Author: TechBrunch

The California Department of Transportation this week gave Nuro approval to test its third-generation R3 self-driving delivery vehicles in four Bay Area cities, a positive boost for the self-driving startup that has faced several setbacks and financial difficulties. The approval allows Nuro to test its driverless delivery vehicles in Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos, and Menlo Park. Nuro's vehicles, which have no seats, windows, steering wheels, or pedals, are designed to transport packages, not passengers. Despite operating on public roads, they look like large sidewalk delivery robots, complete with climate-controlled storage units for storing food. The upgraded geographic area…

Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX on Saturday announced controversial plans to “share” the $230 million loss from a recent security breach with all of its customers, a move that has sent shock waves through the local crypto community. The Mumbai-based company suspended all trading activity on its platform last week following a cyber attack that compromised nearly half of its reserves, but has outlined a strategy to resume operations within a week or so while implementing a “fair and transparent loss socialization strategy” to “equitablely” distribute the impact among its user base. WazirX will “rebalance” customer portfolios on its platform, returning…

Venture capital funding has never been abundant for women, Black founders, or founders of color. In partnership with Crunchbase, we've been tracking funding levels to pinpoint moments of progress and setbacks for marginalized entrepreneurs. For example, Black founders had a strong year in 2021 and raised record amounts of funding, but those amounts dropped significantly as the market cooled and many DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) measures were rolled back. Meanwhile, women have been consistently raising funds over the past few years, hovering around 2%. However, funding for mixed-gender teams has been steadily increasing, suggesting that female founders can receive…

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a U.S. Department of Commerce agency that develops and tests technologies for the U.S. government, business, and the general public, has re-released a testbed designed to measure the extent to which malicious attacks, specifically those that “pollut” training data for AI models, can degrade the performance of AI systems. First released in 2022, a modular, open-source, web-based tool called Dioptra (named after a classic astronomical and surveying instrument) aims to enable companies that train AI models and those who use them to assess, analyze, and track AI risks. NIST said Dioptra can…

While working and even living in space has gone from a distant dream to an inevitable reality, the question remains: what will the next generation of space habitats look like? For Max Space, the answer is clear, and has been for decades, even centuries: a new generation of expandable habitats could offer both safety and enough room to stretch your legs, with the first space habitat scheduled to launch in 2026. The startup is led by Aaron Kemmer, formerly of Made in Space, and Maxime de Jongh, an engineer who has carefully stayed out of the limelight while co-developing expandable…

Payments giant Stripe has acquired four-year-old competitor Lemon Squeegee, the company announced on Friday. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Lemon Squeezy describes itself as the “merchant of record” that calculates and pays worldwide sales tax on digital products and handles legal procedures and fees in each country. It primarily serves SaaS and software businesses. In a post by X, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison announced the acquisition by saying, “Hello, @lmsqueezy! We're going to significantly expand merchant of record sales.” Chief Product Officer Will Gaybrick also said in his own post, “When people ask me, 'What should Stripe release…

Apple's iCloud Private Relay, which protects paying iCloud users from online trackers, has experienced an outage affecting major markets, restricting users' access to web services and apps that use their internet connection. TechCrunch understands that iCloud Private Relay downtime has been affecting some Apple users in markets including Europe, India, Japan and the U.S. since at least Thursday. The sporadic downtime has left users unable to access the web with the Safari browser and has reported internet connection issues with installed apps. Apple's System Status web page confirmed the latest iCloud Private Relay outage, saying the service may be “slow…

Welcome to Startups Weekly, your weekly dose of can't miss content from the startup world. To receive Startups Weekly in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. This week we talk about Wiz's bold decision, a public VC battle, new capital in legal tech, and a16z's close call. Let's get started! This week's most interesting startup stories Image credit: Avishag Shaar-Yashuv / Wiz (Opens in new window), CC BY 2.0 (Opens in new window) license. Wizz Says No to Google: Turning down the search giant's $23 billion acquisition offer was not an easy decision for the fast-growing, four-year-old cybersecurity startup,…

According to a press release on Friday, Apple has signed onto a White House voluntary initiative to develop safe, secure and trustworthy AI. The company will soon introduce its generative AI product, Apple Intelligence, into its core products and bring generative AI to Apple's 2 billion users. Apple joins 15 other technology companies, including Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, who committed to following the White House's ground rules for developing generative AI in July 2023. At the time, Apple did not reveal how deeply it planned to incorporate AI into iOS. But at WWDC in June, Apple…

X, formerly Twitter, has quietly introduced a change that appears to include user data in its Grok AI training pool by default, a move that was spotted by users of the platform on Friday. Grok is the name of a conversational AI, or large-scale language model (LLM), developed by Elon Musk's X as a rival to OpenAI's buzzy ChatGPT chatbot, but its selling point is said to be humor over political correctness. Those worried about X's information being fed to Musk's chatbot can learn more about how to turn off the feature here. The development caught the attention of X's…