timef 03/27/2025

A fledgling open-source startup that’s setting out to tackle API sprawl in the GraphQL ecosystem has secured the backing of e-commerce giant eBay. WunderGraph, as the company is called, today said it has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round of funding to “scale its open source GraphQL federation.” Investors include eBay’s VC arm […]

Mexico City-based Mendel has raised $35 million in a Series B round of funding, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. Corporate spend management platform Mendel last raised in December 2021 — a $15 million Series A round and $20 million in debt — after participating in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 cohort. With this latest capital infusion, the […]

Nintendo announced on Thursday that it is working on Virtual Game Cards, a feature that makes digitally downloaded games more portable across different devices. With the highly awaited Nintendo Switch 2 on the horizon, these Virtual Game Cards will make it easier for users to port over their existing Switch games to their new devices. […]

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership […]

Time’s running out — 4 days left to save over $300 on Founder and Investor Passes for TechCrunch All Stage! Founders, accelerate your journey. Investors, fuel their success. Join us on July 15 at SoWa Power Station in Boston, MA, for TC All Stage, where 1,200 founders and VCs come together to scale from seed […]

Google is rolling out a slew of new features — some powered by AI — across Search, Maps, and Gemini that are designed to help people plan their summer vacations. The new features arrive as users have been turning to tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT for help with planning trips. Google Search’s AI Overviews, which display […]

Abound, a go-to remittance app that was spun off by India's Times Internet, has raised $14 million in a seed round.

NHS vendor Advanced will pay just over £3 million ($3.8 million) in fines for not implementing basic security measures before it suffered a ransomware attack in 2022, the U.K.’s data protection regulator has confirmed.  It’s half the fine that the Information Commissioner’s Office had initially sought in August 2024, when the data watchdog said it […]

While you’re busy Ghibli-fying your images with ChatGPT’s new image-generation capabilities, OpenAI is out raising a ton more cash. The company is close to finalizing a new $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, according to a report from Bloomberg. The report noted that other funds, including the hedge fund Magnetar Capital, Coatue Management, Founders […]

It’s only been a day since ChatGPT’s new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away”. In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen AI-generated images representing […]

Nvidia is looking to get into the server rental market. The semiconductor giant is reportedly nearing a deal to acquire Lepton AI, a company that rents out servers that are powered by Nvidia’s AI chips, according to The Information. The deal is reportedly worth several hundred million dollars, according to The Information, which cited unnamed […]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on Wednesday that the rollout of ChatGPT’s viral new AI image features to free users would be delayed, citing significantly higher demand than the company expected. “Images in ChatGPT are wayyyy more popular than we expected (and we had pretty high expectations),” Altman said in a post on X on […]

The health insurance giant is the latest to remove references to diversity, equity and inclusion policies amid mounting pressure from the Trump administration.

Enterprise browser startup Island just raised a sizable funding round — one that bumps up its valuation significantly, and less than one year after its last fundraise. Dallas-based Island raised $250 million in a Series E round led by Coatue that valued the company at $4.85 billion, the startup announced today. This brings the company’s […]

The Lumon Terminal Pro — the computer used in Apple TV’s hit series “Severance” — has appeared on Apple’s retail website. When shopping Apple.com, you’ll see the new device, adorned with a red “New” label, when you click to view the available Mac computers Apple has for sale from the top-level navigation. But sorry, “Severance” […]

Silicon Valley used to take a backseat to Washington, D.C. But now, the people disrupting technology have taken the wheel at the highest echelons of government. And that’s thanks, in large part, to the Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE. Much reporting on DOGE has focused on its staffers’ ties to Musk, the billionaire bestie of […]

OpenAI is embracing rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data resides. In a post on X on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI will add support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, across its products, including the desktop app for ChatGPT. MCP is an open-source standard that […]

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has allowed Chinese investors to buy stakes as long as the funds are routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore hubs, according to reporting from ProPublica.  SpaceX is a defense contractor for the Pentagon, one that handles sensitive work like building a classified spy satellite network. Investment from China […]

One academic who reviewed the dataset said it was "clear evidence" that China, or its affiliates, wants to use AI to improve repression.

Bradley Tusk, co-founder and managing partner at Tusk Venture Partners, told TechCrunch in today’s episode of Equity that VC as we know it is dead. And it has been for the last four years.  “Maybe there’s some VC that I’ve never heard of that’s awash with liquidity the last couple of years, but we haven’t […]

Digital banking startup Mercury has raised $300 million in primary and secondary funding at a $3.5 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday. The valuation is more than double the startup’s valuation when it last raised capital – a $120 million Series B round in 2021 that valued the company at $1.62 […]

The Canadian company is developing small modular reactors. It previously raised nearly $100 million.

The proliferation of scarily realistic deepfakes is one of the more pernicious byproducts of the rise of AI, and falling victim to scams based on them is already costing companies millions of dollars — not to mention the implications these could have on national security. Today, a startup that’s built a toolset aimed at governments […]

Sez Us, a social app founded by Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, is trying to build a platform without rage-bait. Rage-bait refers to any posts that are intended to stoke controversy. This might be an intentionally controversial political take, or it can be a wholly fabricated scenario designed to farm engagement (for example, a satirical creator […]

YouTube is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts to give creators a deeper understanding of how their short-form content is performing, the company announced on Wednesday. Shorts views will now count the number of times a creator’s Short starts to play or replay. In the past, a view had been counted after a […]

Since the integration of Google Assistant for Waze on iOS in 2020, iPhone users have faced ongoing issues that the company has struggled to resolve for “over a year,” Waze wrote in a post, apologizing for the “prolonged inconvenience.”  On Wednesday, the navigation app officially discontinued the feature. Many users had previously reported on Reddit […]