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Look, I know this is our weekly startup newsletter, and as the most respected company in the world, Apple is type of “not a startup,” but judging by the site’s traffic, you are all such rabid fans that it seems rude to skip a quick recap: Apple held a short 40-minute event this week where it showed off the latest iPad Air, latest iPad Pro (with fancy latest stacked display technology), latest Magic Keyboard, latest Pencil Pro, all-new M4 chips, and much more. Oh, and they finally “admitted” that iPads are more like small laptops than large iPhones, so the company moved the camera to the horizontal edge – where, truthfully, it should have been all along.
Oh! I also have some fun personal news: I’m joining the TechCrunch Equity Podcast as a co-host with the incredibly wonderful (and splendidly powerful) Mary Ann Azevedo. You know, in case you wish my crazy humor to achieve your ears in addition to your eye sockets.
The most interesting startup stories of the week
Buckle up and go on a wild ride as we delve into the history of Newchip, the accelerator that gave startups a golden ticket to success but as a substitute took them straight to bankruptcy court. Lacey Hunter thought she was hitting the jackpot with her AI humanitarian startup TechAid when she joined Newchip. Spoiler alert: she didn’t. Instead of accelerating to glory, Newchip filed for bankruptcy and auctioned off warrants from over 1,000 startups in a capital sale. And poor Hunter? She had no selection but to lock TechAid in this hot mess.
In a sharp turn of events, Microsoft has just hit CTRL+Z on US police departments using Azure OpenAI for facial recognition. This update to the Regulations was as subtle as a rhinoceros in a china shop. In short: if you have a badge, a driving mustache and a pair of mirror aviators, then yes no AI face games for you!
- Rabbit R1 is not alleged to be good (yet): Rabbit r1 is an AI gadget that apparently got here out of the oven faster than a batch of undercooked cookies. Packed with more quirks than app integration, this little carrot chewer makes you wonder if it could have just been one other app on your phone. But that is the point for now, argues Devin.
- I have 99 problems, but technique is not one of them: Rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake have taken their feud to a latest level – or should we say, depth? It’s all fun and games until Tupac gets deeply spoofed in your track.
- On his bike: On today’s episode of “How to Beat a $50 Billion Company,” Peloton, once the shining star of home fitness, continues on its sad treadmill of misfortune. They are shedding 15% of the workforce (about 400 people for those allergic to percentages), proving that math is indeed a cruel mistress.
Trouble in the transport trenches
Fisker Inc., Henrik Fisker’s electric vehicle startup, is having a midlife crisis. After releasing two prototypes – Pear and Alaska – last August, he allegedly charged the engineering firm that helped develop them. Bertrandt AG filed a $13 million lawsuit alleging that Fisker withheld payments and kept its mental property like a jilted lover refusing to return his favorite sweatshirt. It appears this is not a one-off: It’s more like an episode of Judge Judy, with over 30 lawsuits involving lemon law violations, unpaid wage claims from former employees, and vendors suing for overdue bills. Although Fisker’s vice chairman of communications insists that Bertrandt’s lawsuit is “baseless,” this set of legal problems suggests that the company may have more cracks than Humpty Dumpty after the unlucky wall incident.
- Tesla’s flirtation with lidar: Oh, delicious irony! Elon Musk once called lidar sensors the “mainstay” of autonomous cars, but Tesla is currently Luminar’s most important customer. The company exploited this supposedly redundant technology so much that it accounted for over 10% of Luminar’s revenue in the first quarter of 2024. That’s $2 million price of bullets! However, Luminar itself is struggling and has just laid off 20% of its staff.
- Rivian on the ropes: I assumed my financial skills were questionable, but despite earning a staggering $1.2 billion in revenue in the first quarter, they still managed to lose $1.45 billion! It looks like their cost-cutting efforts need a little more effort before they even dream of profitability.
- Hyundai breaks the piggy bank: Meanwhile, Hyundai, in an effort to avoid wasting us from the fear of our driving skills, spent almost a billion dollars on Motional. This “generous” investment will give Hyundai a majority stake and enable the development of this autonomous vehicle startup (pun intended). It’s like a Cinderella story, but as a substitute of a pumpkin turning into a carriage, your money turns into autonomous vehicles.
The most interesting collections this week
Iconiq Capital, the private office that has looked after Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey’s money piles since 2011, just raised a whopping $5 billion from two funds for its seventh flagship fund. This sizeable fundraising puts them in the highlight while other big players like Tiger Global stumbled, raising just $2.2 billion (the lowest since 2014, after facing criticism for moving too quickly expenditure of funds).
- The cloud makes it rain: Alternate Clouds are the cool latest kids on the block, people! CoreWeave just raised a whopping $1.1 billion and is now valued at $19 billion. Why? Because GPUs (those expensive tech powerhouses) are popular hardware for training AI models, but not everyone has deep enough pockets to purchase their very own.
- Let’s take a look inside: Remember when Vinod Khosla, founding father of Khosla Ventures, boldly declared that radiologists could be obsolete in five years because of artificial intelligence? Yes… about that. It seems that we’ve not achieved this goal yet (shock!). Now, perhaps realizing that robots aren’t quite able to play doctor, Khosla is investing $50 million in Rad AI, a startup that goals to make radiologists’ lives easier without having to switch them (yet) with machines.
- Evaluate the roof: Itai Ben-Zaken is living proof that stumbling in a startup is just the cha-cha dance of entrepreneurship: He’s back with Honeycomb Insurance, using artificial intelligence to show aerial photos of roofs into property inspections for owners, winning $36 million for Series B firms
Other stories you may’t miss on TechCrunch…
Every week there are all the time a few stories I would like to share with you that by some means don’t fit into the above categories. It could be a shame to miss them, so here’s a random bag of goodies:
- All deepfakes, all the time: While we’re used to seeing Katy Perry dressed like an enchanted chia animal, she wasn’t there at all this yr – but you would not know it from the 10 million views her fake photo in a mossy dress received on social media.
- Newer saw the sun shining so brightly: Looks like Jack Dorsey scared Bluesky away faster than a Tinder date who just discovered you have a tarantula. Mr. “I’m too cool for social media platforms” by chance dropped in a conversation on X that he had left the board of his pet project, Bluesky. He didn’t even hassle to offer a reason or tweet some cryptic haiku about change and evolution – he just replied with a plain old “no” when asked if he was still on the board.
- The latest Apple ad is disgusting: Apple’s latest ad has won our hearts by literally squishing a pile of creative tools and analog items into the shape of an iPad. Oh, we get it, Apple! You say that this skinny (who asked for it?) latest iPad could replace all of this, but your vision of a future without physical instruments and paper books seems quite dystopian and we don’t love it.
- A tail with a comfortable ending: In the latest episode of “Actually a Whale,” scientists eavesdrop on sperm whales with a little help from machine learning. Turns out these mammoth chatting mammals use their very own secret language! A series of clicks (called “codes,” if you are so inclined) make the whales create words and sentences we have never understood before. What a cool flutter.
- LMGTFY: Stack Overflow decided to play with OpenAI. After initially launching ChatGPT resulting from fear of spammy replies, they modified their mind (or code?). Now they’re teaming up to enhance AI’s responses to programming tasks.