Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say
Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company. Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported that Motional is pausing commercial operations and delaying plans to launch a robotaxi service with its next-gen Hyundai Ioniq 5
Read morePitch Deck Teardown: Cloudsmith’s $15M Series A deck
The deck included some redacted numbers, but there was still enough data to get a good picture. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Read moreOpenAI’s ChatGPT announcement: What we know so far
The company is describing the event as “a chance to demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates.” © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Read moreAnthropic’s Claude sees tepid reception on iOS compared with ChatGPT’s debut
Unlike ChatGPT, Claude did not become a new App Store hit. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Read moreFounders Fund leads financing of composites startup Layup Parts
Scarcely five months after its founding, hard tech startup Layup Parts has landed a $9 million round of financing led by Founders Fund to transform composites manufacturing. Lux Capital and Haystack also participated. The breakneck pace is more than a subtle indication that investors’ appetite for tech-focused solutions to the woes
Read moreStartups Weekly: Trouble in EV land and Peloton is circling the drain
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Look, I know this is our startups weekly newsletter, and as the most valuable company in the world, Apple is kind
Read moreAnthropic now lets kids use its AI tech — within limits
AI startup Anthropic is changing its policies to allow minors to use its generative AI systems — in certain circumstances, at least. Announced in a post on the company’s official blog Friday, Anthropic will begin letting teens and preteens use third-party apps (but not its own apps, necessarily) powered by
Read moreThe buzziest EV IPO of the year is a Chinese automaker
Zeekr's market hype is noteworthy and may indicate that investors see value in the high-quality, low-price offerings of Chinese automakers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Read moreVC fund performance is down sharply — but it may have already hit its lowest point
Venture capital has been hit hard by souring macroeconomic conditions over the past few years and it’s not yet clear how the market downturn affected VC fund performance. But recent data from the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System (SFERS) give us something to chew on. SFERS’s venture portfolio recorded a
Read moreThreat actor says he scraped 49M Dell customer addresses before the company found out
The person who claims to have 49 million Dell customer records told TechCrunch that he brute-forced an online company portal and scraped customer data, including physical addresses, directly from Dell’s servers. TechCrunch verified that some of the scraped data matches the personal information of Dell customers. On Thursday, Dell sent
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