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Plateau civil servants give condition to suspend strike

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Eugene Manji, NLC chapter chairman of Plateau state on Wednesday stated that the state civil servants will suspend their ongoing strike if government pays the balance of their February and March salaries.

Recall, Plateau civil servants embarked on an indefinite strike on 11 May after the government failed to meet their demands which included payment of salaries and other entitlements.

Mr. Manji told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the workers might resume work if the government met their demands.

“We asked the administration of former Gov. Simon Lalong to pay civil servants that were yet to collect their February salaries and to pay March salary arrears, but it did not.

“This government came in and asked that we should give it time to consider our demands, but we are of the conviction that government is a continuum.

“It eventually agreed to pay, but not until after the verification of the actual civil service staff strength.

“If after the verification and we establish the willingness and commitment to pay, we will meet with the workers and consider the possibility of suspending the strike.

“We are monitoring the screening which started on Tuesday and if our members begin to receive their bank credit alerts as the government promised, then we will summon a meeting,’’ he stressed.

Mr Manji explained that the government had promised that the verification would hold concurrently with payment.

He also told NAN that the NLC was aware that the House of Assembly gave Governor Caleb Mutfwang the approval to secure a facility and clear the backlog of the salary arrears.

“We want to give government the benefit of the doubt and return to work after the payment of the one-month arrears with the hope that it will pay for the remaining months.

“Should the government renege, we would be left with no choice but to resume the industrial action,” Mr Manji said.

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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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