Only Products and Other Stuff

RoboGrocery combines computer vision with a soft robotic gripper to bag a wide range of different items. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

This is by no means a complete list, just a few of the most obvious tricks that AI can supercharge. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Identity.vc writes checks that range from €250,000 to €1.5 million into companies from the pre-seed to Series A stages. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Two separate studies investigated how well Google's Gemini models and others make sense out of an enormous amount of data. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Some of the largest, most damaging breaches of 2024 already account for over a billion stolen records. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

There’s something of a trend around legacy software firms and their soaring valuations: Companies founded in dinosaur times are on a tear, evidenced this week with SAP‘s shares topping $200 for the first time. Founded in 1972, SAP’s valuation currently sits at an all-time high of $234 billion. The Germany-based enterprise software provider was valued […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google’s trying to make waves with Gemini, its flagship suite of generative AI models, apps and services. So what’s Google Gemini, exactly? How can you use it? And how does Gemini stack up to the competition? To make it easier to keep up with the latest Gemini developments, we’ve put together this handy guide, which […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Digit’s first job will be moving totes around a Connecticut Spanx factory — which is most definitely not a euphemism. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Reddit is taking a stand against AI companies — or at least asking them to pay up. Earlier this week, Reddit announced that it’s changing its Robots Exclusion Protocol, also known as its robots.txt file. This dry-sounding edit is part of a larger negotiation/battle between the AI companies that are hungry for content they can […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Sierra Space said that despite the slip, its first Dream Chaser spaceplane is still on track for its maiden mission before the end of the year. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

At this early stage, Persona’s pitch doesn’t stray far from the various humanoid firms with which it’s set to compete. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

VW Group said Tuesday it will invest $1 billion into EV startup Rivian as part of a broad software development deal that could expand to as much as $5 billion. The deal, which was announced Tuesday afternoon, sent Rivian’s shares up more than 36% in after-hours trading. Under the deal, VW Group will use Rivian’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Fearless Fund’s cofounder and COO Ayana Parsons has announced that she was stepping down. The firm is being sued by a politically conservative group. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Reddit says the update shouldn't affect the majority of users or good faith actors, like researchers and organizations, such as the Internet Archive. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Gurugram-based startup works with Indian factories to help them manufacture fashion wear for global brands. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Telegram's founder Pavel Durov says his company only employs around 30 engineers. Security experts say that raises serious questions about the company's cybersecurity. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Prosus, the largest external investor in Byju's, has written off its 9.6% stake in Indian edtech firm. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Vinod Khosla is more popular than ever right now. The Sun Microsystems co-founder turned prominent investor — first at Kleiner Perkins and, for the last 20 years, at his venture firm Khosla Ventures — has always been sought after by founders thanks to his no-nonsense advice and his firm’s track record, including bets on Stripe, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

After a few months of testing during the general elections, Meta is making its Llama-3-powered AI chatbot available to all users in India. However, Meta AI currently only supports English and no other local languages. The company started testing Meta AI in India across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook in April by rolling it out […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

We’re at a transitional moment in streaming — user growth is slowing and major players are looking to consolidate, but the long-promised dream of profitability finally seems within reach (especially if you’re Netflix). The perfect time, then, for The New York Times to interview many of the industry’s big names — including Netflix co-CEO Ted […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

18-year-olds Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landschoot have founded APIGen, a platform to build custom APIs from natural language prompts. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OmniAI is a set of tools that transform unstructured enterprise data into a something that data analytics apps and AI can understand. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A hacker is advertising customer data allegedly stolen from the Australia-based live events and ticketing company TEG on a well-known hacking forum. On Thursday, a hacker put up for sale the alleged stolen data from TEG, claiming to have information of 30 million users, including the full name, gender, date of birth, username, hashed passwords, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The e-fuels startup is working on producing fuel for aviation and maritime shipping using carbon dioxide and other waste carbon streams. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

YouTube appears to be taking a firm stance against Premium subscribers who attempt to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to access cheaper subscription prices in other countries. This week, a number of users took to Reddit to express their frustration after their Premium plans were canceled for using a VPN to purchase the subscription […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Like it or hate it, artificial intelligence – especially generative AI – is the technology story of 2024. OpenAI, with its rollouts of viral services like ChatGPT and billions in funding, may have gobbled up the lion’s share of attention and money so far. But according to a new report out from top VC Accel […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

