Author: Editor-in-Chief

Like many startups, climate tech companies often face a “valley of death” that lies between early-stage funding and growth capital that helps proven technologies reach commercial scale. But because climate tech startups are often hardware focused — physical problems tend to require physical solutions, after all — this valley of death tends to be a lot wider. Financing a first-of-a-kind power plant or factory can cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Now a new fund hopes to bridge this financing gap, also known as the “missing middle.” Called the All Aboard Coalition, it aims to raise $300 million by October…

X’s long-awaited encrypted DM feature, XChat, is becoming more widely available. Though the feature shipped in beta in May, XChat is now accessible for more users, including those who do not subscribe to X Premium. Separate from the existing DM inbox, XChat is end-to-end encrypted. The chat system supports media uploads, group chats, pinned messages, and the ability to mark messages as read or unread. Vanishing mode has been rumored to be in the works as well. Right now, users can only access XChat if they opt into using it. On desktop, XChat is accessible to some users from…

The luxury membership platform Vivrelle, which allows customers to rent high-end goods, announced Thursday the launch of an AI personal styling tool called Ella as part of its partnership with fashion retailers Revolve and FWRD. The launch is an example of how the fashion industry is leveraging AI technology to enhance customer experiences and is one of the first partnerships to see three retailers come together to offer a personalized AI experience. Revolve and FWRD let users shop designer clothing, while Revolve also has an option to shop pre-owned. The tool, Ella, provides recommendations to customers across the three retailers…

Francesco Cacciatore is a self-proclaimed skeptic. Yet after spending two decades in the European aerospace industry and hitting, as he put it, a “crisis,” he made an undeniably optimistic bet: he started a space company. “You ask yourself, ‘What am I doing?’” he said in a recent interview. “I got offered some interesting opportunities, but then I kind of collapsed and realized I wanted to try and build something myself.” That something turned out to be one of the most challenging problems in aerospace: reentry. Along with his cofounder Víctor Gómez García, Cacciatore founded Orbital Paradigm, a Madrid-based startup building…

Inspired by his grandparents, who were apple farmers in China, Charlie Wu got the idea to apply technology to agriculture while studying computer science at Cornell University, a top agriculture school. “I got to meet fruit professors who are the best in the world at what they do,” Wu told TechCrunch. “Through talking to them, I realized even the largest farms in the nation basically have no idea what is actually growing out in their fields.” He dropped out of Cornell, became a Thiel fellow, and in 2022 began building Orchard Robotics, a startup that uses cameras and AI…

Pornhub owner Aylo will pay a $5 million settlement to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Utah over allegations that the company knowingly profited off of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and nonconsensual material (NCM). Formerly MindGeek, Aylo made some significant changes to the way it moderates content in late 2020, when The New York Times published an exposé showing how Pornhub — Aylo’s most popular portfolio website — failed to prevent and remove uploads of CSAM and NCM. It was only after pressure from credit card operators that the company began to verify the ages of all actors in…

Amid lawsuits alleging child safety concerns, online gaming service Roblox announced on Wednesday that it’s expanding its age-estimation technology to all users and partnering with the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC) to provide age and content ratings for the games and apps on its platform. The company said that by year’s end, the age-estimation system will be rolled out to all Roblox users who access the company’s communication tools, like voice and text-based chat. This involves scanning users’ selfies and analyzing facial features to estimate age. This age-estimation tech is combined with other systems, including ID age verification and verified…

The world’s most-flown rocket may start flying even more. U.S. regulators have completed a key environmental review that paves the way for SpaceX to more than double the number of Falcon 9 launches from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. In addition to the annual launch increase from 50 launches to up to 120, the Federal Aviation Administration’s environmental review also approved a new on-site landing zone that could accommodate up to 34 booster landings per year. These boosters are the reusable first-stage portions of Falcon 9 rockets that SpaceX lands and refurbishes for future flights. The review, finalized on…

French AI startup Mistral AI is finalizing a €2 billion investment at a post-money valuation of $14 billion, reports Bloomberg, positioning the company as one of Europe’s most valuable tech startups. The two-year-old OpenAI rival, founded by former DeepMind and Meta researchers, develops open source language models and Le Chat, its AI chatbot built for European audiences. Mistral isn’t commenting on the report, but the round would represent Mistral’s first major raise since June 2024, when it was valued at €5.8 billion. The company has previously raised over €1 billion from prominent investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and General…

CoreWeave, which provides cloud servers to large companies training AI models, has struck an agreement to acquire OpenPip, a two-year-old Y Combinator-backed startup that helps enterprises develop customized AI agents with reinforcement learning, the companies announced on Wednesday. “Reinforcement learning is emerging as a pivotal force to strengthen model performance on agentic and reasoning tasks,” said Brian Venturo, co-founder of CoreWeave, in a statement to TechCrunch. “By combining OpenPipe’s advanced self-learning tools with CoreWeave’s high-performance AI cloud, we’re expanding our platform to give developers at AI labs and beyond an important advantage in building scalable intelligent systems.” CoreWeave and OpenPipe did…