks.

And so the question becomes: How can xAI actually make money? And apparently just selling the infrastructure could be one of the main ways to do it.

Kirsten: And you could take a positive view on that, right? They figured out a way to make money. But I think that when you are positioning your company — in this case, SpaceX-slash-xAI — as a forward-looking, innovative company, that's tougher to sell if you are simply just renting out your GPUs and not using them for that innovation.

Sean: But why be positive when you can be cynical? Which is to say that this seems like a major heat check before the IPO that we're about to see get rammed into the markets with SpaceX.

Anthony, you mentioned not only is Grok not being used for big enterprise tasks, there's been reporting that xAI employees were using other models, they weren't even using [Grok] internally, and that caused this big shakeup inside of xAI, post-acquisition from SpaceX, that involved essentially all the co-founders leaving xAI other than Elon Musk, [and] him basically saying he's starting from scratch on xAI, despite the fact that SpaceX paid $250 billion for it in the run-up to this mega-IPO.

And now he's saying that they're going to dissolve xAI as a separate entity inside SpaceX altogether. He's starting to call the whole thing SpaceXAI, because this man loves nothing but to ruin a brand that has some value to it — see Twitter.

This may be a more believable business in the near term, and so on some level, I could see this being maybe more attractive to investors come IPO time, because it's like a bit more reliable and certainly more real than them being a frontier lab developer. But it's also not the kind of business that's going to draw the same — at least, in a normal environment — outside investment that we're seeing go into all the frontier labs.

That's maybe one of the biggest tension points we've seen develop during this IPO process.

Loading the player...

Topics

AI, Anthropic, Equity podcast, SpaceX, xAI

Anthony Ha

Anthony Ha on BlueskyAnthony Ha on Linkedin

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

View Bio

Newsletters

See More

Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news

TechCrunch Daily News

Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage. Add TechCrunch Daily News to your subscription choices

Startups Weekly

Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly. Add Startups Weekly to your subscription choices

TechCrunch Week in Review

Get the best of our coverage, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Add TechCrunch Week in Review to your subscription choices

TechCrunch Mobility

TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight. Add TechCrunch Mobility to your subscription choices

No newsletters selected.

Subscribe

By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.

Keep reading

Image Credits: Kim Kulish/Corbis / Getty Images

Enterprise

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on LinkedInShare on RedditShare over EmailCopy Share Link

Laid-off Oracle workers tried to negotiate better severance. Oracle said no.

Julie Bort

3:59 PM PDT · May 8, 2026

As was widely reported, Oracle axed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people via email on March 31.

One of the employees cut that day told TechCrunch about the experience: “I had, like, this weird feeling in my stomach. I went to go sign into the VPN, and the VPN was like, ‘this user doesn’t exist anymore.’ Then I called my friend, and I was like, ‘Hey, can you see me in Slack?’ And she said, ‘No, your account’s been deactivated.’”

The person soon received an email stating their role was terminated immediately. The severance offer arrived a few days later. But Oracle’s terms would quickly become a point of contention — and some laid-off employees would push back.

Oracle offered fairly standard Corporate America terms to laid off employees. In exchange for signing a release waiving their right to sue, employees received four weeks of pay for the first year, plus one additional week per year of service, capped at 26 weeks. The company was also paying for one month of COBRA insurance.

The catch: Although stock compensation often makes up a good chunk of a tech worker’s pay, particularly at Oracle, the company did not accelerate soon-to-vest RSUs. Any shares that hadn’t vested by the termination date were forfeited.

That held true even for stock granted as retention incentives or in place of salary increases tied to promotions. One long-tenured employee lost $1 million in stock that was just four months from vesting; RSUs made up about 70% of his compensation, Time reported.

Some employees also discovered that if they were classified as remote workers by the company, and didn’t work in a state with stronger worker provisions like California or New York, the company said they didn’t qualify for WARN Act protections.

Everyone wants a piece of the enterprise AI pie | Equity Podcast

0 seconds of 31 minutes, 2 secondsVolume 0%

Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard ShortcutsEnabledDisabled

Shortcuts Open/Close/ or ?

Play/PauseSPACE

Increase Volume↑

Decrease Volume↓

Seek Forward→

Seek Backward←

Captions On/Offc

Fullscreen/Exit Fullscreenf

Mute/Unmutem

Decrease Caption Size-

Increase Caption Size+ or =

Seek %0-9

Live

This video file cannot be played.(Error Code: 232011)

The WARN Act is a law that requires companies conducting mass layoffs to give employees two months notice prior to letting them go. It’s triggered when 50 or more people are impacted at one location. By classifying employees as remote workers, the minimum location requirements can be sidestepped.

Some people were unaware they were classified as remote workers, because they were near an office and worked on a hybrid schedule.

Even if they were covered by the WARN Act, this did not necessarily extend severance, the former Oracle employee said. That's because Oracle included the two-months' WARN notice pay in its existing calculation of four-weeks, plus one week per year.

For a short time, a group of employees tried to negotiate en masse with Oracle, according to a letter seen by TechCrunch. At least 90 people signed a public petition urging the database and cloud computing giant to match the terms of other big tech companies conducting mass layoffs in the name of AI.

For instance, Meta’s severance package, according to an email published by Business Insider, started at 16 weeks of base pay, plus two weeks for every year of employment and covered COBRA for 18 months.

Microsoft, which extended voluntary retirement offers to long-serving employees, provided accelerated stock vesting, a minimum of eight weeks’ pay, and an additional one to two weeks for every six months of service, depending on rank, the Seattle Times reported.

And Cloudflare, which just cut 20% of its employees, offered lump sum severance that was the equivalent of base pay through the end of 2026, plus healthcare coverage through the end of the year, and accelerated vesting of stock through August 15. So if an employee was close to obtaining another tranche, they will get it.

