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Accel doubles down on Sarla Aviation’s ambition to develop electric air taxis in India

Transportation /

Sarla Aviation launched one year ago with a pitch built for India’s congested streets. The electric air taxi startup, named after India’s first woman pilot, Sarla Thukral, would focus on aircraft that can carry more weight — even if that means shorter ranges.  “In India, a shorter range is fine, as long as you can […]

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EV startup Harbinger’s obsession with simplicity fuels $100M Series B

Transportation /

It’s not an easy time to raise money for an electric vehicle startup, especially given how many have failed or are close to failing. But Los Angeles-based Harbinger has pulled it off by taking an hyper-focused approach to electrifying commercial trucking.  The reward is a $100 million Series B, co-led by early Tesla investor Capricorn

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Raspberry AI raises $24M from a16z to accelerate fashion design

AI /

The world of fashion is moving at a faster pace each year. Most retailers introduce new styles each season, and fast-fashion companies like Shein, H&M and Zara update their collections continuously.  To keep pace with the rapid demand for new styles, brands and manufacturers have been turning to tech to accelerate their design process. Raspberry

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Biden admin snubs Tesla’s $100 million big-rig charging funding request — again

Transportation /

The Department of Transportation announced Friday another $636 million in funding that will be awarded to 49 applicants for electric vehicle charging infrastructure — and Tesla’s application for nearly $100 million to fund a big rig charging corridor was once again passed over. Tesla’s name was not among the list of recipients released, and its partner

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Groww, India’s biggest trading app, seeks $7B value in IPO

Fintech /

Groww, India’s largest retail stockbroker, is preparing to file for an IPO in 10 to 12 months, seeking a valuation between $6 billion and $8 billion, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The Bengaluru-headquartered’s listing would be the first IPO by a digital trading platform in India. The targeted valuation is more than double

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Bench customers are now being forced to hand over their data or risk losing it, they say

Fintech /

After accounting startup Bench abruptly shut down on December 27 and was bought in a fire-sale by Employer.com, Bench customers are now learning they can’t easily just take their financial data and leave.  And some are very unhappy about it, three customers told TechCrunch. To recap: When Bench, a startup based in Canada that raised

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How OpenAI’s bot crushed this seven-person company’s web site ‘like a DDoS attack’

AI /

On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company’s ecommerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack.  He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site.  “We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page,”

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Gumloop, founded in a bedroom in Vancouver, lets users automate tasks with drag-and-drop modules

Apps /

Developers Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal think that AI has the potential to automate lots of business-relevant tasks, but that many of the AI-powered automation tools on the market today are unreliable and costly. Part of the problem is that users expect too much of AI, Brodeur-Urbas told TechCrunch — for instance, they assume that

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Scale AI hit by its second employee wage lawsuit in less than a month

Startups /

Scale AI relies on an army of workers it categorizes as contractors to do essential AI work like labeling images or rating LLM responses for Big Tech and others. But the AI startup, most recently valued at $13.8 billion, is facing mounting legal challenges over its labor practices. On January 3, 2025, former Scale AI

Scale AI hit by its second employee wage lawsuit in less than a month Read More »