Interlagos, the venture capital firm started by former senior SpaceX leaders, is looking to raise $550 million for its first venture fund, according to regulatory filings and a confidential deck sent to prospective LPs and viewed by TechCrunch. The existence of the firm was first reported by TechCrunch in April, but almost nothing has been
When Swsh launched last year, the social app was initially designed as a poll game (similar to the Most Likely To game), where users can answer five daily questions with their friends. However, the company has completely switched gears, joining a very crowded market — photo album-sharing platforms. These types of apps have existed for
Accountants typically dread month-end and quarter-end closings. That’s because finalizing financial records for a specific period is generally a manual, error-prone and time-consuming endeavor. In 2020, Parker Gilbert (pictured above; middle) was so fed up with the tedium of managing finance and accounting at an early-stage startup that he decided to co-found Numeric, an accounting
It was the banana that did it. Brian O’Kelley, who had recently sold his previous startup, ad platform AppNexus, to AT&T for a reported $1.6 billion, was watching a lecture through MIT during COVID as part of a yearlong course on supply chain management. “There was this one slide in a lecture about the carbon
Zoom wants to turn you into an AI-animated, photorealistic avatar — but not until sometime next year. The upcoming feature, announced today at Zoom’s annual dev conference, will translate a video clip that users record of themselves into a digital clone — complete with a head, upper arms, and shoulders. Users will be able to
Health and life insurance providers face a rising volume of claims due to chronic disease and aging populations, but their processes lack scalability. AI automation can help, but it takes more tailoring than for other insurance types. Automating property and casualty insurance, for instance, gave rise to public company Guidewire decades ago, but health insurance
Advances in DNA sequencing and the vast amounts of genomic data being produced by next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology have created a startup opportunity to build software for biologists so they can more easily analyze this big data and take the next leap. It could help when it comes to developing new vaccines, cancer treatments and
The synthetic biology and precision fermentation space is a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity these days. But it’s not every day you come across a startup that’s using genetic engineering to produce natural rubber — a substance that’s challenging to reproduce in a lab because of how long its polymer is. Paris-based baCta has a proof
Tyler, the Creator dropped his hit song “911” in 2017 with the line: “Sucks you can’t gas me up, shout out to Elon Musk.” However, while performing this weekend at the Austin City Limits music festival nearby Tesla’s Texas headquarters, the Grammy-winning artist changed the latter half of the lyric to: “man, f**k Elon.” It
As we approach the final stretch before TechCrunch’s biggest event of the year — one of the most highly anticipated tech conferences for startups and VCs alike — let’s take a look at the top five reasons you won’t want to miss Disrupt 2024, set to take place at Moscone West in San Francisco from
Thoughtly co-founder Casey Mackrell had a big week. First, he got married. Then, he went viral. At his wedding reception, Mackrell needed to quickly give a colleague access to code that could only be unblocked from his laptop. His fellow co-founder Torrey Leonard seized the moment by taking a photo to capture Mackrell wrapping up
Startup employees often go on to found interesting ventures, basing their new work on the experience gained from their time building a company from scratch. But not all of those experiences are positive, and sometimes, a less-than-satisfactory exit can do more to fuel a founder’s fervor than anything else. In the case of Forward Earth’s
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Green Day’s classic pop-punk album “Dookie,” Los Angeles art studio Brain has constructed extremely lo-fi versions of the songs in various formats and is selling one-off versions of them. On the website Dookie Demastered you can also enter a drawing for $49 wireless doorbell that will play the intro
Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan sat down with Zander Brumbaugh, the 22-year-old founder of Gamebeast, a startup that offers Roblox developers tools like A/B testing and LiveOps to modify games without needing to release a new version or interrupt a user’s ongoing game. Gamebeast recently raised a $3.7 million pre-seed round, led by J2 Ventures
In 2016, when Alan originally launched its health insurance product in France, it was the first new health insurance company in the country in 30 years. Now, as Alan announces its expansion to Canada, the startup is about to break a new record: There hasn’t been a new health insurance company in Canada since 1957.
