Monday, June 23, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we have the details on a recent cyberattack at insurance company Aflac; we learn that TikTok is shutting down its book publisher; and we have Harvey's latest valuation.

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Pavlo Gonchar / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images

🦆 A hack! Insurance giant Aflac experienced a cyberattack earlier this month that resulted in hackers stealing an unknown quantity of its customers' personal information. The stolen data includes Social Security numbers, health information, and more.

🎧 Suspicious subs: Spotify is drawing attention from the U.S. Senate. On Friday, two senators urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the company for bundling multiple products into a more expensive subscription, without user consent, and paying creators fewer royalties in the process.

🪏 Filling the gaps: There are a lot of workflow collaboration platforms, but many aren't suited to work with the types of tools and document formats that hardware engineering teams need. AllSpice looks to fix that with its software that aims to be the GitHub for electrical hardware engineering teams.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: miodrag ignjatovic / Getty Images

📚 Shut it down: Did you know that TikTok had a book publisher, 8th Note Press? I sure didn't. The company launched the publisher back in 2023 with the rise of #BookTok, but now TikTok is shutting it down and giving authors their publishing rights back.

☢️ New York goes nuclear: New York governor Kathy Hochul announced a new nuclear power initiative for the state, with plans to host a new nuclear power plant that can produce 1 gigawatt of energy. The sites being considered are all owned by Constellation Energy, which has struck deals with the tech sector.

🗣️ Keep on rolling: Amazon announced a new upgraded digital assistant, Alexa+, back in February. While the service is still not publicly available, Amazon has been steadily rolling Alexa+ out to customers, and it's now in the hands of 1 million users.

💰 2021 time: Legal AI company Harvey AI continues to rake in venture capital. The startup announced it raised $300 million in a Series E round that values the company at $5 billion. This comes just four months after a $300 million Series D round garnered a $3 billion valuation.

📊 Looking into a leak: Elon Musk's xAI might be developing a file editor for Grok with spreadsheet support, according to leaked code. If true, this would likely mean xAI is looking to compete with its AI peers through embedded AI connectivity tools.

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Around the web

📈 Data center dilemma: Meta is building a sprawling data center in Holly Ridge, Louisiana. While the company claims it will bring economic incentives to the community, this data center will also raise energy costs for the residents of the area, which is one of the poorest regions in the state.

💻 This diva: Elon Musk's lawyer is claiming that the billionaire tech CEO "does not use a computer." This comes after a court filing, in Musk's case against Sam Altman and OpenAI, said Musk wasn't fully complying with the discovery process. Interesting!