If you pay attention to what the biggest tech companies are saying about AI demand, you’ll notice a common thread: they’re running short of compute capacity. That means the large language models underpinning AI products today need even more data centers to be trained and for inferencing, and therefore, they need more power. Against that backdrop, energy efficiency has suddenly …
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Jeff Bezos reportedly returns to the trenches as co-CEO of new AI startup, Project Prometheus | TechCrunch
Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos seems to be getting his hands dirty once again: the billionaire is partly backing a new AI startup called Project Prometheus that has raised $6.2 billion in funding, and will take on duties as co-chief executive of the new venture, the New York Times reported, citing several sources familiar with the project. Bezos will share the …
Read More »Luminal raises $5.3 million to build a better GPU code framework | TechCrunch
Three years ago, Luminal co-founder Joe Fioti was working on chip design at Intel when he came to a realization. While he was working on making the best chips he could, the more important bottleneck was in software. “You can make the best hardware on earth, but if it’s hard for developers to use, they’re just not going to use …
Read More »MCP AI agent security startup Runlayer launches with 8 unicorns, $11M from Khosla’s Keith Rabois and Felicis | TechCrunch
On Monday, a new Model Context Protocol security startup called Runlayer launched out of stealth with $11 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois and Felicis. It was created by third-time founder Andrew Berman (previous companies: baby-monitor maker Nanit and an AI video conferencing tool, Vowel, that sold to Zapier in 2024). In the four months since Runlayer …
Read More »Surveillance tech provider Protei was hacked, its data stolen and its website defaced | TechCrunch
A Russian telecom company that develops technology to allow phone and internet companies to conduct web surveillance and censorship was hacked, had its website defaced, and had data stolen from its servers, TechCrunch has learned. Founded in Russia, Protei makes telecommunications systems for phone and internet providers across dozens of countries, including Bahrain, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Pakistan and much of …
Read More »Bone AI raises $12M to challenge Asia’s defense giants with AI-powered robotics | TechCrunch
South Korea’s major defense giants have amassed roughly $69 billion in order backlogs as of late 2024, according to media reports. Seoul is also accelerating investment in advanced weapons systems and expanding its defense ties, particularly with Europe. With the new EU-South Korea Security and Defence Partnership in 2024 and growing exports of vehicles and artillery, the country has become …
Read More »Sakana AI raises $135M Series B at a $2.65B valuation to continue building AI models for Japan | TechCrunch
As U.S. giants like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic race to develop the large language models that underpin their AI products, startups such as Sakana AI, Mistral AI, DeepSeek and AI21 Labs are carving out their own niche with specialized models designed for specific regions, industries, or unique features. In pursuit of that goal, Tokyo-based Sakana AI has closed a ¥20 …
Read More »OpenAI’s Fidji Simo Plans to Make ChatGPT Way More Useful—and Have You Pay For It
In case OpenAI’s structure couldn’t get any weirder—a nonprofit in charge of a for-profit that’s become a public benefit corporation—it now has two CEOs. There’s Sam Altman, chief executive of the whole company, who manages research and compute. And as of this summer, there’s Fidji Simo, the former CEO of Instacart, who manages everything else. Simo hasn’t been seen much …
Read More »Inside a Wild Bitcoin Heist: Five-Star Hotels, Cash-Stuffed Envelopes, and Vanishing Funds
As Kent Halliburton stood in a bathroom at the Rosewood Hotel in central Amsterdam, thousands of miles from home, running his fingers through an envelope filled with €10,000 in crisp banknotes, he started to wonder what he had gotten himself into. Halliburton is the cofounder and CEO of Sazmining, a company that operates bitcoin mining hardware on behalf of clients—a …
Read More »Danish startup FlatPay joins the club of European fintech unicorns to track | TechCrunch
Flatpay, which facilitates card payments for SMBs, has joined the ranks of European fintech unicorns — or startups valued at more than $1 billion — a milestone that has driven some of the region’s biggest exits. These include competitors like Adyen, a Dutch payment processing giant that remains far ahead in scale. However, Flatpay’s fresh funding could help it narrow …
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