Boston-Based Banks Berkshire Hills and Brookline in Talks to Combine
Each has about $12 billion in assets; a deal could be finalized as soon as next week
Boston-based regional bank companies Berkshire Hills Bancorp BHLB -0.20%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Brookline Bancorp are in talks to combine, according to people familiar with the matter.
The details
The deal would merge the two banks, which each have about $12 billion in assets, and could be announced as soon as next week, assuming talks don’t fall apart.
Berkshire Hills had a market value of around $1.3 billion as of midday Friday, while Brookline’s was just over $1 billion.
The rationale
Berkshire has more than 80 branches throughout New England and New York. Brookline operates several banks throughout the Northeast, each with between a dozen and roughly two dozen branches: Brookline Bank in Boston, BankRI in Providence, R.I., and PCSB Bank in the lower Hudson Valley in New York.
Both banks have exposure to commercial real-estate loans, which have come under pressure.
The context
More regional banks have started to consider whether to partner up to address commercial real estate, technology and other challenges, especially midsize and small institutions that don’t enjoy the scale and diversity of megabanks.
Bank executives are optimistic that President-elect Donald Trump will take a friendlier approach to mergers in the industry and ease capital and consumer regulations.
Over 100 bank deals with an aggregate value of more than $14 billion have been announced so far this year, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data. That is compared with $4 billion worth of transactions announced last year.
Luxury Brands Are Courting the Wealthy at Tony Winter Resorts With Après-ski Gear, Eveningwear and Even Performances
Loro Piana, Ferragamo and MSGM, among others, are flocking to the slopes.
MILAN — The ski season has officially begun and so has the rush of luxury and fashion brands flocking to the mountains to reach wealthy customers during their winter getaways.
Quiet luxury stalwart Loro Piana has opened its first pop-up in Kitzbühel, the tony destination nestled in the snow-dotted Austrian Alps, leveraged as an opportunity to spotlight its commitment to the precious fabrics.
Shaped as a traditional Mongolian “gher,” a mobile house used by local nomadic people, the pop-up carrying the brand’s holiday collections for men and women is defined by sober decor with a wooden interior dotted with white glittered details, midnight blue walls and flooring.
Replete with an outside deck lined by lit-up Christmas trees and filled with upholstered wooden seats and tables with sheepskin throws and plaids, the space will remain open until mid-March offering Loro Piana clients a selection of après-ski gear, eveningwear and the brand’s ski capsule.
Over in Cortina d’Ampezzo on the Italian side of the Dolomites, brands and retailers are eager to capitalize on the latest successful edition of Cortina Fashion Week, the recently wrapped long weekend of events and fashion activations organized by local association “Cortina for Us.”
In keeping with its strong ties with luxury brands, local multibrand store Franz Kraler, which boasts several boutiques in the surrounding area including two units on Corso Italia, linked with several marquee names including Ferragamo, Elisabetta Franchi and Napapijri.
The Florentine house has mounted its “Winter Escape” pop-up in partnership with the retailer focusing on gifting. Accessories spanning from creative director’s Maximilian Davis’ Hug bag in multiple iterations to velvet ballerina flats take center stage.
Designer Elisabetta Franchi, herself a regular in Cortina, also picked the marquee boutique to debut her brand’s Chalet capsule collection of ski and après-ski apparel, with a dedicated corner spotlighting the brand’s ski suits and cocooning knits. At Franz Kraler’s men’s boutique next door, a steel installation highlights Napapijri’s The Archive Project collection comprising four signature outerwear pieces from the ‘90s and early 2000s.
Meanwhile Harmont & Blaine has dipped its toes into hospitality, taking over the Chalet Tofane ski lodge.
Marking the debut of a three-year partnership that stretches until the Winter Olympics to be disputed between Cortina d’Ampezzo and Milan in 2026, the Italian brand has customized furniture and décor with its signature dachshund logo scattered throughout in the form of wooden sculptures realized by local artisans.
