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Mutfwang: Atiku’s Aide Bwala Criticizes Verdict on Plateau Governor’s Sack Over Disobedience of Court Order

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Daniel Bwala

Daniel Bwala, an aide to Atiku Abubakar, has expressed his dissatisfaction with the verdict of an Appellate Court that led to the removal of Governor Caleb Mutfwang of Plateau State.

Bwala, airing his grievances on Channels Television’s Politics Today program on Monday, highlighted his concerns about the unusual circumstance where an election is invalidated on the grounds that a court order was disobeyed.

Recall that in September, the Plateau State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal affirmed the election of Mutfwang but two months later, an appellate court on Sunday sacked the PDP governor.

The court held that the party violated the court order that a valid congress be conducted in the 17 local government areas of that state.

However, Bwala argued that an election should not be invalidated because of a court order on party congresses.

According to him, “If you look at the grounds in section 134, disobedience to court order was not there. Now, the court can say disobedience to court order was a consequence of not conducting the primary.

“Even if they don’t conduct the primary, it is pre-election but it is more of the disobedience of the court order.”

He urged the people of Plateau to be hopeful “because our eyes are now fixated on Ebonyi because if this goes this way, then we have every reason to believe that it will go in the favour of PDP.”

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New leaders, new fund: Sequoia has raised $7B to expand its AI bets

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Few venture firms have bet more aggressively on AI than Sequoia Capital, and it isn’t slowing down.

The Silicon Valley stalwart has raised roughly $7 billion for a new fund, according to Bloomberg. Sequoia declined TechCrunch’s request for comment. The money will go toward what the firm calls its “expansion strategy” — essentially its late-stage investing arm, focused on the U.S. and Europe — and it’s nearly double Sequoia’s last comparable fund, a $3.4 billion vehicle raised in 2022.

That growth in fund size reflects something bigger: late-stage investing has taken on an entirely new meaning in the AI era. Companies can now scale at a speed and cost that would have been unimaginable a decade ago, and the firms backing them have to keep pace.

The money signals where Sequoia sees the future: deeply embedded in AI, from the giants building the underlying technology to the startups putting it to work. The firm has backed two of the most prominent players in the AI race — OpenAI originally and, more recently, Anthropic — both of which are reportedly eyeing public listings in 2026. The development that could mean a significant payday for the firm.

Sequoia isn’t only swinging for the foundational AI heavyweights, however. It has also placed bets on other buzzy startups, including Physical Intelligence, the Bay Area robotics startup, and Factory, which builds AI agents for enterprise engineering teams.

The fundraise is also the first major capital raise under Sequoia’s new leadership, with Alfred Lin and Pat Grady now serving as co-stewards of the 54-year-old firm.

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Factory hits $1.5B valuation to build AI coding for enterprises

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More than three years after the emergence of generative AI, AI-assisted coding remains by far the most popular and lucrative use case for the technology.

Although multiple companies — including Anthropic, maker of Claude Code, as well as Cursor and Cognition — are already vying for dominance, investors believe there is room for at least one more player.

On Wednesday, Factory, a startup developing AI agents for enterprise engineering teams, announced it had raised $150 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, and Blackstone. Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, joined the startup’s board.

Factory founder Matan Grinberg told the Wall Street Journal that the company’s key differentiator is its ability to switch between different foundation models, such as Anthropic’s Claude or Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. However, startups like Cursor also don’t rely on a single model to generate code.

Factory’s customers include engineering teams at Morgan Stanley, Ernst & Young, and Palo Alto Networks.

The startup was founded in 2023 after Grinberg, then a PhD student at UC Berkeley, cold-emailed Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire. The two bonded over mutual academic interest. (Maguire’s PhD from Caltech is in the same area of physics Grinberg was studying.)

Maguire convinced Grinberg to drop out and launch Factory, with Sequoia backing the startup at the seed stage.

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