Tesla, Inc. announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2017, as well as for the financial year 2017 Wednesday evening, after markets closed. While the company posted its highest quarterly revenue yet, and a smaller than expected loss, it also quietly delayed the delivery of its mass-market sedan, the Model 3. The revenue of almost $3.3 billion for the October-December quarter was 10 percent more than the preceding quarter, and over $1 billion more than the same quarter in 2016. For the entire year, gross revenue stood over $11.7 billion, a significant increase from the $7 billion posted during 2016. Wall Street expectations put the quarterly revenue around $3.2 billion. The adjusted loss per share, of $3.04, was also lower than the $3.19 expected.

Big numbers are nothing new to Quizlet, one of the most widely-used digital study tools in the United States. And according to one website tracker, it is among the most visited sites in the country (besting LinkedIn and Spotify). But there's another number that also has the company excited. This week Quizlet raised an additional $20 million in a Series B round led by Icon Ventures. Other investors include Union Square Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Owl Ventures and Altos Ventures.

Uber executives are travelling the globe to reassure regulators that the company is changing the way it does business. As Laura Frykberg reports, it follows a string of controversies that have hurt the ride-hailing firm's reputation. A group led by Japanese technology conglomerate Softbank has acquired a major stake in Uber. In a tender offer that expired Thursday, Dec. 28, SoftBank acquired a 15 percent stake in Uber while the remaining members got about 3 percent, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to publicly discuss details. (Photo: Eric Risberg, AP) SAN FRANCISCO -- There's a big trial starting Monday between two companies you've heard of -- Uber and Waymo, the autonomous car company owned by Google-parent Alphabet. But their brawl is over a topic you might not be familiar with: the technology inside a little spinning eyeball on the top of a self-driving car's roof.

One Stop Systems, an Escondido maker of high performance computing systems, became a publicly traded company on Thursday, raising $19 million in the first public stock offering of the year for a San Diego company. The company's shares opened at $5, below the expected range of $6 to $8 in its prospectus. One Stop sold more shares than projected, offering 3.8 million compared with the 2.9 million targeted in the prospectus. The company will use the proceeds to pay down debt and for working capital. Roth Capital Partners was the lead underwriter on the deal, with Benchmark Co. as co-manager.

Twenty-five different startups were funded in January cumulatively raising $784 million; a great start for the new year. Four acquisitions were reported during the month while the IPO front lay waiting for something to happen. According to Silicon Valley Bank's annual survey of 1,000 executives, startup founders are confident 2018 will be a good year for funding and for business conditions – except hiring and retaining foreign talent. More than half of startups surveyed (51%) reported that at least one of their founders is an immigrant. One-third of startups said laws and regulations prompted them to locate facilities (or move non-sales operations) offshore.

Google's parent company Alphabet has reported lower than expected profits in the last three months of 2017 after higher costs offset an increase in advertising sales. Revenue for the three months ending December 31 was $32.3 billion (£22.6bn), a rise of 24% on the same period in 2016. Overall, Alphabet reported a loss of $3 billion (£2.1bn) for the fourth quarter as it set aside $11 billion for taxes - an estimated $9.9 billion (£6.9bn) was for taxes on repatriated earnings. Excluding the tax provision, Alphabet would have posted a profit of $6.8 billion (£4.7bn), falling short of the $7 billion analysts had predicted. The tech giant's shares slid 2.3 per cent in after-hours trade on the results, highlighting concerns about the rising costs of projects such as the Waymo's self-driving car service, and the fact that profits were weaker than expected. The company also used its earning report to confirm that current board member John Hennessy has been named Alphabet chairman following the departure of Eric Schmidt in December.

Google shares were roughly flat when the market closed on Thursday after Alphabet posted earnings less than what Wall Street expected. The after hours GOOGL stock price, however, did take an initial dive before rallying toward its $1,181.50 Alphabet, the parent company of Google, revealed its earnings report for fiscal quarter ending December 2017 shortly after the market closed. The company posted a $32.32 billion revenue, higher than Wall Street expectations. However, the company posted $9.70 earnings per share, missing expectations.

Microsoft $MSFT smashed analysts expectations for its December quarter earnings report Wednesday after the close. Once again $MSFT Cloud earnings powered revenue. Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing segment continued to expand, posting strong gains in its business selling web-based services to corporate customers. Microsoft did not give March-quarter guidance in its earnings news release. Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform growth has slowed down over the last few quarters but annually it's still showing near 100 percent annual growth.

Machine learning and vision startup Aquabyte announced Tuesday that it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding in order to build out a team of developers to refine its software, which is geared toward using machine learning and vision to reduce costs for fish farming. The round was co-led by Costanoa Ventures and New Enterprise Associates. Princeton University and other investors also participated in the round. The main purpose of the round is to help the company build out a team to develop its technology, both at its headquarters in San Francisco as well as Norway, where the company is working with pilot customers. The company is also focused on Norway because there's significantly more fish farming there than there is in the United States.

Ng announced Tuesday that he raised money from venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners as well as SoftBank Group Corp. In an interview with Reuters, Ng said his goal was to identify new business ideas around artificial intelligence and be able to put cash into them quickly from the so-called AI Fund, of which he will serve as general partner, so that founders of the portfolio companies will not need to burn time pitching traditional venture capitalists. Ng said he plans to draw on his experience at Baidu, one of China's largest internet companies, where he led the artificial intelligence team to develop a range of new business lines. Under Ng, Baidu released a voice-based operating system that users can talk to - much like Amazon's Alexa voice assistant or Apple's Siri - and also started working on self-driving cars and face recognition technology to open things like transit turnstiles when users approach. "Based on that experience, I have an unusual point of view on the building of AI businesses. I think it's a more systematic, repeatable process than most people think," said Ng, who also taught artificial intelligence courses at Stanford University.