timef 03/20/2025

Venture capital investment in European startups passed $52 billion last year, reflecting the market’s long-term growth trajectory and gradual stabilization after the out-sized peaks of 2021-2022 (driven largely by the COVID-19 pandemic), and the comparative slump of 2023, according to a new report. Although 2024 has seen political and regulatory turmoil, Europe’s talent pool of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch Sessions: AI kicks off on June 5 at Zellerbach Hall in UC Berkeley — and you have the power to decide who you want to see lead an impactful breakout session. We have narrowed down the impressive number of speaker applications to six incredible finalists. Now, it’s up to you to choose who you […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The company recently signed a deal with energy provider AES for three solar projects across the Midwest. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Tesla is issuing a recall for around 46,000 Cybertrucks sold to date because of an exterior steel trim panel on the side of the windshield that can peel off. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said in a filing that the piece can come off while in motion, which can create a hazard for […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On Wednesday, Spotify launched a new personalized playlist designed to help listeners discover upcoming concerts in their area. The playlist, titled “Concerts Near You,” is updated every Wednesday with 30 songs from artists performing nearby, along with full event details and ticket links. Spotify partners with ticketing platforms like AXS, DICE, Eventbrite, and Ticketmaster.  Like […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

If you’re reading this, you already know: It’s time to amplify your brand. Get in front of thousands of TechCrunch event attendees, readers, and decision-makers who can take your business further this year by exhibiting at a TechCrunch event. The perks of exhibiting: What’s in it for you Exhibiting doesn’t just elevate your brand — […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Over the last few years, developers have increasingly complained about paying fees to Apple or Google for App Store or Play Store distributions. App makers have often said that both companies make it difficult for them to earn money outside of their systems. New York-based app revenue management platform Adapty wants to change that with […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amid an ongoing regulatory battle with European privacy authorities, Meta announced on Thursday that its AI-powered virtual assistant, Meta AI, is finally launching in the European Union. The chatbot-like tool will be rolled out across Meta’s portfolio of social platforms, albeit with a more limited feature set compared to what it offers in its domestic […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TikTok is partnering with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to bring real-time Amber Alerts directly to users’ For You feeds in the United States, the company announced on Thursday. With this new feature, if an Amber Alert is activated by law enforcement and you are in the designated search area, the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Pruna AI, a European startup that has been working on compression algorithms for AI models, is making its optimization framework open source on Thursday. Pruna AI has been creating a framework that applies several efficiency methods, such as caching, pruning, quantization and distillation, to a given AI model. “We also standardize saving and loading the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A Swedish startup aiming to build a hyperscale cloud company in Europe has raised €50.6 million ($55 million) in Series A funding. Evroc, as it’s called, says it’s laying the foundations for a “secure, sovereign and sustainable hyperscale cloud to reimagine the digital future of Europe.” The announcement comes amid growing calls to create a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI is facing another privacy complaint in Europe over its viral AI chatbot’s tendency to hallucinate false information — and this one might prove tricky for regulators to ignore. Privacy rights advocacy group Noyb is supporting an individual in Norway who was horrified to find ChatGPT returning made-up information that claimed he’d been convicted for […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Michael Seibel announced late Wednesday on X that after more than 12 years at Y Combinator, he is transitioning to a “partner emeritus” role. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan shared the news separately in a company blog post, highlighting Seibel’s long history with the accelerator. Seibel first joined YC as a founder, going through the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Debt collection in emerging markets often feels outdated and can be costly — damaging borrower trust. As consumer lending surges and regulators push for fairer practices, legacy collection outfits are struggling to maintain pace. ClearGrid aims to help modernize debt collection — and recovery — with AI. The Dubai-based startup, which is emerging from stealth […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

