timef 04/09/2025

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) may have to pay a fine of $1 billion or more to resolve a U.S. export control investigation related to a chip it made that was used in a Huawei AI processor, according to a report by Reuters. TSMC did not provide any further comments as it is now “in […]

Doing laundry can be a chore. It takes time and is tedious. Few of us like to do it. So it’s no surprise that startups have emerged to take that load off your back — literally. And investors are lining up to fund new and older players alike.  Eleven-month-old NoScrubs has just raised $2 million […]

Samsung has updated SmartThings, its app that lets users control the company’s IoT devices, with new home automation capabilities in an apparent bid to cross-sell more of its smart home devices and appliances to existing customers. Besides the automation features, users will get new integrations with the Samsung Health app, an intercom feature, and support […]

It’s been a tough but exciting year for 23-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of AI sales agent startup Artisan. Artisan just raised a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, Carmichael-Jack exclusively tells TechCrunch. Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others participated as well. A year […]

Hosting platform WordPress.com on Wednesday launched a new AI website builder that allows anyone to create a functioning website using an AI chat-style interface. The feature, which is being made available to WordPress users for free, is targeted at entrepreneurs, freelancers, bloggers, and others who need a professional online presence, the company says. At this […]

Instagram appears to be quietly testing locked reels that viewers would have to unlock with a code and a provided hint. The feature is a simple way to increase engagement with the creator’s content, but it could also offer creators and celebrities a way to share exclusive reels with their most dedicated fans, who are […]

After months of hearty marketing efforts and large-scale technology demos across the U.S., Nuro has secured $106 million in fresh funding to help scale its autonomous driving technology and advance commercial partnerships.  The Series E round brings Nuro’s total funding raised to $2.2 billion and its valuation to $6 billion. That’s a drop from the […]

Legal tech has come a long way, but the bulk of an intellectual property or patent lawyer’s work today is still done with spreadsheets, word processors and PDFs. A startup out of Delaware, Solve Intelligence, is using generative AI to speed up that work, believing its tech is uniquely suited to the needs of patent […]

Tessell, a startup developing a multi-cloud database-as-a-service, has raised $60 million in a new funding round led by WestBridge Capital ahead of its plans to expand its market presence and launch an AI-powered conversational database management service. As data becomes more critical than ever, many companies are struggling to manage and store it efficiently. Legacy […]

It’s been a couple of years since our last topic-focused, one-day event — but with AI transforming the tech landscape, we couldn’t miss the chance to gather 1,200 founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone shaping the future of AI for a deep dive into what’s next. On June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley, […]

Samsung said on Wednesday that it’s adding Google’s Gemini AI to its home robot Ballie through a partnership with Google Cloud. Users will be able to ask the robot different queries to get answers from Gemini, said the companies. Samsung aims to tap into Gemini’s multimodal capabilities for its robot. The Korean tech giant said […]

During its Cloud Next conference this week, Google unveiled the latest generation of its TPU AI accelerator chip. The new chip, called Ironwood, is Google’s seventh-generation TPU and is the first optimized for inference — that is, running AI models. Scheduled to launch sometime later this year for Google Cloud customers, Ironwood will come in […]

Google is releasing a new AI model designed to deliver strong performance with a focus on efficiency. The model, Gemini 2.5 Flash, will soon launch in Vertex AI, Google’s AI development platform. The company says it offers “dynamic and controllable” computing, allowing developers to adjust processing time based on the complexity of queries. “[You can […]

Google is upgrading Workspace, its suite of cloud-based productivity tools, with new AI capabilities. The suite is gaining Workspace Flows, a tool designed to automate multi-step processes such as updating spreadsheets and digging through documents for information. Flows can tap Gems, Google’s brand of custom AI-powered chatbots, to handle specialized tasks, and it can also […]

On Wednesday, Google rolled out updates to several of its first-party media-generating AI models available through its Vertex AI cloud platform. Lyria, Google’s text-to-music model, is now available in preview for select customers, and the company’s Veo 2 video creation model has been enhanced with new editing and visual effects customization options. The company has […]

Gemini Code Assist, Google’s AI coding assistant, is gaining new “agentic” capabilities in preview. During its Cloud Next conference on Wednesday, Google said Code Assist can now deploy new AI “agents” that can take multiple steps to accomplish complex programming tasks. These agents can create applications from product specifications in Google Docs, for example, or […]

Reddit Answers, the platform’s conversational AI search tool, gets an upgrade through an integration with Google Gemini. This comes over a year after Reddit expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to access its Vertex AI platform to build AI agents. Google and Reddit announced the update on Wednesday, explaining that by incorporating Gemini on Vertex AI, […]

Fashion goes in and out of style, and so, it turns out, do fashion startups. Lyst — the high-end fashion marketplace with 160 million users that was once valued at $700 million — has been acquired for just $154 million in an all-cash deal. The buyer is Zozo, a Japan-based fashion and e-commerce business. Zozo […]

The advisories say the spyware apps are used to target members of civil society who may oppose China’s state interests.

If you ever call 911 from an area that’s hard to get to, you might hear the buzz of a drone well before a police cruiser pulls up. And there’s a good chance that it will be one made by Brinc Drones, a Seattle-based startup founded by 25-year-old Blake Resnick who dropped out of college […]

Instagram head Adam Mosseri says the company is looking to improve the app’s search functionality, admitting this is an area where Instagram could do more to compete. The remarks, made on a recent episode of the “Build Your Tribe” podcast, come at a time when younger Gen Z users often turn to social apps like […]

A new company, Deep Cogito, has emerged from stealth with a family of openly available AI models that can be switched between “reasoning” and non-reasoning modes. Reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 have shown great promise in domains like math and physics, thanks to their ability to effectively fact-check themselves by working through complex problems step […]

Last week, details emerged about an application that fintech giant Stripe had submitted for a U.S. banking license. There was a lot of chatter on X about whether this meant Stripe – already the largest privately valued fintech in the world – would now be adding bank to the list of descriptions of what it […]

Jeff Bezos is funding a secretive EV startup based in Michigan called Slate Auto that could start production as soon as next year, according to multiple sources and documents that link the billionaire’s family office to the startup. Slate, which took root in another Bezos-connected company called Re:Build Manufacturing, has been operating quietly since its […]

Your 401k is suffering. The billionaires are fighting. The gamers are imperiled. Not even the penguins on McDonald Island, where no humans reside, have been spared. But at long last, 26-year-old YouTuber and chocolatier MrBeast has weighed in on President Donald Trump’s controversial plan to impose sweeping tariffs on imports. Jokes aside, the prolific YouTuber […]

On Monday, the “de-extinction” startup Colossal Biosciences announced its most ambitious results to date: the dire wolf. These are creatures that have been extinct for more than 12,000 years made famous by the HBO show Game of Thrones. These white, fluffy animals live on a 2,000-acre preserve in a location so secretive that journalists, including […]

Tech giants like Microsoft might be touting AI “agents” as profit-boosting tools for corporations, but a nonprofit is trying to prove that agents can be a force for good, too. Sage Future, a 501(c)(3) backed by Open Philanthropy, launched an experiment earlier this month tasking four AI models in a virtual environment with raising money […]

Tapestry, a new app designed to organize the open social web, is adding a valuable feature to help people who are keeping up with multiple social networks: It will now remove duplicate posts from your feed. That means if you follow the same person across social networking services like Bluesky and Mastodon, you won’t have […]