sam altman
Wave, a Stripe-backed African fintech valued at $1.7 billion, cut 15% of its staff in June
Wave, an African fintech that offers mobile money services in Senegal and Ivory Coast, laid off about 15% of its workforce last month. TechCrunch first got a whiff of the…
Postmates founder banks $23 million for his new crypto startup TipTop
Postmates founder Bastian Lehmann’s new crypto startup TipTop was lightly teased out a few weeks ago, but now the stealth startup is sharing some info on its early funding, though…
LeadGenius co-founder gets back to user-centric design roots with Marvin
Marvin’s technology is an interview and user research tool that plugs into video conferencing tools to record customer interviews and them them into searchable insights.
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African tech took center stage in 2021
Two years ago, the African tech ecosystem saw newfound attention from global players that translated to the continent’s best year of receiving venture capital. From varying sources, it is estimated up to $2 billion went into African tech startups in 2019. With high-profile visits from the most famous Jacks (Ma and Dorsey), a long-awaited first…
TrueNorth has raised $50 million from Sam Altman and others to empower independent truckers
Jin Stedge studied aerospace engineering at MIT, but after she found herself at Scotty Labs, an SRI International spin-out focused on autonomous driving, she says she came to appreciate how…
Mixnet maker Nym tops up with $13M led by a16z’s crypto fund
Switzerland-based privacy tech startup Nym Technologies, which is trying to commercialize an old idea for privacy-centric infrastructure (mixnets) by combining it with buzzy crypto incentives, has closed $13 million in…
Helion Energy, a clean energy company committed to creating a new era of plentiful, zero-carbon electricity from fusion, today announced the close of its $0.5 billion Series E, with an…
Microsoft’s new Azure OpenAI Service brings GPT-3 to (a few) more developers
Microsoft today announced the launch of the Azure OpenAI Service, which, as the name implies, makes OpenAI’s machine learning models available on the Azure platform. Specifically, that means GPT-3, OpenAI’s…
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Sam Altman’s Worldcoin wants to scan eyeballs in exchange for crypto
As investors race to capitalize on surging interest in cryptocurrencies, startups are getting creative in how they onboard a generation of crypto users to their first wallets. Worldcoin is perhaps one of the most audacious efforts to bribe the world to embrace their currency. The startup, founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Alex Blania,…
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Rich and worried about the world? Put your money where your concern is
Too much bullshit that is bad for the planet gets shrugged off under the protective armor of preserving shareholder value.
Humane, a stealthy hardware and software startup co-founded by an ex-Apple designer and engineer, raises $100M
A stealthy startup co-founded by a former senior designer from Apple and one of its ex-senior software engineers has picked up a significant round of funding to build out its…
Los Angeles delivery robot startup Coco this week has announced $36 million in funding. The Series A was led by Sam Altman, Silicon Valley Bank and Founders Fund, with participation…
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Altman brothers lead B2B payment startup Routable’s $30M Series B
We all know the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital adoption in a number of areas, particularly in the financial services space. Within financial services, there are few spaces hotter than B2B payments. With a $120 trillion market size, it’s no surprise that an increasing number of fintechs focused on digitizing payments have been attracting investor…
Optimizely co-founder Dan Siroker said the idea for his new startup Scribe goes back to a couple of personal experiences — and although Scribe’s first product is focused on Zoom,…
Because algorithmic bias is rarely straightforward, many GPT-3 applications will act as canaries in the growing coal mine that is AI-driven applications.
Extra Crunch Live: Join our Q&A tomorrow at noon PDT with Y Combinator’s Geoff Ralston
From Airbnb to Zapier, and Coinbase to Instacart, many of the tech world’s most valuable companies spent their earliest days in Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Steering the ship at Y…
Homebuilding is not for the faint of heart, particularly those who want to build something custom. Selecting the right architect and designer, the myriad contractors, the complexity of building codes…
Microsoft teamed up with OpenAI to build a massive AI supercomputer in Azure
At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced that it has teamed up with OpenAI, the startup trying to build a general artificial intelligence, with — among other things —…
Vote.org founder launches VoteAmerica, a nonprofit using tech tools to help Americans vote by mail
With November looming, the scramble to protect the 2020 U.S. election from coronavirus chaos is on. To that end, a small, skilled cluster of voting rights advocates are launching a…
Altman and others want to crowdfund 1 billion masks in the next 180 days
Sam Altman, former president of Y Combinator and CEO of OpenAI, tweeted out his goal to secure 1 billion masks in 180 days. People just need to crowdfund those masks,…
TrueNorth raises $3M to make independent trucker operations more seamless
As the COVID-19 pandemic makes health officials urge us all to stay at home, truckers are doing the exact opposite of that to help us live our lives inside. Now,…
Aspen Neuroscience raises $70M for its experimental Parkinson’s Disease treatment
Since 2012, Dr. Jeanne Loring, the founder of the eponymous Loring Lab at Scripps Research, has been thinking about how to use pluripotent stem cells as a potential treatment for…
Elon Musk says all advanced AI development should be regulated, including at Tesla
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is once again sounding a warning note regarding the development of artificial intelligence. The executive and founder tweeted on Monday evening that “all org[anizations]…
China Roundup: Y Combinator’s short-lived China dream
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world.…
Sam Altman, Index Ventures back a startup taking on Slack.
Week in Review: Regulation boogaloo
Hello, weekenders. This is Week in Review, where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories…
Microsoft is making a $1 billion bet on OpenAI, the company formed by notable founders including Elon Musk and Sam Altman three years ago with the aim of doing research…
Elon Musk-backed Neuralink to detail its progress on upgrading the brain to keep pace with AI
Elon Musk’s brain computer interface (BCI) venture Neuralink will provide some more insight into what they’ve been working on for the past two years, during which time we’ve heard very…
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ZeroDown is constructing a new path to home ownership
Part real estate fund, part tech startup, ZeroDown wants to make it easier to buy a home in the Bay Area.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will tell Disrupt about tomorrow’s jobs
OpenAI’s co-founders Greg Brockman and Sam Altman aren’t afraid of Terminator robots. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF in October, they’ll tell our audience why it’s the more subtle repercussions of artificial…
