With AI igniting an investor frenzy, every month, more startups obtain unicorn status. Using data from Crunchbase and PitchBook, TechCrunch tracked down the VC-backed startups that became unicorns so far this year. While most are AI-related, a surprising number are focused in other industries like satellite space companies Loft Orbital and blockchain-based trading site Kalshi. This list will … Read more
OpenAI announced it has acquired a tiny startup called Torch for an undisclosed sum. An unnamed sourced told the Information that OpenAI paid $100 million worth of equity for the startup. Torch’s four-person team is joining OpenAI, both companies said. Torch was working on an app that combined all of a person’s medical information for … Read more
In early tests with a review unit of Bee, we found the device itself was easy to use. It’s just a press of a button to turn recording on or off. In the app, you can configure whether a double press bookmarks a section of the conversation, processes the current conversation, or both, and you … Read more
Anthropic’s agentic tool Claude Code has been an enormous hit with some software developers and hobbyists, and now the company is bringing that modality to more general office work with a new feature called Cowork. Built on the same foundations as Claude Code and baked into the macOS Claude desktop app, Cowork allows users to … Read more
A company called GRU Space publicly announced its intent to construct a series of increasingly sophisticated habitats on the Moon, culminating in a hotel inspired by the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco. On Monday, the company invited those interested in a berth to plunk down a deposit between $250,000 and $1 million, … Read more
Paramount Skydance escalated its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) today by filing a lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court against WBD, declaring its intention to fight Netflix’s acquisition. In December, WBD agreed to sell its streaming and movie businesses to Netflix for $82.7 billion. The deal would see WBD’s Global Networks division, comprised … Read more
Linux and Git creator Linus Torvalds’ latest hobby project contains code that was “basically written by vibe coding,” but you shouldn’t read that to mean that Torvalds is embracing that approach for anything and everything. Torvalds sometimes works on a small hobby project over holiday breaks. Last year, he made guitar pedals. This year, he … Read more
A UK employment tribunal rejected a request from fired Rockstar Games employees to receive interim pay while waiting for a full hearing about their dismissal, according to Bloomberg and IGN. After Rockstar fired 34 employees last year — 31 from the UK and three from Canada — the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) … Read more
Just weeks after raising the price of its RAM modules, Framework has announced that it’s also increasing the price of its desktop PC in response to the global memory shortage. The Framework Desktop with 32GB of RAM and an AMD Ryzen AI Max 385 chip now starts at $1,139, instead of $1,099. “We held off … Read more
Meta’s Reality Labs team is expected to lose around 10 percent of its staff, with layoffs concentrated on the division’s metaverse employees, as reported by The New York Times. The layoffs are apparently a side effect of Meta’s AI ambitions, which are pulling focus away from its virtual reality division. According to the Times, Meta’s … Read more