Author: Jason

Last week, details emerged about an application that fintech giant Stripe had submitted for a U.S. banking license. There was a lot of chatter on X about whether this meant Stripe – already the largest privately valued fintech in the world – would now be adding bank to the list of descriptions of what it… Read more

Jeff Bezos is funding a secretive EV startup based in Michigan called Slate Auto that could start production as soon as next year, according to multiple sources and documents that link the billionaire’s family office to the startup. Slate, which took root in another Bezos-connected company called Re:Build Manufacturing, has been operating quietly since its… Read more

Your 401k is suffering. The billionaires are fighting. The gamers are imperiled. Not even the penguins on McDonald Island, where no humans reside, have been spared. But at long last, 26-year-old YouTuber and chocolatier MrBeast has weighed in on President Donald Trump’s controversial plan to impose sweeping tariffs on imports. Jokes aside, the prolific YouTuber… Read more

On Monday, the “de-extinction” startup Colossal Biosciences announced its most ambitious results to date: the dire wolf. These are creatures that have been extinct for more than 12,000 years made famous by the HBO show Game of Thrones. These white, fluffy animals live on a 2,000-acre preserve in a location so secretive that journalists, including… Read more

Tech giants like Microsoft might be touting AI “agents” as profit-boosting tools for corporations, but a nonprofit is trying to prove that agents can be a force for good, too. Sage Future, a 501(c)(3) backed by Open Philanthropy, launched an experiment earlier this month tasking four AI models in a virtual environment with raising money… Read more

Tapestry, a new app designed to organize the open social web, is adding a valuable feature to help people who are keeping up with multiple social networks: It will now remove duplicate posts from your feed. That means if you follow the same person across social networking services like Bluesky and Mastodon, you won’t have… Read more

The most severe security bug can be exploited without user interaction, per Google. Read more

If you’re reading this, consider it your signal: The opportunity to influence the future of tech is here. TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is now accepting speaker applications. Join us onstage this October 27–29 at Moscone West in San Francisco and share your ideas with 10,000+ tech leaders, VCs, and innovators shaping what’s next. Apply to speak… Read more

Zoox, Amazon’s autonomous vehicle unit, is deploying a small fleet of retrofitted test vehicles on the streets of Los Angeles starting Tuesday – a modest, yet meaningful step as the company inches toward offering public rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco later this year.  The data-collection effort marks Zoox’s entrance into its sixth city… Read more

Rain, a startup offering employer-integrated earned wage access (EWA) app coupled with financial-wellness features like overdraft alerts and spending trends, has raised $75 million in an all-equity Series B round. The round was led by Prosus at a post-money valuation of $340 million. Rain plans to use the new funds to help it add credit… Read more