Author: TechCrunch News

French startup Mistral AI has officially closed its much anticipated Series A funding round. The company has raised €385 million, or $415 million at today’s exchange rate — according to Bloomberg, it values the company at roughly $2 billion. Mistral AI is also opening up its commercial platform today. As a reminder, Mistral AI raised…

For the next few weeks, TechCrunch’s robotics newsletter Actuator will be running Q&As with some of the top minds in robotics. Subscribe here for future updates. Part 1: CMU’s Matthew Johnson-Roberson Part 2: Toyota Research Institute’s Max Bajracharya and Russ Tedrake Part 3: Meta’s Dhruv Batra This time it’s Boston Dynamics CTO, Aaron Saunders. He…

Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the past few days in tech. AI stole the headlines once again, with tech giants from Google to X (formerly Twitter) heading off against OpenAI for chatbot supremacy. But plenty happened besides. In this edition of WiR, we cover Google faking a…

W elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. People moving on to new jobs is not a bad thing — and not only when they have been laid off. That’s why…

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Borrowing has become more expensive, and profits are harder to come by, which means that 2023 has been a savage year in startup land. PitchBook data suggests that around 3,200 startups — representing a total of $27.2 billion in venture…

Was it too good to be true? Beeper, the startup that reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users, is experiencing an outage, the company reported via a post on X on Friday. And Apple is to blame, it seems. Users, including those of us at TechCrunch with access to the app, began…

Indian startups have raised about $7 billion this year, according to market intelligence platform Tracxn, down from about $25 billion in 2022 and $37 billion in 2021. High-flying venture investors in India managing hundreds of millions of dollars are tempering expectations, making early-stage startup bets that in best-case scenarios they hope will return 3 to…

Surveys have become an integral part of many aspects of our lives, but most of them are tedious, leading to ineffective responses and actions. Dinghan Shen and Yuan Xue, two software engineers working in Silicon Valley, recognized an opportunity to leverage the breakthroughs brought by large language models to make surveys more empathetic and engaging.…

After years of promises and limited tests, Meta has started rolling out default end-to-end encryption protection for Messenger. In an announcement, Mark Zuckerberg said that personal chats and calls will get default end-to-end encryption. However, encryption for group chats still remains an opt-in feature. End-to-end encryption is an important security layer as it doesn’t allow…

Establishing commercial markets on the moon is going to require thinking a little differently. That’s DARPA’s hunch, anyway. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the U.S. Department of Defense’s R&D arm, which has just selected 14 companies to participate in a new study to develop technological frameworks for a lunar future. “The next decade…