11-21-24 -

Bill to ban social media use by under-16s arrives in Australias parliament
Legislation to ban social media for under 16s has been introduced in the Australian parliament. The country’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, confirmed the plan to curb the use of social media by kids earlier this month, and the bill ...

11-21-24 -

Lighthouse, an analytics provider for the hospitality sector, lights up wit...
Here is yet one more sign of the travel industry’s noticeable boom: a major growth round for one of the B2B startups servicing it. Lighthouse, a data analytics platform for hotels and others in the hospitality industry, has closed a Series C of ...

11-20-24 -

DOJ: Google must sell Chrome to end monopoly
The United States Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should divest its Chrome browser as part of a remedy to break up the company’s illegal monopoly in online search, according to a U.S District Court of the District of C...

11-20-24 -

WhatsApp will finally let you unsubscribe from business marketing spam
WhatsApp Business has grown to over 200 million monthly users over the past few years. That means there are tons of businesses sending messages to users — and some of these messages could be considered as spam. For customers, the only option wa...

11-20-24 -

OneCell Diagnostics bags $16M to help limit cancer reoccurrence using AI
OneCell Diagnostics has secured $16 million in a Series A round as it aims to limit cancer recurrence using AI advancements along with scientific ways. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

11-20-24 -

Indias Arzooo, once valued at $310M, sells in distressed deal
Arzooo, an Indian startup founded by former Flipkart executives that sought to bring “best of e-commerce” to physical stores, has sold its assets in distressed sale to Moksha Group. The deal follows Arzooo engaging with several...

11-20-24 -

OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in NY Times copyright lawsuit
Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, which are suing OpenAI for allegedly scraping their works to train its AI models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data potentially relevant to the case. Earlier this fall,...

11-20-24 -

Hyundai reveals the Ioniq 9, its biggest EV to date
Hyundai revealed Wednesday the new Ioniq 9, an all-electric three-row SUV — and its largest EV to date — based on the SEVEN concept that we saw in 2021. (Look, nobody said car-naming protocol had to make sense.) The SUV, which made its debut a...

11-20-24 -

Nvidias CEO defends his moat as AI labs change how they improve their AI models
Nvidia raked in more than $19 billion in net income during the last quarter, the company reported on Wednesday, but that did little to assure investors that its rapid growth would continue. On its earnings call, analysts prodded CEO Jensen Huang a...

11-20-24 -

Reddit appears to be back after a 4-hour-long outage
Social media platform Reddit experienced an outage this afternoon at around 12:20 p.m. PT (or possibly even earlier), resulting in thousands of users being unable to access its website and app. After four hours, it appears to be working again. Red...

11-20-24 -

Snowflake snaps up data management company Datavolo
Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to acquire Datavolo, a data pipeline management company, for an undisclosed sum. Snowflake unveiled the deal at the close of the market bell on Wednesday, when it also announced its Q3 2025 earnings. Its closing is...

11-20-24 -

Solar power magnate Gautam Adani and others indicted over alleged $250M bribe...
Billionaire Gautam Adani and several executives at his company, the Indian conglomerate Adani Group, have been indicted over an alleged scheme to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials in exchange for contracts to a 12 gigawatt s...

11-20-24 -

PDF to Brainrot study tools are a strange iteration on a TikTok trend
Several AI-based study tools are capitalizing on a “PDF to Brainrot” trend, which will read the text of a document you upload over “oddly satisfying” videos, like ASMR clips of mixing paint and cutting soap,...

11-20-24 -

Fusion startup Tokamak Energy attracts $125M for its egg-like reactor design
Startups pursuing fusion power have benefitted from AI's insatiable thirst for electricity. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

11-20-24 -

Another VC-backed fintech, Earnin, faces crackdown over allegedly predatory l...
The attorney general for the District of Columbia is suing instant payday loan fintech Earnin for “deceptively marketing and providing illegal high-interest loans,” the AG alleges. Earnin allows its users to get loans against paychecks. It adv...

11-20-24 -

Reddit appears to be back after a four-hour-long outage
Social media platform Reddit is experiencing an outage this afternoon, resulting in thousands of users being unable to access its website and app. Reddit confirmed that it’s currently investigating the issue, according to its status page. We dis...

11-20-24 -

FTX CTO Gary Wang avoids prison time
Not every former top FTX executive is heading to prison. Gary Wang, former FTX chief technical officer, was spared prison time by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan today. Judge Kaplan praised Wang’s cooperation with federal authorities. W...

