Digital payments platform Stripe invites customers to join its management team meetings on a bi-weekly basis so it can get “candid feedback,” according to co-founder Patrick Collison. In an April 8 post on X, the fintech giant’s CEO said the company has a customer join for the first 30 minutes of the meeting, which is […]

A few years ago, Chef Robotics was hurting. But founder Rajat Bhageria turned it around by doing something that early-stage founders fear to do.

Albert Saniger, the founder and former CEO of Nate, an AI shopping app that promised a “universal” checkout experience, was charged with defrauding investors on Wednesday, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. Founded in 2018, Nate raised over $50 million from investors like Coatue and Forerunner Ventures, most recently raising […]

Several tech companies have scaled back public commitments to DEI amid a broader crackdown by the Trump administration.

In a recent appearance on Possible, a podcast co-hosted by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said Google plans to eventually combine its Gemini AI models with its Veo video-generating models to improve the former’s understanding of the physical world. “We’ve always built Gemini, our foundation model, to be multimodal from the […]

In recent years, focus on career and delayed marriage age is driving some women to consider preserving their fertility through egg freezing. But the steep cost of the procedure, estimated at $10,000 to $15,000 per attempt, means many women can’t afford it during their most fertile years: 20s and early 30s. Cofertility, a startup founded […]

Thinking Machines Lab, the new AI startup from ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is reportedly attempting to close one of the largest seed rounds in history. Business Insider reported on Thursday that Thinking Machines Lab has doubled the target for its seed funding round to $2 billion. The round, should it close according to plan, would […]

AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other top AI labs are increasingly being used to assist with programming tasks. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in October that 25% of new code at the company is generated by AI, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has expressed ambitions to widely deploy AI coding models within the social […]

It’s time for BeReal to get real — it’s difficult to turn a profit on a social photo-sharing app without selling ads or memberships. Now, after its €500 million exit to French mobile publisher Voodoo, BeReal is rolling out advertising in the U.S. Its initial products include in-feed ads in the app’s same dual-camera post […]

Social network Bluesky is rolling out a new version of its software, which adopts some of the features former X users have missed. Nope, it’s not an edit button! Instead, the open social network is adding support for chat reactions in its direct messages feature and is revamping its search page as “Explore,” directing users […]

Just one day after TechCrunch revealed that Jeff Bezos is backing a secretive EV startup called Slate Auto, an early version of the company’s low-cost electric pickup truck was spotted in the wild. Reddit user u/discostranger09 posted a photo to the r/whatisthiscar subreddit on Wednesday of a small, dark gray, two-seater pickup truck on a […]

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon attended the ASU+GSV Summit this week, where experts in education and technology gathered to discuss how AI will impact learning. While speaking on a panel about AI in the workforce, McMahon repeatedly referred to AI as “A1,” like the steak sauce. “You know, AI development — I mean, how […]

Season 7 of “Black Mirror” premiered on Thursday, introducing a new mobile game connected to one of its episodes. The game, titled “Thronglets,” from Netflix’s own Night School Studio, serves as a companion to the episode called “Plaything.” Players interact with virtual yellow pets and strive to keep them alive. If players are successful in […]

Jobandtalent, an AI-based “workforce as a service” marketplace that connects people with companies looking for hourly workers, announced it has raised €92 million ($103 million).  The Series F — which includes participation from Atomico, BlackRock, DN Capital, Hercules, Infravia, Kibo, and Kinnevik — values the Madrid, Spain-based company at €1.3 billion ($1.5 billion) post-money.  On the surface, […]

A challenge for many tech companies is delivering high-bandwidth, multimodal data — for example, simultaneous audio and video — to users in real time without interruptions. Some firms build solutions in-house, but these often require a lot of upkeep and maintenance. To ease the burden, Russ d’Sa and David Zhao created LiveKit, an open source […]

Although there has been significant pushback from artists regarding the proliferation of AI design tools and the content used to train generative models, the companies making the software for creative work are nevertheless building AI into their toolkits. It’s a signal of just how quickly AI has gained importance — regardless of what their customers […]

OpenAI announced on Thursday that it’s starting to roll out a new memory feature in ChatGPT that allows the chatbot to tailor its answers to users based on the contents of their previous conversations. The company says the feature, which appears in ChatGPT’s settings as “reference saved memories,” aims to make conversations with ChatGPT more […]

Meghan Markle is stepping further into the world of business and entrepreneurship.  In an interview with Fortune, Meghan revealed that she is an angel investor in the healthcare company Midi, which provides a virtual platform to help treat women experiencing menopause and other health-related concerns.  She joined the company’s $63 million Series B round last […]

Glossier is reportedly fundraising again, aiming to raise $100 million with a valuation “south of a billion dollars,” according to Puck.  Glossier, still one of the more popular beauty brands, was last valued at $1.8 billion nearly four years ago, but has struggled with profitability and scale these past few years. Glossier did not immediately […]

Symphonic Capital announced today in a blog post that it raised $13.5 million for its inaugural fund to invest in early-stage companies.  Sydney Thomas launched the firm in 2022 after leaving Charles Hudson’s Precursor Ventures, where she was the first hire.  Thomas said her fund will focus on founders outside of the Bay who are […]