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Affiniti’s 20- and 22-year-old founders raise $17M led by SignalFire just 6 months after an $11M seed

Affiniti founders Aaron Bai, 20, and Sahil Phadnis, 22, are building the kind of expense management software for main street small businesses that tech startups have enjoyed for years. Their growth has been so impressive that six months after raising an $11 million seed round, they raised a $17 million Series A, led by Signal […]

Affiniti’s 20- and 22-year-old founders raise $17M led by SignalFire just 6 months after an $11M seed Read More »

Cocospy stalkerware apps go offline after data breach

A trio of phone surveillance apps, which was caught spying on millions of people’s phones earlier this year, has gone offline. Cocospy, Spyic, and Spyzie were three near-identical but differently branded stalkerware apps that allowed the person planting one of the apps on a target’s phone access to their personal data — including their messages,

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Deel wants Rippling to hand over any agreements involving paying the alleged spy

Deel has lobbed a new volley in the ongoing legal battle with rival HR tech startup Rippling. Deel filed a motion, containing a series of letters, asking the Irish court to make Rippling hand over information. In one letter, Deel wants unredacted versions of witness affidavits, including the famed one by former Rippling employee, Keith

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Laser-powered fusion experiment more than doubles its power output

The world’s only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily ramping up the amount of power it produces, TechCrunch has learned. In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then again to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source

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Y Combinator startup Firecrawl is ready to pay $1M to hire three AI agents as employees

Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl is back on the hunt for AI agent employees. As we reported back in February, its first attempt didn’t yield an AI worth hiring. But it’s now placed three new ads on YC’s job board for “AI agents only” and has set aside a $1 million budget total to make it

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The Nuclear Company raises $46M to develop massive reactor sites

The Nuclear Company is taking an old approach to building new nuclear reactors. Rather than gin up a new design or try to mass manufacture smaller reactors, it wants to develop a series of reactors using existing designs. The two-year-old startup announced a Series A last month that included investments from CIV, Goldcrest Capital, MCJ

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The Nuclear Company raises $51M to develop massive reactor sites

The Nuclear Company is taking an old approach to building new nuclear reactors. Rather than gin up a new design or try to mass manufacture smaller reactors, it wants to develop a series of reactors using existing designs. The two-year-old startup announced a Series A last month that included investments from CIV, Goldcrest Capital, MCJ

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Fake fired Twitter worker ‘Rahul Ligma’ is a real engineer with an AI data startup used by Harvard

The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two men with boxes outside the company’s headquarters. One introduced himself as recently laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.”  His real name is Rahul Sonwalkar but the prank went viral. He piled on his character’s notoriety when he went to the Bahamas to

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Fieldstone Bio is building microbes that can sense everything from TNT to arsenic

The world is awash in data about, well, the world — thanks to satellites and environmental sensors. But there’s still a lot we can’t see, and Fieldstone Bio thinks microbes can change that. “They’ve evolved to sense and respond to information. It’s just trillions of calculations going on at all times all around us,” Brandon

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Cognichip emerges from stealth with the goal of using generative AI to develop new chips

Chips are a critical component of the AI industry. But new chips don’t hit the market with the same speed as new AI models and products do. Cognichip has a lofty goal of creating a foundational AI model that can help bring new chips to market faster. San Francisco-based Cognichip is working to build a

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