Primary Ventures has closed a $625 million Fund V focused on seed investing nationwide, which is a sizeable fund for a firm that focuses solely on early-stage investing. It perhaps showcases how the size of early-stage rounds has dramatically increased in the age of AI.  Ben Sun, a co-founder and general partner at Primary Ventures, … Read more

For much of his career, Mohamed Mohamed worked at institutions — BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey — all of whom, he said, “treated real estate as a computational problem.” “They had proprietary data pipelines, internal valuation models, simulation tools, and increasingly, early AI systems supporting underwriting and capital allocation,” he told TechCrunch of how these … Read more

AI video generation startup Runway has raised a $315 million Series E round, nearly doubling its valuation to $5.3 billion, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.  The fresh funds will allow Runway to “pre-train the next generation of world models and bring them to new products and industries,” per a company blog post … Read more

Swedish music streaming giant Spotify saw its user numbers peak last quarter, driven by its year-end “Wrapped” campaign, which rounds up stats and listening highlights for users, and new features on its free tier. The company said it saw a record 38 million new users in the fourth quarter, taking its total to 751 million … Read more

We have long had our doubts about the Trump Phone. Since its very first debut, the device — technically called the Trump Mobile T1 Phone 8002 — has seemed utterly impossible to execute as advertised. The Trump Mobile team has also spent the last eight months rapidly moving the goalposts, changing specs and making increasingly … Read more