3The leaders of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce said they are investigating how 23andMe’s bankruptcy might affect customers’ data. Representatives Brett Guthrie, Gus Bilirakis, and Gary Palmer (all Republicans) sent a letter Thursday to the genetic testing company’s interim CEO Joe Selsavage asking a number of questions about how 23andMe will handle customer … Read more
Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of stuff for you this week: antitrust lawsuits against Google and Meta; Grok can now remember; Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow wants to make his mark; and much, much more. Have a great weekend! It’s over: Google violated antitrust laws in the ad tech market, a judge … Read more
Techstars, a nearly 20-year-old startup accelerator, announced new terms for startups that enter its three-month program. The organization will now invest $220,000, which is $100,000 more than it offered previously, in companies starting with its fall 2025 batch. The capital will be divided into two components. The group is offering companies $20,000 in exchange for … Read more
A new animated kids’ series expected to premiere this year won’t be headed for a TV network. Or a streaming service. Instead, the founders of production studio We Ghosted Media plan to launch on a decentralized web platform that uses blockchain technology. And yes, a crypto wallet will be involved. We Ghosted Media — founded by … Read more
The tech layoff wave is still kicking in 2025. Last year saw more than 150,000 job cuts across 549 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. So far this year, more than 22,000 workers have been the victim of reductions across the tech industry, with a staggering 16,084 cuts taking place in February alone. We’re … Read more
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week brought us mixed messages. A fresh IPO filing, but a bleak outlook for exits overall. New funding rounds, but founders frustrated over lack of capital. … Read more
Expense management startup Ramp is being considered for a charge card pilot program by the U.S. government’s General Services Administration, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The government’s internal expense card program, dubbed SmartPay, is a $700 billion program. It is estimated that the charge card pilot program contract for which Ramp is being … Read more
When news broke that OpenAI was in talks to acquire AI coding company Windsurf for $3 billion, one of the first questions on the mind of anyone following the space was likely: “Why not buy Cursor creator Anysphere instead?” After all, OpenAI Startup Fund has been an investor in Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, since the … Read more
On February 18, 2024, Ian Laffey posted on X that he and two others he’d just met built a cheap drone at a hackathon that calculated its coordinates simply by using its camera and Google Maps. He and his colleagues, Sacha Lévy and Carl Schoeller, were all engineers under the age of 25. The tech … Read more
Chatbot Arena, the crowdsourced benchmarking project major AI labs rely on to test and market their AI models, is forming a company called Arena Intelligence Inc., reports Bloomberg. In a blog post published Thursday, Chatbot Arena said that the company will “give [it] the resources to improve [its platform] significantly over what it is today.” … Read more
