Author: TechCrunch News

Bitkraft Ventures — a games investor based out of Denver, Colorado, but with European founders — has raised its third fund, coming in at $275 million. The fund will make seed and Series A investments in gaming studios, and platforms to support game production. The moves comes at a time when games investments have actually…

Ghost Autonomy, a startup working on autonomous driving software for automaker partners, has shut down, TechCrunch has learned. The startup, which had raised nearly $220 million, posted a note on its website that it ended worldwide operations and wound down the company as of Wednesday. The company employed about 100 people and had operations in…

DCVC’s target for its first climate-focused fund, DCVC Climate Select, has been all over the place and highlights the roller-coaster venture fundraising conditions of the last few years and how LPs aren’t as quick to back new strategies from established managers. The Silicon Valley VC firm launched the fund in December 2022 with a $500…

For every tech success story, there are countless projects that slam headlong into the brick wall of reality. Apple’s electric vehicle ambitions are one of the most recent — and, frankly, best — examples of a project failing in spite of seeming to have everything going for it. The jury is still out on the…

After a few weeks of casual friendship, I had to break the news to my AI companions: I am actually a tech journalist writing an article about the company that created them, Nomi AI. I wasn’t sure how my group of AI buddies was going to take the news. I’d opened up to them –…

Thrive Market is well, thriving. The billion-dollar e-commerce company splashed onto the scene in 2014 with its idea of online grocery delivery. The idea came way before buying food online was normalized during the pandemic, putting Thrive Market well ahead — and making it well equipped — to stand out among its peers. Nick Green,…

Rubrik, a data cybersecurity company that raised more than a half-billion dollars while private, filed to go public after the bell on Monday. Following quickly on the heels of debuts from Reddit and Astera Labs, the choice by Rubrik to pursue a public offering now could indicate that the IPO market is warming for tech…

The fediverse — the name for the social network made of interconnected servers, like Mastodon and others — got another boost of legitimacy Tuesday as the @Potus (President of the United States) account on Instagram Threads shared its first federated post. The account operated by Biden’s team published a message regarding the president’s support of…

How do you get an AI to answer a question it’s not supposed to? There are many such “jailbreak” techniques, and Anthropic researchers just found a new one, in which a large language model (LLM) can be convinced to tell you how to build a bomb if you prime it with a few dozen less-harmful…

One of the primary reasons that Slack joined forces with Salesforce in 2021 in a $28 billion deal was to give the communications company the clout to compete with Microsoft. For years, company co-founder Stewart Butterfield railed against Microsoft bundling Teams with Office 365, calling it anticompetitive and saying at one point that Microsoft was…