Charlie Javice, the founder of student loan application startup Frank that was purchased by JP Morgan for $175 million, was found guilty on Friday of defrauding the bank by greatly inflating the customer count. After a five-week trial, the jury found Javice guilty, agreeing with...
Social platform X struggled after Elon Musk took over, but its fortunes improved dramatically after US President Donald Trump won reelection. Now it will be become part of Musk's AI startup xAI....
Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has acquired his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, he announced in a post on X Friday. “xAI has acquired X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B...
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week reminded us that creative accounting doesn’t only happen in Hollywood. Some hopes were dashed, but...
This week, OpenAI launched a new image generator in ChatGPT, which quickly went viral for its ability to create Studio Ghibli-style images. Beyond the pastel illustrations, GPT-4o’s native image generator significantly upgrades ChatGPT’s capabilities, improving picture editing, text rendering, and spatial representation. However, one of...
Lucid Motors plans to resume customer deliveries for its new all-electric Gravity SUV at the end of April. Getting the Gravity into customer hands is a big milestone for Lucid, whose success will hinge on being able to offer vehicle types popular with American drivers....
OpenAI is reportedly nearing completion of a massive $40 billion funding round, with SoftBank leading the way. But this week, it wasn’t just the company funding news making headlines — its new image generator went live in ChatGPT, with capabilities including the ability to turn...
YC-backed startup Taxo has raised a $5m seed round to save doctors time and money on admin work....
Researchers looked inside the chatbot’s “brain.” The results were surprisingly chilling....
The brother goes on vision quests. The sister is a former English major. Together, they defected from OpenAI, started Anthropic, and built (they say) AI’s most upstanding citizen, Claude....
Krafton, known for its titles PUBG and BGMI, has acquired a controlling stake in 12-year-old Indian mobile gaming studio Nautilus Mobile....
AI web crawling bots are the cockroaches of the internet, many developers believe. FOSS devs are fighting back in ingenuous, humorous ways....
Certification platform Certiverse raised an $11 million Series A led by Cherryrock Capital, it announced this week. The company was founded by Ruben Garcia, Pablo Meyer, and Federico Lopez in 2023. It lets organizations develop certification exams at, its founders say, far less cost than...
This week on Uncanny Valley, our hosts ask what impact religion will have on Silicon Valley....
HoneyBook, a startup last valued in late 2021 at $2.4 billion, told TechCrunch that it hit $140 million annualized recurring revenue (ARR). This makes HoneyBook one of the few startups with peak-VC-era valuations to report their financials after the market cooled. Many startups that raised...
When Twin came out of stealth in January 2024, AI agents were more of a theoretical concept than a reality. Today, the Paris-based company is releasing an automation agent in partnership with Qonto, the fintech startup that offers business bank accounts to more than 500,000...
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...
As Elon Musk continues to expand his political power in the US, his mother has repeatedly traveled to China to speak at events, model for Chinese brands, and promote Tesla....
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...
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...
Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go....
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.”...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
One academic who reviewed the dataset said it was "clear evidence" that China, or its affiliates, wants to use AI to improve repression....
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...
According to Bradley Tusk, co-founder and managing partner of Tusk Venture Partners, venture capital has been “effectively dead for the last four years.” A self-proclaimed “Fixer,” Tusk recently made the decision not to raise a fourth fund. Instead, he decided to go back to his...