Wind and solar power have become so cheap to install, and at times so abundant, that utilities don’t know what to do with it all. Sometimes they’ll even pay the owners of other power plants not to generate electricity. In response, scientists and engineers have been racing to find inexpensive ways to store that power
Month: August 2024
In 2020, Kathryn Wu launched a side hustle while she was working as a product engineer at Pinterest. Wu started a milk tea company, OhTea, with the hopes of connecting with local grocery stores and gift shops to get them to carry the tea. She quickly realized how difficult it was to not only be
AI giants like Anthropic, OpenAI and Stability AI have faced a lot of heat over how they’ve scraped data and rode rough-shod over others’ intellectual property when training and operating their foundational models. Now, a startup called Story — that’s announcing $83 million in funding — is bidding to rebalance the scales with a blockchain-based
Meet Starpath, a startup that wants to make it possible for you to live on Mars one day. Starpath is building robots that it hopes will be able to autonomously mine liquid oxygen from the moon. That liquid oxygen can then be used to develop fuel for spacecrafts, which could make it possible for humans
Ashesh Shah, the founder and CEO of The London Fund is, as you might imagine, bullish on Bolt. The London Fund is a U.K. venture firm with “over $1 billion in cash and assets” in AUM that is leading a proposed $450 million raise for Bolt, a one-click checkout startup that has been embroiled in
Beats Studio Pro are getting one of AirPods’ best features. A firmware update, noted by 9to5Mac, is delivering multi-user audio sharing, allowing music to be streamed to multiple headphones at once. Apple regularly releases features to its AirPods line before they make their way to the Beats brand. The feature arrived on a number of
August was online publishing platform Medium’s first profitable month — ever. That’s according to Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine, who on Wednesday published a recap of Medium’s recent digital Medium Day 2024 conference. Stubblebine says that Medium had over a million members as of April, and that more members “than ever before” are subscribing to the
FireHydrant, an NYC incident management startup that launched in 2019, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Blameless, a former competitor. The companies did not share the purchase price. Both companies help SREs (site reliability engineers) deal with the daunting job of keeping software and websites up and running. When things go wrong, they help
Tick-tock! We’re in the last 3 days to save up to $600 on TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 tickets. Lock in these low prices before August 23 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Be part of the 10,000+ innovators, founders and investors gathering at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 28-30. Disrupt 2024 is your chance to scale
Ring announced on Wednesday the next generation of its Battery Doorbell. For $100, customers get extended battery life, color night vision, a head-to-toe view of visitors and a new push-pin mounting system. Head-to-toe HD video was previously only available with the Doorbell Plus and Pro models. Now, according to Ring, the Battery Doorbell provides a
Zomato, the Indian food delivery giant, has acquired the entertainment ticketing business of financial services firm Paytm for $244.1 million, signaling a strategic move to enhance its “going out” offerings. The acquisition, among the largest M&A deals among new-age Indian tech companies, encompasses Paytm’s ticketing services for movies, sports, and events. As part of the
Fabric Cryptography, a hardware startup by MIT and Stanford dropouts (and married couple) Michael Gao and Tina Ju, wants to make modern cryptographic techniques like zero-knowledge proof (which lets you prove things without giving up exactly what you know) and fully homomorphic encryption (which enables you to work with encrypted data without decrypting it) ubiquitous.
