OpenWeb, which helps publishers target readers with ads and manage comments, has raised a $170M Series F at a $1.5B valuation, up from $1.1B in November 2021 (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)

Patrick Coffee / Wall Street Journal:
A look at the increased use of celebrity deepfakes in advertising, with or without their permission, raising legal and ethical questions  —  Digital simulations of Elon Musk, Tom Cruise, Leo DiCaprio and others have shown up in ads, as the image-melding technology grows more popular and presents …

The Information:
Source: Israeli cybersecurity company Cybereason, which is valued at $2.5B, is looking for a buyer after abandoning plans to go public earlier in 2022  —  Cybereason, a prominent Israeli security software firm valued at $2.5 billion by investors including Google, SoftBank …

Blake Brittain / Reuters:
Shopify settles a lawsuit with major educational publishers that claimed the platform ignored notices of users selling pirated textbooks and other materials  —  Shopify Inc has settled allegations by a group of major educational publishers that the Canadian e-commerce company enables piracy on its platform …

Rafaela Lindeberg / Bloomberg:
Swedish last-mile delivery startups Instabox and Budbee plan to merge and create Instabee, valued at ~$1.66B  —  Swedish last-mile delivery operators Instabox AB and Budbee AB plan to merge to create a new company at a valuation of 18 billion kronor ($1.66 billion), according to an emailed statement.

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Google is in talks to invest $200M+ into Toronto-based Cohere, which has raised $170M+ to let companies add NLP to chatbots and other tools  —  Cohere, which creates natural language processing software, also had talks with Nvidia about potential strategic investment  —  Which Photo Is Real?

Gillian Tan / Bloomberg:
New York-based Bilt, which offers a loyalty program and credit card to convert rent payments into points, raised $150M led by Left Lane at a $1.5B valuation  —  Bilt Rewards, which operates a loyalty program and credit card that converts rent payments into points, said its valuation more than quadrupled to $1.5 billion.