Author: TechCrunch News

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…

Image Credits:AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images / Getty Images 5:27 AM PDT · April 18, 2025 Netflix is building a new search experience aimed at improving the discovery experience, and it’s going to use AI to do it, the company’s CEO Greg Peters said during its first-quarter results conference call. Peters said Netflix is working on “interactive search…

Image Credits:Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto / Getty Images 8:01 PM PDT · April 17, 2025 When news broke that OpenAI was in talks to acquire AI coding company Windsurf for $3 billion, one of the first questions on the mind of anyone following the space was likely: “Why not buy Cursor creator Anysphere instead?” After all, OpenAI Startup…

In Brief Posted: 4:08 PM PDT · April 16, 2025 Chapter, a Medicare advisory startup co-founded by former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, has closed a $75 million funding round at a valuation of $1.5 billion led by private equity and venture firm Stripes. The startup helps seniors choose Medicare health plans analyzing doctors, hospitals,…

Design software startup Figma announced Tuesday it has filed its confidential paperwork for an IPO. We won’t know more until that paperwork becomes public, which, best-case scenario would be in about a month. However, with the stock market in groundhog mode — seeing its shadow with every new gyration of the Trump administration’s trade policies…

Image Credits:Telli 2:06 PM PDT · April 15, 2025 Former Y Combinator startup Telli is helping companies alleviate the bottleneck that occurs when a high-volume of customers try to, for example, book appointments. Its AI voice agents kick in and handle basic operations while handing off more-complex processes to human operators. The Berlin-based startup has…