The outcry after a recent marketplace crackdown on games with adult content, seemingly due to pressure from payment processors, prompted Mastercard to release a brief statement Friday pushing back against recent headlines. “Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and … Read more
Apple has formed a new team to build a ChatGPT-like app, according to according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. This team — reportedly called Answers, Knowledge, and Information — is working to build an “answer engine” that can respond to questions using information from across the web. This could be a standalone app or provide search … Read more
SAP announced Friday that it has reached an agreement to acquire recruiting software company SmartRecruiters. In a press release, the European software giant said that SmartRecruiters “powerful, user-friendly interfaces and seamless workflows” will complement SAP’s existing HR tools. Muhammad Alam, the SAP executive board member who leads product and engineering, said in a statement that … Read more
Shortly after Hunter Lightman joined OpenAI as a researcher in 2022, he watched his colleagues launch ChatGPT, one of the fastest-growing products ever. Meanwhile, Lightman quietly worked on a team teaching OpenAI’s models to solve high school math competitions. Today that team, known as MathGen, is considered instrumental to OpenAI’s industry-leading effort to create AI … Read more
Anthropic has revoked OpenAI’s access to its Claude family of AI models, according to a report in Wired. Sources told Wired that OpenAI was connecting Claude to internal tools that allowed the company to compare Claude’s performance to its own models in categories like coding, writing, and safety. In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Anthropic … Read more
Apple CEO Tim Cook held an hourlong all-hands meeting in which he told employees that the company needs to win in AI, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The meeting came after an earnings call in which Cook told investors and analysts that Apple would “significantly” increase its AI investments. It seems he had a similar … Read more
A surprising figure is celebrating Figma’s successful IPO: Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission. In a Friday afternoon post on X, Khan linked to an article about Figma’s impressive first day of trading and argued the IPO is “a great reminder that letting startups grow into independently successful businesses, rather than be … Read more
Startup founders face a perplexing and even contradictory capital market in 2025, according to Sapphire Ventures partner Cathy Gao. “Capital isn’t scarce. But access to that capital is harder than ever,” she said. Gao, who spoke at TechCrunch’s All Stage conference in July, said it’s possible for startup founders, especially those in later Series C … Read more
Even while the tech industry is still fanning its face over Figma’s hot IPO on Thursday, another significant tech IPO occurred this week: Ambiq Micro. On Wednesday, the chip maker for wearable devices saw its shares climb from the initial price of $24 to over $42 on Friday. There’s one thing both companies have in … Read more
CRV has secured $750 million toward the 55-year-old venture firm’s twentieth flagship fund, it announced on Friday. The new fund is smaller than the $1 billion early-stage fund CRV closed in the fall of 2022. At that time, the firm also announced a $500 million second Select fund, a capital pool for backing late-stage rounds … Read more
