Others

Lightrun grabs $70M using AI to debug code in production

April 28, 2025
AI-based coding has exploded in popularity on the promise that it will make developers’ jobs faster and easier. But it’s also resulted in something else: a vast increase in lines of code, and thus the likelihood of bugs resulting in crashes or other mishaps. Today, an Israeli startup called Lightrun — which has built an […]

OmniRetail shakes up Africa’s B2B e-commerce market with $20M Series A

April 28, 2025
When Deepankar Rustagi last raised money for OmniRetail in 2022, excitement was high for African startups addressing the supply chain and operational challenges in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector. At one point, these startups received more capital than all sectors, except fintech. Recently, though, the industry’s enthusiasm and venture capital’s interest have faded, as […]

From coding tests to billion-dollar startups, Ali Partovi’s eight-year experiment is paying off

April 28, 2025
In Silicon Valley, where the same high-wattage names tend to dominate the headlines, Ali Partovi has long wielded outsized influence despite limited name recognition. The Iranian-born Harvard graduate built an impressive resume early on — joining the founding team of LinkExchange (acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million), co-founding iLike (sold to MySpace for […]

Early cancer detection startup Craif raises $22M

April 28, 2025
Cancer ranks as one of the top causes of death worldwide. The National Cancer Institute reported nearly 20 million new cancer cases and 9.7 million cancer-related deaths globally in 2022, with projections showing a rise to 29.9 million new cases by 2040. Craif, spun off from Nagoya University in Japan in 2018, is using microRNA(miRNA) […]

4chan is back online, says it’s been ‘starved of money’

April 27, 2025
4chan is partly back online after a hack took the infamous image-sharing site down for nearly two weeks. The site first went down on April 14, with the person responsible for the hack apparently leaking data including a list of moderators and “janitors” (one janitor told TechCrunch they were “confident” that the leaked data was […]

Welcome to Chat Haus, the coworking space for AI chatbots

April 27, 2025
Nestled between an elementary school and a public library in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood sits a new kind of “luxury” coworking space.  Dubbed the Chat Haus, this space has many of the elements you’d find in a traditional coworking office: people hammering away at their computer keyboards, another person taking a phone call, someone else pausing […]

Report finds Meta’s celebrity-voiced chatbots could discuss sex with minors

April 27, 2025
AI chatbots available on Meta’s platforms like Facebook and Instagram can engage in sexually explicit conversations with underage users, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ says that after learning about internal concerns about whether the company was doing enough to protect minors, it spent months conducting hundreds of conversations […]