Jay-Z’s venture capital firm, Marcy Venture Partners, has merged with another Black-owned investment firm, Pendulum Holdings’ investment arm Pendulum Opportunities, to form MarcyPen Capital Partners, a MarcyPen spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. The newly formed MarcyPen Capital Partners has $900 million in assets under management, according to PitchBook. MarcyPen’s spokesperson declined …...Read More

Colin Angle, one of the co-founders of Roomba maker iRobot, is raising cash for a home robotics venture. A filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reveals that Angle’s new company, Familiar Machines & Magic, is trying to raise $30 million. So far, it has raised $15 million from …...Read More

TuSimple co-founder and former CEO Xiaodi Hou is on a war path in the lead up to Friday’s annual shareholder meeting that will decide the makeup of the company’s board of directors. Over the past several weeks, Hou has sued TuSimple for control of his voting rights, demanded the company …...Read More

TikTok and ByteDance asked the United States Supreme Court to block the law that forces TikTok to be sold off or banned in the United States, according to an emergency filing with America’s top court on Monday. The social media company requested that the Supreme Court consider blocking the sell-or-ban …...Read More

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. This will be the final TechCrunch Space newsletter you receive in 2024, so to all our readers, have a wonderful holiday and see you next year. There’s a lot to look forward to next year. I expect to see much more progress from …...Read More

ChatGPT Search, OpenAI’s AI-powered web search experience, is now live for all ChatGPT users — with several new features in tow. By default, ChatGPT will automatically determine which questions to route through ChatGPT Search, or users can tap a new “Search the web” icon in the ChatGPT interface. ChatGPT Search …...Read More

Instagram has quietly rolled out the ability for users to schedule direct messages. The Meta-owned social network confirmed to TechCrunch on Monday that the new feature is rolling out to all users globally. The option to schedule DMs will be especially useful for creators and brands that want to schedule …...Read More

Google’s experimental arm Google Labs is testing a new image generator called Whisk. This tool allows people to prompt with images instead of text, allowing them to remix a photo by altering the subject, scene, and style. Whisk uses Google’s image generation model, Imagen 3, to combine three images: one …...Read More

Google says it’ll soon begin to allow YouTube creators and rightsholders to let third-party companies including OpenAI, Apple, and Meta to use their content to train AI models. “Over the next few days, creators and rights holders can choose to allow third-party companies to use their content to train AI …...Read More

YouTube on Monday announced it will give creators more choice over how third parties can use their content to train their AI models. Starting today, creators and rights holders will be able to flag for YouTube if they’re permitting specific third-party AI companies to train models on the creator’s content. …...Read More