Despite the tight venture capital market, unicorns are still being created every month. Using data from Crunchbase, CB Insights, and PitchBook, TechCrunch tracked down the newly minted unicorns so far this year. The list includes Elon Musk’s xAI, which is already valued at a staggering $24 billion, as well as a good number of other … Read more
Afore Capital, a firm that claims to be the largest dedicated pre-seed investor, was founded on the idea that the first check into a new startup should be larger than what most accelerators and early-stage investors were offering. When Afore raised its third $150 million fund in 2022, the firm wrote checks ranging from $1 … Read more
The Federal Trade Commission announced on Thursday that it will launch a public inquiry into “censorship by tech platforms,” soliciting comments from people who feel they have been demonetized, banned, or otherwise censored due to their speech or affiliations. “Tech firms should not be bullying their users,” said FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson in a statement. … Read more
On a cool morning last November, 800 people gathered before sunrise in a South Burlington hangar to witness the maiden flight of Beta Technologies’ first electric aircraft to be built on its new scaled production line. Kyle Clark, Beta’s enigmatic founder and CEO, piloted the Alia CX300 — one of the startup’s two aircraft models … Read more
OpenAI said on Friday that it is rolling out Operator, its so-called AI agent that can perform tasks on behalf of users, for ChatGPT Pro subscribers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the U.K., and more countries. OpenAI said Operator will be available in most places where ChatGPT is available, apart from … Read more
Road rage has been around for a while. A newer phenomenon that’s cropping up is EV charging rage — the feeling when a fellow EV owner cuts the line to grab one of the only working charge ports. It’s common enough that people posted altercations between EV drivers on social media and forums. In at … Read more
Meta announced in a blog post on Thursday that it’s now accepting sign-ups for its Community Notes program on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The announcement follows Meta news last month that it’s going to end its third-party fact-checking program and is instead moving to a Community Notes model similar to the one at X. In … Read more
A security vulnerability in a pair of phone-monitoring apps is exposing the personal data of millions of people who have the apps unwittingly installed on their devices, according to a security researcher who found the flaw. The bug allows anyone to access the personal data — messages, photos, call logs, and more — exfiltrated from … Read more
Electric trucking startup Nikola is hoping to sell what remains of its whole business as early as April, lawyers for the company told a judge Thursday during the first hearing of its bankruptcy case in Delaware. The lawyers claimed Nikola already has at least three interested buyers (who they did not name) and that the … Read more
There is a whole shady industry for people who want to monitor and spy on their families. Multiple app makers market their software — sometimes referred to as stalkerware — to jealous partners who can use these apps to access their victims’ phones remotely. Yet, despite how sensitive this data is, an increasing number of … Read more