timef 02/25/2025

The Federal Aviation Administration has started testing the use of SpaceX Starlink satellite internet terminals in the national airspace system, nearly two years after Verizon was awarded a $2 billion contract to perform similar work. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk claimed on his social media platform X that the Verizon system “is not working […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried serves the early days of his 25-year prison sentence, the crypto wunderkind-turned-criminal made his first public post on X in over two years. Bankman-Fried’s thread on X responds to Elon Musk’s recent ultimatum to federal employees: respond to his email with five bullet points of recent accomplishments, or resign. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The U.K.’s antitrust authority has given the go-ahead to IBM’s planned multibillion acquisition of infrastructure software company HashiCorp. In a brief case update published today, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it had “cleared the anticipated acquisition by IBM of HashiCorp,” and it would publish the full rationale for its decision in due course. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has reopened access to its API after halting service for nearly three weeks due to capacity constraints. On Tuesday, the company began allowing customers to top up credits for use on its API, which lets developers build apps and services on top of cloud-hosted versions of DeepSeek’s AI. Server resources remain […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Microsoft is reportedly shrinking its data center footprint. The tech giant has canceled leases with multiple data center providers that total a “couple hundred megawatts” of capacity, according to Bloomberg, which cited a memo from investment bank TD Cowen. This total represents the equivalent of about two data centers. The reason for Microsoft’s move is […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As part of its efforts to further invest in the Chinese market, Apple announced this week that it’s bringing its Apple Developer service to China’s WeChat app. The service includes news, announcements, and other upcoming activities for members of the developer community, which have typically been offered via Apple’s website and its own Developer app. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

DoorDash has agreed to pay $16.75 million to settle a lawsuit by New York’s attorney general that accused the delivery platform of pocketing workers’ tips to cover wages. The lawsuit alleged that between May 2017 and September 2019, DoorDash used customer tips to offset the base pay it had already guaranteed to workers, instead of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Mitico thinks that it has found a way to slash the cost of carbon capture using a simple salt that’s been tweaked for industrial duty. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Orbital mobility took center-stage in the space industry last year, with venture capitalists funneling massive sums into startups developing tech for nimble satellite operations. So it’s no surprise that one of the most recent deals is to Magdrive, a UK-based startup that says its electric propulsion system for satellites will deliver a higher thrust in […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Quantum computing remains a holy grail in the world of technology, but with some important breakthroughs in the last several months, investors are betting on the more promising startups in the space to make the concept of super-efficient particle- and electron-based computing a reality. In the latest development, Quantum Machines, an Israeli startup that provides […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Adobe announced on Tuesday it’s bringing its popular design and editing software Photoshop to mobile, starting with iOS. The company plans to launch a Photoshop for Android app later this year. With the new Photoshop for iPhone app, users can access both free and paid features through a mobile-friendly design that’s accessible on the go. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Just a few weeks after chipmaker Tenstorrent raised nearly $700 million in funding, developers can now try out Tenstorrent’s AI accelerators on Koyeb. Tenstorrent sells AI processors built around the RISC-V instruction set architecture, and has developed its own open-source neural network library, TT-NN, and open-source low-level programming model, TT-Metalium. Tenstorrent is part of a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple Watch shipments in India grew 141% in 2024, while the country's overall smartwatch market dipped 30% year-on-year. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

“Agentic AI” is the concept of the moment. Developers big and small are rushing to build apps to leapfrog the heavy lifting needed to employ generative AI in specific contexts… and investors are rushing to fund the most interesting of these.  In one of the latest examples, a startup out of Israel called Perfect — […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On Tuesday, Google introduced a new, free consumer version of its AI code completion and assistance tool, Gemini Code Assist, and which the company calls Gemini Code Assist for Individuals. The company also rolled out Gemini Code Assist for GitHub, a code review “agent” designed to automatically look for bugs in code and offer suggestions […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Europe’s top court has weighed in to clarify the rules around interoperability requirements on Big Tech in a referral on a case related to Google’s Android Auto platform. Back in 2021, the tech giant was hit with an €100 million antitrust fine by Italy’s competition authority for refusing to let a third-party electric car charging […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Texas-based company said hackers accessed applicants’ SSNs and financial information © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo has closed its inaugural European fund at €1.8 billion ($1.9 billion), through which it plans to take equity stakes in mid-sized software companies across the continent. Europe has no shortage of homegrown venture capital (VC) funds — the likes of Atomico and Cherry Ventures have closed early and growth-stage funds […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Billy McFarland is back, with Fyre Festival 2. Scheduled to take place in Isla Mujeres, Mexico from May 30 to June 2, tickets just went on sale, ranging from $1,400 to a truly brazen $1.1 million — even though no artists have been confirmed, and McFarland himself isn’t sure if he can legally leave the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

