Since its founding in 2021, OpenAI Startup Fund has raised $175 million for its main fund and secured an additional $114 million through five separate special purpose vehicles, which are investment pools for specific opportunities. Unlike many sizable tech companies, OpenAI says it doesn’t use the company’s money to invest in startups. The ChatGPT maker…
The CEO of Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition startup that created a searchable database of 30 billion photos by scraping the internet, has resigned, according to a statement he supplied to TechCrunch. The CEO, Hoan Ton-That, said “it is time for the next chapter in my life” and that he would remain on as…
Mercor, the AI recruiting startup founded by three 21-year-old Thiel Fellows, has raised $100 million in a Series B round, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Menlo Park-based Felicis led the round, valuing Mercor at $2 billion—eight times its previous valuation, the Wall Street Journal previously reported. Existing investors Benchmark, General Catalyst, and DST Global also…
Character AI, a startup that lets users chat with different AI-powered characters, is now testing games on its desktop and mobile web apps to increase engagement on its platform. The games are available to Character AI’s paid subscribers and a limited set of users on the free plan. For this initial release, the company developed…
No company has capitalized on the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. Its revenue, profitability, and cash reserves have skyrocketed since the introduction of ChatGPT a little over two years ago — and the many competitive generative AI services that have launched since. And its stock price soared more than eightfold. During that period, the…
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has fined accessiBe, a startup that claims to make websites more compatible with the screen readers blind people rely on to access the internet, for false advertising and compensating reviewers without disclosing that it sponsored the reviews. In a proposed order, the FTC would require accessiBe to pay $1 million that…
AI holds huge promise for healthcare, but not just on the medical side; many startups are convinced machine learning-based systems can do a lot of good on adjacent tasks such as appointment scheduling and confirmations. Brazilian startup Carecode is among these AI believers. It’s coming out of stealth with an ambition to reduce healthcare costs…
When Nicolás Camhi, Matías Pérez Pefaur and Diego Chahuán (pictured above, left to right) launched Vambe last year, they were building a CRM for debt collection. But despite gaining traction, they soon realized that their customers were not as interested in their debt collection product as the WhatsApp AI agents Vambe had built to facilitate…
Indoor climbing is a tricky sport to track. That’s why Spanish startup Lizcore caught TechCrunch’s eye at MWC earlier this year. The team of two co-founders — led by CEO Edgar Casanovas Lorente, a climbing instructor and guide turned entrepreneur — were showing off hardware they hope will see climbing gyms ushering in the kind of social gamification…
On October 21, a new ticker opened to Nasdaq traders: NBIS, a truncation of Nebius, a fledgling player in the AI cloud infrastructure space. Casual observers could be forgiven for wondering where this company had come from, as there had been little in the way of the usual fanfare that surrounds most startups’ journey to…