EtherealX, an Indian space startup, has raised $5 million in a seed funding round as it plans to develop fully reusable medium-lift launch vehicles, making satellite launches cost-effective and time-efficient. Space launches have multiplied in recent years. However, despite the number of players, launches still involve substantial transportation costs and …...Read More

John Schulman, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, has left the company for rival AI startup Anthropic. The news comes as The Information reports that OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, has taken an extended leave of absence and Peter Deng, a product manager who joined OpenAI last year after leading products …...Read More

Grok, not to be confused with the homophonic AI startup Groq that this morning raised over $600 million, spread false information about Vice President Kamala Harris on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. That’s according to an open letter penned by five secretaries of state and addressed to …...Read More

Hello, and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. Before we dive in, I wanted to quickly plug this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt, our flagship event. We’ve planned a half-day of space industry programming for you, and it includes some of the biggest names in the industry. Check out the full agenda here. …...Read More

Saudi Arabia is committing even more money to Lucid Motors as the EV startup struggles to erase its losses. Lucid announced Monday as part of its second-quarter earnings report that an affiliate of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is committing another $1.5 billion, with half coming in the form of …...Read More

Last year, OpenAI held a splashy press event in San Francisco during which the company announced a bevy of new products and tools, including the ill-fated App Store-like GPT Store. This year will be a quieter affair, however. On Monday, OpenAI said it’s changing change the format of its DevDay …...Read More

Space-as-a-service startup Muon Space closed a $56.7 million fundraising round to scale its satellite platform, while also announcing a new deal with defense giant Sierra Nevada Corp. California-based Muon designs, builds and operates satellites in low Earth orbit on behalf of customers. Some customers, like Hydrosat, provide their own payloads, …...Read More

Google has suffered a major court defeat in the U.S. that could alter the way it does business, should the decision stand. Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ruling in a case brought against Google by the Justice Department, said that Google had …...Read More

We’re so excited to announce that we’ve added a dedicated AI Stage presented by Google Cloud to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. It joins Fintech, SaaS and Space as the other industry-focused stages — all under one big roof. We couldn’t possibly host TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 without a huge deep dive on …...Read More

Location data, for better or worse, continues to be a part of the bedrock of how apps are built. Now a startup developing AI market research based on that location data, Placer.ai, has quietly raised $75 million at an expanded valuation of nearly $1.5 billion, TechCrunch has learned. The startup …...Read More