Author: TechBrunch

Over the past few years, nuclear fusion power has gone from being a joke, always thought to be a decade away, to an increasingly realistic and attractive technology that is luring investors off the sidelines. While the technology may be difficult to master and expensive to build right now, fusion promises to produce nearly limitless energy on Earth by harnessing the sun's power source, nuclear reactions. If startups can perfect a commercially viable fusion power plant, it has the potential to upend a multi-trillion-dollar market. The bullish wave driving the fusion industry has been driven by three advances: more powerful…

Alex Parmley had been thinking about starting his latest company, ORNG, since his days working at his previous company, Phood. Phood, which launched in 2018, was a payments app that allowed students to use Dining Dollars to order food from third-party apps and merchants around the world. The company developed the first campus-integrated debit card and partnered with universities across the country, including the University of Texas at Austin. As a business owner, Parmley experienced firsthand the long and tedious process of transferring funds. He recalled that it could take 15 to 30 days for vendors to receive the actual…

Lawyers representing FTX CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman Freed, who was convicted of fraud and money laundering late last year, are seeking a retrial. Following the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Bankman Freed was convicted on all seven counts and sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture. He is serving his sentence in Brooklyn. Bloomberg reports that Bankman-Freed's appeal focuses on the behavior of U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, claiming that Judge Kaplan's ruling was “not just erroneous but biased” and that the judge “constantly ridiculed Bankman-Freed throughout the trial, repeatedly criticized her…

Stanford Professor Fei-Fei Li, considered by many to be the “godmother of AI,” has raised $230 million for her new startup, World Labs, from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Radical Ventures. World Labs is valued at over $1 billion and the money was raised in two funding rounds, several months apart, TechCrunch reported in August. Li's company hopes to have its first product ready in 2025, and aims to build AI models that understand and interact with 3D worlds. WorldLab is developing “large-scale world models” to be used by professionals, including artists, designers, developers and engineers. Martin Casado, a…

The rise of neobanks has been fascinating to watch in recent years, with many of them having grown from simply challenging traditional banks to becoming huge players in their own right. Dave and Varo Bank are just a few of these neobanks. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, Dave co-founder and CEO Jason Wilk and Varo Bank founder and CEO Colin Walsh talk about how their companies overcame challenging macroeconomic conditions to achieve impressive growth in both customers and revenue. Dave has 10 million members and is profitable with record revenue of $73.7 million in the first quarter, while Varo Bank has…

OpenAI released the new o1 models on Thursday, giving ChatGPT users their first chance to try out an AI model that pauses and “thinks” before responding. There are high hopes for these models, code-named “Strawberry” within OpenAI. But does Strawberry live up to the hype? I agree. Compared to GPT-4o, the o1 model feels like one step forward and two steps back. ChatGPT o1 excels at inference and answering complex questions, but the model is roughly four times more expensive to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI's latest models lack the tooling, multimodal capabilities, and speed that made GPT-4o so impressive. In…

OpenAI released the new o1 models on Thursday, giving ChatGPT users their first chance to try out an AI model that pauses and “thinks” before responding. There are high hopes for these models, code-named “Strawberry” within OpenAI. But does Strawberry live up to the hype? I agree. Compared to GPT-4o, the o1 model feels like one step forward and two steps back. OpenAI o1 excels at inference and answering complex questions, but the model is roughly four times more expensive to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI's latest model lacks the tooling, multimodal capabilities, and speed that made GPT-4o so great. In…

Welcome to Startups Weekly, your weekly dose of the can't miss happenings from the startup world. Want to receive it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week proved once again that the startup world is not uniform when it comes to taking risks. This week's most interesting startup stories Image credit: Neurode While post-acquisition layoffs and controversy following risky decisions aren't entirely surprising, there's more encouraging news on the innovation front. Team downsizing: Italy-based app company Bending Spoons is set to lay off 75% of the staff at WeTransfer, the Dutch file-transfer startup it acquired in July.…

Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator plans to increase the number of cohorts it runs each year from two to four starting in 2025, Bloomberg reported Thursday. Y Combinator president Garry Tan told the site that despite the changes, the number of companies going through YC each year will remain roughly the same, meaning each cohort will be about half the size it has been in recent years. Doubling the cohorts will mean doubling the demo days, Tan added, giving investors more time to meet with startups. The upcoming fall program will begin on September 29th, just a few days…

If you're wondering whether your Facebook and Instagram posts are being used to train parent company Meta's AI models, the answer is almost certainly yes. That's probably not all that surprising: Meta has already said it uses user content and data to train its AI, but this week the company's global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, acknowledged just how much of that content is actually being used. The topic came up during a question and answer session with Australian lawmakers, with Greens senator David Shoebridge saying, “Meta has decided to remove all photos and text from all public posts posted on…