Krafton, known for its titles PUBG and BGMI, has acquired a controlling stake in 12-year-old Indian mobile gaming studio Nautilus Mobile.

AI web crawling bots are the cockroaches of the internet, many developers believe. FOSS devs are fighting back in ingenuous, humorous ways.

Certification platform Certiverse raised an $11 million Series A led by Cherryrock Capital, it announced this week. The company was founded by Ruben Garcia, Pablo Meyer, and Federico Lopez in 2023. It lets organizations develop certification exams at, its founders say, far less cost than traditional methods. Certifications are an age-old method to gain technical []

President Trump is slapping 25% tariffs on all cars imported to the United States, including from our immediate North American neighbors. Hes also placed a 25% tariff on certain parts used to build cars. Its a decision that will likely supercharge the cost of new and used cars, but its also a gift to Tesla, []

HoneyBook, a startup last valued in late 2021 at $2.4 billion, told TechCrunch that it hit $140 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR). This makes HoneyBook one of the few startups with peak-VC-era valuations to report their financials after the market cooled. Many startups that raised in 2021 and have not raised since then remain []

Meta-owned Instagram is copying yet another feature from TikTok. This time, its the ability for users to play a reel at 2x speed by long pressing on the right or left side of their screen. When TikTok first launched, videos could only be 15 seconds long. As the years passed and TikTok rose in popularity, []

After teasing a return to OG Facebook earlier this year, the social network on Thursday announced an update that will give users a simple way to connect with friends. The company is introducing a new Facebook Friends tab that will only showcase updates from friends, without any other recommended content. Meta explains in a blog []

When Twin came out of stealth in January 2024, AI agents were more of a theoretical concept than a reality. Today, the Paris-based company is releasing an automation agent in partnership with Qonto, the fintech startup that offers business bank accounts to more than 500,000 customers across Europe. If you want to automate repetitive tasks, []

TikTok is set to expand its TikTok Shop e-commerce platform to users in France, Germany, and Italy on Monday, Reuters reports. TikTok Shop has been available in the United Kingdom since 2021, and now the company is ready to expand farther into Europe. While TikTok Shop is also available in the United States and saw []

The encrypted messaging app Signal is getting some unexpected attention this week. High-ranking officials in the Trump administration, including Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth, communicated the plans for an attack on the Yemeni Houthis via a potentially unauthorized group chat on Signal. However, Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly added []

Meta, X, and Snap are celebrating a new Utah law that will require Apple and Google to take responsibility for verifying users ages on their app stores and obtain parental consent for minors. The tech giants have been battling to determine which party should be responsible for age verification on the app stores. Companies like []

A fledgling open source startup thats setting out to tackle API sprawl in the GraphQL ecosystem has secured the backing of e-commerce giant eBay. WunderGraph, as the company is called, today said it has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round of funding to scale its open source GraphQL federation. Investors include eBays VC []

Mexico City-based Mendel has raised $35 million in a Series B round of funding, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. Corporate spend management platform Mendel last raised in December 2021 a $15 million Series A round and $20 million in debt after participating in Y Combinators Winter 2021 cohort. With this latest capital infusion, the []

Nintendo announced on Thursday that it is working on Virtual Game Cards, a feature that makes digitally downloaded games more portable across different devices. With the highly awaited Nintendo Switch 2 on the horizon, these Virtual Game Cards will make it easier for users to port over their existing Switch games to their new devices. []

ChatGPT, OpenAIs text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership []

Times running out 4 days left to save over $300 on Founder and Investor Passes for TechCrunch All Stage! Founders, accelerate your journey. Investors, fuel their success. Join us on July 15 at SoWa Power Station in Boston, MA, for TC All Stage, where 1,200 founders and VCs come together to scale from seed []

Google is rolling out a slew of new features some powered by AI across Search, Maps, and Gemini that are designed to help people plan their summer vacations. The new features arrive as users have been turning to tools like OpenAIs ChatGPT for help with planning trips. Google Searchs AI Overviews, which display []

Abound, a go-to remittance app that was spun off by India's Times Internet, has raised $14 million in a seed round.

NHS vendor Advanced will pay just over 3 million ($3.8 million) in fines for not implementing basic security measures before it suffered a ransomware attack in 2022, the U.K.s data protection regulator has confirmed. Its half the fine that the Information Commissioners Office had initially sought in August 2024, when the data watchdog said it []

While youre busy Ghibli-fying your images with ChatGPTs new image-generation capabilities, OpenAI is out raising a ton more cash. The company is close to finalizing a new $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, according to a report from Bloomberg. The report noted that other funds, including the hedge fund Magnetar Capital, Coatue Management, Founders []

Its only been a day since ChatGPTs new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. In the last 24 hours, weve seen AI-generated images representing []

Nvidia is looking to get into the server rental market. The semiconductor giant is reportedly nearing a deal to acquire Lepton AI, a company that rents out servers that are powered by Nvidias AI chips, according to The Information. The deal is reportedly worth several hundred million dollars, according to The Information, which cited unnamed []

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on Wednesday that the rollout of ChatGPTs viral new AI image features to free users would be delayed, citing significantly higher demand than the company expected. Images in ChatGPT are wayyyy more popular than we expected (and we had pretty high expectations), Altman said in a post on X on []

The health insurance giant is the latest to remove references to diversity, equity and inclusion policies amid mounting pressure from the Trump administration.

