Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we’re thinking of the cool deal EV startup Rivian managed to strike with VW, exciting digital health startups, and the story of two founders who re-mortgaged a home to keep their startup. We also have notes on tension around the data that AI companies can and cannot use, more funds for early stage startups, and the creepiest robot face you’ve seen yet. Let’s dive in! — Rebecca

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Rivian

1. Rivian gets a 10-figure bump from VW: German carmaker Volkswagen is investing a cool billion into EV startup Rivian as part of a software development deal that could balloon to as much as $5 billion. The investment comes at a great time for Rivian as it pushes to develop its mass-market R2 SUV. The companies will also create a joint venture to develop and grow the software. Read More

2. Your guide to the fediverse: Have you been nodding along, pretending to understand what decentralized social media platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Pleroma are all about when you really don’t have a clue? You’re not alone. But don’t worry, we’ve got a guide to help you figure out what the federated universe is all about. Read More

3. OpenAI delays advanced voice mode: OpenAI first demoed ChatGPT’s voice capabilities in May, but we’re now a couple months in, and OpenAI says it needs more time. That’s fine, if you ask me. Are any of us really ready for an eerily realistic bot to talk about damn near everything? Read More

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Morning Must Reads

Image Credits: OpenAI

ChatGPT for Mac: If you have a Macbook and a penchant for typing “chatgpt…” in your web browser, now you don’t need to get Chrome involved anymore. OpenAI has released a ChatGPT app for macOS, which you can summon by just pressing Option + Space once installed. Read More

GM’s Cruise gets a new CEO: The robotaxi company’s CEO Kyle Vogt stepped down last year after a safety incident that resulted in Cruise grounding its entire U.S. fleet. Cruise has finally found a new CEO in Marc Whitten, a video game industry veteran who was a founding engineer at Xbox and CTO at Unity. Whitten also brings experience at Amazon and Sonos to the table. Read More

The 10 most exciting digital health startups: Healthtech isn’t as hot as it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, but I think it’ll make a comeback, especially with the advent of genAI. We spoke to a dozen healthcare VCs about which startups have the most promising future. Read More

Microsoft AI’s CEO ♥️ Sam Altman: During an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mustafa Suleyman (who founded AI pioneer DeepMind) made it very clear that he admires OpenAI’s CEO, and trusts him with AI safety. And he would say that, wouldn’t he? Microsoft has a huge stake in OpenAI’s for-profit business, despite technically being a competitor. Read More

DTCP raises $450M for early stage European startups: The fund, Incharge Capital, is a joint venture with Porsche that will focus on mobility startups, and is backed by Softbank and Deutsche Telekom. DTCP had originally been targeting $500 million, but the firm “went through a very complicated market environment for fundraising.” Read More

From mortgaging their home to raising $18M: Founders, what would you do to bootstrap your startup? The founders over at Climate X, which assesses the climate risk of physical assets, re-mortgaged their house while struggling to raise venture capital so they could pay their staff. Pale Blue Dot eventually helped them out, and now Climate X assesses risk for financial services clients with over $6.5 trillion in combined assets under management. Talk about a comeback story. Read More

iPhone users can now send gifs to Android users: Apple has added support for RCS (Rich Communication Services) to its Messages app as part of the latest iOS 18 developer beta. RCS lets you send and receive files and high-quality images, see typing indicators, get read receipts and more, which iPhone users previously could only do with each other. Now, they can text and share files with Android users, too. Read More

Let old people age in their own homes: Older adults don’t want to go to nursing facilities, so there’s plenty of work for at-home care agencies. But such agencies usually only help out the elderly during the day, and only for a few hours at a time. Sensi.AI has just raised $31 million to help agencies virtually monitor the well-being of their elderly clients around the clock. It’s a great idea, but I hope the startup's privacy and security measures are up to snuff. Read More

Opera adds AI-powered image generation: Opera’s latest beta of its browser, Opera One, brings a host of new features, including AI capabilities like image and voice generation and a page context mode that lets users ask an AI assistant questions about a webpage. There are also new multimedia controls as well as the capability to split tabs so you can work on two web pages at the same time. Read More

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Around the Web

Anthropic comes for the enterprise AI market: Anthropic has launched a suite of tools called Projects and Artifacts, which aim to change how teams interact with AI and reshape workflows, reports VentureBeat. The project focuses on team collaboration and knowledge management in a way that could help organizations integrate AI into existing processes. Read More

Big Tech quietly changes T&Cs to make room for AI: Companies like Google want to train their AI models on data that’s protected by privacy laws, so they’re carefully rewriting their terms and conditions to include words like “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning” and “generative AI,” reports The New York Times. This means companies could start training AI models on the most personal kinds of data, including private messages and emails. It may finally be time to read those T&C documents. Read More

Reddit fights back against crawler bots: Reddit plans to update its Robots Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt file) to block automated scraping of its platform, reports Engadget. The update follows reports of Perplexity and other AI companies regularly bypassing websites’ robots.txt protocol, blatantly disregarding publishers’ clear communication that they don’t want their content accessed. Read More

Before You Go

Image Credits: University of Tokyo

And the NOPE award goes to… A smiling robot face made of human skin that is literally the stuff of nightmares. The experiment, published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, could be the first step in determining how living skin tissue (as opposed to artificial skin) might be attached to a robot’s limb or face. We’ve got a GIF in the article, and you really have got to see this. Or not, if you’d like to sleep well for the next week. Read More