SpaceX just fired off one of the biggest shots yet in the spectrum wars, agreeing to pay $17 billion to take over a massive chunk of wireless airwaves from EchoStar for Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell services.

The deal is the most aggressive signal yet that SpaceX wants to rule the satellite-to-phone market.

Also, Ramp answered any lingering questions as to why investors recently valued the expense management startup at $22.5 billion, just 45 days after a previous funding round valued it at $16 billion: The company says it has achieved $1 billion in annualized revenue.

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Nuclearn got its start when the founders were working at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station just west of Phoenix. They had been experimenting with ways to streamline various repetitive tasks first from a data science perspective then with more advanced AI models.

Also, ReOrbit, a Finnish startup focused on helping nations control their own sovereign satellites, has raised a record €45 million (about US $53 million) Series A round of funding for a European space tech company. The funding round signals that Europe’s new space market is heating up, fueled by a geopolitical environment in which countries increasingly worry about relying on foreign technology for critical infrastructure.

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Deep Fission is proposing to build small, cylindrical nuclear power plants and lower them into 30-inch diameter holes drilled one mile down into the Earth. By burying the reactors, the company hopes to solve several problems that plague current reactors, including concerns over meltdowns and potential terrorist attacks.

Also, The corporate space world tired Bianca Cefalo to the point that she found it easier to literally start her own space company and launch objects into orbit. 

Bloomberg reported that Cognition AI, the startup behind AI coding agent Devin, has hit a $10.2 billion valuation after raising $400 million, marking a jump from the company’s $4 billion valuation earlier this year. 

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Why is a startup that bills itself as the “Netflix of AI,” and that recently raised money from Amazon’s Alexa Fund, talking about remaking a movie that was first released in 1942? 

Well, the company has built a platform that allows users to create their own cartoons with AI prompts — Fable is starting out with its own intellectual property, but it has ambitions to offer similar capabilities with Hollywood IP. 

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If you spend any time online, there’s a good chance you’ve seen plenty of ugly, AI-generated ads — but few to none when interacting with AI chatbots themselves. Koah co-founder and CEO Nic Baird argued that will inevitably change.

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Sodium-ion battery startup Natron ceased operations this week, ending the company’s 12-year quest to commercialize its technology in the U.S.

The company had $25 million worth of orders lined up for its Michigan factory, but it couldn’t deliver them until it had UL certification, according to Raleigh’s The News & Observer, which reported on the business’s closure because Natron had been planning to bring jobs to the state of North Carolina with its new factory.

Also, Acqui-hires feel like they’re here to stay: The team behind Alex Codes, a popular tool that lets developers use AI models within Apple’s development suite Xcode, is joining OpenAI.

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On Thursday, Augment announced that it raised an $85 million Series A led by Redpoint, with participation from 8VC, Autotech Ventures, and others. The massive round comes just five months after the startup launched out of stealth with a hefty $25 million seed round.

Also, Mark Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer from Indiana, has filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.

Mark Zuckerberg the lawyer uses a commercial Facebook page to advertise his legal practice and communicate with potential clients. But his page has been disabled five times in the last eight years, since Meta’s moderation systems flag his account as falsely impersonating Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the platform.

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Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian’s CEO and co-founder, said, ‘today’s browsers weren’t built for work; they were built for browsing. This deal is a bold step forward in reimagining the browser for knowledge work in the AI era.’

Also, Francesco Cacciatore is a self-proclaimed skeptic. Yet after spending two decades in the European aerospace industry and hitting, as he put it, a “crisis,” he made an undeniably optimistic bet: he started a space company, saying ‘I wanted to try and build something myself.’

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On Wednesday, Orchard Robotics announced that it raised a $22 million Series A funding led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital, and with participation from returning investors, including General Catalyst and Contrary. Although the idea of using computer vision for specialty crops isn’t new, Wu says that the largest farms in the U.S. still rely on manual sampling to make critical decisions about farm operations.

Also, French AI startup Mistral AI is finalizing a €2 billion investment at a post-money valuation of $14 billion, reports Bloomberg, positioning the company as one of Europe’s most valuable tech startups. The two-year-old OpenAI rival, founded by former DeepMind and Meta researchers, develops open source language models and Le Chat, its AI chatbot built for European audiences.

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When congressional Republicans took a sledgehammer to the Inflation Reduction Act last summer, advanced geothermal startups were largely spared. Drilling for renewable energy appears to be one of the few things that engenders bipartisan support. Now, with the uncertainty settled, geothermal companies are announcing deals that promise to pave the way for broader deployment of their technology.

Also, Fizz, the college social app, is expanding into grocery delivery thanks to a new partnership with Gopuff, the startup told TechCrunch exclusively. The partnership will allow students to order anything from late-night snacks to weekly groceries directly within the Fizz app in as fast as 15 minutes.

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