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French startup Ÿnsect shot into the spotlight when “Iron Man” star Robert Downey Jr. touted its merits on the Late Show during Super Bowl weekend 2021. Now, nearly four years later, the insect farming company has been placed into judicial liquidation — essentially bankruptcy — for insolvency.  The company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as … Read more

Naware founder Mark Boysen first tried killing weeds with drones and a 200-watt laser. He’d been noodling on ideas for a startup with some friends, and thinking about how his family in North Dakota had lost three members to cancer, something they suspected may be related to chemicals in the groundwater. Finding a chemical-free way … Read more

Every year, TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield pitch contest draws thousands of applicants. We whittle those applications down to the top 200 contenders, and of them, the top 20 compete on the big stage to become the winner, taking home the Startup Battlefield Cup and a cash prize of $100,000. But the remaining 180 startups all blew … Read more

Waymo appears to be testing adding Google’s Gemini AI chatbot to its robotaxis in an effort to integrate an AI assistant that would accompany riders and answer their queries, according to findings by researcher Jane Manchun Wong. “While digging through Waymo’s mobile app code, I discovered the complete system prompt for its unreleased Gemini integration,” … Read more

After 33 years, Bernardo Quintero decided it was time to find the person who changed his life — the anonymous programmer who created a computer virus that had infected his university decades earlier. The virus, called Virus Málaga, was mostly harmless. But the challenge of defeating it sparked Quintero’s passion for cybersecurity, eventually leading him … Read more