11-20-24 -

US charges five accused of multi-year hacking spree targeting tech and crypto...
The five alleged hackers are accused of stealing millions of dollars in crypto, and corporate data from several victims all over the world. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

11-20-24 -

May Mobility to test driverless shuttles in Ann Arbor
May Mobility is slowly advancing its driverless capabilities. The startup this week launched a small-scale deployment of autonomous shuttles, which will drive themselves along a fixed route without a human safety driver present. May will initially...

11-20-24 -

Benchmark invests $19M in New Lantern, a smarter way for radiologists to use AI
Shiva Suri gained a unique perspective into how radiologists work when he quarantined and shared a home office with his mom, a well-regarded radiologist. “I watched her work day in and day out, and she was wasting about seven to eight ho...

11-20-24 -

Led by Anduril, defense tech funding sets a new record this year
Defense tech startups have raised almost $3 billion so far in 2024, surpassing the previous record from 2022 of $2.6 billion.  © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

11-20-24 -

Messenger gets HD video calls, AI backgrounds, and more
Meta is introducing new features for Messenger, its messaging app, including AI-powered noise suppression. Messenger is getting HD video calls and voice isolation, both of which can be enabled via the call settings menu. HD calls are now the defau...

11-20-24 -

DuckDuckGo calls for EU to widen its Digital Markets Act probe of Google
Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has urged the European Union to widen its Digital Markets Act (DMA) investigation into Google, claiming the search giant is in breach of several areas where the bloc has yet to formally probe the company&am...

11-20-24 -

This Week in AI: Congressional commission warns of Chinese AGI
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. America’s AI war with China is intensifying — or at least, the rhetoric around it is. On Tuesday, a U....

11-20-24 -

H, the AI startup that raised $220M, launches its first product: Runner H for...
H, the Paris startup founded by Google alums, made a big splash last summer when, out of the blue, it announced a seed round of $220 million before releasing a single product. Three months later, still without a product, that splash started to loo...

11-20-24 -

As Bluesky soars, Threads rolls out custom feeds globally
As X competitor Bluesky takes off, topping 20 million users, Meta’s own Twitter-like app, Instagram Threads, has begun rolling out a new feature called custom feeds, to its global audience. Hoping to capitalize on user demand for more pe...

11-20-24 -

Federal prosecutors have charged another Forbes 30 Under 30 alum with fraud
The FBI unsealed an indictment yesterday that alleges Joanna Smith-Griffin, founder of the AI startup AllHere Education, engaged in “securities fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft in connection with defrauding investors” out of ne...

11-20-24 -

A Chinese lab has released a reasoning AI model to rival OpenAIs o1
A Chinese lab has unveiled what appears to be one of the first “reasoning” AI models to rival OpenAI’s o1. On Wednesday, DeepSeek, a quantitative trader-funded AI research company, released a preview of DeepSeek-R1, w...

11-20-24 -

TV Time points to Apples significant power over devolpers after being removed...
TV Time, a popular TV and movie tracking and recommendations app with more than 30 million registered users, disappeared from Apple’s App Store for several weeks, leading to questions about its future from the app’s avid fan ba...

11-20-24 -

TV Time points to Apples significant power over developers after being remove...
TV Time, a popular TV and movie tracking and recommendations app with more than 30 million registered users, disappeared from Apple’s App Store for several weeks, leading to questions about its future from the app’s avid fan ba...

11-20-24 -

Comcast spins off its cable channels into separate company as it looks for gr...
Cable television has long been viewed as a stagnant business, showing little promise for growth over the years. However, Comcast believes it has found a new growth opportunity. On Wednesday, the company announced that it’s spinning off NBCUniver...

11-20-24 -

Chinese AV startup Pony AI boosts its IPO goal to $260M
Pony AI, the Chinese autonomous vehicle startup that’s looking to go public on the Nasdaq stock exchange, now wants to raise around $260 million, according to a new regulatory filing. That’s up from its previous target of aroun...

11-20-24 -

Amazon debuts its largest Echo Show yet
Amazon on Wednesday introduced the Echo Show 21, its largest Echo Show yet. The smart display comes with double the viewing area of the existing Echo Show 15, which is also getting an upgrade. The two new devices have better audio quality than the...

