The long-standing feud between rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar is heating up. Drake — via a business entity called Frozen Moments LLC — filed a petition yesterday in a New York Supreme Court accusing distributor Universal Music Group (UMG) of artificially inflating the popularity of “Not Like Us,” Lamar’s recently released “diss” track directed at
Just last year, Inflection AI was as hot as a startup could be, releasing best-in-class AI models it claimed could outperform technology from OpenAI, Meta, and Google. That’s a stark contrast compared to today, as Inflection’s new CEO tells TechCrunch that his startup is simply no longer trying to compete on that front. Between then
Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, wants to get into hardware — kinda sorta. Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s founder and CEO, posted on X yesterday that he was considering making a “simple, under $50” device to “reliably answer” questions “voice to voice.” He promised that Perplexity would “definitely” sell such a device if the post got more
Spotify on Tuesday introduced a new set of tools for authors and publishers distributing their audiobooks on its platform with the launch of Spotify for Authors. Similar to its existing efforts, Spotify for Artists and Spotify for Creators (previously Podcasters), Spotify for Authors will allow writers and publishers to track insights and analytics about their
Beyond patriotism, there’s another huge reason to join a defense startup: it pays really, really well. Thanks to The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA), we can see the total compensation that defense tech startup Anduril, valued at $14 billion valuation, pays its top employees. The act requires the company to report the top
Vikram Bhaskaran was leading creator partnerships at Pinterest when his father started showing early symptoms of ALS, a rare, terminal neurodegenerative disease. “It turned my world upside down,” Bhaskaran said. He worked during the day, and spent his evenings Googling the illness and treatment options and in Facebook groups. But Bhaskaran discovered that finding clear,
The Onion, a satirical publication, won a bankruptcy auction earlier this month to purchase conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ website, InfoWars, and other related assets. However, that sale is now in limbo after a federal judge temporarily halted the deal. On Monday, Elon Musk threw yet another wrench in the works, objecting to the transfer of
The rapidly growing social networking startup Bluesky, a Twitter/X alternative built on open web principles, revealed in a livestream on Monday how its approach to user account verification will differ from existing services, like Meta and X. While traditional social media has shifted to a pay-for-verification model, where users pay for the privilege of the
This week on found, Dom and Becca are talking with the co-founders of Alloy Women’s Health. The startup just closed a new funding round to expand its mission of fixing menopause care. Alloy founders, Monica Molenaar and Anne Fulenwider, discussed raising capital in a competitive health tech landscape, their choice to bypass traditional insurance models,
A group appears to have leaked access to Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, in protest of what they’re calling duplicity and “art washing” on OpenAI’s part. On Tuesday, the group published a project on the AI dev platform Hugging Face seemingly connected to OpenAI’s Sora API, which isn’t yet publicly available. Using their authentication tokens —
Writing the documentation that must go alongside the development of new drugs is a highly labor-intensive process: not much software is used and there’s a shortage of expert writers. Paris-based Biolevate helps medical writers go faster with a platform that uses NLP and visual document reading to assisting in writing. It’s now raised €6 million
Volta, a new startup with a team split between two headquarters in Milan and Paris, has secured a €6 million pre-seed round ($6.3 million) to develop a new vertical software-as-a-service platform focused on B2B sales. In more practical terms, the Volta team pitches its product as an equivalent to Shopify but focused on B2B transactions.
