The Berlin-based startup Periwinkle is offering a new avenue for those wanting to leave centralized social media operated by Big Tech companies. Instead of joining a decentralized, open social networking app like Mastodon or Bluesky, Periwinkle allows anyone to set up a social media account on their own domain, under …

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down from the top leadership position and transitioning to a new role as chief innovation officer, the company announced Monday. Graber, who has helped grow the X and Threads competitor to 43 million users and furthered the development of its underlying AT Protocol, will …

AMI Labs, the new venture cofounded by Turing Prize winner Yann LeCun after he left Meta, has raised $1. 5 billion pre-money valuation. AMI is working on world models, or AI that learns from reality, not just from language. This category has fewer players than generative AI, but maybe not …

City Detect, a company that uses vision AI to help local governments monitor the health of buildings and neighborhoods, announced on Friday a $13 million Series A round led by Prudence Venture Capital. The startup launched in 2021, and Gavin Baum-Blake, the remaining co-founder, serves as CEO. He said the …

The Pentagon has officially designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after the two failed to agree on how much control the military should have over its AI models, including its use in autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. As Anthropic’s $200 million contract fell apart, the DoD turned to OpenAI instead, …

Retail investors are famously locked out of the startup world. Robinhood is attempting to change that by allowing the general public to invest in a portfolio of what it calls “some of the most exciting private companies operating today. ” To do this, the company that pioneered the commission-free brokerage …

AI video-generation startup Luma on Thursday launched Luma Agents, designed to handle end-to-end creative work across text, image, video, and audio. Luma Agents are powered by the startup’s Unified Intelligence family of models, with architecture trained on a single multimodal reasoning system. Luma Agents are being pitched as a new …

Nominal on Thursday announced a fresh $80 million Series B extension round at a $1 billion valuation, led by Founders Fund. This followed the company’s $75 million Series B round led by Sequoia in September. The company offers software that helps hardware engineers test their designs and began as a …

The $7 million in annual recurring revenue that Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee shared with TechCrunch last summer was a lie, Lee admitted on Thursday on X. Wrote Lee, this “is the only blatantly dishonest thing i’ve said publicly online, so this is my formal retraction. ” Yet his …

A typical merger-and-acquisition process is time-consuming and expensive, even for the largest, well-staffed private equity firms. In addition to spending countless hours meeting with senior executives of potential targets and modeling financial outcomes, these groups spend millions of dollars on external advisers: accountants, lawyers, and management consultants. Since expenses for …