SoftBank Group announced on Wednesday that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a chip designer founded by former Intel executive Renee James, through a $6.5 billion all-cash deal as a strategic move to broaden its investment in AI infrastructure. Ampere will be operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of SoftBank after the deal, which is expected to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Wiz’s $32 billion all-cash acquisition by Google parent Alphabet promises a colossal payday for the cybersecurity startup’s early-stage investors. The deal is a big win for Sequoia, one of the best-known VC firms, which stands to make $3 billion, about 25x the money it invested in the company, Bloomberg reported. Despite substantial returns for Sequoia’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI has launched a more powerful version of its o1 “reasoning” AI model, o1-pro, in its developer API. According to OpenAI, o1-pro uses more computing than o1 to provide “consistently better responses.” Currently, it’s only available to select developers — those who’ve spent at least $5 on OpenAI API services — and it’s pricey. Very […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Using stalkerware is creepy, unethical, potentially illegal, and puts your data and that of your loved ones in danger. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Another consumer-grade spyware operation was hacked in June 2024, which exposed thousands of Apple Account credentials. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Some users on X are turning to Grok for fact-checking, raising concerns among fact-checkers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Sequoia will shutter its D.C. office as well as part ways with the policy team there at the end of March, TechCrunch has confirmed. The news comes — and is somewhat in contrast — with the other prominent VC firms in Silicon Valley strengthening their ties with Capitol Hill and the new Trump administration. Andreessen […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Sequoia will shutter its Washington, D.C., office and part ways with the policy team there at the end of March, TechCrunch has confirmed. The news comes — and is somewhat in contrast — with the other prominent VC firms in Silicon Valley strengthening their ties with Capitol Hill and the new Trump administration. Andreessen Horowitz, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Noam Brown, who leads AI reasoning research at OpenAI, says “reasoning” AI models like OpenAI’s o1 could’ve arrived 20 years earlier had researchers “known [the right] approach” and algorithms. “There were various reasons why this research direction was neglected,” Brown said during a panel at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose on Wednesday. “I noticed […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nvidia has reportedly acquired Gretel, a San Diego-based startup that’s developed a platform to generate synthetic AI training data. Terms of the acquisition are unknown. The price tag is reportedly nine figures and exceeds Gretel’s most recent valuation of $320 million, according to Wired. Gretel and its team of roughly 80 employees will be folded […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Raj Aggarwal is leaving AWS after nearly three years as the company’s GM of generative AI and revenue acceleration, according to a LinkedIn post Aggarwal published Wednesday. “I’m proud of the pioneering work our team did in generative AI from its earliest days,” Aggarwal said in his post. “We built what might be the world’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In a new report, a California-based policy group co-led by Fei-Fei Li, an AI pioneer, suggests that lawmakers should consider AI risks that “have not yet been observed in the world” when crafting AI regulatory policies. The 41-page interim report released on Tuesday comes from the Joint California Policy Working Group on Frontier AI Models, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Newsletter platform Ghost, an open source competitor to Substack, is now connected to the fediverse, also known as the open social web. Federated apps run on the protocol ActivityPub, which powers apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Threads, Flipboard, and others, allowing posts published on one app to be seen and engaged with by those on other […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nvidia has invested in a startup founded by a former Google DeepMind senior research scientist who specialized in robotics and AI. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber made a splash at SXSW last week, showing up at her keynote event in a t-shirt that subtly poked fun at Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. Or, at least it seemed like it was subtle. But so many people appreciated the jab that users convinced Bluesky to reproduce and sell Graber’s shirt […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has added image generation capabilities to its API. Only one model is available in the API at the moment, “grok-2-image-1212.” Given a caption, the model can generate up to 10 images per request (limited to 5 requests per second) in JPG format, priced at $0.07 per image. For comparison, AI […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov said today that the service now has more than 1 billion active users. This number is up from last year’s reported 950 million monthly active users. Durov also noted that the company registered $547 million in profits last year. He had announced the company’s profitability in December but hadn’t provided any […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Social media site X’s valuation has bounced back to $44 billion, according to a new report from the Financial Times. Elon Musk purchased the platform, formerly known as Twitter, for $44 billion back in 2022. However, a report from Bloomberg states that X has raised close to $1 billion from investors in a deal that […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The judge also found that the nonprofits will “suffer imminent, irreparable harm” if they don’t gain access to their funding. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Ribbit Capital is raising $500 million for a new fund, an SEC filing seen by TechCrunch has revealed. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

NVIDIA’s GTC conference kicked off with a series of announcements highlighting its role in advancing autonomous driving technology. The chipmaker provides automakers and autonomous vehicle companies with a handful of Nvidia-branded tools to help power self-driving cars and create digital twins of factories. On Tuesday, companies including Torc, Gatik, and even General Motors announced plans […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Dataminr, a data analytics company that counts NATO and OpenAI among its customers, has raised $85 million in a combination of convertible financing and credit, Dataminr announced on Wednesday. It’s chump change for Dataminr, which closed a $475 million round at a $4.1 billion valuation in 2021. But the company has seen its fair share […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Streaming service and software maker Plex is raising its prices. The company announced on Wednesday its first price increase in a decade for its premium subscription service Plex Pass, which offers power users a variety of additional features, like offline access, themes, hardware transcoding, and other advanced settings. The service will now cost $6.99 per […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google Search and its Play Store app marketplace are suspected of breaching the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), per preliminary findings announced Wednesday by EU Commission enforcers of the bloc’s flagship market contestability law, who have been investigating the company for months. The DMA applies to a handful of tech giants, Alphabet (Google’s parent) […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The judge also found that the nonprofits will “suffer imminent, irreparable harm” if they don’t gain access to their funding. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Have researchers discovered a new AI “scaling law”? That’s what some buzz on social media suggests — but experts are skeptical. AI scaling laws, a bit of an informal concept, describe how the performance of AI models improves as the size of the datasets and computing resources used to train them increases. Until roughly a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Robots are part of an exciting new frontier in tech, but here’s the challenge: robots rely on arrays of sensors, external signals like GPS and Wi-Fi, and customized software to navigate their environments. Further, robotics often involves expensive, ready-made hardware solutions that include built-in software and sensors designed for specific tasks, like estimating relative motion. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.