11-20-24 -

Riding high on open source ERP, Odoo raises $527M via secondaries, lifting it...
Belgium-based Odoo decided to use open-source tools as a way to attack the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software market, going up against giants like SAP. Fast forward a couple of decades and it’s now picking up €500 million in secondary...

11-20-24 -

YC-backed Four Growers builds robots to help solve greenhouse labor shortages
When Brandon Contino and co-founder Dan Chi were developing Four Growers’ produce-harvesting robots, they practically lived in a greenhouse for an entire year. They coded at a small desk tucked in the back corner and discovered that fert...

11-20-24 -

Raven Space Systems opens up a whole new category of industrial 3D printing
Manufacturing has been one of the hottest categories in venture this year, but there are still many innovative materials and processes yet to scale. One example is thermoset composites, materials widely used in aerospace and defense due to their h...

11-20-24 -

Federato fixes insurance risk analysis with AI, raises $40M
Insurance has been fertile ground for artificial intelligence innovation, working as it does at the nexus of giant datasets, risk assessment, predictive analytics, fintech and customer service. Federato, a startup riding that momentum, has now rai...

11-20-24 -

Converge Bios everything store for biotech LLMs brings in $5.5M seed
AI is finding its way into every corner of biotech and pharmaceutical research, but like other industries, it’s never quite as straightforward to implement as one would like. Converge Bio has built a tool for companies to make their biol...

11-20-24 -

Data center monitoring firm LogicMonitor raises $800M at a $2.4B valuation
As companies’ server infrastructure grows, they often run into challenges keeping tabs on the health of their various assets, like their cloud and local data centers. Monitoring tools, also known as observability tools, can help — but ...

11-20-24 -

LogicMonitors massive $800M raise shows AI is driving the demand for data cen...
As companies’ server infrastructure grows, they often run into challenges keeping tabs on the health of their various assets, like cloud instances and local data centers. Monitoring tools, also known as observability tools, can help — ...

11-20-24 -

Current AI scaling laws are showing diminishing returns, forcing AI labs to c...
AI labs traveling the road to super-intelligent systems are realizing they might have to take a detour. “AI scaling laws,” the methods and expectations that labs have used to increase the capabilities of their models for the la...

11-20-24 -

Fintech giant Finastra confirms its investigating a data breach
An incident disclosure shared with Finastra's banking and financial customers confirms a hacker stole files from a company system. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

11-20-24 -

Portugals Tekever raises $74M for dual-use drone platform deployed to Ukraine
Dual-use drone startup Tekever has raised €70 million ($74 million) to develop its product and expand into new markets, specifically the U.S.. The news is part of a trend of smaller tech-driven startups moving into markets normally dominated by ...

11-20-24 -

UK crashes out of global top 50 supercomputer ranking
The U.K. no longer has a supercomputer in the top 50, according to new data from the Top500 project, which ranks the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems globally. The country’s current national supercomputer system, Archer...

11-20-24 -

UK open to social media ban for kids as govt kicks off feasibility study
The U.K. government is not ruling out further beefing up existing online safety rules by adding an Australian-style ban on social media for under 16s technology secretary, Peter Kyle, has said. Back in the summer the government warned it may tough...

11-20-24 -

OpenAI releases a teachers guide to ChatGPT, but some educators are skeptical
OpenAI envisions teachers using its AI-powered tools to create lesson plans and interactive tutorials for students. But some educators are wary of the technology — and its potential to go awry. Today, OpenAI released a free online course designe...

11-19-24 -

You have a few hours left to bid on this burned-out husk in San Francisco
Houses in San Francisco are notoriously expensive, with the average home price currently hovering around $1.26 million. Maybe it’s no wonder then that a fire-ravaged shack priced at $299,000 in one of San Francisco’s southernmost neighborhoods...

11-19-24 -

Ben Lings Bling Capital has already nabbed another $270M for fourth fund
Bling Capital, one of the more prolific and well-connected seed VC firms, has nabbed another $270 million for a new flagship, fourth fund. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

11-19-24 -

SpaceX launches Starship for the sixth time with Trump on site to watch
SpaceX conducted the sixth flight test of its massive Starship rocket on Tuesday afternoon, and although the company did not replicate the history-making booster catch, the company did welcome a very special guest: President-elect Donald Trump.&am...

11-19-24 -

Apple says Mac users targeted in zero-day cyberattacks
Apple said the security update for Macs, iPhones, and iPads is "recommended for all users." © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.