Tech

YouTube has become the biggest platform out there, offering tons of opportunities for creators to earn a living. Back in June, the company reported that its creative ecosystem added over $55 billion to the U.S. GDP and created more than 490,000 full-time jobs. However, many YouTubers have reduced their reliance on ad revenue and brand deals. There are several reasons …

Google Maps is adding new AI features, including a builder agent and an MCP server — a tool that connects AI assistants to Google Maps’ technical documentation — to help developers and users create interactive projects using Maps data and code. The company said it is using Gemini models across the board to power these features. Among these new tools, …

Venmo on Monday introduced a new rewards program, Venmo Stash, offering cash back to customers who transact with their favorite brands on the payments app and engage with Venmo’s products. While cashback rewards are a common incentive for credit cards, Venmo’s rewards — which can be up to 5% — are returned to Venmo’s Mastercard Debit Card. The program is …

Five years ago, when Miles “Deuce” McBride moved to New York as a 20-year-old rookie playing for the Knicks, he found the transition to a big city overwhelming and struggled to find the right crowd. “When I got up here, everybody on my team was married with kids or just kind of loners,” he told TechCrunch, reflecting on his initial …

Amazon Music announced on Monday the launch of “Fan Groups,” a new beta feature that lets users create and join groups based on their favorite genres and artists. The feature allows fans to chat, post, and listen to songs shared within these groups. The feature is currently being tested in Canada on iOS and Android devices. Users can access Fan …

Nearly seven years after announcing its first fund, Sapphire Sport — the venture fund focused on sports, media, and entertainment — is spinning out from Sapphire Ventures. The fund will rebrand as an independent venture firm, 359 Capital. The firm’s new name is a tribute to the sub-four-minute mile, a feat once deemed humanly impossible but ultimately achieved through rigorous …

Autonomous vehicles are having a moment, and it’s making it a lot easier for smaller companies to raise money. Vay, a German startup offering remote-controlled rental cars, will get $60 million in cash from Singaporean tech heavyweight Grab, the company announced on Monday. The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval and expected to close by the end of the …

For more than a decade, makers of government spyware have defended themselves from criticism by saying that their surveillance technology is intended to be used only against serious criminals and terrorists, and only in limited cases.   The evidence gathered from dozens, if not hundreds of documented instances of spyware abuse all over the world, however, shows that neither of those …

After helping thousands of enterprises document how work actually happens, Scribe has raised $75 million at a $1.3 billion post-money valuation to roll out Scribe Optimize, a platform that maps workflows across the enterprise to reveal where automation and AI will actually yield returns — instead of becoming another sunk cost. The all-equity Series C round was led by StepStone, …

Although LLM-powered AI agents are a fairly new phenomenon, one of the areas where they’ve been most popular so far is in sales. 1mind, a startup co-founded by Amanda Kahlow, has been quietly shipping its sales agent, named Mindy, for about a year.   On Monday, the startup announced a $30 million Series A round led by Battery Ventures. This brings 1mind’s total raise to $40 million, the company says.  Kahlow is well known …