Author: TechBrunch

Fusion power startup Focused Energy has signed a deal to purchase two of the world's most powerful lasers, the company tells TechCrunch exclusively. The giant laser will be installed at the startup's future facility, which is being built in the San Francisco Bay Area over the next two years. “These are some of the highest average power lasers in the private sector,” Focused Energy CEO Scott Mercer told TechCrunch. The laser can deliver more than 1 kilojoule of energy to a target and costs nearly $40 million. Focused Energy is pursuing an approach to nuclear fusion known as inertial confinement.…

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center confirmed that hackers accessed the personal and sensitive health data of more than 1.4 million people during a September cyberattack. This cyberattack also affected TTUHSC's El Paso campus, where the attackers stole health information including social security numbers, financial account information, government-issued ID details, medical record numbers, billing data, and medical school diagnosis and treatment information. is. said in an announcement on its dedicated website. As of this writing, the TTUHSC security incident website contains a “noindex” code that tells search engines to ignore the page, making it impossible for affected individuals to find…

Jon Morehouse launched PowerTools in 2019 to help businesses ship static sites and serverless apps to cloud accounts from providers like AWS and Azure. When a customer asked if PowerTools could be used to deploy software to their cloud accounts, Morehouse was skeptical. Morehouse told TechCrunch that after that question, he started talking to other SaaS founders about the concept of deploying applications to customers' clouds. He realized that this is a question founders often get asked by customers. So he decided to change direction. In 2021, Morehouse launched Nuon to build a “Bring Your Own Cloud” (BYOC) platform. Nuon's…

Few things in life divide a room more than the discretion of putting pineapple on a pizza. But if you're convinced that tropical fruits aren't in the pie, you'll have to swallow a bitter pill, at least if you want access to WordPress.org's developer portal and forums. This week, users reported seeing an additional checkbox on their WordPress.org login page asking them to agree that “pineapple tastes good on pizza.” WordPress.org Login: Pineapple on Pizza Image Credit: TechCrunch / Screenshot It's easy to laugh off this as a carnival by the good folks at the WordPress Foundation, but in reality,…

While accepting payments in cryptocurrency may sound like a bad idea, it can actually be a useful feature for international contractors. Remote, a company that lets you hire talent and manage contractors around the world, will introduce cryptocurrency payments on Tuesday. U.S.-based companies will be able to start paying contractors in 69 countries with stablecoins. For this feature, Remote has partnered with Stripe. The company currently only supports USDC, a widely used cryptocurrency stablecoin managed by Circle. Since 1 USDC is worth 1 US dollar at any given time, businesses and contractors are not exposed to the volatility risks created…

Online sellers typically pay up to 8% of every sale to companies like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Stripe, passing the cost on to consumers. So-called “account-to-account” or “A2A” payments can reduce transaction fees to less than 1%, saving merchants and consumers significant cash. The challenge was making it seamless for both sellers and customers. Italian startup Volume believes it has found the answer: a one-click checkout solution via an embeddable widget that integrates as easily as PayPal. “Imagine traditional payment companies like Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, and Checkout.com. They charge 2% to 8% on everything we buy online. We want to…

Aye Finance, an Indian small and medium-sized business lender, aims to raise $171 million in an initial public offering, it said in a filing on Tuesday. The offering consists of a $104 million issuance of new shares and a $67 million secondary sale to existing investors. Proceeds from the IPO will be used to expand the startup's financing portfolio and strengthen its capital base. The lender, which is backed by Alphabet's venture arm Capital G, is currently valued at about $400 million and operates 499 branches across 22 states in India. Assets under management as of September were $588 million.…

Hexa, a Paris-based startup studio that has launched dozens of B2B software companies, is sharing a list of upcoming projects that will soon become independent startups. Hexa originally started in 2011 as eFounders, a startup studio focused on B2B Software-as-a-Service products. Hexa usually comes up with ideas that form the basis of new companies. The Hexa team then tries to match the new project with the right founding team so they can make it their own. For the first year or so, Hexa's in-house team supports founders with product design, go-to-market strategy, recruiting, and financing. Once a startup raises its…

Meta's X rival, Threads, has more than 100 million people using its service every day and is growing steadily, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday. Zuckerberg also noted that Threads currently has 300 million monthly active users, and in November had 275 million monthly active users. Meta regularly releases updated numbers on monthly active Threads users, but this is the first time the company has revealed the number of daily active users. Over the past month, the company has been actively rolling out statistics and features as rival social network Bluesky, which has more than 25 million users, gains momentum.…

Cohere is one of the most well-known AI startups outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, with a valuation of $5.5 billion as of July. It was co-founded by the authors of the paper “Attending Is All You Need,” which helped launch the Large-Scale Language Model (LLM) revolution. Toronto and San Francisco-based Cohere sells AI to enterprise customers and doesn't have a viral consumer chatbot. Anthropic made headlines last month for its deal with Palantir and AWS to sell AI to defense customers, and TechCrunch has learned that Palantir is also a Cohere partner. And, according to information explained in a video…