Hours after Sam Altman and Jony Ive announced on Wednesday that OpenAI was buying Ive’s company, io, in an all-stock transaction valued at $6.5 billion, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski posted a surprising message on X.  Siemiatkowski’s family investment office, Flat Capital, had bought shares in io six months earlier, he said. Since this is an […]

The tale of how smart toilet startup Throne landed its seed round is so full of serendipities, one could almost believe it was orchestrated by the hand of Fortuna, Roman goddess of providence. Throne is an Austin-based company working on an AI-powered toilet device for consumers. It uses computer vision (cameras pointing in the bowl […]

Other than AI Siemiatkowski admission, it wasn't obvious that this was AI. There were only a few subtle signs.

Affiniti founders Aaron Bai and Sahil Phadnis are building the kind of expense management software for main street small businesses that tech startups have enjoyed for years.

Deel has lobbed a new volley in the ongoing legal battle with rival HR tech startup Rippling. Deel filed a series of letters to the Irish court asking Rippling hand over information. In one letter, Deel wants unredacted versions of witness affidavits, including the famed one by former Rippling employee Keith O’Brien. In a story […]

Y Combinator startup Firecrawl is back on the hunt for AI agent employees, after a previous attempt to hire one didn't go as planned.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out a big vision for the future of ChatGPT at an AI event hosted by VC firm Sequoia earlier this month.  When asked by one attendee about how ChatGPT can become more personalized, Altman replied that he eventually wants the model to document and remember everything in a person’s life. […]

At long last, digital consumer bank Chime has moved forward with its IPO by filing its S-1 paperwork Tuesday. Chime had reportedly filed confidential S-1 paperwork back in December. S-1 filings typically reveal all kinds of information, covering financial, legal, and other risk factors. But Chime’s S-1 documents still have a lot of blank spaces. […]

Popular legal AI tool Harvey will now be using leading foundation models from Anthropic and Google, moving beyond strictly using OpenAI’s, Harvey announced in a blog post on Tuesday. This is noteworthy because Harvey is one of the OpenAI Startup Fund’s most successful early-backed portfolio companies. The OpenAI Startup Fund is an OpenAI-associated fund to […]

Buzzwords that are stretched to the point of being meaningless are as old as the tech industry itself. The top current one is “AI agent” and its variants, like “agentic.” So, unsurprisingly, no one really knows what an AI agent is. Even people with software engineering backgrounds who work for Andreessen Horowitz, one of the premier venture […]

The tech industry seems to have two thoughts when it comes to where human workers fit into the AI-powered world they are creating: Either they think that all the jobs, except perhaps their own, will be done by bots. (VC Marc Andreessen seems to think that his work as an investor could never be automated).  […]

Josh Raffaelli, who has deep roots as a Silicon Valley investor and has backed a number of Elon Musk companies, is suing his former employer, the massive trillion-dollar AUM Brookfield Asset Management, reports The New York Times.  Much of Raffaelli’s complaint concerns how Brookfield covered pandemic-related real estate losses and alleges the company fired him […]

SpaceX’s satellite internet service, Starlink, is directly benefiting from the Trump administration’s tariff trade war, according to leaked State Department memos obtained by the Washington Post.   The memos show the U.S. pushing countries to adopt Starlink. Some show that countries believe that doing so could help lubricate their U.S. trade and tariff negotiations. One memo […]

Rubrik co-founder Soham Mazumdar has a new data startup called Wisdom AI. It offers an agentic data analyst that works with structured, unstructured, even “dirty” data.

Anduril announced its ninth acquisition on Monday with the purchase of Dublin’s Klas, makers of ruggedized edge computing equipment for the military and first responders. Anduril wouldn’t reveal financial details of the deal, and the purchase is subject to regulatory approval, but the company did say that Klas employs 150 people.  Relatedly, on Monday, Anduril […]

Rork founders Levan Kvirkvelia and Daniel Dhawan are living a life that sounds like a movie plot — but it actually happened.  They went from broke, with depleted life savings and $15,000 in credit card debt — Dhawan was even sleeping on a mattress at a friend’s apartment — to generating $100,000 of revenue within […]

"We're very engaged on the tariff discussions, Apple CEO Tim Cook said. "On the pricing piece, we have nothing to announce today."

Mach Industries, the defense tech founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, is about to close a fresh $100 million in financing co-led by new investor Khosla and existing investor Bedrock Capital, a source familiar with the deal tells TechCrunch. The new round will value the company at around $470 million, according to the source. However, the […]

Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app to sell ads.

In 2020, when open source database Supabase was founded, its New Zealand-based CEO, Paul Copplestone, couldn’t have imagined it would be sitting in the sweet spot for 2025’s biggest trend: vibe coding.  But on Tuesday, the fruits of that became evident when it announced a $200 million Series D at a $2 billion post-money valuation […]