Author: TechBrunch

Inversion Space is aptly named. The three-year-old startup's main focus is not on transporting things into space, but on bringing them back, turning the ultimate highlands into “Earth's transport layer.” The company's plans for ultra-fast, on-demand delivery to any corner of the planet may sound like a cakewalk, but it's the kind of moonshot goal that could transform ground freight transportation. The goal is to send a fleet of Earth-orbiting vehicles capable of returning to Earth at Mach speeds and delivering cargo in minutes at lower speeds with specially designed parachutes. Inversion has developed a Pathfinder vehicle called Ray, a…

Atlas lies motionless in a prone position on an interlocking gym mat. The only soundtrack is the hum of electric motors. It's not exactly quiet, but it's nothing compared to the hydraulic jerk of its ancestors. As the camera pans around the robot's back, the robot's legs bend at the knees. It's a natural move at first, before going into creepy territory like a Sam Raimi movie. The robot, which appeared to be lying on its back, effectively switched positions with this clever rotation of its legs. Atlas turns his back to the camera when fully standing. His head rotates…

Mercury, a business banking startup founded in 2020, is currently launching consumer banking products. Through his B2B practice, Mercury currently serves over 100,000 businesses, many of which are start-ups. Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury, said the expansion is a natural move for the company and has been in the works for several years. “We already have hundreds of thousands of users of our business banking products, and many have expressed a desire for our personal banking products,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. There are a lot of neobanks, but many of them are “focused on the underbank,”…

Found Energy doesn't have a typical startup origin story. It started with a space robot that was supposed to eat itself. The company is currently developing the same technology to power aluminum smelters and long-distance transportation. Almost a decade ago, Found Energy co-founder and CEO Peter Godart was a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He and several colleagues were brainstorming ways to power a probe that might visit Jupiter's moon Europa. As the team was debating the energy density of a suitable battery, an idea occurred to Godard. The aluminum used in the construction of the spacecraft held more…

Late last summer, TechCrunch teamed up with StrictlyVC to curate a smaller, more intimate evening for our readers. The evening has already been held in San Francisco and Los Angeles this year, featuring co-CEOs of Waymo, co-founders of Anduril and World Coin, founder of AI hardware device Rabbit, as well as top investors like Elad Gil To do. Now, we're heading to Washington, DC, for an evening of top-notch interviews and unparalleled networking at the cozy Woolley's Mammoth Theater on Tuesday, June 11th. What to expect: StrictlyVC events foster meaningful connections between leading investors, entrepreneurs, and executives while delivering exclusive…

It's not every day that you get to hone your skills with Elon Musk as your boss. It was while sourcing manufacturing equipment for Tesla's factory that Will Drery drew inspiration for Diagon, a startup that helps manufacturers source equipment. “The large-scale projects that companies are building today (such as battery manufacturing) require very specific types of process equipment and automation equipment to build and automate the factories,” said Co-Founder and CEO. Drewery told TechCrunch. “I had been hearing and seeing trends in nearshoring and reshoring in American manufacturing. As a supply chain manager, I had been looking with a…

Amira Rasool founded The Folklore in 2018 to help fashion brands from emerging markets such as Africa, Asia and the Caribbean reach international markets. In 2022, after transitioning away from sourcing and direct-to-consumer sales, the company introduced The Folklore Connect, a B2B marketplace and wholesale management software for brands to sell to partner global retailers like Nordstrom. What began as a mission to develop a global market for fashion brands has grown into a platform serving a variety of consumer businesses, including those in the beauty, health and wellness sectors. In the process, we've enabled global retailers to source inventory…

IT operations professionals have a lot on their plate, and when an incident occurs that takes down a critical system, it's always a race against time. For years, companies have sought the benefits of getting back on their feet faster with playbooks designed to find answers to common problems and perform post-mortems to prevent them from happening again. But not all problems are easy to solve, there is so much data and so many possibilities. Point of failure. In fact, this is the problem that generative AI is perfect for solving, and AIOps startup BigPanda today announced a new generative…

Mentee Robotics wasn't exactly stealth. The Israeli company rode a small wave of press at the end of 2022 after the initial announcement of Tesla's humanoid robot. It was the year of the startup's founding, so there wasn't much that stood out at the time. Still, the company made some headlines after its co-founder and chairman, Amnon Shashua, joined forces with Mobileye to form a well-funded AI company, AI21 Labs. But on Wednesday, the company offered a glimpse of Menteebot, a unique take on the rapidly growing humanoid category. In its current form, this system represents a dramatically different approach…

Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs as they are commonly known) are the foundation of everything we do online. APIs allow two things on the Internet, such as connected devices or phone apps, to communicate with each other. However, a significant increase in API usage (roughly half of all internet traffic) is putting enterprise data at risk. A common security risk is granting overly permissive API access to third parties. Malicious hackers can leverage APIs to access sensitive company information. Vorlon, a cybersecurity startup that uses its platform to help businesses protect data from such incidents, says it has raised $15.7…