Skio, a 2020 Y Combinator alum that was founded by self-described college dropout Kennan Frost, has been acquired by competitor Recharge, the companies announced on Thursday. Both Skio and Recharge make products that handle subscription payments for brands. While the official press release did not disclose the terms of the …

When Chris Gray sold his Shark Tank-backed scholarship search startup Scholly to Sallie Mae in 2023, he thought he had it all. Now he’s suing the student loan giant for wrongful termination and alleging that it’s selling the data his app collected, which includes personal info on minors, without properly …

The world today is riven by cultural differences, political divisions, and geopolitical disputes — a challenging environment for any investor hunting for startups that can grow large enough to deliver venture-scale returns. Kompas VC, which operates out of offices in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Tel Aviv, has developed a regionally …

Series, a social networking app, announced that it raised a $5. 1 million pre-seed round, with investors including Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail, Pear VC, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and GPTZero founder Edward Tian. The company was founded early last year by Yale students Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow, both still …

Redwood Materials chief operating officer Chris Lister is leaving the battery recycling company to retire, TechCrunch has learned — and he’s not the only executive that recently departed. Lister, a former vice president who led operations at Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, has been with Redwood since late 2023. He started as …

Earlier this month, NASA’s Artemis II mission sent four astronauts to orbit the moon and used new laser communications systems to beam dramatic images back to Earth. One of the receivers, though, wasn’t hosted by the U. A low-cost terminal built by the companies Observable Space and Quantum Opus, and …

It happens in every emerging industry: founders and investors push toward a common goal, until the money starts to roll in and that shared vision begins to diverge. Cracks are emerging in the fusion power world, which I saw firsthand at The Economist’s Fusion Fest in London last week. It …

Physical Intelligence, the two-year-old, San Francisco-based robotics startup that has quietly become one of the most closely watched AI companies in the Bay Area, published new research Thursday showing that its latest model can direct robots to perform tasks they were never explicitly trained on — a capability the company’s …

Motorola has filed a lawsuit in India against social media platforms and content creators over posts it alleges are defamatory, raising concerns it could dampen critical coverage of the company, experts say. The lawsuit, filed in a Bengaluru court and obtained by TechCrunch, names platforms such as X, YouTube, and …

Historically, marketers relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for personalized online ad campaigns. In late 2024, seven-year-old startup Hightouch launched an AI-powered service that allows marketing professionals to create custom content for brands such as Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify without involving brand design …