Month: January 2025

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Siddhartha Mukherjee, cancer researcher and author of the book “The Emperor of All Maladies,” have co-founded an AI-powered drug discovery startup, Manas AI. The company, which will initially focus on breast cancer, prostate cancer, and lymphoma, has raised $24.6 million in seed funding from Hoffman, General Catalyst, and Greylock. Manas
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Barcelona-based business travel management platform TravelPerk has raised $200 million at a hefty $2.7 billion valuation — almost double the $1.4 billion valuation at its previous fundraise last year. Alongside the raise, TravelPerk also announced it has acquired Swiss startup Yokoy to bring native expenses management into the fray. With the travel and tourism industry
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Quartz, the international business news outlet, has been quietly aggregating reporting from other outlets, including TechCrunch, in order to publish AI-generated articles under the byline “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom.”   Quartz started publishing simple AI-generated earnings reports months ago, but beginning last week, the outlet moved on to short articles. One of the 18 AI-generated articles published
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1X has acquired Kind Humanoid, the Norwegian robotics startup told TechCrunch on Monday. The deal marks a small but key consolidation for a humanoid robotics industry on the brink of a major moment in 2025. TechCrunch spoke with Kind Humanoid in October, when the then-three-person startup announced that it had enlisted famed designer Yves Béhar
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Four years after launching the (then) most lucrative crowdfunding campaign in Kickstarter’s history, Pebble abruptly ended. The hardware startup closed 2016 by filing for insolvency, before being sold off to Fitbit. The fitness-tracking giant built much of the Ionic smartwatch with help from former Pebblers, along with the company’s pioneering software stack. The first Apple
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Perplexity AI has submitted a revised proposal to merge with TikTok, in an arrangement that would give the U.S. government up to 50 percent ownership of the new entity. The Associated Press first reported on the new proposal. A source with knowledge of the bid confirmed to TechCrunch that the AP’s reporting is accurate. The
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Kodiak Robotics has officially handed off two autonomous trucks to customer Atlas Energy Solutions, marking the startup’s first commercial launch.  Atlas, a provider of proppant (i.e., sand) and oilfield logistics, received its first Kodiak-equipped trucks in December and began driverless operations in an off-road environment in West Texas’s remote Permian Basin shortly after. The company
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Angell, a French smart electric bike startup, has announced in an email to customers that the company is declaring insolvency and approaching a court to ask for judicial liquidation. “It’s over for Angell,” said company co-founder and CEO Marc Simoncini on Instagram. (He also happens to be a judge on the French version of “Shark
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Samsung on Wednesday announced the latest additions to its Galaxy S flagship smartphone line at the company’s annual Samsung Unpacked 2025. As suspected, the defining characteristic of the Galaxy S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra is the company’s continued focus on mobile AI — a fact that hardly distinguishes the consumer electronics giant from the rest
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Many nonprofits are stuck with outdated, expensive, and limited tech that hinders their ability to fund their mission or cause. While most consider adopting tech to be a priority, they’re faced with a number of blockers, including siloed data and issues with integration. Peter Byrnes, the co-founder of Fundraise Up, a Brooklyn-based fundraising platform for
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