Author: Jason

Digital banking startup Mercury has raised $300 million in primary and secondary funding at a $3.5 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday. The valuation is more than double the startup’s valuation when it last raised capital – a $120 million Series B round in 2021 that valued the company at $1.62… Read more

The Canadian company is developing small modular reactors. It previously raised nearly $100 million. Read more

The proliferation of scarily realistic deepfakes is one of the more pernicious byproducts of the rise of AI, and falling victim to scams based on these deepfakes is already costing companies millions of dollars — not to mention the implications these could have on national security. A startup that’s built a toolset aimed at governments… Read more

Sez Us, a social app founded by Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, is trying to build a platform without rage-bait. Rage-bait refers to any posts that are intended to stoke controversy. This might be an intentionally controversial political take, or it can be a wholly fabricated scenario designed to farm engagement (for example, a satirical creator… Read more

YouTube is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts to give creators a deeper understanding of how their short-form content is performing, the company announced on Wednesday. Shorts views will now count the number of times a creator’s Short starts to play or replay. In the past, a view had been counted after a… Read more

Since the integration of Google Assistant for Waze on iOS in 2020, iPhone users have faced ongoing issues that the company has struggled to resolve for “over a year,” Waze wrote in a post, apologizing for the “prolonged inconvenience.”  On Wednesday, the navigation app officially discontinued the feature. Many users had previously reported on Reddit… Read more

Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the advent of large language models and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+ along with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to broaden its scope and invest more in AI startups. In a blog post Amazon shared with TechCrunch… Read more

It’s getting easier to build new applications on ATProto, the protocol that powers Bluesky’s social network and a growing number of other apps. At ATmosphere, the ATProto community conference held over the weekend in Seattle, Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee offered attendees a glimpse of what’s ahead for the protocol’s development and how those will help… Read more

Audio startup Krisp on Wednesday said it is launching a new feature that uses AI to change a user’s accent during calls. The company is initially rolling out support for changing Indian English accents to U.S. English. The startup says the accent conversion process preserves the speaker’s voice and only switches phonemes to match American… Read more

Americans’ support for a TikTok ban is declining, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. This survey of over 5,000 U.S. adults found that just 34% of respondents supported banning the short form video app. When Pew ran a similar study in 2023, 50% of adults supported the TikTok ban. Over the same… Read more