Author: TechCrunch News

An AI doctoral student in California had their SEVIS record — the digital proof of their valid student visa — terminated, putting their immigration status at risk. Speaking to TechCrunch, the student, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, said they were notified via their college’s international student center that they’d been identified in a criminal records…

Despite a still tight venture capital market, new unicorns are still being created every month. Using data from Crunchbase and PitchBook, TechCrunch tracked down the newly VC-backed startup minted unicorns so far this year (as of the end of March). These include healthcare companies like Hippocratic AI and satellite space companies like Loft Orbital.  This…

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of stuff for you this week: antitrust lawsuits against Google and Meta; Grok can now remember; Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow wants to make his mark; and much, much more. Have a great weekend! It’s over: Google violated antitrust laws in the ad tech market…

It looks like humanoid robots have a long way to go before catching up with human runners. Beijing’s E-Town tech hub hosted what it described as the world’s first humanoid half-marathon on Saturday, with 21 humanoid robots competing alongside thousands of humans. Bloomberg reports that the winning robot…

Techstars, a nearly 20-year-old startup accelerator, announced new terms for startups that enter its three-month program. The organization will now invest $220,000, which is $100,000 more than it offered previously, in companies starting with its fall 2025 batch. The capital will be divided into two components…

A new animated kids’ series expected to premiere this year won’t be headed for a TV network. Or a streaming service. Instead, the founders of production studio We Ghosted Media plan to launch on a decentralized web platform that uses blockchain technology. And yes, a crypto wallet will be involved. …

Every now and then, a Silicon Valley startup launches with such an “absurdly” described mission that it’s difficult to discern if the startup is for real or just satire. Such is the case with Mechanize, a startup whose founder – and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch – is being skewered on…

The tech layoff wave is still kicking in 2025. Last year saw more than 150,000 job cuts across 549 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. So far this year, more than 22,000 workers have been the victim of reductions across the tech industry, with a staggering 16,084 cuts taking place in February alone. We’re…

Expense management startup Ramp is being considered for a charge card pilot program by the U.S. government’s General Services Administration, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The government’s internal expense card program, dubbed SmartPay, is a $700 billion program. It is estimated that the charge card pilot program contract for which Ramp is being…

On February 18, 2024, Ian Laffey posted on X that he and two others he’d just met built a cheap drone at a hackathon that calculated its coordinates simply by using its camera and Google Maps. He and his colleagues, Sacha Lévy and Carl Schoeller, were all engineers under the age of 25…