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Jury rules Meta violated California privacy laws by quietly collecting Flo users’ menstrual health data

A California jury has found Meta in violation of state user privacy laws in a class-action suit brought by users of period tracking app, Flo, who alleged that the tech giant collected private menstrual health data without users’ consent and used it for ad-tracking purposes. The plaintiffs, claiming to represent millions of Flo users, had accused Flo and Meta of collecting private health data, like their period dates and fertility goals, via Flo’s app without permission, therefore violating Cali

AI-powered fintech Alaan raises $48M, one of the largest Series A rounds in MENA

When Parthi Duraisamy was a consultant at McKinsey’s Dubai office, he discovered that the American Express cards his company relied on for corporate expenses were rarely accepted in the Middle East. This forced Duraisamy to cover significant travel expenses out of pocket and file endless expense reports. “It was a constant pain,” Duraisamy explained on the call. “I’d spend my weekends uploading receipts, reconciling every expense manually.” Now, Alaan, the company he launched with fellow McKin

Google says its AI-based bug hunter found 20 security vulnerabilities

Google’s AI-powered bug hunter has just reported its first batch of security vulnerabilities. Heather Adkins, Google’s vice president of security, announced Monday that its LLM-based vulnerability researcher Big Sleep found and reported 20 flaws in various popular open source software. Adkins said that Big Sleep, which is developed by the company’s AI department DeepMind as well as its elite team of hackers Project Zero, reported its first-ever vulnerabilities, mostly in open source software s

Topics: ai big bug disrupt sleep

Foxconn sells former GM factory to mystery buyer after failing to make EVs

Foxconn has sold the former GM factory it has owned for three years after failing to stand up any meaningful, large-scale electric vehicle production there. The pivot marks the second major failure of Foxconn to deliver on its promises to help revive U.S. manufacturing. The iPhone-maker once promised to build a giant LCD factory in Wisconsin — a project that Donald Trump called the “eighth wonder of the world” during his first term — and wound up underdelivering to an extreme degree. Foxconn s

Joby Aviation to buy Blade Air Mobility’s rideshare business

Electric air taxi developer Joby Aviation has agreed to buy Blade Air Mobility’s helicopter rideshare business for as much as $125 million. Joby is buying the Blade brand and the company’s passenger business, which includes operations in the United States and Europe. Blade founder and CEO Rob Wiesenthal will continue to lead the business, which will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Joby. Blade’s medical division, which transports organs, isn’t included in the transaction and will remain

TechCrunch Mobility: Tesla’s ride-hailing gambit

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tesla CEO Elon Musk is in what one might describe a suboptimal position. He’s pushed hard to get shareholders to view Tesla as an AI and robotics company, not a maker of EVs. And yet, the company’s most visible products, which generate the bulk of its revenues, are its electric cars. Yes, Tesla EVs are advanced, particularly when

Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping

AI startup Perplexity is crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly indicated they don’t want to be scraped, according to internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare. On Monday, Cloudflare published research saying it observed the AI startup ignore blocks and hide its crawling and scraping activities. The network infrastructure giant accused Perplexity of obscuring its identity when trying to scrape web pages “in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences,” Cloudfl

OpenMind wants to be the Android operating system of humanoid robots

Many companies are focused on building robots, or the hardware components to help them move, grip objects, or interact with the world around them. OpenMind is focused under the hood. The Silicon Valley-based startup is building a software layer, called OM1, for humanoid robots that acts as an operating system. The company compares itself to being the Android for robotics because its software is open and hardware agnostic. Stanford professor Jan Liphardt, the founder of OpenMind, told TechCrunc

Joby Aviation to buy Blade Air Mobility’s ride-share business

Electric air taxi developer Joby Aviation has agreed to buy Blade Air Mobility’s helicopter ride-share business for as much as $125 million. Joby is buying the Blade brand and the company’s passenger business, which includes operations in the United States and Europe. Blade founder and CEO Rob Wiesenthal will continue to lead the business, which will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Joby. Blade’s medical division, which transports organs, isn’t included in the transaction and will remai

Mastercard denies pressuring game platforms, Valve tells a different story

The outcry after a recent marketplace crackdown on games with adult content, seemingly due to pressure from payment processors, prompted Mastercard to release a brief statement Friday pushing back against recent headlines. “Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations,” the company said, adding, “At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard

