Tech-focused venture capital firm YZi Labs has increased its stake in Ethena, the stablecoin issuer behind USDe, which will assist the digital dollar’s adoption across decentralized and centralized platforms. The investment will assist Ethena USDe’s (USDe) expansion on BNB Chain while enabling Ethena to continue building its USDtb stablecoin and an institutional settlement layer, “Converge,”…
Applied AI research company Fundamental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera) announced today that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Prosus with participation from Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison. The company has a curious structure, as it is working on multiple AI applications in different fields. When it raised…
About six months after coming out of stealth with $50 million in funding, Latent Labs has released a web-based AI model for programming biology. Latent Labs model has “achieved state-of-the-art on different metrics” when testing the proteins it developed in a physical lab, according to Latent Labs CEO and founder Simon Kohl, a scientist who…
Anza, a Solana blockchain infrastructure firm spun out of Solana Labs, has proposed a new proof-of-stake consensus called Alpenglow that it claims would be “the biggest change to Solana’s core protocol” and compete with current internet infrastructure. “We believe that the release of Alpenglow will be a turning point for Solana. Alpenglow is not only…
There seems to be a new, more impressive AI model every week. Given the rapid pace, how can founders best position themselves to build on top of this technology? At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley, we’ll host a panel on “How Founders Can Build on Existing Foundational Models”…
SSV Network proposed a new permissionless staking module for Lido, aiming to improve decentralization and staking infrastructure for institutional participants. SSV Network proposed a permissionless staking module that leverages SSV’s Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) to integrate node operators (NOs) into the operator set of Lido on Ethereum. If approved, the proposal would add the first…
AI labs traveling the road to super-intelligent systems are realizing they might have to take a detour. “AI scaling laws,” the methods and expectations that labs have used to increase the capabilities of their models for the last five years, are now showing signs of diminishing returns, according to several AI investors, founders, and CEOs…
While OpenAI pursues yet another monster fundraise, it is not stealing all the oxygen in the room: AI startups building promising foundational models can still open doors, and checkbooks. Multiple sources tell us that Black Forest Labs — a startup that’s building generative AI image models and came out of stealth two months ago with…
Elon Musk’s Grok released a new AI image-generation feature on Tuesday night that, just like the AI chatbot, has very few safeguards. That means you can generate fake images of Donald Trump smoking marijuana on the Joe Rogan show, for example, and upload it straight to the X platform. But it’s not really Elon Musk’s…