C12 is announcing that it recently raised an €18 million funding round ($19.4 million at today’s exchange rate). Originally founded in 2020 as a spin-off from the Physics Laboratory of the École Normale Supérieure, the company has been working on a unique process to create quantum computers based on carbon nanotubes. While the concept of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Like many highly valued startups, SpaceX sometimes allows its employees to cash out some of their shares by selling to company-authorized outside investors. TechCrunch has gotten a peek at an internal SpaceX document about such a tender offer from May 2022. Musk posted on X last month that SpaceX holds such sales for employees about […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The agency was investigating the company over potential violations of the Children's Online Privacy Act. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple's changes may affect apps that today have an estimated $393 million in revenue and have been downloaded roughly 58 million times over the past year. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A researcher has found a bug that allows anyone to impersonate Microsoft corporate email accounts, making phishing attempts look credible and more likely to trick their targets.  As of this writing, the bug has not been patched. To demonstrate the bug, the researcher sent an email to TechCrunch that looked like it was sent from […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Loop, the car insurance company co-founded by Harlem Capital co-founder John Henry, has laid off staff as the company struggles with fundraising.  Henry took to Instagram to post the email his co-founder Carey Nadeau sent to impacted staff on June 16th. Nadeu also posted the letter to LinkedIn. It stated that this was the “absolute […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Astroscale’s space junk observation satellite has moved within striking distance to a discarded rocket upper stage that’s been floating around Earth for nearly 20 years, taking close-up pictures — preliminary to actually deorbiting the object in a future mission. The company released an image captured by its satellite from a distance of just 50 meters […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

When Manny Griffiths worked with a personal injury lawyer after his wife’s car accident, he was surprised by the lack of information and communication from their lawyer regarding their claim. The couple sometimes wouldn’t hear from their lawyer for months and found the entire process to be really opaque. Griffiths dug deeper and learned that […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Proton, the Swiss company behind a suite of privacy-focused apps such as ProtonMail, is following in the footsteps of Signal and Mozilla by transitioning to a new non-profit foundation model. The newly setup Proton Foundation will serve as the main shareholder to the existing corporate entity that is Proton AG, which will continue as a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Tinybird is not so tiny anymore. The enterprise data startup TechCrunch first covered three years ago has been growing at a rapid pace and recently raised a $30 million Series B funding round. According to a source, the company is now valued at $240 million. Originally from Madrid and now also based in New York, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Oyo, the Indian budget-hotel chain startup, is finalizing a fresh fundraise of about $100 million to $125 million that slashes its valuation to $2.5 billion, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.  That’s a steep decline in the Gurgaon-headquartered startup’s value, which was worth $10 billion in 2019. The startup, struggling to raise from […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

YouTube continues its efforts to circumvent ad blockers. Earlier this week, ad blocker SponsorBlock posted that the Google-owned video service is testing out server-side ad injection with a limited number of users. Essentially, this means that both the ad is injected into the video before it arrives on your device (in contrast to client-side ad […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Care/of, a company offering personalized subscription vitamin packs, says it will be canceling all subscriptions as of Monday, June 17 and will no longer be accepting new orders. The news doesn’t come completely out of the blue, as Care/of had previously disclosed in a New York Department of Labor filing that it planned to lay […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference had a sizable focus on AI. Apple unveiled its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, which will be available in iOS later this year. iOS 18 will […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Satellite imagery startup Albedo is preparing for its up close and personal debut. Albedo’s first satellite will take to orbit next spring as the company looks to turn the commercial Earth observation industry upside down with its novel approach and ultra-high resolution cameras.  The satellite, called Clarity, will hitch a ride to very low Earth […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Hold on to your Apple Watches, folks! At WWDC 2024, Apple finally decided to give Siri a brain transplant with something they’re calling “Apple Intelligence” (AI—get […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

StepStone raised the largest fund dedicated to investing in venture secondaries ever, the firm announced last week. This fundraise doesn’t just say a lot about StepStone’s venture secondaries investing prowess, but also about how LPs are thinking about the current venture market. The fund, StepStone VC Secondaries Fund VI, raised $3.3 billion. This marks a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

With the Core Spotlight framework, developers can donate content they want to make searchable via Spotlight. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The most critical systems of our modern world rely on GPS, from aviation and road networks to emergency and disaster response, from precision farming and power grids to weather forecasting and military defense. That dependence is becoming a problem.  “We’ve got an increased threat from foreign adversaries who have shown capabilities to jam, to destroy, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Jordan Meyer and Mathew Dryhurst founded Spawning AI to create tools that help artists exert more control over how their works are used online. Their latest project, called Source.Plus, is intended to curate “non-infringing” media for AI model training. The Source.Plus project’s first initiative is a dataset seeded with nearly 40 million public domain images […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

