Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. There’s not that much news from me this week, but I’ve been doing a ton of prep for TechCrunch Early Stage taking place in Boston on…
On Thursday, a federal judge sentenced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison after he was found guilty on seven charges of wire fraud and money-laundering. The scam he pulled was fairly simple: He and his partners created an exchange, FTX, that took customer deposits to invest in and trade cryptocurrencies. Some…
Since Bumble’s blockbuster IPO at the height of the pandemic, investors’ ardor with the dating service has cooled. Bumble’s shares trade at roughly $11 per share right now, a far cry from the $76 they closed at on its first day as a public company in February 2021. Of course, investors are fickle, which is…
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Byju Raveendran, the founder of embattled edtech group Byju’s, has made a last-ditch attempt to placate disgruntled investors including Prosus Ventures. He has just informed them that the board is weighing an offer of renounced shares — shares that a group of investors chose not to buy recently in protest — to prevent the dilution of…
X.ai, Elon Musk’s AI startup, has revealed its latest generative AI model, Grok-1.5. Set to power social network X’s Grok chatbot in the not-to-distant future (“in the coming days,” X.ai writes in a blog post), Grok-1.5 appears to be a measurable upgrade over its predecessor, Grok-1 — at least judging by the benchmark results and…
US may soon unveil list of Chinese chip factories barred from receiving tech
Wen Hsieh and Haomiao Huang, both Kleiner Perkins investors, left the firm in 2023 to start their own venture capital fund called Matter Venture Partners. The firm had backing from Kleiner and Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC. Hsieh was a longtime KPer, having been there for 17 years; Huang had been there four years. With a passion…
Google.org, Google’s charitable wing, is launching a new program to help fund nonprofits developing tech that leverages generative AI. Called Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI, the program is to be funded by $20 million in grants and include 21 nonprofits to start, including Quill.org, a company creating AI-powered tools for student writing feedback, and World Bank,…
Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives has a list of steps Elon Musk can take to turn things around…
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