Thursday, April 25, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! Some days are busy. Then there is this morning’s news rundown. It’s nuts! TikTok’s having a Bad Time, a couple startups have raised simply massive funding rounds, IBM just dropped north of $6 billion on a multi-cloud bet, people are using AI to make drugs, India’s getting an IPO soon… Let's dive in! — Alex

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1. Is a quarter billy enough to make better coding tools? Everyone wants to help developers write more code, more quickly. Projects like GitHub’s Copilot are well-known, but startups are also in the mix: A new company called Augment is not sharing much about its progress, but it has raised north of $250 million thus far. Can it beat the giants at helping people code faster? Read More

2. IBM wants to buy Hashicorp for $6.4 billion: What happens if your growth rate slows to 15% and you have a mutli-cloud strategy? You sell to IBM. At least that’s what Hashicorp is doing. The company’s stock has fallen far from the heights of its public debut back in 2021, so its investors are bound to be happy with this result. Read More

3. What’s ahead for TikTok? That’s the big question this week. A bill that would force the divestment of TikTok from parent company Bytedance or ban it from the United States has passed, and been signed into law. Now the countdown – and legal challenges, begin. Read More

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Swiggy swaggers towards the public markets: Indian food-delivery company Swiggy has shareholder approval to sell $1.25 billion worth of shares in its upcoming IPO. Only $450 million of that total will go to the company itself, but Swiggy’s listing will be a big event for Indian tech companies regardless. Read More

Xaira raises $1 billion to use AI to make new drugs: Drugs – legal or otherwise – are big business. That’s why it’s not shocking that Xaria has managed to raise lots of money to come up with new drugs. The startup has managed to raise so much because it is apparently going start developing drugs that were impossible to make without recent breakthroughs in AI. The company better deliver or a lot of investors are going to be irked. Read More

Drones are going solarpunk: Former YC startup Radical has an adventurous business model: It wants to build solar-powered drone that hangs out really high up in the sky and does stuff for us. Yes, that does sound like that old Facebook drone-internet effort! Indeed, but the tech has advanced far, the startup says, which makes the concept viable. Read More

How low can streaming prices go? That’s the question in India, where JioCinema is offering up big-name titles for as little as a cent per day. It’s wild, and puts lots of pressure on rival streaming services to compete on pricing. There are similar dynamics at play between Apple Music and Spotify in certain markets, so this is going to be interesting to watch. Read More

Anduril wants to make autonomous fighter jets: Startups have one major advantage over incumbents: they can move so fast that they can shake up massive industries. Such is the case with Anduril and its new unmanned fighter jet program. The startup is moving fast and taking big contracts from stodgy old companies that appear more likely to eat off regulatory capture than innovating. Read More

More people use Threads than anyone thought: I have a Threads account, but I do not use it. Why? Because I am bone-grafted to Twitter. But it turns out that I am more of an outlier than I thought: Meta’s Threads boasts 150 million monthly active users today, up from 130 million in February. That’s fast growth for a relatively new social platform. Read More

TikTok drops rewards feature after pressure in the EU: No matter which side of the Atlantic it is on, TikTok is having a Bad Time. Over in the EU, the social platform has dropped a feature from its TikTok Lite service that rewarded users for liking and interacting with videos after officials in the bloc opened an investigation citing concerns that it may pose mental health risks for young people. TikTok Lite is aimed at folks on older phones and slower networks. Read More

Meta’s business model is not popular in Europe: How much data can you use in your advertising services? What type of data? Those questions are bedeviling Meta and its various social media services in the EU, which generates a material chunk of the company’s revenues. Read More

Around the Web

Honey, I shrunk the chips: How small can chips get? Or more importantly, how dense and smart can chips get? TSMC has plans to build “ultra-advanced 1.6-nanometer chips by 2026,” Nikkei reports. That’s very, very, very small. Read More

Just how separate is TikTok from Bytedance? Not very! That’s the latest from the Financial Times, which has a great report digging into the shared use of staff between the two companies, and how much one (Bytedance) seems to be able to micromanage the other (TikTok). Read More

Remembering Palm: Before iPhones and smartphones became the norm, some of us had Palm Pilots and other personal digital assistants. I had a Palm IIIc, which likely tells you how cool I was growing up. Regardless, Ars Technica has a great look at Palm OS and why it mattered. Read More

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Before You Go

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Rabbit’s R1 device is good: Remember the Humane AI pin that was quickly pilloried as less than useful for the price? Well, good news, y’all! The AI hardware game is more than a one-trick pony. Rabbit’s R1 device seems to be pretty good, TechCrunch’s Brian Heater writes. Read More