General Motors is investing $850 million into Cruise as the autonomous vehicle subsidiary slowly makes its way back to testing in Phoenix, Dallas and, as of Tuesday, Houston. GM’s CFO Paul Jacobson announced the capital infusion onstage at Deutsche Bank’s Global Automotive Industry Conference on Tuesday. “This will help bridge Cruise funding until we can […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Siri is now more natural, more relevant and more personal — and it has new look. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

“We were motivated to fundraise because we think the ’24 vintage is going to be a good one,” founder Craig Shapiro said. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The merger has yet to close due to extended due diligence amid ongoing restructuring and macroeconomic headwinds across multiple countries. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

While funding for Italian startups has been growing, the country still ranks eighth in Europe by VC investment, according to Dealroom. Newly created Italian Founders Fund (IFF) hopes to help with the catching up, both in quantity and in quality. With €50 million to invest into 25 companies, it also positions itself as a sector […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

William A. Anders, the astronaut behind perhaps the single most iconic photo of our planet, has died at the age of 90. On Friday morning, Anders was piloting a small plane that dove into the water near Roche Harbor, Wash. His son Greg confirmed his death. Anders retired from the Air Force Reserve as a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S.: 65.1 million households have one, according to the American Pet Products Association. But while cats are not far off, with 46.5 million households with one, a lot of innovation in the pet category has focused exclusively on dogs. And even if the service serves both species, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a $95 million post-money valuation led by NEA, according to two people familiar with the deal. Existing investors Sequoia, which led Anterior’s $3.2 million seed round last September, and Neo, an accelerator […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

If death and taxes are inevitable, why are companies so prepared for taxes, but not for death? “I lost both of my parents in college, and it didn’t initially spark this interest to go start a business around my experience,” said Bereave co-founder Elijah Linder. In the immediate aftermath of Linder’s loss, founding a company […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

It turns out the space industry has a lot of ideas on how to improve NASA’s $11 billion, 15-year plan to collect and return samples from Mars. Seven of these proposals have caught the agency’s attention.  Announced today, NASA has awarded $1.5 million contracts to seven companies to further develop their plans for the revamped […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The keynote will be focused on Apple's software offerings and the developers that power them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Anna will be covering for him this week. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Most interesting startup stories from the week As the end of 0% interest rates keeps taking its toll, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple's annual list of what it considers the best and most innovative software available on its platform is turning its attention to the little guy. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bridgy Fed is one of the efforts aimed at connecting the fediverse with the web, Bluesky and, perhaps later, other networks like Nostr. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple is hoping to make WWDC 2024 memorable as it finally spells out its generative AI plans. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

We just announced the breakout session winners last week. Now meet the roundtable sessions that really “rounded” out the competition for this year’s Disrupt 2024 audience choice program. With five stellar sessions securing their spot among thousands of votes from across the globe, these finalists proved they’ve got what it takes to make things happen. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The malicious attack appears to have involved malware transmitted through TikTok's DMs. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Ace are a contender in a crowded market, but they're still in search of that magic bullet to truly let them stand out from the pack. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Last week, TechCrunch paid a visit to Apple’s Austin, Texas manufacturing facilities. Since 2013, the company has built its Mac Pro desktop about 20 minutes north of downtown. The 400,000 square foot facility sits in a maze of industry parks, a quick trip south from the company’s in-progress corporate campus. In recent years, the capital […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Temasek has previously invested in Lenskart, and this new funding follows a $500 million investment by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority last year. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Less than one year after its iOS launch, French startup ten ten has gone viral with a walkie talkie app that allows teens to send voice messages to their close friends — even when their phone is locked.  © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In an interview at his home near Reykjavík, the entrepreneur-turned-VC shared thoughts on his ventures and the journey that led him from Unity to climate tech, a homecoming of sorts. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

President Joe Biden has vetoed H.J.Res. 109, a congressional resolution that would have overturned the Securities and Exchange Commission’s current approach to banks and crypto. Specifically, the resolution targeted the SEC’s Staff Accounting Bulletin 121, which presents guidance around how banks can handle customers’ crypto assets — in effect, they must treat those assets as […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.