Venture firm CRV raises $750M, downsizing after returning capital to investors

CRV has secured $750 million toward the 55-year-old venture firm’s twentieth flagship fund, it announced on Friday. The new fund is smaller than the $1 billion early-stage fund CRV closed in the fall of 2022. At that time, the firm also announced a $500 million second Select fund, a capital pool for backing late-stage rounds of existing portfolio companies. It’s no surprise that CRV is not raising a late-stage fund as part of its new fundraise. Last year, the firm told The New York Times it wa

Fundamental Research Labs nabs $30M+ to build AI agents across verticals

Applied AI research company Fundamental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera) announced today that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Prosus with participation from Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison. The company has a curious structure as it is working on multiple AI applications in different fields. When it raised its seed funding, Fundametal Research Labs was developing bots that could play Minecraft with you. Today, the company has a games team, a prosumer team

This Detroit startup is turning to utilities to make home efficiency upgrades cheaper

Ask any homeowner: renovation projects are no fun at all. From finding a contractor to determining a fair price, the process is rife with uncertainty. Plenty of startups have popped up to help homeowners tackle electrification projects, including installing solar panels and replacing gas furnaces with heat pumps. But they still struggle with the cost question: acquiring customers is often more than half the battle. Pearl Edison thinks the answer is utilities. “As much as anything, we are leve

Joby Aviation and defense contractor L3Harris to test autonomous hybrid aircraft

Joby Aviation is often cast as a developer of commercial electric air taxis, but the publicly traded company has also pursued a separate track to market through a long-standing relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense. Now, its years of research and development with the Department of Defense may be paying off. The company on Thursday said it had signed an agreement with defense contractor L3Harris Technologies to “explore opportunities” to develop a new aircraft class — specifically, a

Female-founded semiconductor AI startup SixSense raises $8.5M

A Singapore-based deep tech startup called SixSense has developed an AI-powered platform that helps semiconductor manufacturers predict and detect potential chip defects on production lines in real time. It has raised $8.5 million in Series A bringing its total funding to around $12 million. The round was led by Peak XV’s Surge (formerly Sequoia India & SEA), with participation from Alpha Intelligence Capital, FEBE, and others. Founded in 2018 by engineers Akanksha Jagwani (CTO) and Avni Agarw

Apple projects tariff costs will hit $1.1B next quarter

Tariffs are projected to cost Apple $1.1 billion in the July-to-September quarter, an uptick from the previous period, CEO Tim Cook said during the company’s earnings call with investors Thursday. Those cost projections, which are based on current rates and policies, could end up lower than expected as they did in the previous quarter. Apple incurred about $800 million of tariff-related costs for the June quarter, less than the $900 million estimate the company shared in May. Cook said most of

Apple plans to ‘significantly’ grow AI investments, Cook says

Apple on Thursday signaled that it’s getting more serious about its plans to catch up in the AI race. “We see AI as one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime. We are embedding it across our devices and platforms and across the company. We are also significantly growing our investments,” CEO Tim Cook said on the Q3 2025 earnings call with investors. “Apple has always been about taking the most advanced technologies and making them easy to use and accessible for everyone, and that’s a

Your public ChatGPT queries are getting indexed by Google and other search engines

It’s a strange glimpse into the human mind: If you filter search results on Google, Bing, and other search engines to only include URLs from the domain “https://chatgpt.com/share,” you can find strangers’ conversations with ChatGPT. Sometimes, these shared conversation links are pretty dull — people ask for help renovating their bathroom, understanding astrophysics, and finding recipe ideas. In another case, one user asks ChatGPT to rewrite their resume for a particular job application (judgin

TikTok merges its Core Product and Trust & Safety teams

As TikTok’s future in the U.S. remains uncertain, the company is merging its Core Product and Trust & Safety teams into a single organization, according to an internal memo sent to staff by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew and viewed by TechCrunch and confirmed by TikTok. “This new team will allow us to better leverage our technical capabilities across both business and safety objectives, and will help us move faster as we develop the next generation of safety technology,” Chew wrote in the memo. As pa

Waymo’s Tekedra Mawakana on the truth behind autonomous vehicles at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

Autonomous vehicles have long been touted as “just around the corner,” but the reality of what it takes to bring self-driving cars to the streets is anything but simple. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27–29 at Moscone West in San Francisco, Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana joins the Disrupt Stage for a wide-ranging conversation on the current state of AVs — and where the industry goes from here. Inside the self-driving reality check While the headlines often focus on crashes, contr

