Uber Shuttle is coming to America:The ride-hail and delivery giant plans to launch a shuttle service in certain U.S. cities this summer. The goal? To eventually cater to events like concerts and sports games, as well as airport pickups and drop-offs. Read more
Google I/O 2024: Catch up with everything announced at the conference. We also go into all of the top AI announcements from these past two days and why Google could run into some issues with its call-scanning technology. Read more
Fay gets a shot in the arm from Ozempic users: The dietitian startup has been booming from Ozempic patients and emerges from stealth with $25 million from top investors, like General Catalyst and Forerunner. Read more
Heat pump gets a makeover: Quilt’s heat pumps sport the sort of sleek and intuitive designs you’d expect from veterans from Apple, Nest, Google, and Tesla. Each unit is intended to heat and cool a single room, and there’s an app and a thermostat-like Dial from which customers can set temperatures throughout their home. Plus, you can customize the outside of the unit to your warm heart’s content. Read more
Anthropic’s new head of product: Meet Mike Krieger, who is joining Anthropic as the company’s first chief product officer. His name may seem familiar because he is one of the co-founders of Instagram and, more recently, the co-founder of personalized news app Artifact, a startup TechCrunch corporate parent Yahoo recently acquired. Read more
Apple’s new accessibility features: Now iPad and iPhone users get some new features designed to cater to a diverse range of user needs. These include the ability to control your device with eye-tracking technology, create custom shortcuts using your voice, experience music with a haptic engine and more. Read more
Venture capitalists advocate for standardized data collection: A group of VCs formed the Diversity Data Alliance in hopes of simplifying the process of collecting data by creating a framework that firms can use to gather information about founders and funders. It hopes to also work toward creating a centralized data pool to better track and understand funding trends in the industry. This is especially important for marginalized founders, who still receive little to no venture funding. Read more
Alkira grabs $100 million: Tiger Global jumps in to lead a $100 million investment into Alkira and its “network infrastructure as a service,” which lets users virtualize and orchestrate hybrid cloud assets to manage them as a whole. Read more
Weka secures Series E: Data is always a big theme, and that is no different with Weka, which raised $140 million in new capital to build data pipelines to manage a range of data sources, types, and sizes. Read more
Newchip’s bankruptcy is a cautionary tale for founders: Newchip’s bankruptcy has threatened the cap tables of thousands of startups. TechCrunch’s Equity podcast has the details on how founders are trying to buy their companies back, and what this means for the broader accelerator landscape. Listen here
