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
Building an app dedicated to helping people aggregate and read news, articles and social media posts in one place is apparently a tough proposition these days. Smashing, an AI-powered app that lets users curate the news and posts they’d like to read, is shutting down, seemingly because of its inability to scale rapidly enough. “We … Read more
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is slowly bringing its Grok chatbot to parity with top rivals like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Wednesday night, xAI announced a “memory” feature for Grok that enables the bot to remember details from past conversations. Now, if you ask Grok for recommendations, it’ll give more personalized responses — assuming you’ve … Read more
Zoom says its platform is back online after suffering an outage for much of Wednesday afternoon. “Service has now been restored after the earlier outage, and we sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding,” Zoom said in a post on X at around 2 p.m. Pacific. The trouble began around 11:40 a.m., according to The Verge, … Read more
BluSmart, India’s all-electric cab-hailing startup that was once seen as an emerging rival to Uber, appears to have suspended service in some cities just as the country’s market regulator launched a probe into Gensol Engineering, the publicly listed company that shares two of its co-founders. The cab service, which had been operating in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, … Read more
