OpenAI is increasingly looking like a consumer company, telling CNBC that it now has 400 million weekly active users. Usage is still growing at a rapid pace as the AI developer behind the AI chatbot, ChatGPT, “only” had 300 million users in December 2024. Though...
Mercor, the AI recruiting startup founded by three 21-year-old Thiel Fellows, has raised $100 million in a Series B round, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Menlo Park-based Felicis led the round, valuing Mercor at $2 billion—eight times its previous valuation, the Wall Street Journal previously...
Breeze Liu has been a prominent advocate for victims. But even she struggled to scrub nonconsensual intimate images and videos of herself from the web....
Recalls in the food and beverage industry due to contamination incidents can have catastrophic effects. Not only do companies have to pay fines and damages, but the impacts on the brand’s reputation can be long-lasting. That’s why Spore.Bio, a Paris-based deeptech startup, is trying to...
Codeium, an AI-powered coding startup, is raising a new round of funding at a $2.85 billion valuation, including fresh capital, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal. The round is being led by returning investor Kleiner Perkins, the people said. The new round...
Austin-based defense startup Saronic has raised a $600 million Series C to build an autonomous ship factory called “Port Alpha,” it announced. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
For decades, couples going through in vitro fertilization have had to spend tens of thousands of dollars on the procedures with no guarantee of success. It’s not only an emotionally draining process, but a financially exhausting one as well. San Francisco-based startup Future Family wants...
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network is one of USAID’s most data-driven programs, but its work has been stalled by the Trump administration....
Investors on the lookout for startups working at the frontiers of technology are casting their nets ever further into unchartered territory, sometimes literally as well as figuratively. In one of the latest examples, a startup called Karman+ with ambitions to build autonomous spacecraft that can...
Welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter! We’re going on hiatus for a bit, but you can find all our AI coverage, including my columns, our daily analysis, and breaking news stories, at TechCrunch. If you want those stories and much more in your inbox every...
Google is launching a new experiment that uses AI to help people explore more career possibilities. The company announced on Wednesday that a new “Career Dreamer” tool can find patterns between your experiences, educational background, skills, and interests to connect you with careers that might...
Google is pulling its AI assistant Gemini from the main Google app for iOS devices. The move is meant to encourage users to download the standalone Gemini app instead, which would allow Google to more directly compete with other consumer-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude,...
The demand for voice and speech recognition technologies is massive — and growing. An analysis by market research firm Markets and Markets found that the sector could be worth over $28.1 billion by 2027. There’s no shortage of vendors providing voice and speech recognition solutions,...
A couple of weeks after the initial release of Mistral’s AI assistant, Le Chat, the company told Le Parisien that it has reached one million downloads. In particular, Le Chat quickly reached the top spot for free downloads on the iOS App Store in the...
As anticipated, Apple revealed the long-awaited iPhone SE refresh Tuesday. The fourth generation device arrives three years after the last major update to the budget-minded smartphone. This one arrives with a twist, however. The SE branding has been dropped to keep the device more in...
The team at early-stage VC firm Slow Ventures last week launched a $60 million fund entirely dedicated to investing in creators, with an eye towards helping them launch businesses. The idea is that the same entrepreneurial spirit and niche expertise that has helped creators build...
It has been more than two years since ChatGPT burst on the scene. Shortly after that, it seemed like almost every email app integrated AI-powered email writing and summaries. Some also introduced AI-powered search for you to sift through your inbox quickly. Superhuman is now...
Data centers consumed 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 and are estimated to use up to 12% by 2028. The majority of the energy data centers suck up is used to help transfer data from chip to chip. A company called Hyperlume is looking to...
As companies like Nvidia and SoftBank focus on industrial robotics as key areas for future R&D, a startup has raised funding today for another facet of how AI is being used on the factory room floor. Augury, which develops AI-based hardware to identify when machines...
Creating corporate training videos for software is a time-consuming ordeal, especially if you’re an organization with a lot of software licenses. Training videos can help get employees up to speed, but they’re a big lift. They often take entire teams to produce. Tel Aviv-based entrepreneur...
Meta's Waterworth Project will provide internet connectivity on five continents, with landing points in India, the United States, Brazil, and South Africa....
Humane announced on Tuesday that it has been acquired by HP for $116 million. The hardware startup is immediately discontinuing sales of its $499 AI Pins. Humane alerted customers who have already purchased the Pin that their devices will stop functioning before the end of...
This week on StrictlyVC Download, we’re catching our breath and catching up with all of the news that’s been happening in the industry. Connie Loizos and Alex Gove are breaking down the top headlines. They discuss: StrictlyVC Download posts every Tuesday. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen...
Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, could be close to raising more than $1 billion at a $30 billion valuation — a higher valuation than reported just weeks ago. Bloomberg reports that VC firm Greenoaks Capital Partners is...
Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has announced her new startup. Unsurprisingly, it’s focused on AI. Called Thinking Machines Lab, the startup, which came out of stealth today, intends to build tooling to “make AI work for [people’s] unique needs and goals,” and to create AI...
After leaving OpenAI last year, Mira Murati is finally ready to share what she's working on....
Gig marketplace Fiverr wants to let freelancers train AI on their bodies of work and use it to automate future jobs. At an event on Tuesday, Fiverr announced the launch of several new efforts aimed at attracting gig workers to its platform and equipping them...
To fend off future hostile takeover attempts, OpenAI is considering giving its non-profit board special voting rights, according to a new report in the Financial Times. The rights would allow the board to overrule major investors in the company, preserving some of its powers after...
Meta on Tuesday announced that it’ll host its first-ever dev conference dedicated to generative AI. Called LlamaCon after Meta’s Llama family of generative AI models, the conference is scheduled to take place on April 29. Meta said that it plans to share “the latest on...
When he was a senior studying at Texas A&M University, Matthew Iommi realized that there were no good options for transporting groups of people. Fellow college students heading out for the night together didn’t have access to on-demand rides with the same convenience, accessibility, and...