Author: Jason

It’s been a tough but exciting year for 23-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of AI sales agent startup Artisan. Artisan just raised a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, Carmichael-Jack exclusively tells TechCrunch. Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others participated as well. A year… Read more

Hosting platform WordPress.com on Wednesday launched a new AI website builder that allows anyone to create a functioning website using an AI chat-style interface. The feature, which is being made available to WordPress users for free, is targeted at entrepreneurs, freelancers, bloggers, and others who need a professional online presence, the company says. At this… Read more

Instagram appears to be quietly testing locked reels that viewers would have to unlock with a code and a provided hint. The feature is a simple way to increase engagement with the creator’s content, but it could also offer creators and celebrities a way to share exclusive reels with their most dedicated fans, who are… Read more

After months of hearty marketing efforts and large-scale technology demos across the U.S., Nuro has secured $106 million in fresh funding to help scale its autonomous driving technology and advance commercial partnerships.  The Series E round brings Nuro’s total funding raised to $2.2 billion and its valuation to $6 billion. That’s a drop from the… Read more

Legal tech has come a long way, but the bulk of an intellectual property or patent lawyer’s work today is still done with spreadsheets, word processors and PDFs. A startup out of Delaware, Solve Intelligence, is using generative AI to speed up that work, believing its tech is uniquely suited to the needs of patent… Read more

Tessell, a startup developing a multi-cloud database-as-a-service, has raised $60 million in a new funding round led by WestBridge Capital ahead of its plans to expand its market presence and launch an AI-powered conversational database management service. As data becomes more critical than ever, many companies are struggling to manage and store it efficiently. Legacy… Read more

It’s been a couple of years since our last topic-focused, one-day event — but with AI transforming the tech landscape, we couldn’t miss the chance to gather 1,200 founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone shaping the future of AI for a deep dive into what’s next. On June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley,… Read more

During its Cloud Next conference this week, Google unveiled the latest generation of its TPU AI accelerator chip. The new chip, called Ironwood, is Google’s seventh-generation TPU and is the first optimized for inference — that is, running AI models. Scheduled to launch sometime later this year for Google Cloud customers, Ironwood will come in… Read more

Google is releasing a new AI model designed to deliver strong performance with a focus on efficiency. The model, Gemini 2.5 Flash, will soon launch in Vertex AI, Google’s AI development platform. The company says it offers “dynamic and controllable” computing, allowing developers to adjust processing time based on the complexity of queries. “[You can… Read more

Google is upgrading Workspace, its suite of cloud-based productivity tools, with new AI capabilities. The suite is gaining Workspace Flows, a tool designed to automate multi-step processes such as updating spreadsheets and digging through documents for information. Flows can tap Gems, Google’s brand of custom AI-powered chatbots, to handle specialized tasks, and it can also… Read more