The Chalet Tofane’s staff is poised to wear personalized uniforms mixing Harmont & Blaine’s seasonal collections, while a dedicated capsule collection is to bow in the next months, headlined by a checkered tote bag bearing the phrase “Cortina a Colori,” or “Cortina in Colors” in English.
In Courmayeur — a destination beloved by the Milanese in search of winter getaways at the feet of the Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps and Western Europe — MSGM unveiled a similar partnership with the renowned Auberge de La Maison chalet.
A regular of the ski resort, designer Massimo Giorgetti organized a brand experience at the location to mark the drop of a three-piece capsule collection, which comprises a forest green sweatshirt bearing the slogan “Auberge de MSGM [Hotel of MSGM ” flanked by alpine flowers and fair isle knit and beanie.
Known for its relative proximity to first-tier cities in Northern Italy, Courmayeur was the winter destination of choice also for BasicNet-owned brand K-Way, which for the 2024-25 season is taking over the Loge Du Massif mountaintop chalet, decking it in the brand’s signature blue, orange and yellow taping.
Retail partner LuisaViaRoma linked with K-Way as part of its recurring LuisaViaRoma Escapes project, on a brand experience in the destination to spotlight the fashion company’s latest skiwear collection.
On the Swiss face of the Alps, in Saint Moritz, the five-starred Hotel des Bains Kenpinski is on a roll, further courting its wealthy clientele.
The hotel has recently unveiled a new suite-like boutique from knitwear brand Cruciani. The latter is kicking off its next phase with the store opening in the tony destination, after successfully emerging from a composition with creditors procedure under new owner Orlean Invest Holding.
At the beginning of December, the luxury hospitality player also welcomed a new addition to its restaurant offering, with the opening of Billonaire, the concept by Italian entrepreneur Flavio Briatore that blends fine dining, with a menu curated by chef Batuhan Piatti, and entertainment with a show art directed by Irma Di Paola featuring dancers, singers and performance artists.
Signaling that the fascination for tony winter destinations is still going strong, Elie Saab announced this week a new hospitality project in Andermatt, in the heart of the Swiss Alps.
Developed in partnership with architectural studio and Swiss developer A++ Group, the Post Hotel & Residences by Elie Saab will bow in 2027 marking the fashion brand’s first foray into hotels.
The Week’s Biggest Funding Rounds: Fintech’s Big Week
This is our last weekly Top 10 of the year and we go out with some pretty big rounds — especially in the world of fintech. All in all, 2024 was filled with large-money deals, as megadeals soared — with more than 280 rounds of $100 million or more.
1. One, $300M, fintech: Fintech startups have struggled raising money this year, but it’s clearly a little easier when you’re majority-owned by the world’s largest retailer. Walmart, alongside investment firm Ribbit Capital, is leading a $300 million round for fintech startup One, per Bloomberg. The company offers installment loans, debit cards and payments services, representing a significant push by Walmart into the financial services field. The new round gives the Sacramento, California-based startup a valuation of $2.5 billion, per the report.
2. Liquid AI, $250M, artificial intelligence: What would a week be without a big generative AI raise? Liquid AI locked up a whopping $250 million round led by AMD at a $2.3 billion valuation, per Bloomberg. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company has created liquid foundation models — lightweight, general-purpose AI models that need less data and compute power. Oddly, the company’s models actually use mathematical approaches discovered by studying a worm’s brain. Founded in 2023, the company has raised more than $290 million, per Crunchbase.
3. Zest AI, $200M, fintech: Yes, another big fintech round. This one goes to Burbank, California-based Zest AI, which landed a $200 million growth investment from Insight Partners. The startup uses AI to help with credit underwriting — with the technology providing more sophisticated and accurate scoring methods. The new cash will allow Zest to add to its current product portfolio and advance its fraud protection and generative AI technologies. Founded in 2009, the company has raised nearly $358 million, per Crunchbase.