SleekFlow, a Singapore- and Hong Kong-headquartered social commerce platform that has built a conversational AI suite for customer engagement targeted to Asian markets, said Wednesday it had secured a further $7 million in funding. The money will be used to continue developing its AI, as well as penetrate deeper into Southeast Asia and the Middle
The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked a new wave of AI companies. It also brought attention to the companies that were already building in the space like Etched. Etched co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti said on a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Found podcast that his company “stands on the shoulders of giants.” While
Parker Conrad, founder of Rippling, an HR startup valued at $13.5 billion, shared some interesting thoughts about AI during a recent appearance on our Found podcast. “No one actually wants to chat with their HR software beyond the sort of novelty of like, oh, my gosh, it responds to me,” he said. He also thinks
Life sciences investor BEVC is raising a $25 million fund aimed at climate-related startups, according to an SEC filing. BEVC is new on the scene, having been founded just last year in Berkeley, Calif. Its three co-founders all have backgrounds in the life sciences, and its first two investments, Radar Therapeutics and Insamo, were also
A refurbished third-generation Nest Learning Thermostat was one of the first things I picked up upon moving into my first house last month. As a longtime New York City apartment dweller, I’d largely observed the device from afar, wondering how a thermostat of all things became foundational to Google’s hardware play. My timing could have
Construction companies deal with a lot of documents — so many that it can be difficult to process and manage them all. According to one recent survey, a third of construction professionals found accessing documents to be a challenge in completing a project, while a fourth said that inaccurate project paperwork has contributed to a
The countdown continues! You have 4 days left to lock in your TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 tickets at the discounted rate. Don’t miss the chance to save up to $600 — offer ends August 23 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Join 10,000+ enthusiastic startup leaders, founders, and investors from October 28-30 at Moscone West in San Francisco.
Until recently, saving the world usually didn’t involve turning a profit. But as the world has warmed, a range of startups and investors have emerged that have squared the circle, making a clear business case for reducing humanity’s impact on the planet. We’re excited that Rebecca Hu, co-founder and CEO of Glacier; Allison Wolff, co-founder
The United States Department of Justice filed a major lawsuit against Live Nation-Ticketmaster in May, arguing that the entertainment giant is acting as a monopoly. An additional 10 state attorneys general joined the suit this week, bringing the total to 39 states and the District of Columbia. The plaintiffs also filed an amended complaint, making
ElevenLabs, a startup developing AI-powered tools to create and edit synthetic voices, is making its Reader app available across the world with support for 32 languages. The app, first released in June in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, lets users upload any text content — like articles, PDF documents or e-books — and listen
Pakistani startup PostEx, offering financial and logistics services to online merchants, is set to enter new markets, beginning with Saudi Arabia this year, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. “We want to go into other markets to really disrupt them because we see the gap,” said Muhammad Omer Khan, founder and CEO of PostEx, in an interview.
Apple Podcasts can now be streamed from the web. Apple announced on Monday that its Apple Podcasts app is now available on all major web browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari) in over 170 countries. The new dedicated web experience aims to make it easier for anyone with a web browser on any device to
Few truly autonomous systems are deployed on the battlefield, but one startup is looking to change that with robotic systems that use cooperative behavior to boost troops’ intelligence and tactical advantage. Those systems are called “swarms,” and they’re basically collections of autonomous robots that can coordinate their actions. Swarm robotics have been the stuff of
OpenAI and Anthropic spend billions of dollars a year training models like GPT-4 and Claude, but competitive price dumping is making the business around these platforms rather precarious. Aidan Gomez, CEO of competing AI provider Cohere, says that selling access to models is quickly becoming a “zero margin business” in a podcast appearance on Monday.
On Sunday, former President Donald Trump posted a collection of memes on Truth Social — the platform owned by his media company — that make it seem like Taylor Swift and her fans are coming out in support of his candidacy. But as new legislation takes effect, these images could have deeper implications about the
The clock is ticking! You’ve got just 5 days left to lock in discounted tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Save up to $600 on individual ticket types. This limited-time offer ends on August 23 at 11:59 p.m. PT— after that, prices go up. Disrupt 2024 is your gateway to connecting with over 10,000 driven startup leaders,
There are by now plenty of carbon accounting and emissions management platforms. However, startups tracking emissions problems have tended to go for the lowest-hanging fruit first: the direct greenhouse gas emissions from sources owned by a company. In the parlance of the climate industry these are called “Scope 1.” “Scope 2” emissions are all about
Last spring, Sweet Capital Partner Pippa Lamb accidentally auditioned for one of the hottest shows on television. Her Instagram routinely showcases snippets from her life as an investor — travels, another event, another dinner, another panel. One day, her old Oxford classmate Mickey Down, co-creator of the HBO show “Industry,” jokingly called her out for
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