TechCrunch Startup News

 In a new blog post, the company said it received comments from more than 14,000 community members and that it “especially heard from community members who shared concerns about how the guidelines could impact creative expression and traditionally marginalized voices.” The company  said, “after considering this feedback, and in a return to our experimental roots, we are going to bring a greater fo...

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang descended on the United Kingdom this week, armed with a pledge to invest $2.6 billion to supercharge the country’s AI startup ecosystem. Wayve, the U.K.-based self-driving tech startup, could be one of those to receive funds from Nvidia’s AI investment commitment. Also, U.K.-based fintech Tide has entered the unicorn club with a fresh funding of $120 million led by TPG, as...

Jar, an Indian fintech startup that allows users to invest in gold, has turned profitable by helping millions of first-time savers use its app to build digital gold holdings. While many consumer fintechs focus on affluent urban users or credit products, Jar has gained traction by offering a culturally familiar asset — gold — as a low-barrier entry point to saving.  Learn more about your ad choices...

On Thursday, Google Cloud announced it added fast-rising AI coding startups Lovable and Windsurf to its roster of customers. Both companies have chosen Google Cloud as their primary cloud computing provider, the latest sign of Google’s rising prominence against larger rivals AWS and Microsoft Azure. Also, Sam Ross, the co-founder and CEO of Numeral, came up with the idea for his sales tax complian...

Airbuds, a music social app aimed at Gen Z, raises $5M as the app reaches 5 million monthly users. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As speed becomes the defining currency in an AI-driven software world, Blacksmith has raised another round led by Google Ventures — just four months after its initial seed round — to accelerate how code gets shipped. Icarus Robotics cofounders Ethan Barajas and Jamie Palmer spent hours interviewing astronauts about what it was like working in space as they homed in on their startup idea. Their big...

Amazon made same-day delivery the benchmark on Earth. Impulse Space is pitching a similar concept for satellites bound for geostationary orbit about 22,000 miles above Earth, compressing what is typically a months-long transit into a matter of hours. Also, CodeRabbit is helping companies like Chegg, Groupon, and Mercury, along with over 8,000 other businesses, save time on the famously frustrating...

While many robotics companies are building human-sized robots, or working to automate entire factories, MicroFactory is instead trying to think big by building small. Also, Smartphone startup Nothing announced today that it closed its Series C round of $200 million, which was led by the investment firm Tiger Global. With this round, the consumer electronics company is now valued at $1.3 billion. L...

Robinhood announced Monday it has filed an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a new publicly traded fund that will hold shares of startups. The idea behind the “Robinhood Ventures Fund I” is to allow every retail investor access to make money on the hottest startups before they go public. Also, Rodatherm Energy, a new geothermal startup, emerged from stealth Mon...

When Mark Lee was a law student at Harvard, a trademark class exposed him to the staggering scale of counterfeiting, an illicit industry worth more than $3 trillion annually, and set him on an unexpected path to entrepreneurship. Bret Taylor, board chair at OpenAI and CEO of AI agent startup Sierra, was asked in a recent interview with The Verge whether he agreed with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s decla...

Initially launched as an instant messaging app rivaling WhatsApp in 2012, Hike pivoted to real-money gaming in recent years, with its primary platform, Rush, offering casual games like carrom and ludo for cash prizes, following the shutdown of Hike Messenger in 2021. Rush attracted over 10 million users and generated more than $500 million in gross revenue over its four-year run. Learn more about...

After investing in robotics startups for 10 years, Seth Winterroth, a partner at Eclipse, said the time to invest in robotics has never been better. The robotics startup market has matured and the hardware and software powering these bots has gotten significantly better — and cheaper. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Grammy Award-winning musician, composer, and producer Wyclef Jean says the music industry is broken, which is why he’s now involved with a startup, OpenWav, that’s looking to give the power back to the artists. Through the OpenWav app, launched over the summer, artists can drop new music and exclusives; connect directly with fans; sell merch; host concerts, pop-ups, and listening parties; and more...

