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One startup’s quest to store electricity in the ocean

When Manuele Aufiero was a child, his parents would take him hiking along a reservoir in northern Italy. It wasn’t a typical reservoir, though. This one drained and refilled constantly, with pumps raising the water level when electricity was cheap. When nearby cities needed electricity, the pumps would reverse, turning into generators as the water […]

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Sources: Multimodal AI startup Fal.ai already raised at $4B+ valuation

Fal.ai, a startup that hosts image, video, and audio AI models for developers, has closed a new round valuing the company at over $4 billion, four people familiar with the deal said. The company raised approximately $250 million, two of the people said. Major investors in the round are Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, according to

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Apple alerts exploit developer that his iPhone was targeted with government spyware 

Earlier this year, a developer was shocked by a message that appeared on his personal phone: “Apple detected a targeted mercenary spyware attack against your iPhone.”   “I was panicking,” Jay Gibson, who asked that we don’t use his real name over fears of retaliation, told TechCrunch.   Gibson, who until recently built surveillance technologies for Western

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European AI rising star Nexos.ai raises $30M to unlock enterprise AI adoption

For most enterprise companies, AI is either a promise that has yet to deliver or a security risk. The effort of Lithuania’s most famous entrepreneur duo to solve that conundrum has garnered attention — and funding. Just months after Nexos.ai came out of stealth with an $8 million funding round led by Index Ventures, Nord

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Liberate bags $50M at $300M valuation to bring AI deeper into insurance back offices

Liberate, an AI startup automating insurance operations, has raised $50 million in a round led by Battery Ventures as it looks to scale its agentic deployments across carriers and agencies globally. The all-equity round values the three-year-old startup at $300 million post-money, with participation from new investor Canapi Ventures and returning backers Redpoint Ventures, Eclipse,

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Coco Robotics taps UCLA professor to lead new physical AI research lab

Coco Robotics, a startup known for its fleet of last-mile delivery bots, is looking to get more information out of the five years’ worth of data its robots have collected. Its answer: a physical AI lab with University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) professor Bolei Zhou at the helm. Coco Robotics, which made the announcement

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FleetWorks raises $17M to match truckers with cargo faster

The thousands of small trucking companies that help move goods around the United States have a fairly old-school way of doing things, according to Paul Singer. He would know — he left his product manager job at Uber Freight to start a company called FleetWorks, which he believes will modernize things. Created during Y Combinator’s

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Spyware maker NSO Group confirms acquisition by US investors

Israeli spyware maker NSO Group has confirmed to TechCrunch that a U.S. investment group has acquired the company.   NSO spokesperson Oded Hershowitz told TechCrunch on Friday that “an American investment group has invested tens of millions of dollars in the company and has acquired controlling ownership.”  Confirmation of the deal came soon after Israeli tech

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This distributed data storage startup wants to take on Big Cloud

The explosion of AI companies has pushed demand for computing power to new extremes, and companies like CoreWeave, Together AI and Lambda Labs have capitalized on that demand, attracting immense amounts of attention and capital for their ability to offer distributed compute capacity. But most companies still store data with the big three cloud providers, AWS, Google

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