Meta announced Tuesday morning that it was paying billions of dollars to keep an Illinois nuclear power plant running through 2047. The social media company will buy all the “clean energy attributes” of Constellation Energy’s Clinton Clean Energy Center, a 1.1 gigawatt nuclear power plant in central Illinois, starting in June 2027. Electricity will still…
Indian grocery delivery startup KiranaPro has been hacked and all its data has been wiped, the company’s founder confirmed to TechCrunch. The destroyed data included the company’s app code and its servers containing banks of sensitive customer information, including their names, mailing addresses, and payment details, KiranaPro co-founder and CEO Deepak Ravindran told TechCrunch. The…
We’re down to the final two days before TechCrunch Sessions: AI unites the broader AI community at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on Thursday, June 5! Expect a packed agenda with top speakers, expert panels, top-tier networking, and Side Events from our partners. One of our speakers is Andrei Papancea, CEO and co-founder of NLX, who…
It feels like AI companies want us all to talk to their products out loud more often. Meta, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, to name a few, have added functionality to let users talk with their AI bots as naturally as they would with another person, taking advantage of advances in speech-to-text technology. A startup called…
Joby Aviation has reached a tentative deal with investor and Saudi Arabian conglomerate Abdul Latif Jameel (ALJ) to distribute up to 200 electric aircraft valued at about $1 billion over the coming years. If finalized, the partnership could provide Joby with a fast path to monetizing its electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles in Saudi…
TikTok announced on Tuesday that it’s officially launching TikTok for Artists, a new music insights platform that is designed to help artists build their careers. The official launch comes two months after TikTok was spotted testing the platform in select countries. The tool is built to help artists and their teams better connect with fans,…
As global trade evolves, there’s an increasing demand for diverse cross-border payment options. That’s why an Irish-based fintech startup called NomuPay has raised $40 million in a Series C round from SB Payment Service (SBPS), a subsidiary of Japanese telco giant SoftBank Corp, at a valuation of $290 million. NomuPay makes it easier for merchants…
If you’ve ever been locked out of your work computer, you know the urgent need to reach IT support. Unfortunately, help desk staff are often busy assisting others, which can mean a significant delay before you regain access. Andrei Serban realized the critical importance of IT’s manual work when he was a product lead on…
After a while, Danae Shell got tired of hearing the same story over and over again. “Something bad would happen to someone at work, and the story always ended the same way,” she told TechCrunch. “They just left, because doing anything else was incredibly complex and expensive.” One doesn’t need to look far to notice…
A platform for chatting and role-playing with AI-generated characters, Character.AI announced in a blog post on Monday that it is rolling out a slate of multimedia features. These features include AvatarFX, Character.AI’s video-generation model, plus Scenes and Streams, which allow users to create videos featuring their characters and then share them on a new social…
