Topic: techcrunch event
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Build Mode: TechCrunch's New Podcast for Founders
TechCrunch has launched Build Mode, a weekly podcast for early-stage founders that provides honest discussions and actionable strategies from experienced entrepreneurs and experts. The podcast, starting November 13, will tackle real startup challenges like fundraising and hiring, with J.P. Morgan...
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This $30M Startup's Dog Crate-Sized Robot Factory Learns by Watching Humans
MicroFactory has developed a compact, tabletop manufacturing system with dual robotic arms that learn from human demonstrations for precision tasks like circuit board assembly. The startup, founded by Igor Kulakov and Viktor Petrenko, was inspired by their manufacturing challenges and uses a non-...
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Sierra, Co-Founded by Bret Taylor, Raises $350M at $10B Valuation
Sierra, an AI agent startup co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, has raised $350 million in funding, reaching a $10 billion valuation led by Greenoaks Capital. The company has quickly gained hundreds of enterprise clients, including SoFi and Brex, and has raised a total of $635 million since...
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U.S. Government and Startups: A Complex Relationship
The collaboration between American startups and the federal government has deepened, providing funding and contracts in fields like AI and defense, but it also exposes startups to risks such as disruptions during government shutdowns. A recent Equity podcast highlighted that today's startups, esp...
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YouTube Music Tests AI Radio Hosts for Trivia & Commentary
YouTube Music is testing AI hosts that provide trivia and commentary about the music you're playing, aiming to create a more engaging listening experience. This feature builds on similar AI initiatives like Spotify's DJ and is being tested through YouTube Labs, initially available to a limited U....
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Meta's 'Vibes' Feed: AI-Generated Short Videos Arrive
Meta is launching "Vibes," a new feed for AI-generated short videos within its Meta AI app and website, similar to TikTok but populated entirely by AI-created content. The platform will feature personalized, algorithm-curated videos that users can create, remix, and share, with Meta partnering wi...
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Superpanel Secures $5.3M to Automate Legal Intake with AI
Superpanel, an AI platform for legal intake, has secured $5.3 million in seed funding co-led by Outlander VC and Field Ventures to support its expansion and development. The platform was founded by Julien Emery and Dingyu Zhang to automate client communication and document handling, acting as a d...
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Minute Media Acquires Indian AI Startup for Automated Sports Highlights
Minute Media, backed by BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, has acquired Indian AI startup VideoVerse to enhance automated sports highlights generation across its portfolio, including Sports Illustrated and The Players’ Tribune. VideoVerse, valued between $200–250 million, specializes in AI tools for sp...
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Augment AI Logistics Startup Raises $85M Series A from Deliverr Founder
Harish Abbott, co-founder of Deliverr, has launched Augment, an AI-driven logistics company that recently secured $85 million in Series A funding to modernize freight operations. Augment's AI assistant, Augie, automates routine tasks like tracking shipments and invoicing, reducing manual work and...
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EV Owners Face New Hurdle as Waymo's Robotaxi Fleet Tops 2,000
The electric vehicle market is facing challenges due to the transition to Tesla's charging standard and the expiration of federal tax incentives, which may reduce consumer confidence and sales. EV owners are dealing with increasing complexity from needing multiple charging adapters for different ...
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OpenAI Acquires Sky AI to Enhance Mac User Experience
OpenAI has acquired Sky AI, a natural language interface designed to enhance user interactions with Mac computers by assisting with tasks like writing, coding, and planning directly within applications. The acquisition aims to integrate OpenAI's AI deeply into Mac workflows, leveraging the Sky te...
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Zendesk AI Agent Solves 80% of Customer Support Issues
Zendesk has launched a suite of AI-driven products, including an autonomous agent that resolves 80% of customer issues independently and a co-pilot system for the remaining cases. The company's strategic shift to AI-focused support was enabled by key acquisitions, such as Hyperarc, Klaus, and Ult...
