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Sri Mandir helps Hindus visit sacred temples and offer donations, virtually from their phones

While living in the U.S., the Trivedi family was looking for a solution to follow a ritual practice of worshiping at one of India’s Jyotirlingas — a holy representation of the Hindu god Shiva. After searching on YouTube for ways to offer flowers and other items ceremonially at the Indian temple one Sunday in 2023, […]

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Alpha Partners raises $153M third fund for pro-rata investments

Steve Brotman started Alpha Partners in 2014 with a novel idea at the time: investing alongside early-stage VCs to help preserve their ownership in promising companies as they transition to later funding rounds. Alpha’s first fund was a mere $10 million. But as startups started staying private for longer, the VC industry invented various mechanisms

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Bug lets anyone bypass WhatsApp’s ‘View Once’ privacy feature

WhatsApp, the most popular end-to-end encrypted messaging app in the world with more than two billion users, allows users to exchange pictures and videos that disappear soon after opening. But a bug in how WhatsApp implements its so-called “View Once” feature in its browser-based web app allows any malicious recipient to display and save the

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Sunamp’s thermal battery uses a chemical found in salt-and-vinegar potato chips

Nearly 20 years ago, Andrew Bissell was sitting in the living room of his beachfront home in the Edinburgh area. He and his wife, Susan Lang-Bissell, had just sold their medical imaging startup, and he was pondering his future. “Do we retire or do we go again?” Bissell told TechCrunch. Around that time, he was

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How a viral AI image catapulted a Mexican startup to a major adidas contract

Antonio Nuño, Fatima Alvarez, and Enrique Rodriguez have been friends since they were five years old. As teenagers, they became volunteers helping indigenous communities — first in Mexico, then in other countries — and saw that many of the women were artisans.  The trio came to realize that these artists “made very beautiful things in

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C-Zero is raising $18M to make emission-free hydrogen using natural gas, filings reveal

Hydrogen startup C-Zero has raised $5 million of an $18 million funding round, according to an SEC filing. The company is developing a way to strip hydrogen from methane without emitting carbon dioxide. The resulting hydrogen can be used in a range of industries today, including ammonia and petrochemical production, and potentially others in the

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Endolith is using ‘Olympic caliber’ copper microbes to address the copper shortage

Copper is critical to the energy transition away from fossil fuels. The metal is an excellent conductor of electricity, used in everything from electric vehicles to wind turbines. But by the end of the decade, the International Energy Agency expects copper supplies to fall 20% short of demand. One stealthily operating startup thinks it can

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Portex founder Brittany Ennix learned the importance of supply chains from Uber and Flexport

Brittany Ennix first became interested in supply chains as a child.  Her grandfather worked for the Ford glass manufacturing plant, where she says he gave her an appreciation for the complexity of building something. When Ennix moved to Silicon Valley and worked for Uber and later Flexport, her fascination for the industry grew, until she

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X is hiring staff for security and safety after two years of layoffs

Nearly two years after the layoffs across X’s trust, safety and security teams, Elon Musk’s social media company is now trying to hire new employees to help moderate content and secure its platform, according to X’s official job listings.  In the last month, X posted two dozen job openings evenly split across its safety and

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