Category: Crypto

Family offices invest a substantial amount of capital in startups each year. In the first half of 2023, 27% of overall startup deal value came from deals that included a family office investor, according to a recent report from PwC. Despite their prevalence in startup deals, family offices can be a mysterious class of investors…

Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of X (formerly Twitter) challenger Pebble, has joined OpenAI to work on a secretive project. Cselle, who according to LinkedIn has been employed at OpenAI since October, announced the news in a post on X yesterday. “Will share more about what I’m working on in due time,” he…

Election Day is nearly here, and if you haven’t already mailed in your ballot or gone in for early voting, you might need a ride come November 5.  Here’s a roundup of all the freebies, discounts, and information on getting to the polls that transportation companies are offering. Micromobility Lime is offering free rides to…

“There is no AI without data, there is no AI without unstructured data, and there is no AI without unstructured data at scale,” said Chet Kapoor, chairman and CEO of data management company DataStax. Kapoor was kicking off a conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 about “new data pipelines” in the context of modern AI applications,…

As a part of TechCrunch’s ongoing Women in AI series, which seeks to give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved (and overdue) time in the spotlight, TechCrunch interviewed Sophia Velastegui. Velastegui is a member of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) national AI advisory committee and the former chief AI officer at Microsoft’s business software division. Velastegui didn’t…

Investor Wesley Chan has shown a knack for making very early investments into multi-billion-dollar unicorns, such as Plaid, Gusto, Flexport, and, most recently, Canva. Chan comes from an unconventional background — he grew up in an immigrant family and had only middling grades in high school. But he landed a job washing test tubes in…

The hype is palpable: As tech folks from near and far converge for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Fransisco — one of the only places where Waymo is available to the public — there’s ample chatter about the autonomous vehicle service. “If you think about AI hype and all, everyone gets excited about what 10…

Bonobos founder Andy Dunn is back in the builder’s seat, working on an in-person social media platform called Pie. But the biggest lessons he learned from his $310 million Bonobos exit don’t have as much to do with entrepreneurship as they do with staying sane. When Dunn was in college, he was diagnosed with bipolar…

MIT this week showcased a new model for training robots. Rather than the standard set of focused data used to teach robots new tasks, the method goes big, mimicking the massive troves of information used to train large language models (LLMs). The researchers note that imitation learning — in which the agent learns by following…

About a year and a half ago, quantum control startup Quantum Machines and Nvidia announced a deep partnership that would bring together Nvidia’s DGX Quantum computing platform and Quantum Machine’s advanced quantum control hardware. We didn’t hear much about the results of this partnership for a while, but it’s now starting to bear fruit and…