Technology

Loading the player… Andreessen Horowitz just raised a whopping ⁠new $15 billion in funding⁠. And a $1.7 billion chunk of that is going to its ⁠infrastructure team⁠, the one responsible for some of its biggest, most prominent AI investments including Black Forrest Labs, Cursor, OpenAI, ⁠ElevenLabs⁠, Ideogram, ⁠Fal⁠ and dozens of others.   A16z ⁠general partner with the infra team Jennifer Li⁠ (who oversees such investments as ElevenLabs – just valued at $11 billion); Ideagram and Fal, has a clear thesis on where the…

Voice AI company ElevenLabs said today it raised $500 million in a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital, which was an investor in the startup’s last secondary round through a tender. Sequoia partner Andrew Reed is joining the company’s board. The startup is now valued at $11 billion, more than three times its valuation…

Semiconductor startup Positron has secured $230 million in Series B funding, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The outfit plans to use the capital to speed up deployment of its high-speed memory chips, a critical component for the chips used for AI workloads, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.  Investors in the round include Qatar Investment…

The founder of David Protein, maker of popular high-protein nutrition bars, announced on X on Monday that longevity guru Dr. Peter Attia “has stepped down from his role as Chief Science Officer at David.” The announcement comes after Attia’s name appeared in more than 1,700 documents, including email correspondence, released on Friday as part of…

The city’s tech scene is reeling as U.S. immigration agents have escalated their crackdown in Minneapolis, killing several people, including at least two U.S. citizens.  Eight Minneapolis-based founders and investors told TechCrunch that they have put much of their work on hold and now spend their days focused on their communities, volunteering at churches, and…

New York City and others like it are filled with old buildings that are for the most part fine, except they’re not all that comfortable to live in. Built in an era when massive boilers were cutting edge technology, the buildings are usually too hot or too cold, but seldom just right. A string of…

The automotive industry has struggled to adopt hydrogen at scale, but industrial users and data centers might have better luck. Vema Hydrogen inked a deal in December to supply California data centers, and now it has completed a pilot project in Quebec to power industry with hydrogen that it produces deep underground. The startup drills…

Waymo, the Alphabet-owned autonomous vehicle company, has raised $16 billion as it plans to grow its fleet of driverless taxicabs this year to more than a dozen new cities internationally, including London and Tokyo. Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital led the funding round, which now values Waymo at $126 billion, the company…

By now, the Forbes 30 Under 30 list has become more than a little notorious for the amount of entrants who go on to be charged with fraud. Notable alumni include FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Frank CEO Charlie Javice, Joanna Smith-Griffin, founder of the AI startup AllHere Education, and “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, among others….

Cloud data company Snowflake has entered into a $200 million multi-year AI deal with OpenAI on Monday, the latest signal that enterprise AI competition continues to heat up. Under the deal, Snowflake’s 12,600 customers will have access to OpenAI models across all three major cloud providers. Snowflake employees access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise as well….