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Y Combinator's New 'Early Decision' Lets Students Graduate Before Building
Y Combinator's new Early Decision program allows student founders to secure funding and a spot in the accelerator without dropping out, challenging Silicon Valley's traditional celebration of college dropouts. The program is designed for graduating seniors, enabling them to apply, get accepted, a...
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iPhone Air's Secret Weapon: A Battery That Lasts All Day
The iPhone Air features a revolutionary battery technology with a unique two-dimensional shape, enabled by Apple's patented metal can construction for enhanced durability and design flexibility. This metal casing prevents swelling and deformation, allowing the battery to be molded to fit precisel...
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Sonair's 3D Ultrasonic Sensor: Robotic Safety Redefined
Traditional safety protocols are insufficient for robots in shared human spaces, prompting a need for new approaches like Sonair's ultrasonic sensor system. Sonair's ADAR technology uses high-frequency sound waves to create detailed 3D environmental maps, offering advantages in reliability and co...
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Kayak Co-Founder Launches Supercal to Challenge Calendly
Supercal is a new, completely free scheduling platform founded by Paul English, designed to compete with established tools like Calendly by offering robust features without cost. Its standout feature is AI-powered group scheduling that scans multiple calendars to find suitable meeting times, book...
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Rulebase: The AI Coworker for Fintech, Backed by Y Combinator
Rulebase is a fintech startup focusing on back-office automation, using AI to streamline compliance, dispute resolution, and quality assurance in financial institutions. Founded by Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, the company secured $2.1 million in pre-seed funding and has achieved significant c...
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Can't Snooze This Alarm: New App Forces Heavy Sleepers to Complete Tasks
Awake is a new iOS alarm app that requires users to complete physical or mental tasks to turn it off, helping them wake up more effectively. It includes unique features like a personalized morning briefing, social media blocking, and a sleep planning tool to optimize wake-up routines. Developed b...
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Sam Altman: Bots Are Making Social Media Feel "Fake"
Sam Altman expressed concern that the distinction between human and AI-generated content on social media has become so blurred that authenticity is now deeply compromised. He attributed this to factors like users adopting AI-like language, platform engagement incentives, and the rise of automated...
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Uber, Momenta to Launch Autonomous Vehicle Tests in Germany by 2026
Uber and Momenta plan to launch robotaxi testing in Munich by 2026, marking their first public deployment in continental Europe with human safety operators initially present. This partnership is part of Uber's broader strategy to integrate autonomous technology globally, having collaborated with ...
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Phia Founders: How AI is Revolutionizing Online Shopping
Phia, founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, is an AI-driven tool that helps online shoppers make smarter, more sustainable purchasing decisions by addressing the market gap for a digital personal shopper. The service compares prices across retailers and integrates with over 150 second-hand p...
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Brevo's $583M Funding Aims to Challenge CRM Giants
Brevo has achieved unicorn status with €500 million in funding, which it will use to challenge major CRM competitors like Salesforce and expand aggressively in the North American market. The company, which evolved from an email tool to a comprehensive platform, will invest heavily in the U.S. and...
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Meta Tests AI Assistant for Centralized Facebook & Instagram Support
Meta is launching a global, unified support center for Facebook and Instagram to streamline account issue management, featuring tools for reporting problems, account recovery, and an AI-powered search and assistant. The company credits its AI systems with improving security—reporting a 30% reduct...
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Spotify Wrapped 2025 Launches Multiplayer 'Wrapped Party'
Spotify Wrapped 2025 shifts focus from AI to interactive, social features, introducing new elements like the multiplayer **Wrapped Party** to make listening stats a shared event. New interactive features include a **Top Song Quiz**, **Listening Age** analysis, and **Wrapped Clubs** that categoriz...
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Zillow Removes Climate Risk Data After Realtor Backlash
Zillow removed explicit climate risk scores from property listings after real estate professionals complained the data was negatively impacting sales, replacing it with a more subtle link. The data provider, First Street, argues that withholding clear pre-purchase risk information transfers finan...
