Category: Apps

Two mobile operating systems currently comprise nearly 100% of the global smartphone market. Building one is hard, and for most phone makers, there are better uses of resources, especially when Android is right there for the taking. While it’s a potential differentiator, these companies have largely opted to maintain Google’s mobile OS, customized by skins and…

In a Reddit AMA, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that a lack of compute capacity is one major factor preventing the company from shipping products as often as it’d like. “All of these models have gotten quite complex,” he wrote in response to a question about why OpenAI’s next AI models were taking so long.…

MaC VC just raised a $150 million Fund III, according to Fortune.  The firm, which launched in 2021 and already has $600 million in assets under management, will now cut check sizes between $2 million and $3 million into seed-stage companies. Notable investments for the firm include Chef Robotics and Stoke Space. The firm is…

Smart ring maker Oura on Thursday announced that it has acquired Sparta Science, a Bay Area-based health tracking startup. TechCrunch spoke to Sparta back in 2018 at the offices of Playground Global, a key investor. The deal marks Oura’s third acquisition in two years. The company purchased digital identity platform Proxy in May 2023. This…

After 10 years, the Female Founders Fund has returned its $5.85 million Fund I, according to Fortune. The news makes FFF one of the few diverse-focused funds to fully return a fund in a move that may boost the image of investing in women founders across Silicon Valley.  Any further investments and exits to come…

BBG Ventures raised a new $60 million fund to support founders from “diverse backgrounds,” including gender, race, age, and class, Business Insider reported. The firm is known for backing exclusively women founders, and this new fund is a slight departure from that focus but comes as funding to diverse founders continues to dip. Crunchbase found that…

Decart, an Israeli AI company that emerged from stealth today with $21 million in funding from Sequoia and Oren Zeev, has released what it’s claiming is the first playable “open-world” AI model. Called Oasis, the model, which is available for download, powers a demo on Decart’s site: a Minecraft-like game that’s generated on the fly,…

America’s supply chain vulnerabilities were on full display Thursday after drone manufacturer Skydio told customers it was facing a battery squeeze after being hit with sanctions from China.  “This is an attempt to eliminate the leading American drone company and deepen the world’s dependence on Chinese drone suppliers,” Skydio CEO Adam Bry said in a…

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Thursday hinted at an improved, “agentic” version of the company’s Alexa assistant — one that could take actions on a user’s behalf. “I think that the next generation of these assistants and generative AI applications will be better at not just answering questions and summarizing, indexing, and aggregating data, but…

Hello, and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is a wrap, and I’m more than thrilled by the amazing space industry programming we had on offer this year. We covered everything from building a dual-use business to orbital re-entry, we caught up with Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck, and heard about the ground station…