4. Ayar Labs, $155M, semiconductor: Ayar Labs locked up a $155 million Series D led by Advent International and Light Street Capital at a valuation of more than $1 billion. The new round included participation from a number of strategics, including AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Nvidia and 3M New Ventures. Ayar’s optical solutions to transmit data replace older electrical solutions to help users maximize compute efficiency and performance for artificial intelligence infrastructure while also reducing costs and power consumption. Ayar is just the latest optical interconnect startup trying to solve AI’s bottlenecks concerning compute and power usage. In October, Lightmatter locked up a $400 million Series D led by new investor T. Rowe Price at a $4.4 billion valuation. The round nearly quadrupled its previous valuation of $1.2 billion in December of last year after a $155 million raise. That same week, Xscape Photonics — a New York-based startup also using photonics technology to address the energy, performance and scalability challenges of AI data centers — raised a $44 million Series A led by IAG Capital Partners and with investment from the likes of Cisco Investments and Nvidia. Founded in 2015, Ayar has raised $370 million, per the company.
5. Capstan Medical, $110M, medical device: Capstan Medical, a startup developing robotic-enabled minimally invasive technologies to treat heart valve disorders, raised a $110 million Series C led by Eclipse Ventures. With more than 7 million people in the U.S. with heart valve disease, it’s no wonder investors were intrigued by the company. Founded in 2020, the Santa Cruz, California-based company has raised more than $141 million, per Crunchbase.
6. Speak, $78M, edtech: Speak, a startup that wants to help people learn new languages through AI, raised a fresh $78 million Series C led by Accel — doubling its valuation in fewer than six months and reaching unicorn status at a $1 billion valuation. It was just last June when the San Francisco-based startup announced a $20 million Series B extension at a $500 million valuation. Of course, such valuation jumps are nothing new for startups that include AI in their products. In Speak’s case, its platform generates audio conversations between the app and the user, with AI helping to improve users’ fluency. The company says it has created more than 25 million personalized lessons for its users just this year, and since its previous funding round has introduced its enterprise offering for employers. Founded in 2016, Speak has raised $162 million, per the company.
7. Veradermics, $75M, pharmaceuticals: New Haven, Connecticut-based Veradermics, a biopharmaceutical company developing therapeutics for common dermatologic conditions, closed a $75 million Series B led by Suvretta Capital Management. The company plans to use the new cash to fund the ongoing clinical development of its hair loss treatment. Founded in 2019, the company has raised nearly $111 million, per Crunchbase.
8. Gigs, $73M, mobile: San Francisco-based Gigs, a developer of an operating system for mobile services, raised a $73 million Series B led by Ribbit Capital. The startup plans to use the new funding to expand its geographical footprint and invest in new products. Gigs allows tech companies to embed connectivity into their products quickly. Founded in 2021, the company has raised $97 million, per Crunchbase.
9. (tied) Players Health, $60M, healthcare: Minneapolis-based Players Health, a provider of athlete and sports insurance, closed a $60 million Series C led by Bluestone Equity Partners. Founded in 2012, Players Health has raised more than $100 million, per the company.
9. (tied) Sublime Security, $60M, cybersecurity: Sublime Security, an AI-powered email security platform, announced a $60 million Series B led by IVP. Founded in 2019, Washington D.C.-based Sublime says it has raised $93.8 million.
Big global deals
The biggest funding outside the U.S. came from Asia.
- India-based Rebel Foods, which operates multiple food brands, raised a $210 million Series G.
X gains a faster Grok model and a new ‘Grok button’
XAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, may be embroiled in an escalating lawsuit with OpenAI. But that’s not stopping it from shipping new products — on a Friday night, no less.
This evening, xAI revealed that it has begun to roll out an upgraded version of its flagship Grok 2 chatbot model to all users on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. (X, which Musk also owns, often serves as a testing ground of sorts for Grok.) The enhanced Grok is “three times faster,” xAI claims in a blog post, and offers “improved accuracy, instruction-following, and multi-lingual capabilities.”
