Etched, the AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has closed a $300 million Series C funding round at a $10.3 billion valuation, co-founder and COO Robert Wachen tells TechCrunch.
The round was led by Sequoia, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital also participating, along with other, earlier investors. Other backers of the company include…
White House science advisor Michael Kratsios said that Moonshot, the Chinese company behind Kimi K3, the largest available open-weight LLM, built its model by copying Anthropic’s Fable LLM while using chips that aren’t cleared for export to China.
“Large-scale, covert…
ServiceNow bets $40 million on Indian banking software specialist to expand its financial services push
July 24, 2026
ServiceNow, the U.S. enterprise software company known for automating workflows like IT service management and HR operations, is betting on an Indian banking software specialist to deepen its push into global financial services.
The company has invested $40 million in…
Passionfroot, a German startup building a marketplace connecting B2B creators with brands, said on Wednesday it has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Insight Partners.
Rebecca Liu-Doyle, managing director at Insight Partners, said Passionfroot is placed well at a time when creators are specializing as AI companies look for more visibility.
“Passionfroot has the perfect…
Glow emerges from stealth at $1.2B valuation to challenge endpoint security in the AI era
July 23, 2026
Glow, a cybersecurity startup founded by former Meta and Snowflake executives, emerged from stealth as a unicorn, betting that artificial intelligence is reshaping how enterprises secure employee devices.
The Palo Alto-headquartered startup on Wednesday said it raised $180…
For years, Synthesia’s pitch was to use AI to help enterprises create interactive training videos, in minutes, for a fraction of the cost normally associated with developing corporate educational materials. The startup’s newest product is making a different bet – that…
AI and the rise of the universal entertainment app
July 22, 2026
All the big entertainment apps are starting to look the same, and that’s not an accident. For a decade, platforms fought over who would dominate a single format: music, video, podcasts, audiobooks. Now, powered by AI, they’re fighting over something bigger – becoming the app you default to whenever you have time to kill, no matter what form the content takes.
There are several reasons why…
On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. would examine open source models from China for signs of intellectual property theft, threatening sanctions against Chinese AI companies if IP theft is established.
“We’ve seen a lot of talk about open source…
Gritt exits stealth with $32 million for robots to build solar plants — then, everything else
July 22, 2026
One of the most important things happening on Earth today is the solar energy build-out. Around the world, companies and countries are racing to deploy solar and batteries to achieve energy independence and limit the effects of climate change.
That build-out, though, is…
The impressive capabilities of Chinese lab Moonshot’s Kimi K3, the biggest open-weight large language model, has kicked off a debate that conflates two things: the economic possibilities of American AI giants and the future of LLMs as a technology.
OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, Dean W. Ball, went so far as to argue that the US government should find a pretext to create regulatory fear…