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Android Quick Share Now Works with iPhone AirDrop on Pixel 10
Google has updated its Quick Share feature to enable cross-platform file sharing with Apple's AirDrop, allowing Pixel 10 users to exchange files with iPhones, iPads, and Macs, with plans to expand to more Android devices. For the feature to work, iPhone users must set AirDrop to "Everyone for 10 ...
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Cavela Raises $6.6M to Slash Pre-Tariff Manufacturing Costs
Cavela, an AI-powered sourcing platform, secured $6.6 million in seed funding to help businesses automate supplier discovery and negotiation across over 40 countries, addressing challenges from shifting global trade policies. The platform uses AI agents to handle the entire supplier search proces...
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Zap Energy's New Fusion Device Achieves Record Pressure
Zap Energy unveiled its Fuze-3 fusion reactor, achieving record plasma pressure levels and advancing its goal to supply grid electricity by the early 2030s. The device compressed plasma to over 232,000 psi and heated it to 21 million degrees Fahrenheit, setting a new benchmark for sheared-flow-st...
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WisdomAI Raises $50M Led by Kleiner and Nvidia
WisdomAI, founded by former Rubrik co-founder Soham Mazumdar, raised $50 million in Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins and NVentures, following a $23 million seed round from Coatue. The platform uses AI to analyze structured, unstructured, and "dirty" data, allowing business users to ask que...
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Navan IPO Plunges 20% After SEC Shutdown Workaround
Navan's stock fell 20% on its Nasdaq debut, closing below its $25 IPO price and reducing its market valuation to about $4.7 billion, despite being the first company to use a new SEC provision for public listings during a government shutdown. The company utilized an alternative SEC pathway that al...
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Adobe Unleashes AI Assistants for Express & Photoshop
Adobe has launched AI assistants for Creative Cloud, with Express featuring a unique text-prompt mode for image creation and Photoshop incorporating a sidebar-based assistant for tasks like object selection and masking. The company is developing "Project Moonlight" to coordinate multiple AI assis...
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Prezent Secures $30M to Acquire AI Services Firms, Starting with Founder's Other Company
Prezent has raised $30 million to pursue acquisitions, starting with Prezentium, enhancing its enterprise AI presentation platform and expanding its client base in the life sciences sector. The company differentiates itself by focusing on large corporate clients and embedding presentation enginee...
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Ex-PM Rishi Sunak Joins Microsoft and Anthropic as Advisor
Rishi Sunak has accepted senior advisory roles at Microsoft and Anthropic, raising concerns from Parliament's Advisory Committee about potential unfair advantages due to his privileged government knowledge. The committee highlighted risks of these firms gaining undue influence in UK policy, espec...
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Zoox Expands Autonomous Vehicle Testing to Washington DC
Zoox, an Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company, is expanding its testing to Washington D.C., its first East Coast deployment, starting with manual mapping and transitioning to autonomous tests with safety operators. The expansion to Washington D.C. was chosen for its dense urban environment and...
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Oakland Ballers Let AI Manage the Team: The Results
The Oakland Ballers experimented with an AI manager for a game, using historical and team data to autonomously make strategic decisions like substitutions and pitching changes. While the AI performed consistently with human management, the experiment sparked controversy among fans who felt it pri...
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Atlassian Buys DX for $1B to Boost Developer Productivity
Atlassian has acquired developer productivity platform DX for $1 billion, its largest purchase to date, to enhance engineering efficiency with powerful analytics tools. DX was founded to provide meaningful productivity insights without making developers feel monitored and has grown rapidly, servi...
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Nvidia Plans $500M Investment in Self-Driving Startup Wayve
Nvidia is planning a $500 million investment in Wayve, part of a larger £2 billion commitment to the UK's AI sector, reflecting strong confidence in the region's innovation. Wayve's autonomous driving technology uses a unique data-driven, self-learning AI system that operates without high-definit...
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Irregular Raises $80M to Fortify Frontier AI Security
Irregular has raised $80 million in a funding round, valuing the company at $450 million, reflecting strong investor confidence in AI security solutions. The company, formerly Pattern Labs, uses its SOLVE framework and simulated environments to test AI models for vulnerabilities and emergent risk...