Free users can only ask Grok ten questions every two hours. Subscribers to X’s Premium and Premium+ plans get higher usage limits.
XAI also announced tonight the addition of a “Grok button” to X, which the company says is designed to help users discover “relevant context, understand real-time events, and dive deeper into trending discussions.”
And the startup said it’s making several changes to its enterprise API.
XAI’s API has a pair of new Grok models with better efficiency and multilingual performance, xAI says. As a result of the efficiency gains, pricing has been reduced from $5 per million input tokens (~750,000 words) or $15 per million output tokens to $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
In the coming weeks, xAI’s image generation model, Aurora, will come to the API as well, xAI says. Aurora, a largely unfiltered image AI, was released on X this month in the Grok chatbot experience.
OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever believes superintelligent AI will be ‘unpredictable’
OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever spoke on a range of topics at NeurIPS, the annual AI conference, Friday afternoon before accepting an award for his contributions to the field.
Sutskever gave his predictions for “superintelligent AI” — AI more capable than humans at many tasks, which he believes will be achieved at some point. Superintelligent AI will be “different, qualitatively” from the AI we have today, Sutskever said — and in some aspects unrecognizable.
“[Superintelligent] systems are actually going to be agentic in a real way,” Sutskever said, as opposed to the current crop of “very slightly agentic” AI. They’ll “reason” and, as a result, become more unpredictable. They’ll understand things from limited data. And they’ll be self-aware, Sutskever believes.
They may want rights, in fact. “It’s not a bad end result if you have AIs and all they want is to co-exist with us and just to have rights,” Sutskever said.
After leaving OpenAI, Sutskever founded Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a lab focused on general AI safety. SSI raised $1 billion in September.
OpenAI whistleblower found dead at 26 in San Francisco apartment
A former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In October, the 26-year-old AI researcher raised concerns about OpenAI breaking copyright law when he was interviewed by The New York Times.
“The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the decedent as Suchir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco. The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,” said a spokesperson in a statement to TechCrunch. “The OCME has notified the next-of-kin and has no further comment or reports for publication at this time.”
After nearly four years working at OpenAI, Balaji quit the company when he realized the technology would bring more harm than good to society, he told The New York Times. Balaji’s main concern was the way OpenAI allegedly used copyright data, and he believed its practices were damaging to the internet.
“We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time,” said an OpenAI spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch.
Balaji was found dead in his Buchanan Street apartment on November 26, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department told TechCrunch. Officers and medics were called to his residence in the city’s Lower Haight district to perform a wellness check on the former OpenAI researcher. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation, according to police.
“I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them,” said Balaji in a tweet from October. “I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they’re trained on.”
Balaji’s death was first reported by the San Jose Mercury News.
OpenAI and Microsoft are currently involved with several ongoing lawsuits from newspapers and media publishers, including the New York Times, who claim the generative AI startup has broken copyright law.
On November 25, one day before police found Balaji’s body, a court filing named the former OpenAI employee in a copyright lawsuit brought against the startup. As part of a good faith compromise, OpenAI agreed to search Balaji’s custodial file related to the copyright concerns he had recently raised.
Several former OpenAI employees have raised concerns about the startup’s safety culture, but Balaji was one of the few who took issue with the data that OpenAI trained its models on. In a blog post from October, the former OpenAI researcher wrote that he didn’t believe ChatGPT was a fair use of its training data; however, similar arguments could be made for many generative AI products, he said.
Before working at OpenAI, the 26-year-old researcher studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. During college, he interned at OpenAI and Scale AI, the former of which he would go on to work for.
Balaji worked on WebGPT during his early days at OpenAI, a fine-tuned version of GPT-3 that could search the web. It was an early version of SearchGPT, which OpenAI released earlier this year. Later on, Balaji worked on the pretraining team for GPT-4, reasoning team with o1, and post-training for ChatGPT, according to his LinkedIn.
Several of Balaji’s former peers and colleagues in the AI world took to social media to mourn his loss.