OpenAI to launch AI data center in Norway, its first in Europe

OpenAI said Thursday that it plans to launch Stargate Norway, its first AI data center in Europe, in partnership with British AI cloud infrastructure provider Nscale and Norwegian energy infrastructure firm Aker. Nscale will design and build the site, and it will be a 50/50 joint venture between the two companies. OpenAI will be an “off-taker” in the project, buying capacity from the data center. The announcement comes as Europe races to achieve AI sovereignty and invest in data centers and co

SpaceX faces two new lawsuits alleging safety‐related retaliation

When longtime supervisor Robert Markert warned SpaceX leaders that one part of the rocket fairing recovery process could “easily cause serious injury or death,” he alleges he was ignored because “it was the more economical solution,” according to a recently filed lawsuit. A few months later, he was out of the job. Markert is one of two former SpaceX employees who have filed separate wrongful-termination lawsuits, both of which were removed to federal court earlier this month. The two complaints

How 2 UC Berkeley dropouts raised $28M for their AI marketing automation startup

AI-powered marketing automation startup Conversion, founded five years ago by two UC Berkeley dropouts, has raised a $28 million Series A led by Abstract, with participation from True Ventures and HOF Capital. The company’s founding story sounds like it could have been an episode of the HBO show “Silicon Valley.” The story begins all the way back when co-founder and CEO Neil Tewari, now 24, was in high school. He got busted one day watching a TechCrunch Disrupt livestream during class, was sen

PlayerZero raises $15M to prevent AI agents from shipping buggy code

As Silicon Valley races toward a future where AI agents do most of the software programming, a new problem is created: finding the AI-generated bugs before they are put into production. Even OpenAI is dealing with such issues, a former employee has described. Newly funded startup PlayerZero has created a solution: use AI agents trained to find and fix problems before the code is put into production, the startup’s CEO and sole founder, Animesh Koratana, tells TechCrunch. Koratana created Player

How a New Jersey startup found an electrifying way to slash copper costs

Skyrocketing demand for copper promises to push prices to new heights. As the global economy transitions away from fossil fuels, it is going to need twice as much copper in the coming years than humanity has mined throughout all of its existence. Still Bright, a New Jersey-based startup founded in 2022, thinks it has found a novel (and cleaner way) to slash those costs. “The fact that we’ve already mined the easily mineable stuff, and the fact that we need many more mines to come into producti

How 2 UC Berkeley dropouts raised $28 million for their AI marketing automation startup

AI-powered marketing automation startup Conversion, founded five years ago by two UC Berkeley dropouts, has raised a $28 million Series A led by Abstract, with participation from True Ventures and HOF Capital. The company’s founding story sounds like it could have been an episode of the HBO show “Silicon Valley.” The story begins all the way back when co-founder and CEO Neil Tewari, now 24, was in high school. He got busted one day watching a TechCrunch Disrupt livestream during class, was sen

AIR lands $23M to bring its eVTOLs to the US

The combined forces of escalating geopolitical tensions and rising defense budgets are spurring many electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) makers to take a two-pronged approach to building their aircraft: crewed vehicles for personal or commercial taxi use, and uncrewed vehicles meant for logistics and defense purposes. AIR, an Israel-based startup developing eVTOLs, thought it prudent to adopt a similar approach from the get-go, designing both its uncrewed and piloted aircraft with the

Observe continues to adapt to the changing world of software observability

Observe, an observability platform, was founded in 2017 in response to the changing nature of software observability. Companies started pushing out new versions of their software more frequently — and producing significantly more data because of it. Now, Observe is responding to the latest big shift in technology: AI. San Mateo-based Observe helps companies get an inside look at the status of their software, which makes it easier for engineers to spot and solve disruptions and outages. The re

Footnotes, TikTok’s crowdsourced fact-checks, launches in the US

TikTok on Wednesday announced the public launch of Footnotes, a crowdsourced fact-checking system similar to X and Meta’s Community Notes feature. The technology will initially roll out to U.S. users as a pilot program, allowing contributors to both write and rate Footnotes on TikTok videos. All U.S. TikTok users are able to view the notes that have been rated as helpful and submit their own ratings in return. The company first announced its plans to test Footnotes in April. At the time, it de

Space Force bets on commercial entrants in $4B satcom contest

American warfighters need jam-proof communications, and the Space Force is planning to spend hundreds of millions to ensure they have them. As part of that effort, the service established the Protected Tactical Satcom program to build out secure battlefield communications via satellites. The Space Force has already awarded contracts to defense primes Boeing and Northrop Grumman to develop prototype payloads for satellites heading to far-away geostationary orbit. Now, the program is entering a