Enterprise browser startup Island just raised a sizable funding round one that bumps up its valuation significantly, and less than one year after its last fundraise. Dallas-based Island raised $250 million in a Series E round led by Coatue that valued the company at $4.85 billion, the startup announced today. This brings the companys []

The Lumon Terminal Pro the computer used in Apple TVs hit series Severance has appeared on Apples retail website. When shopping Apple.com, youll see the new device, adorned with a red New label, when you click to view the available Mac computers Apple has for sale from the top-level navigation. But sorry, Severance []

Silicon Valley used to take a backseat to Washington, D.C. But now,the people disrupting technology have taken the wheel at the highest echelons of government. And thats thanks, in large part, to the Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE. Much reporting on DOGE hasfocused on its staffers ties to Musk,the billionaire bestie of []

OpenAI is embracing rival Anthropics standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data resides. In a post on X on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI will add support for Anthropics Model Context Protocol, or MCP, across its products, including the desktop app for ChatGPT. MCP is an open-source standard that []

Elon Musks rocket company SpaceX has allowed Chinese investors to buy stakes as long as the funds are routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore hubs, according to reporting from ProPublica. SpaceX is a defense contractor for the Pentagon, one that handles sensitive work like building a classified spy satellite network. Investment from China []

One academic who reviewed the dataset said it was clear evidence that China, or its affiliates, wants to use AI to improve repression.

Bradley Tusk, co-founder and managing partner at Tusk Venture Partners, told TechCrunch in todays episode of Equity that VC as we know it is dead. And it has been for the last four years. Maybe theres some VC that Ive never heard of thats awash with liquidity the last couple of years, but we havent []

Digital banking startup Mercury has raised $300 million in primary and secondary funding at a $3.5 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday. The valuation is more than double the startups valuation when it last raised capital a $120 million Series B round in 2021 that valued the company at $1.62 []

The Canadian company is developing small modular reactors. It previously raised nearly $100 million.

The proliferation of scarily realistic deepfakes is one of the more pernicious byproducts of the rise of AI, and falling victim to scams based on these deepfakes is already costing companies millions of dollars not to mention the implications these could have on national security. Today, a startup thats built a toolset aimed at []

Sez Us, a social app founded by Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, is trying to build a platform without rage-bait. Rage-bait refers to any posts that are intended to stoke controversy. This might be an intentionally controversial political take, or it can be a wholly fabricated scenario designed to farm engagement (for example, a satirical creator []

YouTube is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts to give creators a deeper understanding of how their short-form content is performing, the company announced on Wednesday. Shorts views will now count the number of times a creators Short starts to play or replay. In the past, a view had been counted after a []

Since the integration of Google Assistant for Waze on iOS in 2020, iPhone users have faced ongoing issues that the company has struggled to resolve for over a year, Waze wrote in a post, apologizing for the prolonged inconvenience. On Wednesday, the navigation app officially discontinued the feature. Many users had reported on Reddit that []

Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the advent of large language models and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+ along with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to broaden its scope and invest more in AI startups. In a blog post Amazon shared with TechCrunch []

Its getting easier to build new applications on ATProto, the protocol that powers Blueskys social network and a growing number of other apps. At ATmosphere, the ATProto community conference held over the weekend in Seattle, Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee offered attendees a glimpse of whats ahead for the protocols development and how those will help []

Audio startup Krisp on Wednesday said it is launching a new feature that uses AI to change a users accent during calls. The company is initially rolling out support for changing Indian English accents to U.S. English. The startup says the accent conversion process preserves the speakers voice and only switches phonemes to match American []

Americans support for a TikTok ban is declining, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. This survey of over 5,000 U.S. adults found that just 34% of respondents supported banning the short form video app. When Pew ran a similar study in 2023, 50% of adults supported the TikTok ban. Over the same []

Amazon continues to infuse AI into its shopping tools to encourage customers to make more purchases. The company announced on Wednesday a new feature called Interests, aimed at creating a more personalized and conversational search experience. With the new feature, customers can enter tailored prompts in the search bar, reflecting their interests, preferences, and even []

The clock is ticking less than a week left until TechCrunch All Stage ticket prices go up! Save over $300 on founder and investor passes before March 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Founders, accelerate your path. Investors, empower their rise. On July 15, join 1,200 founders and VCs at SoWa Power Station in Boston, []

Kaspersky attributed the hacks to an espionage campaign targeting journalists and employees at educational institutions.

Before RJ Scaringe founded Rivian in 2009, he had micromobility on his mind. More than a decade later, his musings took root in a small skunkworks program inside Rivian that set out to answer one question:Could the companys technology be condensed down into something smaller and more affordable than its electric vans, trucks, and SUVs? []

A trio of cloud industry leaders have launched a new company with the mission of modernizing software configuration data management. Emerging from stealth today with $4 million in funding, ConfigHub is the handiwork of CEO Alexis Richardson, founder of cloud-native container management platform Weaveworks; CTO Brian Grant, former Google software engineer and original lead architect []

Its virtually impossible today to determine when a students writing has been composed using ChatGPT or another GenAI tool, and it can be a nightmare to disprove incorrect accusations. An AI edtech startup called Brisk has built a tool that could at least help teachers identify some of the telltale signs, and its now announcing []

A complete list of all the known layoffs in tech, from Big Tech to startups, broken down by month throughout 2024.

Microsoft is introducing a deep research AI-powered tool in Microsoft 365 Copilot, its AI chatbot app. Theres been a raft of deep research agents launched recently across chatbots, including OpenAIs ChatGPT, Googles Gemini, and xAIs Grok. Powering them are so-called reasoning AI models, which posses the ability to think through problems and fact-check themselves []

Block just laid off 931 employees. Read the email from its co-founder Jack Dorsey for more details on why.