The founder of once-hyped crypto startup BitClout is facing trouble. On Tuesday, the SEC charged BitClout founder Nader Al-Naji with fraud and unregistered offering of securities, claiming he used a pseudonymous identity to avoid regulatory scrutiny while he raised over $257 million in cryptocurrency.  BitClout, a decentralized social media platform, raised from a who’s-who of
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Ever since a government experiment proved in 2022 that fusion isn’t as far fetched as it once seemed, physicists, engineers, and investors have been growing increasingly bullish on the technology’s ability to deliver on its long held — if frequently delayed — promise of providing nearly limitless amounts of emission-free power. The latest exhibit of
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AI hardware is all the rage in startup land — though receptions have thus far been mixed. Two notable examples, Rabbit and Humane, released devices to disappointing results. a16z-backed Limitless and Exor-backed Bee AI, meanwhile, are working on their own screenless AI wearables. Avi Schiffmann, a Harvard dropout who built a Webby Award-winning website that
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Perplexity AI will soon start sharing advertising revenue with news publishers when its chatbot surfaces their content in response to a user query, a move that appears designed to assuage critics that have accused the startup of plagiarism and unethical web scraping.  Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s head of business, told TechCrunch that the company was actually
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The first time I saw Google’s latest commercial, I wondered, “Is it just me, or is this kind of bad?” By the fourth or fifth time I saw it, I’d stopped wondering. It starts innocuously enough, with a father talking about how much his daughter loves Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (she “might even be the world’s number
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Samsung’s original Galaxy Flip was the phone that taught me to love foldables. Prior to the launch of the clamshell, devices were big and bulky like the Galaxy Fold. Rather than embracing portability, the goal was jamming as much screen real estate as possible into a pocketable design. The result, in the case of the
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Clutch, a marketplace for digital marketing services, has been acquired by the online social network Plaiced, Clutch’s co-founder, Madison Long, told TechCrunch.  The deal closed earlier this week for undisclosed terms.  “The creator economy is growing rapidly, we knew to remain competitive and really be able to take over market share, an acquisition would be
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Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. To get Startups Weekly in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. This week we are talking about Wiz’s bold decision, VC’s public feud, legal tech’s new capital and a16z’s close call. Let’s go! Most interesting startup stories
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Welcome back to another recap of Equity, TechCrunch’s flagship podcast about the business of startups. This episode is packed with some significant fundraises, a potentially massive acquisition falling apart and looking at what happens when a fintech company suddenly stops serving certain customers. To kick things off, Mary Ann Azevedo walked everyone through Clio’s huge
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Skip exited stealth this week to announce a partnership with outdoor clothing specialist Arc’teryx. The deal is the first to bring Skip’s MO/GO technology to market: “powered pants” that utilize a soft exoskeleton technology, developed in-house at Alphabet’s X Labs moonshot factory. MO/GO, short for “mountain goat,” is a hybrid soft/rigid exoskeleton system designed to
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The energy transition is a marathon, not a sprint. But opportunities for acceleration are growing. Swedish startup Greenely* has just spotted one. It’s closing an €8 million Series A funding round to expand its energy management platform into neighbouring Nordic countries (so around $8.7M at current exchange rates). The energy tech startup is serving around
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