Plaid, which connects bank accounts to financial applications, has sold about $575 million worth of common stock at a $6.1 billion post-money valuation, the fintech company confirmed to TechCrunch. The valuation is about less than half of the $13.4 billion that San Francisco-based Plaid was valued at when it raised a $425 million Series D … Read more
Circle, the issuer of USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, filed to go public on Tuesday. The company, which makes money from interest earned on its reserve assets, reported that its 2024 revenue and reserve income was $1.68 billion, up from $1.45 billion the year prior. Circle’s 2024 net income was $156 million, … Read more
Aetherflux, the space solar startup founded by Baiju Bhatt, the billionaire co-founder of Robinhood, has raised $50 million in a Series A round as it works to launch its first low Earth orbit demonstration in 2026. The San Carlos, California-based startup, which came out of stealth last October, aims to eventually launch a constellation of … Read more
TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has been at the center of controversy in the U.S. for four years now due to concerns about user data potentially being accessed by the Chinese government. Earlier this year, the app experienced a temporary outage in the U.S. that left millions of users in suspense before it … Read more
Accounting software company Open Ledger has launched a new product in time for tax day. Meet PokéTax, a game that helps make tax filing quite fun. Instead of tax forms, users take on Tax Trainers — gym leaders — representing different parts of a tax form, such as income, deductions, and credits. Each leader asks … Read more
CaaStle, a startup that launched in 2011 as a plus-sized clothing subscription service and later became an inventory monetization platform for clothing retailers, is facing financial difficulties, the company confirmed to TechCrunch following a report by Axios. Citing a letter from the board, Axios reported that the company is almost out of money, CEO Christine … Read more
OpenAI has been accused by many parties of training its AI on copyrighted content sans permission. Now a new paper by an AI watchdog organization makes the serious accusation that the company increasingly relied on nonpublic books it didn’t license to train more sophisticated AI models. AI models are essentially complex prediction engines. Trained on … Read more
TikTok is shutting down its Instagram competitor, TikTok Notes, on May 8. The photo-sharing app launched in testing in Canada, Australia, and Vietnam last year. The company is notifying TikTok Notes users of its decision to retire the app and is directing them to ByteDance-owned Lemon8, which isn’t surprising given that the apps are quite … Read more
OpenAI’s new image generator, powered by its GPT-4o model, is now available to all users, CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X. The feature was until now available only to paying users of ChatGPT. While it is not clear how many images users on the free tier can generate, Altman last week had … Read more
Construct Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in startups applying technology to sectors like manufacturing, transportation, and defense, has closed its third fund with $300 million in capital commitments. The Washington, D.C.-based firm previously raised a $225 million second fund and a $75 million capital pool for later-stage companies in 2022. While many … Read more