WordPress.com owner Automattic last year acquired the multi-service messaging app Beeper for $125 million and said it would merge it with Texts.com, an earlier acquisition in the same category. Now, Beeper is releasing the first set of redesigned apps for iOS and desktop in beta after the merger. In a blog post, Beeper said that […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The U.K. government wants to move full steam ahead on big plans to use and build AI across the country, but not everyone is marching to the beat of its drum. On Monday, a group of 1,000 musicians released a “silent album”, in protest of planned changes to copyright law — changes the artists say […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Ofcom, the U.K.’s internet safety regulator, has published another new draft guidance as it continues to implement the Online Safety Act (OSA) — the latest set of recommendations aim to support in-scope firms to meet legal obligations to protect women and girls from online threats like harassment and bullying, misogyny, and intimate image abuse. The […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In a bold move last month, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post, telling President Trump that “America must win the AI war.” The statement sparked mixed reactions, as seen during Wang’s appearance Sunday during the opening night of Web Summit Qatar. When Wang’s interviewer Axios’s Felix Salmon […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anthropic’s next funding round is reportedly growing larger. Anthropic, which makes the AI chatbot Claude, is finalizing a $3.5 billion fundraising round that values the company at $61.5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. Anthropic initially set out to raise $2 billion, but investors have now agreed to a larger tranche, per the WSJ. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Edtech company Chegg has sued Google claiming that the tech giant’s AI summaries of search results have hurt Chegg’s traffic and revenue. In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Chegg accuses Google of unfair competition — specifically reciprocal dealing, monopoly maintenance, and unjust enrichment. Google, Chegg claims, forces […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Do you sometimes refer to X by its old name, Twitter? That’s okay. Even Elon Musk, the man who changed Twitter’s name to X, still occasionally refers to the social media platform he runs as Twitter. “Twitter added far more features with fewer people,” said Musk in a post on X Monday. The owner of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani’s appeals to overturn their fraud convictions and reduce their prison sentences were denied Monday by the Northern District Court of California, which also refused to soften their $452 million joint restitution order. Holmes, the founder of Theranos, and Balwani, its former COO, were convicted in separate trials in 2022 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple Fellow Phil Schiller, the executive in charge of leading the App Store, testified in court on Monday that he had originally raised concerns about the 27% commission the iPhone maker planned to charge app developers on any purchases made outside the App Store. In addition to being a potential compliance risk, he suggested that […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk surveyed his followers on X — the platform he spent $44 billion to buy — asking whether federal employees should be required to send his team an email with a list of five things they accomplished this week. With the yes votes totaling over 70%, Musk followed through. Federal employees […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A complete list of all the known layoffs in tech, from Big Tech to startups, broken down by month throughout 2024. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anthropic used Pokémon to benchmark its newest AI model. Yes, really. In a blog post published Monday, Anthropic said that it tested its latest model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, on the Game Boy classic Pokémon Red. The company equipped the model with basic memory, screen pixel input, and function calls to press buttons and navigate around the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

SpaceX said Monday that last month’s Starship explosion was brought on by a cascading series of events caused by propellant leaks — a problem the company says has been addressed ahead of an eighth test flight that could happen as early as Friday. The spaceflight company is still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Music streamer SoundCloud announced a partnership with entertainment company Live Nation today, allowing artists on its platform to list Ticketmaster and Universe events on their profile in a customized way. The company said it would create more promotion opportunities for artists in the future in partnership with Ticketmaster through a new promotion program but didn’t […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Khosla Ventures, a firm known for early investments in OpenAI, is raising $3.5 billion across three funds, the Wall Street Journal reported. That target is 17% larger than the firm’s previous 2023 fund haul of $3 billion.   About half of the new capital will be allocated to its ninth core venture fund. The remaining money will […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

After launching automatically generated captions for videos last year, Google Drive is now launching searchable video transcripts. Google announced that starting Monday, Drive users can now view and search transcripts for their videos. The new feature gets rid of the need to upload a video’s audio to a transcription service like Otter. Transcripts will appear […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anthropic is releasing a new frontier AI model called Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which the company designed to “think” about questions for as long as users want it to. Anthropic calls Claude 3.7 Sonnet the industry’s first “hybrid AI reasoning model,” because it’s a single model that can give both real-time answers and more considered, “thought-out” […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, released Grok 3, its long-awaited flagship AI model, last week. Grok 3 powers the Grok chatbot apps for mobile and the web, as well as the Grok experience on the Musk-owned social network X. Given that there’s so much competition in the AI chatbot space these days, it wasn’t a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

DeepSeek has gone viral. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts (and Google Play, as well). DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Robinhood on Monday said that the SEC has closed its investigation into Robinhood’s crypto unit and will not pursue action. This follows Coinbase saying on Friday that the SEC has dropped its lawsuit against it. The SEC, under former chair and crypto hawk Gary Gensler, was looking into a number of crypto exchanges over how […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AI-powered search engine Perplexity says it’s building its own web browser. In a post on X on Monday, the company launched a signup list for the browser, which isn’t yet available. It’s unclear when it might be — or what the browser look like, even. But we do have a name: Comet. “Just like Perplexity […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Today marks three years since Russia’s illegal, unprovoked, and brutal invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian people have heroically fought the war with grit and determination, but they have also, against the odds, innovated on and off the battlefield.  In addition to establishing a defense tech initiative called BRAVE1, the country has also hosted tech conferences like […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TikTok, including its Chinese counterpart Douyin, in 2024 became the first non-game app to reach $6 billion in in-app purchase revenue in a year. According to a new report from app intelligence provider Sensor Tower, TikTok also generated a record high of $1.9 billion in gross in-app purchase (IAP) revenue in the fourth quarter of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Australian government followed the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom in taking action against the Russian cybersecurity giant © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

North Korea is behind the massive crypto hack, according to several blockchain monitoring firms and a well-known researcher © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Pre-Series A founders, this is your moment! If you’re ready to showcase your game-changing innovations on a global stage, the battlefield awaits. Applications for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 — the premier startup pitch competition — are officially OPEN. This is your shot to shine! Step onto the global stage and showcase your groundbreaking startup to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta is phasing out its third-party fact-checking programs in the U.S. while it reintroduces a bonus program for creators, which pays them for viral content. The timing of these changes at Meta could intensify the prevalence of misinformation, according to ProPublica. In the past, content creators could not monetize posts that fact-checkers deemed false; but […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.