Author: TechCrunch News

Cleaning the outside of buildings is a dirty job, and it’s also dangerous. Lucid Bots came on the scene in 2018 with its Sherpa line of drones to clean windows in tall places, and now it’s back to take on more labor-intensive tasks. The Charlotte, N.C.-based company, which was part of Y Combinator’s 2019 cohort,…

Mushrooms continue to be a big area for alternative proteins. Canada-based Maia Farms recently raised $1.7 million to develop a blend of mushroom and plant-based protein using biomass fermentation. There’s also MyForest Foods and Fable Food. Then there’s Meati Foods, which claims it’s like no other alternative protein. The company makes cutlets and steaks from…

Monzo has raised another £150 million ($190 million), as the challenger bank looks to expand its presence internationally — particularly in the U.S. The new round comes just two months after Monzo raised £340 million ($425 million), meaning the London-based company has now raised north of $610 million in 2024, and $1.5 billion since its…

Today is Apple iPad Event day, and we’re ready to bring you all the iPad goodness you can stand, including if some of the rumors are true of what’s coming, like a new iPad Pro, iPad Air, Apple Pencil and a keyboard case. Don’t have time to watch? That’s ok — we’ve summed up the…

U.K.-based autonomous vehicle startup Wayve started life as a software platform loaded into a tiny electric “car” called Renault Twizy. Festooned with cameras, the company’s co-founders and PhD graduates, Alex Kendall and Amar Shah, tuned the deep-learning algorithms powering the car’s autonomous systems until they’d got it to drive around the medieval city unaided. No…

Interest in male birth control has increased in the past few years, especially since the U.S. overturned Roe vs. Wade, which protected a woman’s right to have an abortion. Since then, states have tried to make abortion nearly impossible, prompting an increased look at contraceptives to allow both men and women to have more control…

Researchers at MIT CSAIL and Project CETI believe that they have unlocked a kind of sperm whale “alphabet” with the aid of machine learning technologies. Results from the study, which were published under the title, “Contextual and Combinatorial Structure in Sperm Whale Vocalizations,” point to key breakthroughs in our understanding of cetacean communication. The study…

The first bit of news out of the Automate conference this year arrives by way of Alphabet X spinout Intrinsic. The firm announced at the Chicago event on Monday that it is incorporating a number of Nvidia offerings into its Flowstate robotic app platform. That includes Isaac Manipulator, a collection of foundational models designed to create…

News that Jack Dorsey is out at Bluesky caused a stir this weekend. After all, Dorsey is a former Twitter co-founder and CEO, so his investment of time into the rival social network carried weight. The decentralized social networking service said that it is looking for a new board member. But while we had to…

Building a startup is hard. Building a company that helps startup is similarly difficult. That’s the takeaway from TechCrunch reporting on Techstars and Newchip. In the case of Newchip, the accelerator appeared to promise a bit more than it could deliver. Mix in a culture that appeared to be turbulent at best, and you have…