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Bumble BFF Redesign: Now Focused on Friend Groups & Community
Bumble has redesigned its BFF platform to focus on friend groups and community building, responding to younger users' desire for meaningful social connections beyond one-on-one interactions. The update integrates technology from the acquired platform Geneva, introducing a Groups tab for creating ...
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Lyft & May Mobility Launch Robotaxi Service in Atlanta
Lyft and May Mobility have launched a pilot program in Atlanta, integrating autonomous vehicles into the Lyft app for on-demand robotaxi bookings, marking Lyft's latest effort to compete in the autonomous vehicle sector. The service currently uses a limited fleet of hybrid-electric Toyota Sienna ...
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Facebook's 'Poke' Feature Is Making a Comeback
The Facebook Poke feature is experiencing a resurgence, especially among younger users, and has been upgraded with gamified elements like poke counts and reward icons to boost engagement. Meta's strategy aims to replicate the habitual interaction seen on platforms like Snapchat and TikTok, though...
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WhatsApp's New AI Feature Rewrites Your Messages in Any Tone
WhatsApp has launched an AI-powered "Writing Help" tool that allows users to adjust message tone, clarity, and engagement in real time while composing. The feature uses on-device processing with Meta's Private Processing technology to ensure message content remains confidential and is never acces...
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Nvidia Unveils Open AI Models for Autonomous Driving Research
Nvidia has launched the open-source Alpamayo-R1 model, a vision language action model designed to advance autonomous driving by enabling vehicles to process visual and textual data for better environmental interpretation and navigation. The model, built on Nvidia's Cosmos Reason architecture, aim...
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Cloudflare Outage: How a Latent Bug Caused Major Internet Disruption
A major internet disruption on Tuesday impacted platforms like ChatGPT and X, stemming from a service failure at infrastructure provider Cloudflare. The outage was caused by a latent bug in Cloudflare's bot mitigation systems, triggered by a routine configuration change, and was not a cyberattack...
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Accel Invests in Uber Rival Rapido as Prosus Increases Stake
Venture capital firm Accel has made a strategic investment in Indian ride-hailing service Rapido, with Prosus increasing its stake, facilitated by TVS Motor's full divestment of its shares for approximately $32 million. TVS Motor achieved a return on investment exceeding 152% over three years, ha...
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Trump Proposes $100,000 H-1B Visa Fee, Targeting Program That Launched Musk and Instagram
The H-1B visa application fee has been increased dramatically from $215 to $100,000 per visa, a move aimed at curbing systemic abuse and protecting domestic employment. The program allows U.S. companies to hire skilled foreign professionals for specialized roles, with an annual cap of 65,000 visa...
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Latest Updates on the US TikTok Deal
TikTok, owned by China's ByteDance, has faced years of U.S. scrutiny over data security concerns, leading to political tensions and service disruptions for American users. A proposed deal would transfer control of TikTok's U.S. operations to American investors like Oracle and Silver Lake, valuing...
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Unlock Your Codebase with Macroscope: AI-Powered Bug Fixing
Macroscope is an AI-driven platform that automates codebase management, bug detection, and provides natural language insights for engineering teams and product leaders. Founded by former Twitter head of product Kayvon Beykpour, the tool integrates with GitHub and other systems to analyze code and...
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Snap Launches Snap OS 2.0 with Native Browser & WebXR Support
Snap has launched Snap OS 2.0, a major software upgrade for its AR glasses, introducing a native browser, WebXR compatibility, and new interactive features to enhance user experience. The update includes a Spotlight Lens for spatially anchored content, a Gallery Lens for reviewing and sharing cap...
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The Golden Age of Robotics Startups Is Here (And It's Not Just AI)
Venture capital investment in robotics has surged, with $6 billion deployed in the first seven months of 2025, driven by tangible commercial successes and clearer market applications. The sector's growth was catalyzed by Amazon's 2013 acquisition of Kiva Systems, which inspired new companies and ...
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