TechPulse USA

By Daniel Rao Photo: London's Canary Wharf financial district. This is a file photo of London's financial centre, not a Guidewire or hyperexponential office or product. Credit: Gordon Joly, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Insurance has always been a business of judgment calls made under uncertainty, usually slowly, usually by people drowning in paperwork. Guidewire just paid up to $2.1 billion to change who — or what — makes those calls. The American software maker announced on Tuesday that it will buy London-based hyperexponential, an AI firm whose software already helps price some of the most complicated commercial risks on the planet, and the price tag alone tells you this is not a polite tuck-in acquisition. It is a bet that the underwriter of the future works shoulder to shoulder with an AI agent, and that the company that owns that relationship owns the next decade of commercial insurance. Let us be blunt about what is really happening here. Guidewire is not bu...

By Daniel Rao DoorDash is trying to buy the grocery run — all of it, in one cheque — and the first people to flinch were its own shareholders. Late on Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that DoorDash is in advanced talks to acquire Instacart, a deal that could value the grocery-delivery company at around $17 billion and could be finalised as soon as this week. There are, the Journal stressed, no guarantees it comes together. But the market did not wait for guarantees: Instacart shares jumped roughly 8% on Monday, while DoorDash shares fell around 6%. One side of this trade thinks it is being rescued. The other thinks it is overpaying. Both, in a sense, are right — and that tension is the whole story. Photo: A Walmart Supercenter in Quincy, Florida — file photo. Walmart, not Instacart, is the rival DoorDash most needs to outflank in grocery. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (public domain). What the Journal actually reported — and what it didn't Let us be precise about wha...

Eleven-point-eight times revenue. That is the multiple the London Stock Exchange Group has just agreed to pay for a company whose crown jewels are loan documents you will never be allowed to see. On Thursday, LSEG announced it will buy Octus — the credit-intelligence firm that started life as Reorg — from private-equity owner Permira for $3.535 billion in cash, its biggest acquisition since the $27 billion Refinitiv deal in 2019. And the stated logic is blunt: this is data that AI cannot scrape. The timing is no accident. LSEG's share price has been ground down by roughly 28 per cent from its February 2025 peak on a single fear: that artificial intelligence will commoditise the financial-data business that now drives almost half the group's revenue. Activist investor Elliott disclosed a stake in February and has been pushing for portfolio changes. So chief executive David Schwimmer has answered the AI question with his chequebook — by buying the one kind of financial data t...