Thursday, April 18, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! It’s been a busy morning, which means today’s issue has something for everyone: A massive fintech round, staff terminations at Google, an in-depth look at Airchat, YouTube drama, robotaxis getting confused by traffic cones, lots of cool space companies, and even more. Let’s dive in! — Alex

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Ramp

Ramp raises $150M more: Spend management and corporate card startup Ramp is now worth $7.65 billion after raising an extension to its Series D round. The new raise brings the company’s valuation closer to its old valuation of $8.2 billion, up from its most recent price tag of $5.8 billion. The new money will be used to build more AI features and for M&A. Read More

Gov fines BloomTech for deceiving students: Formerly known as Lambda School, for-profit coding bootcamp BloomTech has been fined by a U.S. regulator for deceiving students about the cost of its loans, making up graduate hiring rates, and for engaging in illegal lending masked as “income sharing” agreements with high fees. Read More

Google fires staff protesting its contracts with Israel: Google has fired 28 workers after they organized sit-in protests at its Sunnyvale and New York offices. The employees were protesting Project Nimbus, which reportedly provides Israel with the full suite of Google Cloud’s AI and ML tech. The employees felt that their employer was being complicit in genocide, and lying about the extent of its work with the Israeli military. Google said that the employees were disrupting work, and were joined by non-staffers in their protest. Read More

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Morning Must Reads

Image Credits: Magzter

Dailyhunt buys Magzter: VerSe Innovation, which owns Indian news aggregator Dailyhunt, is buying New York-headquartered Magzter. Magzter is a digital newsstand app that offers all-you-can-eat access to magazines, and has more than a million paying subscribers. Read More

AirChat is an interesting social experiment: AirChat, a new project by AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and former Tinder exec Brian Norgard, is a neat blend of Twitter and Clubhouse. Amanda Silberling takes an in-depth look at the app, how large it stands to become, and if it can avoid the fate of Clubhouse. Read More

Master finance basics with Mercury’s VP of finance, Dan Kang, at TechCrunch Early Stage: Early Stage is next week, and I am beyond stoked to get my backside to Boston for the event. See you soon! Read More

If you don’t want scathing reviews, make better products: The Humane AI pin is a neat idea, but most reviewers agree that it doesn’t live up to its potential in its first iteration, and it’s also rather expensive. However, YouTuber Marques Brownlee’s critique of the device was criticized for being too harsh and potentially damaging to the company. Brownlee does not agree, of course. Still the saga makes for an interesting look at the culture of toxic positivity on the Internet, and who is allowed to air their criticisms. Read More

Orbex wants to help the EU retain space capabilities: There are several space launch companies today, but the EU’s sovereign launch abilities are sadly lacking. UK-based small launch startup Orbex wants to fill that void, and it has just raised $20.7 million in a Series D to do so. The company said it may make larger rockets in the future, too. Read More

Bellwether wants to ring the alarm bell when the weather goes bad: AI is useful for scanning lots of data and finding stuff that humans might miss or can’t simply find. Bellwether, an Alphabet X project, wants to use AI to find wildfires and floods, quickly, which sounds like a pretty ideal use case for the tech. Very cool and much needed. Read More

Waymo robotaxis get stuck, block SF onramp: While zipping around San Francisco, seven Waymo robotaxis got bamboozled by a road closure and traffic cones, causing them to get stuck and block a freeway onramp. The saga stopped traffic for a bit. Stuff like this is going to keep happening, but it doesn’t bother me at all because robotaxis are hella cool. Please bring the traffic cone issue to Providence. Read More

How climate tech startups can avoid the commercial valley of death: For many climate startups, coming up with an amazing piece of tech is not the battle; getting it into mass production is. The usual financiers of such first-of-its-kind facilities usually balk at the novelty of it. Climate nonprofit Prime Coalition is hoping to help solve that issue with a new program, Trellis Climate. Read More

Around the Web

TSMC buoyed by strong chip demand: The world’s biggest semiconductor maker beat analysts’ expectations for both revenue and profit in the first quarter, CNBC reports. It appears all the rapid innovation in tech is helping keep demand for chips high. Read More

Say hello to alternative app stores on iOS: In the EU, at least. AltStore PAL is now out, and it costs €1.50, The Verge reports. The story has two apps thus far, which is a modest start. The question now is how AltStore and its ilk will change the iOS app market in time. Read More

A more skeptical AI take: Molly White takes an interesting look at modern AI tools, which she says are useful in some cases, but are overhyped and come with real costs that deserve our attention. Read More

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Before You Go

Image Credits: Dark

Punching rocks in space could be big business: France-based Dark wants to launch little rockets from planes that will gently bump space debris out of their orbits. Earth’s upper atmosphere is getting crowded with old junk and we need a way to clear the air, literally. Here’s hoping Dark’s pugilistic approach works so we don't have to deal with space debris falling through our roofs. Read More