For fusion power aficionados, hitting “breakeven” is something of a Holy Grail: the point at which a fusion reaction produces more power than was required to ignite it. Only one scientific experiment, at the National Ignition Facility, has accomplished that feat, and it took over a decade of tweaking the system to achieve the monumental
That Nintendo gadget that showed up on the FCC’s site last month is sadly not the Switch 2. While the gaming giant confirmed in May that a Switch successor is, indeed, in the works, fans are going to have to settle for Alarmo. The $100 motion controlled alarm clock brings sounds from titles like Breath
Following its $40 million fundraise at the beginning of this year, streaming media company Plex announced on Wednesday it’s rolling out a new TV show and movie reviews feature, putting its app in more direct competition with other apps, like Letterboxd and TV Time. The feature will also include social networking elements, as the reviews can be
LoanSnap, an AI-powered mortgage startup, has had its license to operate revoked in Connecticut, according to the state’s Banking Commissioner. This occurred after LoanSnap violated a consent order it had entered into with the Department of Banking in May. The department revealed Tuesday that its consumer credit division opened an investigation that found multiple violations
OpenAI said in a post on X that it is opening new offices in multiple cities, including NYC, Seattle, Paris, Brussels, and Singapore, in addition to its existing locations in San Francisco, London, Dublin and Tokyo, as part of the company’s global expansion efforts. The expansion effort follows the San Francisco-based ChatGPT maker’s whopping $6.4
Cloud providers are chasing after AI unicorns, and the latest is Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs. The startup just tapped Google Cloud as its primary compute provider to train AI models, a deal that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But Li’s tenure as chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud wasn’t a factor,
As government and defense sectors increasingly lean on commercial services, opportunities for startups in dual-use technology have never been more promising. Yet, for young, agile companies, the challenge of entering such a highly regulated and traditional landscape is significant. How can emerging businesses compete with established primes for contracts and attention? And how can investors
Parents are always looking for ways that playtime can turn into a creative and educational opportunity. But for a lot of parents, engineering playful, educational projects just isn’t in the cards. KiwiCo, co-founded by Sandra Lin, is a subscription company that provides STEM-based educational toys to help children learn during fun times. Lin joined the
When you talk to a chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, your responses are largely linear. You often have to ask follow-up questions to get more information. For instance, when you are planning a trip, you might first ask the chatbot about the place and follow it up with questions on meal planning, activities, tips
Mo Alkhadra spent years of his life figuring out how to remove troublesome materials like toxic lead and radioactive waste from water. But as he progressed along his doctorate studies at MIT, he realized that if he wanted to bring his technology to market, he’d need to do something other than build a better Brita.
Learning an instrument is difficult for most people. That’s doubly the case when attempting to learn on your own. It’s the reason so many of us have dusty guitars and keyboards jammed up in our attic rafters amid the croquet mallets and badminton birdies of days past. The latest product from London-based Roli offers a
As the engine powering the world’s digital artists, Adobe has a big responsibility to mitigate the rise of AI-driven deepfakes, misinformation, and content theft. In the first quarter of 2025, Adobe is launching its Content Authenticity web app in beta, allowing creators to apply content credentials to their work, certifying it as their own. This
Middle and high schoolers are both the easiest and most difficult audience. If you’re developing a neat little video game, chances are they’re willing to download it right away. But if, like the team behind Revyze, you’re working on a learning app, good luck pitching them. And yet, the French startup has defied the odds
Lightdash, a business intelligence (BI) platform and open source alternative to Google’s Looker, is lifting the lid on a new product that allows companies to train “AI analysts” specific to individual teams’ use-cases, enabling anyone in a company to query aggregate business data. To help, the 4-year-old startup also on Tuesday announced that it has
Fledgling fintech startup OpenBB is revealing the next step in its plans to take on the heavyweights of the investment research world. The company is launching a new, free version of a product that will open its arsenal of data and financial tooling to more users. OpenBB is the handiwork of software engineer Didier Lopes,