Startups and Investment (Page 2)
News related to Startups and Investment.
New Assassin’s Creed Game Is Out Now, If You Don’t Mind Being Board
If you thought there wasn't going to be a new Assassin's Creed game this year, think again. It's not a video game, but Assassin's Creed: Animus is out today, turning the series into an adventure-style board game for 1-4 players. A competitive game that pits players against each other as they explore distinct eras from the video games, Assassin's Creed: Animus features four protagonists to choose from in its standard…
EA Reportedly Chose An Unannounced Star Wars Game Over BioWare’s Next Mass Effect
EA recently announced it was shutting down BioWare , ending a studio responsible for multiple hit games over 30 years. According to a new report, EA's decision was driven by economics, as it had to choose between funding a new Mass Effect and backing the safer bet, Star Wars: Battlefront 3. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reported that EA had to choose between two costly projects, and with the added pressure of paying…
Things That Go Beep in the Night: Agentic AI Joins the Search for Extraterrestrial Signals
While science fiction lore tells us that humans will meet extraterrestrial life in the form of little green men, the detail that should raise hairs this Halloween is this: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence took a major leap forward with AI, and it increasingly focuses on AI agents built by humans listening for AI agents built by aliens. Some scientists have suggested that extraterrestrial civilizations…
Can AI data centers be mass-produced like cars? This startup aims to find out
Runware is building a factory to turn out prefabricated AI data centers on an assembly line. The real test will be whether it can deliver at that scale.
Apple acquires Ascend․io, an agentic AI engineering startup
Apple recently struck a deal to acquire Ascend.io, a company focused on agentic data engineering technology. Under the Digital Markets Act, Apple must now publicly report acquisitions above a certain size. This has given us new insight into the company’s acquisition strategy, including glimpses at its future goals . more…
Cisco gives 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of the company's legacy code in 24 months — president plucks former startup founder, telling him to 'go nuts'
In a world where youth unemployment is growing as AI replaces more and more entry-level jobs, Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel is going for a different approach. According to a report by Fortune , he's given a 27-year-old ex-startup founder — brought into the company by an earlier acquisition, and previously languishing in a role five levels below — a new job to refactor 98% of the company's…
Rocket Report: Winter is coming for Themis; Cowboy Space adds iron to the fire
Welcome to Edition 9.17 of the Rocket Report! It's been a while since an American company announced plans for a medium-lift new launch vehicle, but that's what happened this week when a startup named Cowboy Space revealed specs for its Big Iron rocket, named for the classic country-western song by Marty Robbins. I'm a huge fan of the name. Maybe Cowboy Space is striking while the iron is hot as the space industry…
Rivian expands joint venture with VW to include AI assistant
Rivian doesn't disclose if the value of its $5.8 billion joint venture will expand as a result.
OpenAI doubles usage limits on Pro plans as competition with Anthropic heats up
OpenAI is doubling usage limits across its paid plans, from Pro 100 to Pro 500. A planned cut to the Pro 200 quota was reversed after user pushback. More efficient models like Terra and Sol should push usable capacity even higher. The move comes just ahead of Anthropic's IPO, as both companies fight for B2B dominance in AI. The article OpenAI doubles usage limits on Pro plans as competition with Anthropic heats up…
SuperMe raises $20M for its network of AI expert profiles
SuperMe just raised $20 million to let you pester AI clones of Silicon Valley’s savviest people about your career.
Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Holdings is acquiring ADT for $7.6 billion
The Joshua Kushner-led Thrive Holdings is acquiring ADT in an all-cash deal valued at $7.6 billion. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027 and will take ADT private, as reported earlier by Bloomberg . Joshua Kushner is the brother of President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Thrive Holdings was founded last year, serving as an offshoot of Joshua Kushner's venture capital firm Thrive…
The ‘Pain in the Ass’ Math That Could Save Vibe Coding From Itself
A new startup called &Truth is joining the race to automate formal verification, a painstaking process that uses math to prove software works as intended.
Agent identity startup Mintive lands Cowboy Ventures, Coatue, angels Jeff Dean, Andrej Karpathy
Mintive was founded by two engineers who have been working on AI for decades through Google Brain, Coursera. It's platform promises to help IT easily control enterprise agents
Wabi, the AI agent that builds mini apps, now valued at $1.25B after latest round
On Thursday, AI app, Wabi, now describing itself as a "personal agent," said it has raised $55 million at a $1.25 billion valuation.
Anthropic is asking Wall Street to believe in AGI
Today on Decoder , I’m joined by Joey Brookhart, an analyst at the chip and AI research firm SemiAnalysis, to help me dig into the story inside the numbers of the Anthropic IPO filing — a document known as an S-1. Anthropic just filed its S-1 to go public on the Nasdaq, and it could start trading as soon as next month at a valuation of anywhere between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. That would immediately make it…
HyperX Omen 35L review: A polished gaming PC for deep pockets
HP’s HyperX Omen 35L is ambitious, and it’s hard not to be impressed by it in our maxed-out test guise with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Nvidia RTX 5080. From its monochrome design and extensive RGB lighting to its top-tier components, it checks the boxes enthusiasts are looking for. But when a PC is $6,211 like our test configuration, it raises the question of whether the Omen 35L’s blend of style, performance, and…
Slice Into GFN Thursday: ‘Phantom Blade Zero’ Launches on GeForce NOW
This Halloween week, GFN Thursday is delivering a fresh batch of gaming treats. Something wicked this blade comes. S-GAME’s Phantom Blade Zero launches on GeForce NOW today, bringing a scarily good blend of martial arts and punk fantasy to the cloud. There’s also something on the horizon for adventurers: World of Warcraft: Forever arrives Wednesday, Nov. 4 at 3 p.m. PST, with a launch-week access reward coming for…
Garmin Messenger is placing too much trust in SMS verification, and this might not end well
TL;DR A Garmin Messenger user reports restoring their entire chat history on a second phone using only SMS verification, without a Garmin account password. The findings raise concerns that recycled phone numbers could let new owners access previous conversations, including sensitive location information. Garmin has reportedly been informed of the issue, but it hasn’t confirmed a fix. Handing over an old phone number…
Anthropic’s IPO filing shows most of its compute goes to R&D, not serving customers — company details massive $800 billion in TPU and GPU contracts
Anthropic spent less than a third of its $8.9 billion first-half compute bill on serving customers, with most of the rest going into training, research, and running Claude internally, its S-1 filing shows. It has meanwhile signed up for hundreds of billions of dollars more in TPU and GPU capacity. By our math, it has meanwhile signed up for roughly $800 billion more in TPU and GPU capacity, and revenue per compute…
Upwind raises $400M after walking away from Datadog acquisition offer
The cloud security startup raised a Series C at a $3.8B valuation, instead of selling itself for the same price.
Anthropic just launched tools to show companies what their AI spending is buying
The frontier lab is lifting the curtain on how users spend money on its models ahead of a planned IPO.
7 days until TechCrunch Founder Summit: Save up to $100 on your pass before doors open
In just 7 days, TechCrunch Founder Summit takes over Boston’s SoWa Power Station on November 4. Your chance to save up to $100 on tickets is running out, and the opportunity to learn and connect directly with experienced founders, investors, and startup leaders is almost here.
The Download: dead startups fueling AI and interspecies communication
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models When Keelan Miskell began winding down his crypto startup, he didn’t think its data was worth much. But he’s…
China’s snooping around Pacific undersea cables raises risks for Big Tech
US-owned trans-Pacific cables face growing risks from sabotage and China.