News

Meta inks deal for solar power at night, beamed from space

Published

3 months ago

April 27, 2026

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The race to secure electricity for AI models has reached new heights: Meta has signed an agreement with the startup Overview Energy that could see a thousand satellites beam infrared light to solar farms that power data centers at night.

In 2024, Meta’s data centers used more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity—roughly enough to power more than 1.7 million American homes for a year—and its need for compute power is only increasing. The company has committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable power sources, with a focus on industrial-scale solar power plants.

Typically, data centers turning to solar power must either invest in battery storage or rely on other generation sources to operate at night.

Overview, a four-year-old, Ashburn, Virginia, outfit that emerged from stealth in December, has a different solution: The company is developing spacecraft that collect plentiful solar power in space. It then plans to convert that energy to near-infrared light and beam it at sufficiently large solar farms—on the order of hundreds of megawatts—which can convert that light to electricity.

By using a wide, infrared beam to power existing terrestrial solar infrastructure, Overview thinks it can sidestep the technological challenges and safety and regulatory issues that bedevil plans to transmit power to Earth through high-power lasers or microwave beams. CEO Marc Berte says you’ll be able to stare right into his satellite’s beam with no ill effects.

The technology would increase the return on investment from building solar farms and reduce reliance on fossil fuels — if it can be deployed at scale.

Overview says it has already demonstrated power transmission to the ground from an aircraft, and is planning to launch a satellite to low Earth orbit in January 2028 to perform its first power transmission from space.

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In today’s announcement, Meta said it signed the first capacity reservation agreement with Overview to receive up to 1 gigawatt of power from the company’s spacecraft, although it’s not clear if any money changed hands. Overview developed a new metric for this contract, megawatt photons, which is the amount of light required to generate a megawatt of electricity.

Berte expects to begin launching the satellites that would fulfill that commitment in 2030, with a goal of flying 1,000 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, a high orbit in which each satellite remains fixed above the same point on Earth. He expects each of the company’s spacecraft to provide power from space for more than 10 years.

Once in space, Berte says the fleet of spacecraft will be able to cover about a third of the planet, with an initial deployment that will reach from the West Coast of the United States across to Western Europe. As the Earth rotates below and customer solar farms enter evening and night, Overview’s spacecraft should boost their electrical generation with additional light from space.

Berte sees opportunity in combining both generation and transmission, with the flexibility to deliver power to solar farms wherever and whenever it is most valuable.

“There’s a big difference between being in any one energy market, and being in all of the energy markets,” Berte told TechCrunch.

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Business

Senate Passes Bill to Rename NAICOM as Insurance Regulatory Commission

Published

56 minutes ago

July 22, 2026

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BY NKECHI NAECHE-ESEZOBOR—The Senate on Tuesday passed a bill seeking to rename the National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) as the Insurance Regulatory Commission.

If enacted, the proposed law will establish an Insurance Regulatory Commission and repeal the existing legislation that established the National Insurance Commission (NAICOM).

Under the proposed framework, the new regulatory body would be responsible for providing guidance to the Federal Government on policies concerning natural disaster risks and other important issues affectcing the insurance sector.

The bill was sponsored by the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Insurance and Other Financial Institutions, Senator Mukhail Adetokunbo Abiru (APC, Lagos East).

Presenting the report, Abiru said “The current National Insurance Commission Act 1997 is outdated and does not adequately address the emerging economic growth, needs and development of the insurance business.”

“Despite its the commission’s vsignificant contributions, the enabling law has become obsolete, failing to align with current realities and global best practices, and unable to keep pace with the evolving nature of the insurance industry, exposing numerous gaps in the law and necessitating urgent amendments,” he said.

Regarding administrative leadership, Abiru explained that the draft law outlines precise criteria for director appointments, guaranteeing that solely qualified specialists with backgrounds in risk mitigation, law, financial systems, corporate management, and underwriting obtain leadership seats.

He noted further that this updated statute equips the agency to offer enhanced strategic guidance and supervisory control, driving the expansion of the nation’s coverage market

The post Senate Passes Bill to Rename NAICOM as Insurance Regulatory Commission appeared first on Business Today NG.

News

Glow emerges from stealth at $1.2B valuation to challenge endpoint security in the AI era

Published

57 minutes ago

July 22, 2026

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Glow, a cybersecurity startup founded by former Meta and Snowflake executives, emerged from stealth as a unicorn, betting that artificial intelligence is reshaping how enterprises secure employee devices.

The Palo Alto-headquartered startup on Wednesday said it raised $180 million in an all-equity Series A funding round that valued it at $1.2 billion, with backing from Sequoia Capital, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, and Redpoint Ventures, alongside participation from Index Ventures, Swish Ventures, Lux Capital, Operator Collective, and Holly Ventures. The investment made Glow one of the latest cybersecurity startups to achieve unicorn status before publicly disclosing revenue metrics.

As more enterprises deploy AI tools and attackers increasingly use generative AI to automate phishing, develop malware, and launch more sophisticated cyberattacks, companies are rethinking how they secure endpoints — from employee laptops to servers and other connected devices. Concerns have intensified since Anthropic unveiled its Mythos AI model, which the company said demonstrated advanced capabilities in identifying and exploiting software vulnerabilities, prompting broader debate over AI-assisted cyberattacks. Glow is betting that this shift requires a new approach to endpoint security.

Founded in 2025, Glow is building an endpoint security platform that helps enterprises monitor and control the software, AI agents, and developer tools running on employee devices. The startup said the platform uses specialized AI agents to continuously map enterprise environments, assess risk in real time, and enforce security policies.

“If you think of the past decade, everything was moving to the cloud and SaaS. Suddenly, AI lands on the endpoint in a way we’ve never seen,” co-founder and chief executive Roi Tiger (pictured above, center) said in an interview.

Tiger, a former Meta vice president of engineering, co-founded Glow alongside former Snowflake cybersecurity strategy head Omer Singer (pictured above, left), former Claroty vice president of research and development Ophir Arie (pictured above, right), and former Meta engineering leader Arnon Joseph. The startup’s leadership team also includes chief operating officer Emily Heath, a former chief information security officer at United Airlines and Docusign who served on the board of Wiz through its $32 billion acquisition by Google and was previously a partner at Cyberstarts.

Even though it has only just emerged from stealth, Glow said it already has paying customers across industries including healthcare, retail, and financial services. However, it declined to disclose customer names and numbers. The startup’s typical deployments, Tiger said, span tens of thousands of employee devices across global organizations.

To power the platform, Glow uses AI models from Anthropic and Google’s Gemini through Amazon Bedrock, while building its own software to provide the models with enterprise context and improve their reliability for security tasks, Tiger told TechCrunch.

Glow’s platform, Tiger said, has already prevented malicious npm packages, third-party software components used to build applications, from being installed in customer environments, identified AI agents attempting to pull in such software, and detected employee devices where endpoint detection and response tools were missing or operating with reduced functionality.

Glow enters a crowded endpoint security market dominated by companies including CrowdStrike, Microsoft, SentinelOne, and Palo Alto Networks. Tiger said existing endpoint detection and response products focus primarily on detecting threats after they emerge, whereas Glow is designed to prevent risky software, AI agents, and developer tools from entering enterprise environments in the first place.

The startup employs nearly 100 people, about 70% of whom are in Israel and the remainder in the U.S. Whether AI-native endpoint security platforms become a distinct category remains to be seen, as enterprises are only beginning to grapple with the security implications of increasingly capable AI models.

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