Gigascale, the venture firm led by former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer, announced on Monday that it had raised a $250 million fund to back founders who are “rebuilding the physical economy.” The new fund will focus on energy, grid infrastructure, and critical minerals all through the lens of climate tech. By continuing with the overt…
The mall is making a comeback. As younger people return to American shopping malls in greater numbers, a startup called “The Mall” is bringing the concept online with an app that lets users create a personalized virtual mall from their favorite brands and track sales in one place. The idea itself is simple, if not…
OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, were sued by the Florida attorney general on Monday, in a first-of-its-kind state litigation effort over ChatGPT’s alleged links to a number of violent incidents. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of looking the other way on safety concerns as it has sought to prioritize winning “the AI arms race and…
Google parent company Alphabet said Monday that it plans to raise $80 billion to help pay for the massive AI infrastructure buildout it has planned. Alphabet will sell off that amount in stock and will then use the funds to pay for “general corporate purposes, including capital expenditures to scale AI infrastructure and global compute,”…
Every founder who applies to Startup Battlefield wants the same thing: the Disrupt Main Stage. Six minutes to pitch and demo live, in front of top-tier Silicon Valley investors. A dedicated TechCrunch article published as you present. A shot at the $100,000 equity-free prize and the Disrupt Cup. And all of that could be yours,…
Nvidia opened Taipei’s enormous Computex trade show on Sunday with a spark, literally. The chipmaker unveiled a new PC CPU called the RTX Spark, which it dubbed a “superchip,” and named a who’s who list of PC makers that will soon deliver AI PCs powered by it. The super-fast, 1-petaflop chip is designed to run…
Mach Industries, the three-year-old defense tech startup run by 22-year-old founder and CEO Ethan Thornton, has raised a $300 million Series C at a $1.8 billion valuation, the company announced on Monday. The raise nearly quadruples the valuation of the company in a year. In June 2025, Mach raised $100 million at a $470 million…
Some of the most consequential companies in tech history didn’t launch with a splashy fundraising announcement. They started with a pitch. Dropbox demoed to a room of skeptics. Cloudflare took the stage before most people understood what edge networking meant. Discord was a scrappy game developer called Hammer & Chisel. Mint, Trello, Forethought, N26 —…
SpaceX has added new language to its IPO filing that warns prospective investors about the company’s access to a potentially scarce resource: water. The company, which now includes Elon Musk’s AI play, xAI, wrote in an amended version of the filing on Monday that access to water — required to cool its data centers —…
Instagram has resolved a security issue that allowed several users’ accounts to get hacked. The attack appeared to rely on tricking Meta’s own AI-powered support chatbot into granting access to a victim’s account. Over the weekend, several users on Reddit claimed that their Instagram accounts had been compromised, and a number of users on X…