Former NSA deputy director George Barnes has made his first investment as a venture capitalist for his new job at the VC incubation studio Red Cell Partners. It’s a $3 million seed deal in an open source cybersecurity startup called Hunted Labs, he told TechCrunch exclusively....
After hitting record lows at the start of the pandemic, mortgage rates began to climb in 2022 and haven’t come down significantly since. With 30-year mortgage rates hovering at over 6.5% today (they were as low as 2.49% in 2020!), buying a home is simply...
Mobile networks continue to be a major target for cybersecurity breaches, and Chinese hacking group Salt Typhoon’s persistent attacks on multiple carriers are only the latest known examples. The mobile carrier startup Cape is taking a novel approach to addressing the problem: It has built...
TechCrunch Sessions: AI is nearly upon us, and you have the power to decide who you want to see lead a dynamic breakout session. We have whittled speaker applications down to six incredible finalists to take the stage on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at...
There’s a controversy brewing over “AI-generated” studies submitted to this year’s ICLR, a long-running academic conference focused on AI. At least three AI labs — Sakana, Intology, and Autoscience — claim to have used AI to generate studies that were accepted to ICLR workshops. At...
Prezent has raised $20 million in an all-equity funding to build specialized presentation models and expand its footprint into new markets. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Aletiq has raised a €6 million funding round led by Point Nine a few months ago (around $6.5 million at current exchange rates). The French startup is announcing the founding round today. Aletiq has been developing product lifecycle management (PLM) software for manufacturing industrial companies...
While Rippling and Deel duke it out in the field and in the courtroom alleging illegal sales and marketing tactics, here’s another way to boost business growth: pick up a massive sum of cash to expand your operations in those areas. Factorial, the Barcelona-based “unicorn”...
Nvidia is collaborating with Disney Research and Google DeepMind to develop Newton, a physics engine to simulate robotic movements in real-world settings, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced at GTC 2025 on Tuesday. Disney will be among the first to use Newton to power its next-generation...
On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance said that the Trump administration’s support of AI and tech innovations should benefit both populists and those investing and leading tech companies. “I think there’s too much fear that AI will simply replace jobs rather than augmenting so many...
Tesla received a permit Tuesday from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to operate a transportation service in the state, the beginning of a long regulatory road that could eventually lead to the company getting the OK to operate a robotaxi service there. The permit,...
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote Tuesday at the company’s GTC 2025 conference stuck with tradition and was chock full of announcements. But the company also snuck in a little history lesson. During the automotive portion of his speech, Huang referred to AlexNet, a neural network...
Nvidia at GTC 2025 announced a new lineup of “AI personal supercomputers” powered by the company’s Grace Blackwell chip platform. Jensen Huang, the semiconductor company’s founder and CEO, unveiled the two new machines, DGX Spark (previously called Project Digits) and DGX Station, during his keynote...
General Motors is turning to Nvidia to help bring AI to the physical world in an expanded collaboration designed to touch every aspect of the automaker’s business, including factories, robots, and self-driving cars. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who announced the partnership Tuesday during...
Nvidia is releasing what it’s calling an AI foundation model for humanoid robotics. Announced at GTC 2025 in San Jose, the model, dubbed Groot N1, is a “generalist” model, trained on both synthetic and real data. Nvidia claims that Groot N1 features a “dual system...
Tuesday’s big news that Google is acquiring security startup Wiz for a record-breaking $32 billion comes with a very big qualifier. Google says it will position Wiz as a “multicloud” offering, meaning Wiz will not be a Google-only shop. The reality is that Google had...
On stage at Nvidia’s GTC 2025 conference in San Jose on Tuesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced a slew of new GPUs coming down the company’s product pipeline over the next several months. Perhaps the most significant was Vera Rubin. Vera Rubin, which is set...
Maju Kuruvilla, who left the CEO role of controversial one-click checkout startup Bolt last year, is back. He’s launching his own startup, focused on a different problem for online shoppers: what he calls “check-in.” When you click on an ad for something like a t-shirt,...
Stability AI has released a new AI model, Stable Virtual Camera, that the company claims can transform 2D images into “immersive” videos with realistic depth and perspective. Virtual cameras are tools often used in digital filmmaking and 3D animation to capture and navigate scenes in...
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Google seems to agree. On Tuesday, the company added a feature to its AI-powered Gemini chatbot that the company is calling Canvas. Similar in concept to OpenAI’s identically-named Canvas tool for ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Artifacts,...
Arcade, an AI agent infrastructure startup founded by former Okta exec Alex Salazar and former Redis engineer Sam Partee, has raised $12 million from Laude Ventures. Laude is the new fund launched in 2024 by Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski, the UC Berkeley computer scientist who also co-founded Databricks....
AI coding assistants are becoming wildly popular, with the vast majority of respondents in GitHub’s latest poll saying that they’ve adopted AI tools in some form. Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman recently claimed that a quarter of YC’s W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI....
In a brief message Tuesday morning on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company’s “open” AI model family, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads. That’s up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024 — a ~53% increase over a roughly three-month period. Llama,...
It’s time to make your voice heard. After receiving an overwhelming amount of applications for speakers at TechCrunch Sessions: AI, we have chosen six incredible finalists. TC Sessions: AI takes place on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley — and you have the...
According to a report, AI startup Anthropic is working on voice capabilities for its AI-powered chatbot, Claude. The company’s chief product officer, Mike Krieger, told the Financial Times that Anthropic plans to launch experiences that allow users to talk to Anthropic’s AI models. “We are...
During a health-focused event in New York on Tuesday, Google announced that it’s developing a collection of “open” AI models for drug discovery called TxGemma. The AI models, which Google said will be released through its Health AI Developer Foundations program later this month, can...
A new iOS social wellness app called Exist wants to help middle-aged consumers connect and build meaningful communities with one another as they navigate their lives and the stresses that come with it. The app describes itself as the edgier cousin of Calm or Headspace,...
Google on Tuesday announced new products and features aimed at healthcare use cases, including improved overviews in Google Search for health queries, medical records APIs, and new health-focused “open” AI models. In Search, Google says it’s using AI and ranking systems to expand “knowledge panel”...
So-called “vibe coding” with LLM-driven tools like Cursor Composer — a term coined by renowned computer scientist Andrej Karpathy — describes a hands-off approach to writing code using Gen AI models, and it has really taken off recently. According to Y Combinator, one quarter of...
Y Combinator-backed Nigerian food procurement startup Vendease has changed its employee pay structure and is seeking fresh capital, TechCrunch has learned. This is after laying off 44% of its workforce — around 120 employees —last month, marking its second round of job cuts in five...