Author: TechCrunch News

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…

Every Sunday, NPR host Will Shortz, The New York Times’ crossword puzzle guru, gets to quiz thousands of listeners in a long-running segment called the Sunday Puzzle. While written to be solvable without too much foreknowledge, the brainteasers are usually challenging even for skilled contestants. That’s why some experts think they’re a promising way to…

The race is on to build a new generation of healthcare software to replace legacy hospital systems that in some cases may not have been updated in decades. A startup out of Munich, Germany called Avelios has ambitions to build a new kind of end-to-end administrative system, leaning into more modern tooling using AI and…

Modern product engineering requires the production of highly accurate digital simulations, allowing engineers to create prototypes and understand the real-world performance of materials. Currently, legacy software platforms from companies like IBM and Dassault are generally deployed, but now startups are joining the arena, powered by generative AI. One such is Trace.Space, coming out of Riga,…

In just a few days, France will host the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, with heads of state flocking to Paris to meet global tech leaders. They’ll most likely announce some big investments and diplomatic agreements focused on safety or the environmental impact of artificial intelligence. Ahead of the summit, early-stage VC firm Galion.exe, growth investment…

Hitachi Ventures secured $400 million for a fourth fund, the firm exclusively told TechCrunch. The size of the new fund is a vote of confidence in a range of deep tech verticals. The corporate VC’s sprawling portfolio mimics that of its limited partner’s, including energy, manufacturing, biotech, and AI. “We are open to other breakthrough…

On the heels of Chinese AI firm DeepSeek making a huge splash in OpenAI’s American backyard, OpenAI is diving into expanding in Asia, with major commercial deals that will also help it train its AI on more Asian-language content and user behavior — a gateway to doing more business in these markets in the future…