The Briefing

In other news, brace yourselves: We’re starting to see acquisitions of distressed companies dressed up as AI-driven purchases. At least, that’s how investment firm Ithaca Holdings described its deal, unveiled on Tuesday, to buy dating app Bumble at a $1.3 billion valuation. As Ithaca co-CEO Ravi Gupta, a former Sequoia partner, said in an X post, “Bumble stood out” from “hundreds of companies” Ithaca had reviewed to see which “would become more valuable as AI advances.”

Sure, AI could improve Bumble’s service or at least make it more efficient. But Bumble could apply AI to its operations without being acquired. It could just hit up Google or Palantir for help: They send out AI consultants everyone loves to call “forward-deployed engineers” to help businesses adopt the new technology. The real reason Bumble is selling is surely that its business is troubled. Revenue fell 10% last year and another 15% in the first half of this year. The company had $450 million of debt as of June 30 but only $154 million in cash. 

That’s why it’s a bit hard to take at face value the “congrats” offered by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky to Bumble’s founder and outgoing CEO, Whitney Wolfe Herd, in an X post Tuesday. Bumble is selling at $6.05 a share, one-seventh of its $43 a share IPO price. It’s not exactly the future Herd painted when the company went public. Then she wrote in Bumble’s IPO prospectus that the offering “marks the start of a very bright future for Bumble Inc, one that we believe will…drive great value for shareholders.” 

None of that is to say that Gupta and his co-CEO, former Meta Platforms executive John Hegeman, can’t turn Bumble around. Maybe Herd will turn out to be right, as she said in a statement on Tuesday, that “the best is yet to come.” It’s just a pity the public market investors who got burned won’t get a chance to participate in that bright future.

Character’s Steady Slide Into Oblivion

Another troubled company, early AI startup Character.AI, filed for bankruptcy on Monday in what’s likely to be one of the final steps in the company’s long slide into oblivion. Its investors probably didn’t mind too much, though, as they cashed out with a decent profit in 2024 when Google paid $2.7 billion to license Character.AI’s models. 

As part of that same deal, Character’s co-founders, former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, rejoined Google. (Shazeer later bolted for OpenAI.) The Google licensing deal was one of a number of similar arrangements tech firms struck to get hold of key talent and technology from AI startups in 2024, also including a deal Microsoft did with Inflection AI and Amazon’s Adept one. By structuring them as licensing deals rather than acquisitions, the tech giants hoped to avoid antitrust scrutiny. (Many of the deals got investigated anyway.)

Sometimes what’s left survives: Inflection recently launched Inflection AI Labs, which it said was an effort to shape “the future of personal intelligence.” On the other hand, Adept’s website hasn’t been updated since mid-2024, shortly after its Amazon deal. 

Then there’s Character, which in mid-2025 hired Karandeep Anand, who had previously worked at Meta, as CEO. A few months later, we reported that Character was considering raising money. Things went in a different direction. Last month, Walt Disney Co. hired Anand as chief technology officer, along with other members of Character.AI’s technical team. Disney also has bid $20 million to license the company’s intellectual property as part of the bankruptcy process, Character said on Tuesday. 

In Other News

• Candle Media, the Blackstone-backed media rollup effort run by former Disney executives Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs, is selling Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, back to Witherspoon, along with French firm Mediawan), Bloomberg reported. Candle had bought the Hello Sunshine at a valuation of $900 million in 2021, considered a steep price at the time.

• Apple is launching a tabletlike smart home device as part of a renewed push into the home. The $299 HomeView is a 7-inch screen that sits on kitchen counters or mounts on walls. Apple said it is designed for watching and listening to content as well as smart home management.

• JPMorgan said it’s blocking external AI agents like Meta’s Muse and Instinct from accessing client accounts. “We’re not going to allow just any outside agent to come in inside the company because that’s just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan,” said Jamie Dimon, CEO of the bank, on its third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.

Today on The Information’s TITV

Check out today’s episode of TITV in which Akash Pasricha speaks with Vals AI CEO Rayan Krishnan about Muse’s new Wonder models.

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