Shield AI, which is building an ‘AI pilot’ to turn aircraft into autonomous systems, expands massive Series F

Welcome to the final Daily Crunch of the year. We’ll be off Monday for New Year’s Day, but fret not! We’re back on Tuesday.

This morning, Aria exclusively reported on Shield AI, the defense tech startup, expanding its latest funding round with $300 million in equity and debt — bringing its total Series F to $500 million. Shield AI is building an “AI pilot” to turn aircraft into autonomous systems, with the goal of allowing fleets of aircraft to operate independently of remote operators, communications or GPS. Read more here.

She also covered SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, which launched a secretive military spaceplane to orbit last night after weeks of delays, though scant details about the mission have been released to the public. Read more.

And I wrote about Copilot Chat, GitHub’s ChatGPT-like programming-centric chatbot, becoming generally available for all Copilot users. It’s powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model and can answer questions about codebases. Read more. 

Elsewhere, Connie has an interview with Sanna Marin, the popular former prime minister of Finland. They talked Putin, powerful women and legislating in the age of AI. Read more. 

More Top Reads

The TechCrunch Pub Quiz: How well do you remember the major events in tech this year? Play TC’s quiz to find out — round 2 published today. Here’s round 1.

Overlooked tech in mobility: Rebecca dug into the technology that’s helping cities move today. Some of it is unsexy, but transportation is, more often than not, a utility. Read more.

Investor survey roundup: For TechCrunch+, Karan put together a curated list of timely TC investor surveys from the year. They touch on topics including alternative protein, the robotics revolution, the Silicon Valley Bank collapse and the future of power. Learn more.

Badly handled breaches: Carly highlights 2023’s worst-handled data breaches — the ones plagued with delays, silence and unanswered questions. Read the full list. 

Offline LLMs: Giga ML, a Y Combinator-backed startup, wants to help companies deploy text-generating AI models offline and then fine-tune them to their needs. Learn more.

Ditching Audible: Amazon-owned Audible is arguably the most popular audiobook app out there. There are several other lesser-known options that offer a great listening experience for people looking to try out a new app or just getting into the world of audiobooks — Aisha has the list. 

China’s robotaxis face roadblocks: A few years ago, robotaxis were the darlings of VCs in China. But now, losses are pushing China’s self-driving upstarts to seek new revenue streams, reports Rita. Learn more.

What lies ahead for robotics: Brian reflects on the year that was for the robotics industry — and what comes next. Humanoid robots? Generative AI? It’s all on the table. Read more.

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On the pods

The Equity crew said goodbye to 2023 with its annual predictions episode. As they attempt to do every year, the hosts brought in a number of voices to speak on startup trends, media, proptech, AI and transport — and went back and vetted their predictions from last year. Listen here.

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