Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje's weekly roundup of must-sees from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Look, I know this is our weekly newsletter about startups. As the world's most valuable company, Apple is in some ways the ultimate “non-startup,” but judging by the site's traffic, you're a very passionate fan. It seems rude not to summarize briefly. Apple held a short 40-minute event this week to introduce the new iPad Air, the new iPad Pro (with fancy new stacked screen technology), the new Magic Keyboard, the new Pencil Pro, the latest M4 chip, and more. Oh, and they've finally “admitted” that the iPad is more like a small laptop than a big iPhone, so the company moved the camera to the edge of the landscape – and let's be honest, it's been there all along. It should have been.
oh! And I have some fun personal news. I'm joining the TechCrunch Equity podcast as co-host with the amazingly wonderful (and amazingly terrifying) Mary Ann Azevedo. In case you want to have my funny humor not only in your eye holes but also in your ear holes.
This week's most interesting startup stories
Embark on a wild ride as we delve into the story of Newchip, an accelerator that promised startups a golden ticket to success but instead sent them straight to bankruptcy court. When Lacey Hunter joined Newchip's program at the AI humanitarian startup, she thought she could hit the jackpot with TechAid. Spoiler alert: she didn't. Instead of accelerating toward glory, Newchip filed for bankruptcy, and at a stock yard sale she auctioned off warrants from over 1,000 startups. And the poor hunter? Amid this turmoil, she had no choice but to shut down her TechAid.
In a spicy twist, Microsoft hit CTRL + Z on US police departments that use Azure OpenAI services for facial recognition. This Terms of Use update was as subtle as a china shop rhinoceros. In short, if you've got a badge, a handlebar mustache, and a mirror aviator, you don't need an AI face game.
Rabbit R1 isn't actually good (yet). The Rabbit R1 is an AI gadget that apparently comes out of the oven faster than you can bake a bunch of half-baked cookies. Packed with more quirky features than app integration, this little carrot muncher makes you wonder if it was just another app on your phone. But for now, Devin insists that's the point. The problem is he has 99, but technology he has not one. Rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake have taken their feud to new heights. I mean, should I say deep? It's all fun and games until Tupac gets deepfaked into your track. On the Bike: In today's episode of How to Grow a $50 Billion Company, Peloton, once the shining star of home fitness, continues to trudge down a sad treadmill of misfortune. They've laid off 15% of their employees (about 400 people if you include people with allergies in the percentage), proving that math is indeed a cruel mistress.
Peloton's ratings are plummeting.Image credit: Peloton
Troubles in the transport trenches
Henrik Fisker's EV startup Fisker is having a bit of a midlife crisis. After releasing two prototype machines, Pear and Alaska, in August last year, the engineering company that supported their development is said to have become rigid. The company, Bertrand AG, filed a $13 million lawsuit accusing Fisker of stopping payments and holding on to its intellectual property like a nervous lover who refuses to return his favorite sweatshirt. Apparently this isn't just a one-off. It's more like an episode of “Judge Judy,” with more than 30 lawsuits alleging lemon law violations, claims from former employees for unpaid wages, and claims from past-due suppliers. Fisker's vice president of communications insists Bertrand's lawsuit is “without merit,” but this hodgepodge of legal troubles has left him with more trouble than Humpty Dumpty after his ill-fated wall incident. This suggests that there may be a rift within the company.
Tesla’s flirtation with LIDAR: Ah, the delicious irony! Elon Musk once called lidar sensors a “crutch” for self-driving cars, and Tesla is now Luminar’s biggest customer. The company spent so much money on this seemingly unnecessary technology that it accounted for more than 10% of Luminar's Q1 2024 revenue. That's $2 million worth of crutches! But Luminar itself is struggling, and just laid off 20% of its staff. Rivian in trouble: Here I thought my financial skills were questionable, but despite his whopping $1.2 billion in first quarter earnings, still… He lost $1.45 billion. It appears that cost-cutting measures require a little more effort before we can dream of profitability. Hyundai pries open the piggy bank: Meanwhile, Hyundai poured nearly $1 billion into Motional to save us from the horrors of our own driving skills. This “generous” investment will see Hyundai take a majority stake and continue operating the self-driving startup (just kidding). It's like a Cinderella story, but instead of pumpkins turning into carriages, cash turns into self-driving cars.
Rivian introduced R2 in March, but the company continues to lose money.Image credit: Kirsten Kolosek
This week's most interesting fundraisers
Iconic Capital, the private firm that has been babysitting Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey's big bucks since 2011, has raised a whopping $5 billion across two funds for its seventh flagship fund. This huge funding puts them in the spotlight while other major companies like Tiger Global stumble on their laces with just $2.2 billion in funding (criticism for throwing money away too quickly) (This is the lowest amount since 2014).
Clouds are raining: Alternative clouds are the new cool kids on the block, folks! CoreWeave has raised a whopping $1.1 billion and is currently valued at $19 billion. why? Because GPUs (those expensive tech companies) are a popular item for training AI models, but not everyone has the deep pockets to buy their own. Take a look inside: Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, remembers when he boldly declared that thanks to AI, radiologists would be obsolete within five years. Yes, about that. As it turns out, we're not quite there yet (shocking!). Now, after realizing that robots probably aren't ready to play doctor yet, Khosla is investing his $50 million into his Rad AI. The startup aims to make the lives of radiologists easier without (yet) attempting to replace them with machines. Assessing the roof: Itai Ben Zaken is living proof that startup stumbles are nothing more than cha-cha moves in the entrepreneurial dance: He returns to Honeycomb Insurance and leverages AI to raise the roof. for the company's $36 million Series B by turning aerial photography into property inspections for homeowners.
The clouds are raining. Image credit: Khanchit Khirisutchalual / Getty Images
Other must-see TechCrunch articles…
Every week, we have a few stories that just don't fit into the categories above, but we'd like to share with you. It would be a shame if you missed it, so I'd like to introduce you to a bag containing random goods.
Deepfakes of everything are happening all the time: We're used to seeing Katy Perry dressed like a magical chia pet, but this year she wasn't even there – but… You wouldn't know it from the 10 million views an image of her fake girlfriend in a moss-covered dress received on social media. A new person saw the sun, and it shone so brightly: So it looks like Jack Dorsey ghosted Blue Sky faster than a Tinder date who just discovered you had a pet tarantula. “I'm Too Cool for Social Media Platforms” casually jumped into the conversation on X to announce that he was leaving the board of his Bluesky, his pet project. He didn't give a reason or even tweet a cryptic haiku about change and evolution, only saying a resounding “no” when asked if he was still on the board. Apple's new ad is disgusting: Apple's latest ad breaks our hearts as it literally squashes a stack of creative tools and analog items into the shape of an iPad. Oh, okay, Apple! You say this skinny (who asked for that?) new iPad can replace all of these things, but your vision of a future without physical instruments and paper books… It feels pretty dystopian and we don't like it. Tails with a Happy Ending: In the latest episode of “Whale, Indeed,” scientists eavesdrop on sperm whales with the help of machine learning. It turns out that these giant mammals actually spoke using their own secret language. In a series of clicks (call them “codas” if you're feeling fancy), the whale appears to form words and sentences that we couldn't understand before. It's so flippingly cool. LMGTFY: Stack Overflow decided to play nice with OpenAI. At first I gave priority to ChatGPT for fear of spammy responses, but they had a change of heart (or code?). They are currently working together to improve AI responses in programming-related tasks.
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