Anduril announced Tuesday that a fleet of its XL uncrewed undersea vehicle “Ghost Shark” will begin operations in Australian waters next year under a massive billion dollar contract. The five-year award structure is the defense-startup holy grail; it’s a program of record that essentially locks in recurring revenue by becoming a line item in the country’s defense budget. Also, Perplexity, the AI-p...

Arc announced Wednesday it has signed a contract of that value with Curtin Maritime, a tug and barge operator. The new hybrid-electric tugs are expected to hit the waters around the Los Angeles port in 2027. Curtin has ordered eight tugs — at around $20 million apiece — and Arc will build them in conjunction with Snow & Co. shipyard. Also, it’s been a long road for the 20-year-old fintech Klarna t...

Fabian Kamberi, CEO and co-founder of the Berlin-based AI gaming startup Born, thinks the current AI companions on the market are designed to be exploitative and geared towards isolating users through one-to-one relationships with AI chatbots. Also, Clyx is a social platform that helps users find community events to join. Five years after its launch, the app today has 50,000 active users buying ti...

SpaceX just fired off one of the biggest shots yet in the spectrum wars, agreeing to pay $17 billion to take over a massive chunk of wireless airwaves from EchoStar for Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell services. The deal is the most aggressive signal yet that SpaceX wants to rule the satellite-to-phone market. Also, Ramp answered any lingering questions as to why investors recently valued the expense man...

Nuclearn got its start when the founders were working at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station just west of Phoenix. They had been experimenting with ways to streamline various repetitive tasks first from a data science perspective then with more advanced AI models. Also, ReOrbit, a Finnish startup focused on helping nations control their own sovereign satellites, has raised a record €45 milli...

Deep Fission is proposing to build small, cylindrical nuclear power plants and lower them into 30-inch diameter holes drilled one mile down into the Earth. By burying the reactors, the company hopes to solve several problems that plague current reactors, including concerns over meltdowns and potential terrorist attacks. Also, The corporate space world tired Bianca Cefalo to the point that she foun...

Why is a startup that bills itself as the “Netflix of AI,” and that recently raised money from Amazon’s Alexa Fund, talking about remaking a movie that was first released in 1942?  Well, the company has built a platform that allows users to create their own cartoons with AI prompts — Fable is starting out with its own intellectual property, but it has ambitions to offer similar capabilities with H...

If you spend any time online, there’s a good chance you’ve seen plenty of ugly, AI-generated ads — but few to none when interacting with AI chatbots themselves. Koah co-founder and CEO Nic Baird argued that will inevitably change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sodium-ion battery startup Natron ceased operations this week, ending the company’s 12-year quest to commercialize its technology in the U.S. The company had $25 million worth of orders lined up for its Michigan factory, but it couldn’t deliver them until it had UL certification, according to Raleigh’s The News & Observer, which reported on the business’s closure because Natron had been planning t...

On Thursday, Augment announced that it raised an $85 million Series A led by Redpoint, with participation from 8VC, Autotech Ventures, and others. The massive round comes just five months after the startup launched out of stealth with a hefty $25 million seed round. Also, Mark Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer from Indiana, has filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta. Mark Zuckerberg th...

Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian’s CEO and co-founder, said, ‘today’s browsers weren’t built for work; they were built for browsing. This deal is a bold step forward in reimagining the browser for knowledge work in the AI era.’ Also, Francesco Cacciatore is a self-proclaimed skeptic. Yet after spending two decades in the European aerospace industry and hitting, as he put it, a “crisis,” he made an u...

On Wednesday, Orchard Robotics announced that it raised a $22 million Series A funding led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital, and with participation from returning investors, including General Catalyst and Contrary. Although the idea of using computer vision for specialty crops isn’t new, Wu says that the largest farms in the U.S. still rely on manual sampling to make critical decisions about far...