Google says hackers are calling financial firm employees to hack and extort victims
Groups of hackers are breaking into large U.S. financial firms to steal sensitive data and extort victims, Google’s security researchers report.
venture capital
Why Lightspeed is going all-in on creator-led venture capital
Venture firms are turning to creators to build trust with the next generation of founders before a check is ever written. It’s a trend that’s been building with a16z’s acquisition of Erik Torenberg’s Turpentine podcast and OpenAI’s acquisition of TBPN. Lightspeed Venture Partners just made its own notable hire in that vein, bringing on Claire Zau, a seed investor with a major following on Instagram and […]
NEA’s Tiffany Luck says enterprises are still figuring out their AI ROI
Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. This tension between […]
Defense tech is flooded with money, but who’s built to last?
Defense tech is red hot right now. Anduril and Mach Industries just doubled and quadrupled their valuations, respectively, and the U.S. government is proposing a 40% increase in defense budget. A wave of new startups is chasing those government contracts, but according to Ross Fubini, the venture investor who wrote Anduril’s first check, most of them will get lost in the Valley of Death between prototype contract […]
You don’t need to be an AI startup to raise. Lucra has $20M to prove it.
Slapping “AI” on your startup’s pitch deck is basically table stakes right now. When a founder raised $20 million from Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest for an eSports gamification loyalty startup without those two letters in the spotlight, it got us wondering how the conversation even started — especially when ARK had already been burned by a company operating in the same space. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Julie […]
Theo Baker spent four years investigating Stanford. Before he leaves, here’s what he found.
“There’s a common refrain among [young] people in this world that it’s easier to raise money for a startup right now than to get an internship. Which is remarkable, right?”
The climate tech IPO window could finally be cracking open
Nuclear startup X-energy went public, geothermal startup Fervo is about to. Could this be the moment that climate tech investors have been waiting for?
Fusion power may not be sci-fi. Just ask the people who sunk $5B into it.
Fusion energy has been “20 years away” for decades, but has the science finally caught up? Private investment in fusion companies surged from $10 billion to $15 billion in just months, and the money is coming from places you wouldn’t expect. Watch as Rebecca Bellan and guest host Tim De Chant sit down with Rachel Slaybaugh, general partner at DCVC on this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. The trio breaks […]
OpenAI alums have been quietly investing from a new, potentially $100M fund
Zero Shot, a new venture capital fund with deep ties to OpenAI, is aiming to raise $100 million for its first fund. It has already written some checks.
Diverse teams start with diverse VCs
It is the path of least resistance for a growth-stage company to hire from the familiar Silicon Valley pipelines but if a founder wants a diverse team, that value has to be put into practice from the very first hire.