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For the past eight years, renowned vehicle designer Henrik Fisker has been suggesting his EV startup would make a lot of promises, but nothing has materialized. As Fisker looks for an unlikely savior, employees tell TechCrunch that the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of the husband-and-wife team that steers the company.
This week there is also a big disruption in the fintech space. After years of mistakes and struggles, banking-as-a-service fintech Synapse is officially bankrupt. Based on Synapse’s filing, around 100 fintechs and 10 million end customers may be affected by the company’s collapse.
Elon Musk just made a lot of money for xAI. The AI startup raised $6 billion at a pre-funding valuation of $18 billion as it aims to compete with OpenAI, Microsoft and Alphabet.
In another big money move, Google invested nearly $350 million into Flipkart. The new investment gives the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup a $36 billion valuation. Google, which reaches more than half a billion people in India, has identified the South Asian country as a key overseas market.
News
Is Sam Altman fired from Y Combinator?: Paul Graham set the record straight. In a series of posts on X, Y Combinator’s co-founder denied claims that Sam Altman was forced to resign in 2019 due to a conflict of interest. Read more
Spotify Pays Back Car Thing: Spotify is facing backlash over its decision to end support for its in-car streaming device, Car Thing. Spotify has now started the refund process, but some users are asking the company not to brick their devices. Read more
Are earbuds the future of AI hardware?: Unlike generative AI gadgets like Humane’s Ai Pin and Rabbit’s R1, Iyo aims to build the technology into an already successful category: Bluetooth earbuds. Read more
Firefly works in: On the heels of a personal tragedy, the A Tel Aviv-based startup has raised $23 million for an “infrastructure as code” solution to the growing problem of cloud asset management. Read more
Is Apple going to “sherlock” the Arc?: Apple is reportedly planning to release a new technology called “intelligent recap” in iOS 18, which appears to mimic Arc Search’s innovative “Browse for me” functionality. Read more
Misinformation goes back: A pair of new studies provide evidence that misinformation on social media has the power to change people’s minds. Find out who is most responsible for the majority of “fake news” in the period under review. Read more
The AI model also has a favorite number: Engineers at Gramener conducted an experiment where they asked some of the main LLM chatbots to pick a random number between 0 and 100 – and the results were amazing. Read more
Mistral open coding model: A French AI startup has released the first generative AI model for coding, called Codestral, designed to help developers write and interact with code. Read more
Greetings to tech memes: Is it time to disrupt the meme industry? With Meme Depot, founder Alex Taub wants to build a comprehensive archive of memes imaginable with a crypto-focused business model. Read more
AI comes to tutor: The arrival of AI bots poses a threat to long-established tutoring and professional tutoring franchises, and a major application from China. But does it really help students learn? Read more
Analysis
What happens to a company when the founder dies?: Onyx Motorbikes was in trouble – and the 37-year-old owner died suddenly without a will or succession plan, leaving behind millions of dollars in debt. Rebecca Bellan reports on how the battle for control has left Onyx in legal limbo. Read more
‘edgelords’ in OpenAI: Meredith Whittaker has some candid thoughts on the current leadership at OpenAI. Mike Butcher sat down with the president of Signal to discuss what he describes as the unruly “frat house” contingent in the tech industry in a wide-ranging conversation. Read more
Don’t expect an IPO from this startup: While 2024 is looking to be a better year for tech startups to go public, there are still some high-profile companies that want to wait a little longer. From Plaid to Figma, Rebecca Szkutak rounds up the companies that aren’t itching to go public. Read more
