timef 04/08/2025

The most severe security bug can be exploited without user interaction, per Google.

If you’re reading this, consider it your signal: the opportunity to influence the future of tech is here. TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is now accepting speaker applications. Join us on stage this October 27–29 at Moscone West in San Francisco and share your ideas with 10,000+ tech leaders, VCs, and innovators shaping what’s next. Apply to […]

Zoox, Amazon’s autonomous vehicle unit, is deploying a small fleet of retrofitted test vehicles on the streets of Los Angeles starting Tuesday – a modest, yet meaningful step as the company inches toward offering public rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco later this year.  The data-collection effort marks Zoox’s entrance into its sixth city […]

Rain, a startup offering employer-integrated earned wage access (EWA) app coupled with financial-wellness features like overdraft alerts and spending trends, has raised $75 million in an all-equity Series B round. The round was led by Prosus at a post-money valuation of $340 million. Rain plans to use the new funds to help it add credit […]

Founders, the battlefield is calling! Startup Battlefield 200 applications are now live — and the race has begun. If you’ve got a groundbreaking idea and the guts to pitch it to the world, TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is your arena. You’ll face elite VC judges. You’ll compete against 199 of the world’s most promising startups. And […]

An executive order will direct the federal government to list coal as a critical mineral and force some coal-fired power plants to keep generating electricity.

Join us for an unforgettable opportunity at TechCrunch Sessions: AI, happening at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on June 5! We’re on the lookout for enthusiastic volunteers to be part of this exciting event. If you’ve ever wondered what goes into the making of tech gatherings, now’s your chance to find out firsthand. Apply here by […]

Waymo is preparing to use data from its robotaxis, including video from interior cameras tied to rider identities, to train generative AI models, according to an unreleased version of its privacy policy found by researcher Jane Manchun Wong, raising fresh questions about how much of a rider’s behavior inside autonomous vehicles could be repurposed for […]

You voted. They rose to the top! Meet the two Audience Choice winners who’ll take the breakout stage at TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley to share their insights with 1,200 AI leaders and enthusiasts.  We sifted through hundreds of Call for Content submissions and narrowed them down to […]

Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new AI venture, Thinking Machines Lab, has gained two new prominent advisors: Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI’s chief research officer, and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher behind many of the company’s more transformative innovations. Thinking Machines Lab’s website was quietly updated with McGrew and Radford’s names sometime in March. A spokesperson […]

Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new AI venture, Thinking Machines Lab, has gained two new prominent advisers: Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI’s chief research officer, and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher behind many of the company’s more transformative innovations. Thinking Machines Lab’s website was quietly updated with McGrew and Radford’s names sometime in March. A spokesperson […]

Snapchat is introducing Sponsored AI Lenses, a new ad format that lets brands engage with consumers in an immersive way. While Snapchat has offered brands the opportunity to pay for sponsored lenses on the platform for years, now they can leverage AI-generated experiences powered by Snap’s proprietary generative AI technology. With these interactive lenses, brands […]

On Tuesday, Amazon debuted a new generative AI model, Nova Sonic, capable of natively processing voice and generating natural-sounding speech. Amazon claims that Sonic’s performance is competitive with frontier voice models from OpenAI and Google on benchmarks measuring speed, speech recognition, and conversational quality. Nova Sonic is Amazon’s answer to newer AI voice models such […]

A founder who has carved out a name for himself building products to help restaurants connect better with would-be diners has raised $50 million for his latest startup: a new take on the idea of customer loyalty.  Blackbird Labs has built a payments-meets-loyalty-meets-blockchain platform for restaurants to grow repeat business while reducing some of the […]

The startup has commissioned a demonstration unit of its organic flow battery.

