This AWS outage was a literal nightmare

Amazon outage hits smart beds: One of the more surprising impacts of this week’s massive AWS outage? Smart bed failures. Eight Sleep’s line of internet-ready mattress systems were impacted by Monday’s server outage at Amazon’s largest data cluster, Northern Virginia’s US-EAST-1. Users on Reddit, X, and elsewhere complained about mattresses that got stuck at hot temperatures or awkward, inclined positions. CEO Matteo Franceschetti apologized on social media for the situation, and vowed to “outage-proof” the Eight Sleep experience moving forward. (The new system allows the Eight Sleep app to communicate with mobile devices via Bluetooth when they can’t connect to Central Control.)

VideoShops raises $42M: Brand deals lie at the center of the entire “creator economy,” but they’ve largely been exclusive to the top creators who dominate their respective platforms and drive the most traffic to clients. VideoShops opens the field to more entrants, and simultaneously disrupts the “affiliate marketing” space that can so often lead to spotty results and frustrations for both brands and aspiring spokespeople alike. Creators build out their own profiles listing favorite brands (for now, it’s limited to the beauty and wellness verticals) and sharing the links with their audiences. They then receive a cut from anyone who buys their recommendations through their portal, without having to constantly share new URLs, sending fans all over the internet in hopes of collecting a chunk of revenue share. The startup launched over the summer and has over 50,000 creator seller storefronts so far, with more than 500,000 products being hawked by 3,500 creator/merchants. They’ve got $42 million in seed funding in the bank.

Crusoe raises $1.4 billion: According to the Financial Times, the AI infrastructure provider and datacenter developer raised fresh funds from a variety of investors, including Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners, bringing its valuation to a healthy $10 billion. CEO Chase Lochmiller explained that it’s not just OpenAI dedicating billions to compute and infrastructure ahead of what we can only presume will be mass AI adoption: “OpenAI has been the most public with… large announcements, but this is not a trend that’s isolated to them. We are seeing it across the ecosystem.” Crusoe has brought in a total of $3.9 billion in funding since its 2018 launch, and has a number of new datacenters — including a 1.8 gigawatt campus in Wyoming and some natural gas-powered locations in Alberta, Canada — in the works.

BlueQubit: The SF-based startup comes from a group of Stanford alumni, and is working on “quantum software as a service” (QSaaS). This allows companies that don’t have the architecture set up for quantum computing to nonetheless access the technology via emulators or “quantum processing units” (QPUs). The company raised $10 million in seed funding last year.

QuEra: In quantum computing, the basic unit of information is known as a quantum bit, or “qubit.” QuEra develops systems that use neutral atoms, which are controlled and trapped by lasers, as their qubits. They’ve already pioneered using the qubits in an analog mode, and plan to one day offer a hybrid analog-digital quantum system. The concept is attracting attention from some major players; they grabbed a major investment last month from Nvidia’s venture capital arm, NVentures.

Alice & Bob: The Paris-based startup (see? they do exist!) is developing “cat qubit quantum architecture.” (It’s a reference to the famous philosophical concept of Schrödinger’s Cat, explaining how a single piece of matter can occupy “two states” at once.) The qubit is designed to be “fault tolerant,” meaning that it corrects some errors at the hardware level, but not all. This radically simplifies the design of the overall machine, while still allowing for enough precision to, you know, compute. The company raised a $104 million Series B earlier this year, and plans to release a “useful” quantum computer by 2030. – Lon

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