Validating consumer demand is a crucial step for any startup, and TechCrunch Early Stage is offering a golden opportunity to learn how to do it right. Peter Gladstone, senior adviser for startups at Harvard Innovation Labs, is set to lead…
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. After years of booming growth, the AI industry is now experiencing a significant…
Kenyan B2B e-commerce company MarketForce is winding down its B2B e-commerce business that served informal merchants (mom-and-pop stores) after a turbulent two-year period that saw it scale down operations severely. The shutdown of the B2B…
Midas, a fintech startup that allows people in Turkey to invest in U.S. and Turkish equities, says it has raised $45 million in a funding round led by Portage Ventures of Canada. The startup is aimed at Turkey’s retail investor market and…
New AI models from Meta are making waves in technology circles. The two new models, part of the Facebook parent company’s Llama line of artificial intelligence tools, are both open source, helping them stand apart from competing offerings…
It’s been more than a minute since Tesla went public, but the EV company was inescapable on TechCrunch this week. From layoffs to pricing changes and more, it was a week dyed deeply in Tesla colors so we had to chat through the latest. But…
Silicon Valley powerhouse venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz just promoted Jennifer Li to general partner to help lead infrastructure investments.
Plenty of large corporations want to join the AI revolution, but many feel it’s too early to be locked into one foundational model. That means there’s a market for a layer between companies and Large Language Models (LLMs) — something…
Apple has removed the Meta-owned end-to-end encrypted messaging app WhatsApp from its App Store in China following a government order citing national security concerns, the news agency Reuters reported Friday. Meta’s newer, Twitter-esque…
Tesla is recalling all 3,878 Cybertrucks that it has shipped to date, due to a problem where the accelerator pedal can get stuck, putting drivers at risk of a crash, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The…
Tesla is pushing forward with a plan to build an electric big rig charging corridor stretching from Texas to California, despite being snubbed by a lucrative federal funding program that’s part of Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But…
Much has been (and will continue to be) written about automation’s impact on the jobs market. In the short term, many employers have complained of an inability to fill roles and retain workers, further accelerating robotic adoption. The…
Ibotta began its path as a public company on Thursday by opening at $117 per share, a big increase from its IPO price of $88, itself an increase from its proposed range of $76 to $84 per share. And this pop is despite boosting the size of…
Consolidation continues apace in the world of security. Sources tell us that Lacework — a cloud security startup that was valued at $8.3 billion post-money in its last funding round — is in talks to be acquired by another security player,…
Meta has released the latest entry in its Llama series of open source generative AI models: Llama 3. Or, more accurately, the company has open sourced two models in its new Llama 3 family, with the rest to come at an unspecified future…
Meta’s making several big moves today to promote its AI services across its platform. The company has upgraded its AI chatbot with its newest Large Language Model, Llama 3, and it is now running it in the search bar of its four major apps,…
Serve Robotics, the Uber and Nvidia-backed sidewalk robot delivery company, debuted publicly on the New York stock exchange Thursday, making it the latest startup to choose going public via a reverse merger as an alternative path to…
Last month, a hacker wreaked havoc during an esports tournament of the popular shooter game Apex Legends, hacking two well-known streamers mid-game to make it look like they were using cheats. A month later, it seems like the hacking saga…
Dataplor’s “secret sauce” combines technology and public domain data with a human factor, employing over 100,000 people, called Explorers, to validate all the data via computer.
Google has terminated the employment of 28 staff following a prolonged sit-in protest at the company’s Sunnyvale and New York offices. The employees were protesting against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract inked by…
VerSe, the parent firm of Indian news aggregator app Dailyhunt, has acquired the popular digital newsstand firm Magzter, which competes with Apple News+.
Waymo can operate on San Francisco freeways without a human driver, but the company is still only testing on freeways with a human driver in the front seat.
Spend management startup Ramp has raised another $150 million at a post-money valuation of $7.65 billion, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today. New investor Khosla Ventures and existing backer Founders Fund co-led the raise, which…
Over the weekend, another social media platform exploded into the fray: AirChat. The app is like a combination of Twitter and Clubhouse. Instead of typing a post, you speak it. The app quickly transcribes what you say, and as your…
TechCrunch Early Stage is gearing up for another insightful event on April 25, and one roundtable session promises to be particularly illuminating for early-stage founders. Titled “Finance Fundamentals Before Your First Finance Hire: A…
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has published new guidance which has major implications for adtech giants like Meta and other large platforms. Since November 2023, the owner of Facebook and Instagram has forced users in the…