Ethiopian plastic upcycling startup Kubik gets fresh funding, plans to license out its tech
Kubik, a plastic upcycling startup, has raised a $1.9 million seed extension, months after announcing initial equity investment. The startup’s latest investment is from African Renaissance...
Humanoid robots are learning to fall well
The savvy marketers at Boston Dynamics produced two major robotics news cycles last week. The larger of the two was, naturally, the electric Atlas announcement. As...
MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria talks AI hype and the database evolution as he crosses...
A lot has happened since Dev Ittycheria took the reins at MongoDB, the $26 billion database company he’s led as president and CEO since September 2014....
Will a TikTok ban impact creator economy startups? Not really, founders say
President Joe Biden signed a bill on Wednesday that could ban TikTok — for real this time. After so many false starts and stops, some creator...
TikTok faces a ban in the US, Tesla profits drop and healthcare data leaks
Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering this week’s noteworthy happenings in tech.
TikTok’s fate in the U.S. looks uncertain after President Joe...
The ‘valley of death’ for climate lies between early-stage funding and scaling up
Jonathan Strimling faced a dilemma. His company had spent nine years working on chemical processes that could turn old cardboard boxes into high-quality building insulation. The...
Photo-sharing community EyeEm will license users’ photos to train AI if they don’t delete...
EyeEm, the Berlin-based photo-sharing community that exited last year to Spanish company Freepik after going bankrupt, is now licensing its users’ photos to train AI models....
How Rubrik’s IPO paid off big for Greylock VC Asheem Chandna
When Asheem Chandna drove up to Rubrik’s office in Palo Alto on a Friday night in early 2015, he was looking forward to learning what the...
Google’s new ‘Speaking practice’ feature uses AI to help users improve their English skills
Google is testing a new “Speaking practice” feature in Search that helps users improve their conversational English skills. The company told TechCrunch that the feature is...
xAI, Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, is closing on $6B in funding and X, his...
xAI, Elon Musk’s 10-month-old competitor to the AI phenom OpenAI, is raising $6 billion on a pre-money valuation of $18 billion, according to one trusted source...