Battery tech is pivotal as the world leans into electrification to power decarbonization in the race against climate change. But rising demand is putting more attention on the limits and drawbacks of current generation lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery technology. This is where Cambridge University spin-out Molyon hopes to come in: the U.K. startup is developing next-gen
With global content consumption rising and demand for non-English content surpassing that for English movies and shows, IMAX is leveraging AI to scale localization on its original content. The entertainment and media industry grew 5% to $2.8 trillion in 2023, according to a report by PwC. The industry is expected to continue its expansion, though
When ServiceTitan dropped its S-1 notice of an impending public offering on November 18, many VCs likely rejoiced. A successful IPO by the company, which builds operating software for trade businesses, could be what the quiet IPO market needs to start shaking loose. But the timing of ServiceTitan’s IPO may not be entirely based on
Volkswagen bet big on European-made batteries a few years ago with two massive investments in Northvolt, the Swedish manufacturer. Now the automaker’s €1.4 billion stake is worth less than half that, according to Reuters. The write-downs occurred throughout the current fiscal year as the situation at Northvolt deteriorated. It’s unclear what Volkswagen’s current stake is
Want to keep up with what everyone’s talking about on alternative social media sites like Bluesky and Mastodon, but don’t have time to constantly scroll through their respective apps? A newly launched link aggregation service called Sill may be able to help. The service is similar to the older startup Nuzzel, which was ultimately acquired
Back in 2016, Hammad Syed and Mahmoud Felfel, an ex-WhatsApp engineer, thought it’d be neat to build a text-to-speech Chrome extension for Medium articles. The extension, which could read any Medium story aloud, was featured on Product Hunt. A year later, it spawned an entire business. “We saw a bigger opportunity in helping individuals and
After the European Union opened a competition investigation into Corning earlier this month, citing concerns over alleged exclusive dealing, the Gorilla Glass maker has offered a raft of changes to its contract clauses aimed at settling the probe. The U.S. company is a supplier to major electronics brands including Apple’s iPhone, and the changes could
Brightcove, a cloud platform that helps businesses manage and monetize video content, is being taken private by Italian technology company Bending Spoons in an all-cash deal valued at $233 million. The transaction prices Brightcove at $4.45 per share, translating to a 90% premium on its 60-day average. Founded out of Boston in 2004, Brightcove develops
Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold two companies for billions of dollars, collectively. Now he plans to take his food delivery and take-out business Wonder public in a couple of years at an ambitious $40 billion valuation. We talked with Lore in person in New York recently about Wonder and its ultimate aim of making
It’s not exactly a secret that Apple has explored the possibility of building a television. Before his death in 2011, co-founder Steve Jobs famously told biographer Walter Isaacson that he’d “finally cracked it,” but no full-fledged Apple TV (as opposed to the Apple TV set-top box) has emerged in the years since. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman
Midway through 2024, Mike Packer, a partner at fintech-focused QED Investors, predicted we’d already hit the bottom for funding to Latin American fintech startups, and that a bounce back was coming. While momentum hasn’t been a straight shot up and to the right ever since, it’s looking like he was right. The volume of venture
Tesla and Rivian may have resolved a lawsuit in which Tesla accused Rivian of poaching employees and stealing trade secrets. Bloomberg reports that Tesla told a California judge that the companies have reached a “conditional” settlement, and that it expects to seek dismissal of the lawsuit by December 24. Tesla filed the suit, which was
It may be hard to remember, but George Clooney and Brad Pitt co-starred in a movie, “Wolfs,” that Apple released just two months ago. On Friday, the film’s writer and director Jon Watts said Friday that a sequel is no longer happening; in a follow-up interview with Deadline, he explained that he “no longer trusted
Anthropic has raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon, and has agreed to train its flagship generative AI models primarily on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division. The OpenAI rival also said it’s working with Annapurna Labs, AWS’ chipmaking division, to develop future generations of Trainium accelerators, AWS’ custom-built chips for training AI
The European Union looks to have clinched political agreement on the team of 26 commissioners who will be implementing President Ursula von der Leyen’s policy plan for the next five years. A final vote is still pending next week, but on Thursday, Politico’s Brussels Playbook newsletter reported a deal in the European Parliament on the
The AI race is taking a detour as developers consider a new path to super-intelligent systems: test-time compute. Not sure what that means? Don’t worry, the Equity pod team breaks it down. Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Devin Coldewey and Margaux MacColl dig into the week’s tech and startup news, including what
Despite all the talk of doom and gloom about the economy, entrepreneurship is actually on the rise in the U.S.: In 2024, an average of 430,000 new business applications were submitted every month, marking a 50% rise from 2019. But the number of accountants these new businesses will need to maintain their books, file taxes,
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. If you’d like to receive this newsletter in your inbox every Friday, sign up here! The week before Thanksgiving is typically busy with announcements of all sorts, but this week has been particularly interesting. Money was flowing to big problems, like defense, cybersecurity, and
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