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Today — 26 February 2025TechCrunch News

Apple iPhone 16e review: An A18 chip and Apple Intelligence for $599

26 February 2025 at 18:00

Apple delivered its latest budget handset, the $599 iPhone 16e, without pomp. There was no big event in person, nor was there one online. No journalists scrambled through hoards of colleagues to snap photos of the phone. Instead, CEO Tim Cook tweeted out that new hardware was on the way, days before Apple announced the […]

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Europe’s Relay pulls in $35M Series A after applying Asia’s model to delivery

26 February 2025 at 17:01

Being somewhat later than Europe in adopting the idea of parcel delivery, much of Asia built its delivery infrastructure around e-commerce, effectively “Uberizing” how deliveries worked down to the last mile. Think DoorDash but for parcels, not food. This is what the founders of Europe’s Relay realized and decided to bring to the region — […]

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Lonestar and Phison’s data center infrastructure is headed to the moon

26 February 2025 at 16:56

Data storage and resilience company Lonestar and semiconductor and storage company Phison launched a data center infrastructure on a SpaceX rocket on Wednesday that’s headed to the moon. The companies are sending Phison’s Pascari storage — solid state drives (SSDs) built for data centers — packed with Lonestar’s clients’ data on a SpaceX Falcon 9 […]

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Commercetools, a pioneer in ‘headless commerce’, lays off dozens of staff

26 February 2025 at 16:15

Commercetools — a “headless commerce” platform that provides APIs to companies building online storefronts — saw a major boost in its business just a few years ago, raising money at a whopping $1.9 billion valuation as the world went shopping online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and businesses rushed to improve their e-commerce […]

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Shop Circle raises $60M to encircle e-commerce with an app suite

26 February 2025 at 16:07

The boom in e-commerce post-pandemic meant shops moved online. However, some merchants ended up with dozens of separate app providers to accommodate everything from supply chains, to inventory, to marketing. The founders of Shop Circle realized this and either built or bought many such apps. The company has now raised $60 million in a Series […]

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shrugs off DeepSeek as sales soar

26 February 2025 at 15:54

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is more bullish about Nvidia's sales than ever, despite a market panic last month induced by China's DeepSeek.

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Meta’s Oversight Board is reviewing the company’s new hate speech policies

26 February 2025 at 15:53

Meta’s Oversight Board, the company’s independent group created to help with sensitive policy decisions, is preparing to weigh in on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent changes to how Facebook, Instagram, and Threads handle hate speech, Engadget reported. Zuckerberg announced an overhaul of its content moderation policies in January, shortly before the inauguration of U.S. President Donald […]

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With Alexa+, Amazon makes an intriguing play in the consumer agent space

26 February 2025 at 15:32

Amazon shared an impressive vision of an “agentic” future on Wednesday — one in which the company’s improved Alexa, Alexa+, handles countless mundane tasks, from booking restaurants to finding appliance repairmen. If Amazon can deliver, it could be the first out to the gate with a comprehensive, consumer-focused agent tool. The company hopes to marry […]

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Trump signs executive order to expand DOGE’s spending review powers

26 February 2025 at 15:32

In a newly issued executive order (EO), the Trump administration has instructed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Elon Musk-advised initiative to reduce federal spending, to create a “centralized technological system” in every agency to record contract and grant awards. As part of the ramp-up of these systems, agency employees who approved individual contract […]

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a16z hires former Republican congressman Patrick McHenry as advisor

26 February 2025 at 15:28

Former North Carolina congressman Patrick McHenry announced Wednesday that he landed a job with VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. He will be a senior advisor. His post on X said little about what the job entails, except to be advocating for startups (which a16z likes to call “little tech”) with policymakers. Andreessen Horowitz did not immediately […]

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Maternity clinic Millie nabs $12M Series A from an all-star, all female class of VCs

26 February 2025 at 15:05

Millie, a California-based maternity clinic, founded by Anu Sharma, announced the raise of a $12 million Series A by investors including RH Capital, TMV, and Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures.  Sharma was inspired to launch the company after the birth of her daughter in 2019. She faced pregnancy complications and, as the child of a […]

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Avride’s sidewalk delivery bots land in Japan

26 February 2025 at 13:09

Avride sidewalk bots will start delivering restaurant orders and groceries in central Tokyo this week through a partnership with e-commerce giant Rakuten, the latest commercial expansion by the Yandex spinout into Northeast Asia. The Austin-based autonomous vehicle startup is one of four projects under Nebius Group, a Netherlands-based company formerly called Yandex NV that sold […]

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Here are all the tech companies rolling back DEI or still committed to it — so far

26 February 2025 at 12:00

Companies around America have started cutting DEI programs and eliminating DEI commitments from public documents in response to legal and political threats from the Trump administration. Just a few weeks ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi instructed the Department of Justice to “investigate, eliminate, and penalize,” DEI programs deemed illegal in private sector companies that receive […]

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Inception emerges from stealth with a new type of AI model

26 February 2025 at 11:00

Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a “DLM” for short. The generative AI models receiving the most attention now can be broadly divided into two types: […]

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Hacked crypto exchange Bybit offers $140M bounty to trace stolen funds

26 February 2025 at 10:38

Bybit has already paid more than $4 million to bounty hunters who helped trace and freeze some of the stolen funds.

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ElevenLabs is launching its own speech-to-text model

26 February 2025 at 10:00

ElevenLabs, an AI startup that just raised a $180 million mega-funding round, has been primarily known for its audio-generation prowess. The company took a step in another technological direction by launching its first stand-alone speech-to-text model called Scribe. The startup, valued at $3.3 billion, has aided many other companies in providing speech-to-text services through its […]

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Pixel Watch 3 is getting ‘Loss of Pulse Detection’ in the US in March

26 February 2025 at 09:13

Google announced on Wednesday that it has received FDA clearance for the Pixel Watch 3’s “Loss of Pulse Detection” feature and will be launching it in the U.S. at the end of March. The feature can detect when a user’s heart stops beating due to an event like primary cardiac arrest, respiratory or circulatory failure, […]

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Hinge launches a new feature for daters to privately share details with matches

26 February 2025 at 09:13

Dating app Hinge launched a new feature called “Match Note” on Wednesday, allowing users to privately share information with matches that they haven’t shared publicly on their profile.  Users can add a Match Note by going to their profile, similar to how they can add a text prompt. The note is always visible to new […]

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Amazon Alexa+ can read, summarize and recall lengthy documents

26 February 2025 at 08:31

At Amazon’s annual Devices & Services event on Wednesday, the company introduced Alexa+, an enhanced version of its voice assistant, now powered by generative AI.  During the demonstration, Amazon showcased how users can share documents with Alexa+, allowing it to recall important details and answer questions about those documents. Mara Segal, director of Alexa, provided […]

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Amazon Alexa+ can do your grocery shopping, too

26 February 2025 at 08:29

Amazon is not giving up on making its Alexa a virtual shopping assistant. On Wednesday, the company announced that Alexa+, its revamped Alexa experience, will be able to help consumers grocery shop from home using more natural conversations and requests. The feature will work with Amazon Fresh or any other grocery partner working with Amazon, […]

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