Oracle declined to negotiate, according to an email seen by TechCrunch. It was a take-it-or-leave scenario, the employee said.

When asked about its severance terms, classifying employees as remote, and the failed attempt by employees to negotiate more, Oracle declined to comment.

Such a reaction from the company isn’t a surprise, not even to those who hoped to negotiate. But it does underscore that for all the theoretical high pay (often via stocks) and perks that tech workers enjoy when it’s an employees' market, they have very few protections in place when it isn’t.

Topics

AI, Enterprise, Exclusive, Layoffs, oracle, severence, TC

Julie Bort

Venture Editor

Julie Bort on Twitter

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.

View Bio

Latest in Enterprise

See More

Enterprise

Laid-off Oracle workers tried to negotiate better severance. Oracle said no.

3 days ago

In Brief

Intel’s comeback story is even wilder than it seems

3 days ago

AI

Cloudflare says AI made 1,100 jobs obsolete, even as revenue hit a record high

3 days ago

Keep reading

Image Credits: TechCrunch

AI

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on LinkedInShare on RedditShare over EmailCopy Share Link

Cloudflare says AI made 1,100 jobs obsolete, even as revenue hit a record high

Julie Bort

11:33 AM PDT · May 8, 2026

Cloudflare on Thursday joined a growing list of tech companies — including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — that have reported increased revenue alongside massive layoffs, attributing both trends to their use of AI.

Cloudflare, which provides internet security and performance services to millions of websites worldwide, announced it was cutting its workforce by approximately 20%, which equates to 1,100 people, it said as part of its first quarter 2026 earnings report on Thursday.

“We’ve never done something like this in Cloudflare’s history,” co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said Thursday on the quarterly conference call, marking the first mass layoff in the company’s 16-year history. The company is cutting people from all teams and geographies except for salespeople who carry revenue quotas, CFO Thomas Seifert detailed on the call.

The news of the workforce cuts came as the company reported quarterly revenues of $639.8 million, a 34% year-over-year increase and the highest single quarter in the company’s history. However, this was coupled with a loss of $62.0 million compared with losing $53.2 million in the year-ago quarter.

That widening loss, even as revenue surged, highlights a familiar paradox in Cloudflare’s story: The company is growing fast but has yet to turn a consistent profit. But the loss was a smaller percentage of revenue, and the quarter was coupled with a lot of other positive indicators. For instance, Cloudflare reported that it had over $2.5 billion in “remaining performance obligations,” a year-over-year growth of 34%. RPO is the favorite metric these days to indicate revenue under contract but not yet delivered.

Hence, Prince insisted, the 20% cuts were not to reduce expenses but were strictly because of its use of AI.

“Today’s actions are not a cost-cutting exercise or an assessment of individuals’ performance; they are about Cloudflare defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates and creates value in the agentic AI era,” Prince and Cloudflare co-founder and president, Michelle Zatlyn, wrote in a related blog post about the layoffs.

Everyone wants a piece of the enterprise AI pie | Equity Podcast

0 seconds of 31 minutes, 2 secondsVolume 0%

Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard ShortcutsEnabledDisabled

Shortcuts Open/Close/ or ?

Play/PauseSPACE

Increase Volume↑

Decrease Volume↓

Seek Forward→

Seek Backward←

Captions On/Offc

Fullscreen/Exit Fullscreenf

Mute/Unmutem

Decrease Caption Size-

Increase Caption Size+ or =

Seek %0-9

Live

This video file cannot be played.(Error Code: 232011)

Prince acknowledged on the call that even though Cloudflare has been selling AI-powered products, it was at first cautious about adopting AI itself.

"Internally, the tipping point was last November. At that point, across our teams, we began to see massive productivity gains, team members that were two, 10, even 100 times more productive than they had been before. It was like going from a manual to an electric screwdriver," he described.

"Cloudflare's usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone," he added.

Image Credits: SEC filings; Cloudflare press releases /

Prince highlighted the internal use of AI coding, saying that virtually the entire R&D team is now using the company's own Workers platform — a tool that lets developers build and run software directly on Cloudflare's global network — including its vibe coding feature. He also noted that 100% of the code produced this way and deployed for use in Cloudflare's products is "now reviewed by autonomous AI agents."

But it's not just developers who are using AI internally, he said. "Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done."

As a result, these highly productive, AI-powered employees require fewer support staff, he argued.

"A lot of the support people that provide support behind them, those roles aren't going to be the roles that, you know, drive companies going forward," Prince said.

Interestingly, Prince says that Cloudflare "will continue to hire people, and we'll continue to invest in them because the people that are embracing these tools are just so much more productive than we'd ever seen before. I would guess that in 2027 we'll have more employees than we did at any point in 2026."

Cloudflare said it ended its first quarter before layoffs with a headcount of about 5,500.

The pattern Prince described — deploying AI gains as justification for workforce reductions even during a period of strong revenue growth — is fast becoming a familiar script across the tech industry. Whether it reflects true structural transformation or acts as convenient cover for cost discipline is a question that investors and employees will be wrestling with for some time to come.

When asked by an analyst on the call why the company needed to cut so deeply after such a good quarter, Prince said, "Just because you're fit doesn't mean you can't get fitter."

Topics

AI, cloudflare, Enterprise, Layoffs, TC

Julie Bort

Venture Editor

Julie Bort on Twitter

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

View Bio

May 27

Athens, Greece

Most Popular

Loading the next article

Error loading the next article

Some areas of this page may shift around if you resize the browser window. Be sure to check heading and document order.

reCAPTCHA

Recaptcha requires verification.

protected by reCAPTCHA

This site is exceeding reCAPTCHA Enterprise free quota.