Author: Editor-in-Chief

British renewable energy provider Octopus Energy said this week that it’s spinning off Kraken, its tech platform for utilities, spurred in part by $500 million in committed annual revenue from other utilities and energy providers. An eventual Kraken IPO could be valued at $15 billion and could occur within a year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Kraken was actually the company’s initial product, per Octopus CEO Greg Jackson. “We created Octopus as the ‘demo client,’” he told the Journal earlier this year. That demo client has since grown to provide power to more than 7.7 million households in the…

President Donald Trump made countering immigration one of his flagship issues during last year’s presidential campaign, promising an unprecedented number of deportations. In his first eight months in office, that promise turned into around 350,000 deportations, a figure that includes deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE (around 200,000), Customs and Border Protection (more than 132,000), and almost 18,000 self-deportations, according to CNN. ICE has taken center stage in Trump’s mass deportation campaign, raiding homes, workplaces, and public parks in search of undocumented immigrants. To aid its efforts, ICE has at its disposal several technologies capable of identifying and…

At Meta Connect 2025 on Wednesday, the company unveiled its new Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses that are geared toward runners, cyclists, and other athletes. The glasses retail for $499 and are launching on October 21. Meta Connect is the social networking giant’s biggest conference of the year, where it unveils smart glasses and VR headsets. The glasses feature a large unified front lens, instead of having two cameras positioned at the top corners of the frames, which is in previous Meta smart glasses and the Oakley Meta HSTN model. The new glasses can capture video in up to 3K…

TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 takes place October 27–29 at Moscone West in San Francisco, bringing together 10,000+ startup and VC leaders to shape the future of tech. Few embody what it means to build with discipline in a tough market better than Chris Britt, co-founder and CEO of Chime. What began as a scrappy fintech challenger has grown into one of the rare companies to go public in today’s challenging environment. In his session, “Building a Company that Lasts,” Britt will share the lessons behind Chime’s rise — from weathering market headwinds to making the leap from private to public when…

Earlier this year, Apple introduced its Foundation Models framework during WWDC 2025, which allows developers to use the company’s local AI models to power features in their applications. The company touted that with this framework, developers gain access to AI models without worrying about any inference cost. Plus, these local models have capabilities such as guided generation and tool calling built in. As iOS 26 is rolling out to all users, developers have been updating their apps to include features powered by Apple’s local AI models. Apple’s models are small compared with leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Meta.…

Mastodon, the non-profit organization that maintains the software powering the decentralized alternative to social networks like Threads and X, has a new plan to make money. Instead of relying entirely on donations and grants as before, the company announced on Friday that it will now offer paid hosting, moderation, and support services for organizations that want to join the open social web. That network, also called the fediverse, offers a way for individuals and organizations to set up their own servers that interconnect with others that run the same protocol, ActivityPub. ActivityPub powers a number of different software applications, including…

Although today’s Meta Connect developer conference was largely about new smart glasses, the social networking company did announce a handful of metaverse updates during Wednesday’s keynote. Of these, one of the largest was the introduction of Hyperscape, first demoed at last year’s event, which allows developers and creators to build more photorealistic spaces in virtual reality. The company announced that Hyperscape Capture is now rolling out in Early Access, meaning Quest device owners will be able to scan a room in a few minutes, then turn it into an immersive and photorealistic world that’s like a digital replica of a…

Dawn Capital’s latest partner, Shamillah Bankiya, stopped by Equity this week to talk about the European landscape and the biggest misconceptions Americans have about the European startup world. Dawn Capital is a marquee firm in the U.K. with more than $2 billion in AUM, 34 exits, and 11 unicorns. Names in the portfolio include AI companies Collibra and Dataiku. It focuses on early-stage companies, backing them from seed to Series C. It’s currently investing from its $620 million Fund V. Bankiya, meanwhile, is one of the few Black women venture partners in Europe. Her investments at the firm include AI…

The House Oversight Committee has requested that the CEOs of Discord, Twitch, Reddit, and gaming platform Steam testify on October 8 about their platforms’ alleged involvement in any online “radicalization” and the “incitement to commit politically motivated acts,” according to letters sent from the House committee to the four tech CEOs. In a statement, Rep. James Comer, chairman of the Oversight Committee, referenced the murder of Charlie Kirk and “other acts of politically motivated violence” as reasons why Congress has a “duty to oversee the online platforms that radicals have used to advance political violence,” he said. “To prevent…

The world’s countries may have pledged to cut its carbon pollution, but with global emissions reaching an all-time high last year, they’ve fallen far short. Digging out of that hole is going to require removing carbon straight from the atmosphere. But it comes with a hefty price tag, mostly because of the energy required. Removing one metric ton of CO2 using direct air capture is expected to require around 2,000 kWh of energy when the technology is sorted and scaled up. One startup called DACLab says it’s already doing it for less, though. “We have data that I can share…