Dark kitchens– also referred to as ghost kitchens, cloud kitchens, or virtual kitchens– often receive criticism for their food quality. Sizl, a cook-to-order delivery service based in Chicago, seeks to change this perception by delivering meals made with fresh ingredients in around 30 minutes flat. The company announced its recent $3.5 million seed round on […]

Meta is introducing Teen Accounts to Facebook and Messenger. The feature, which automatically enrolls young users into an app experience with built-in protections, will be available on these platforms in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada before expanding to additional regions in the future. Teen Accounts first rolled out to Instagram last September after Instagram […]

Billing itself as “Stripe for emerging markets,” Turkish Fintech Sipay has raised a $78 million Series B funding round, claiming a valuation of $875 million in the process. This round is significant, as Sipay plans to expand into markets outside of Turkey, offering additional services like remittances that Stripe currently does not offer in those […]

Apple is considering importing more iPhones from India to side-step the 54% additional tariffs on goods imported from China that U.S. President Donald Trump announced last week, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing anonymous sources. The company sees this as a short-term measure while it seeks to negotiate with the Trump administration to get an […]

IBM is releasing the latest version of its mainframe hardware that includes new updates meant to accelerate AI adoption. The hardware and consulting company on Monday announced IBM z17, the latest version of its mainframe computer hardware. This fully encrypted mainframe is powered by an IBM Telum II processor and is designed for more than […]

Retaining top AI talent is tough amid cutthroat competition between Google, OpenAI, and other heavyweights. Google’s AI division, DeepMind, has resorted to using “aggressive” noncompete agreements for some AI staff in the U.K. that bar them from working for competitors for up to a year, Business Insider reports. Some are paid during this time, in […]

On Monday, Microsoft reportedly terminated the roles of two software engineers, Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal, who protested the company’s reported dealings with the Israeli military during Microsoft’s Copilot and 50th anniversary event last week. According to an internal message viewed by CNBC, Microsoft wrote that Aboussad could have raised concerns “confidentially with your manager, […]

Amazon has upgraded its AI video model, Nova Reel, with the ability to generate videos up to two minutes in length. Nova Reel, announced in December 2024, was Amazon’s first foray into the generative video space. It competes with models from OpenAI, Google, and others in what’s fast becoming a crowded market. The latest Nova […]

Amid a morning of pandemonium on Wall Street, a popular news aggregator on X, known as Walter Bloomberg, posted a false report declaring that President Trump was considering a 90-day pause on his controversial tariff proposal. This news was not true, and yet, index funds like the Dow Jones whipsawed, rapidly rising for a brief […]

Nikola founder Trevor Milton, who was recently pardoned after being convicted of securities fraud, is trying to buy the assets of his former company out of bankruptcy, according to new court filings and a person familiar with the matter. Nikola filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February and has said it hopes to sell […]

At 11 a.m. in California last Thursday, the day after President Donald Trump declared sweeping new tariffs under what he dubbed “Liberation Day,” Ryan Petersen was live on camera, fielding questions from a virtual room packed with more than 2,300 anxious customers. The founder and CEO of Flexport, a now 12-year-old global logistics and customs […]

A Meta exec on Monday denied a rumor that the company trained its new AI models to present well on specific benchmarks while concealing the models’ weaknesses. The executive, Ahmad Al-Dahle, VP of generative AI at Meta, said in a post on X that it’s “simply not true” that Meta trained its Llama 4 Maverick […]

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives slashed his price targets for Apple and Tesla over the weekend as President Trump’s tariffs threaten to disrupt both businesses.  “The tariff economic Armageddon unleashed by Trump is a complete disaster for Apple given its massive China production exposure,” Ives said in a warning note over the weekend. “In our […]

Heron Power is raising between $30 million to $50 million for a Series A, according to a report.

Waymo is preparing to use data from its robotaxis, including video from interior cameras tied to rider identities, to train generative AI models, according to an unreleased version of its privacy policy found by researcher Jane Manchun Wong.  The draft language reveals Waymo may also share this data to personalize ads, raising fresh questions about […]

Google is bringing multimodal search to AI Mode, its Google Search experiment that lets users ask complex, multi-part questions and follow-ups to dig deeper on a topic. Users who have access to AI Mode can now tap the feature to ask questions about photos they’ve uploaded or taken with their camera. The new image-analyzing functionality […]

In a recent memo to employees, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke made a bold policy change: teams must demonstrate why AI can’t perform a job before they’re permitted to ask for more headcount and resources. “Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI,” Lütke […]