Author: TechCrunch News

Kubik, a plastic upcycling startup, has raised a $1.9 million seed extension, months after announcing initial equity investment. The startup’s latest investment is from African Renaissance Partners, an East African venture capital firm; Endgame Capital, an investor with a bias for technologies around climate change; and King Philanthropies, a climate and extreme poverty investor. The…

OpenAI is facing another privacy complaint in the European Union. This one, which has been filed by privacy rights nonprofit noyb on behalf of an individual complainant, targets the inability of its AI chatbot ChatGPT to correct misinformation it generates about individuals. The tendency of GenAI tools to produce information that’s plain wrong has been…

Jonathan Strimling faced a dilemma. His company had spent nine years working on chemical processes that could turn old cardboard boxes into high-quality building insulation. The good news was the team had finally cracked it: CleanFiber’s technology pumped out insulation — really good insulation. It had fewer contaminants and produced less dust than other cellulose…

Givebutter started in a George Washington University dorm room in 2016 as a software solution to make nonprofit fundraising more transparent and fun. Eight years later, the company is profitable and it just raised $50 million to scale as momentum for nonprofit-focused startups appears to be growing. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Max Friedman, fundraised…

Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering this week’s noteworthy happenings in tech. TikTok’s fate in the U.S. looks uncertain after President Joe Biden signed a bill that included a deadline for ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to divest itself of TikTok within nine months or face a ban on distributing it…

President Joe Biden signed a bill on Wednesday that could ban TikTok — for real this time. After so many false starts and stops, some creator economy founders and their clients are rolling their eyes. They’ve been through this before. “I think two years ago, this would have been devastating,” Karat Financial co-founder and co-CEO…

When IBM announced its intention to acquire HashiCorp for $6.4 billion on Wednesday at market close, it was easy to conclude that the two companies should fit well together, but a deal comes down to more than strategy. It also comes down to the financials. The question is whether this acquisition holds up to scrutiny…

When Asheem Chandna drove up to Rubrik’s office in Palo Alto on a Friday night in early 2015, he was looking forward to learning what the young company that had yet to build its product would show him. The Greylock partner wasn’t disappointed. The company’s CEO, Bipul Sinha, drew Rubrik’s plan to revamp the data…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Ticktock, TikTok: It’s been a wild week for TikTok. Even as the company starts testing its Twitter competitor in certain markets and launches its luxury secondhand shop…

Space and defense startup True Anomaly has laid off around 25% of its workforce and canceled its summer internship program, TechCrunch has learned. “With our rapid growth over the past two years, we looked at every aspect of our company to make sure we are laser focused on our goals and best positioned to execute,”…