Author: TechCrunch News

Rapyd Financial Network is reportedly looking to raise $300 million in a new funding at a steep valuation cut from its 2021 high. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only…

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has paused funding for a $5 billion EV charging infrastructure program that Tesla has received at least $31 million from. The move is widely viewed to be illegal. It’s the latest attempt from the Trump administration to hack away at federally funded renewable energy projects around the country…

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, who left AI startup Anthropic last week after a mere five months, is reportedly joining former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s secretive new startup, per Fortune. It’s not clear what Schulman’s role there will be. Fortune wasn’t able to learn that information, and Murati has been tight-lipped about the venture since she…

Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei is worried about competitor DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company that took Silicon Valley by storm with its R1 model. And his concerns could be more serious than the typical ones raised about DeepSeek sending user data back to China.  In an interview on Jordan Schneider’s ChinaTalk podcast, Amodei said DeepSeek generated…

In Brief Posted: 2:49 PM PST · February 7, 2025 Image Credits:Mike Coppola / Getty Images OpenAI is expanding its footprint to Germany. According to a press release issued Friday, the ChatGPT maker plans to open an office in Munich in the coming months. “Germany is renowned for its technical expertise, academic excellence, and industrial…

A group of more than 100 organizations has published an open letter calling on the AI industry and regulators to mitigate the tech’s harmful environmental impacts just days before leading industry CEOs, heads of state, academics, and nonprofits descend on Paris for a major AI conference…

On Thursday, President Trump asked Republican lawmakers to end tax breaks on carried interest.  The tax break allows private equity and venture fund managers to treat their earnings from investments at a lower capital gains rate, rather than as ordinary income.  The removal of the tax break would be a big hit to the VC…

India’s central bank is introducing an exclusive “.bank.in” domain for banks from April 2025 as part of efforts to combat rising digital payment frauds and bolster trust in online banking services. The Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) will serve as the exclusive registrar for the new domain, the Reserve Bank of…

Sprinklr, a U.S. firm providing a customer experience management platform to global brands, has laid off about 15% of its workforce — around 500 employees — due to business performance not meeting expectations, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The new layoffs come less than a year after the company cut about 3% of its workforce in…

Boston Dynamics Wednesday announced a partnership designed to bring improved reinforcement learning to its electric Atlas humanoid robot. The tie-up is with the Robotics & AI Institute (RAI Institute), earlier known as The Boston Dynamics AI Institute. Both organizations were founded by Marc Raibert, a former MIT professor who served as Boston Dynamics’ CEO for…