March 13, 2026

Travis Kalanick reportedly starting a new self-driving company backed by Uber

Kalanick reportedly wants to be more aggressive in pursuing the technology than industry-leader Waymo.

Netflix says its DVD-by-mail customers get to keep their final shipment of discs

August 22, 2023
Netflix has one final surprise for customers of its 25-year-old DVD-by-mail business (yes, it still exists!) ahead of its September 29th shutdown. They get to keep their last shipment of DVDs without any additional charges for unreturned discs. Earlier this month, the company had offered its remaining customers the chance to receive up to 10 […]

Not a traditional founder? Learn how to use it to your advantage at TC Disrupt 2023

August 22, 2023
The list of reasons why venture investors don’t fund diverse startups is long, legion and ludicrous, to put it politely. Nontraditional founders still face a ridiculous uphill slog. Here’s some good news: If you don’t fit the “pale, male from Yale” stereotype, you can use your experience to your benefit. We’re excited to share a […]

AI company Hypergiant Industries snapped up by PE firm Trive Capital

August 22, 2023
Private equity firm Trive Capital has acquired Hypergiant Industries, in a deal that will furnish the Texas-based AI company with capital to “build even faster,” Hypergiant CEO Mike Betzer told TechCrunch in a recent interview. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Hypergiant’s core product is called CommandCenter, a geospatial data visualization platform designed […]

Swedish EV battery maker raises $1.2B to expand to North America

August 22, 2023
Northvolt, a Swedish producer of lithium-ion batteries, has raised around $1.2 billion from BlackRock and various Canadian pension plans to build new factories in North America and Europe, according to report from Reuters. Tuesday’s announcement signals the first time Northvolt has shared concrete plans to build in North America. If Northvolt builds in the U.S., […]

Meta releases an AI model that can transcribe and translate close to 100 languages

August 22, 2023
In its quest to develop AI that can understand a range of different dialects, Meta has created an AI model, SeamlessM4T, that can translate and transcribe close to 100 languages across text and speech. Available in open source along with SeamlessAlign, a new translation data set, Meta claims that SeamlessM4T represents a “significant breakthrough” in […]

Former Bose employees are resurrecting Sleepbuds

August 22, 2023
I can’t recall a piece of hardware of recent vintage that I wanted to like more than Bose Sleepbuds. That made them all the more frustrating. In recent years, I’ve been on a kind of mini-quest to find a suitable pair of sleeping headphones. As a terrible sleeper, I love the idea, but the reality […]

It’s official: Threads launches its highly anticipated web app

August 22, 2023
Starting today, Instagram Threads will begin the rollout of one of its most-requested features: the ability to use the service via the web, while logged in. At launch, Threads users will be able to post, view their feed, and interact with posts from the desktop, the company says, but the experience won’t be in complete […]

Meet Relume, the bootstrapped AI web builder that wants to supercharge Figma and Webflow

August 22, 2023
Despite the abundant venture capital available for startups in the current wave of generative AI breakthroughs, totaling $14 billion in equity funding as of August this year, Relume has turned down investments and instead relied on bootstrapping since its launch in November 2021. “We are focusing more on building a product that we can get […]