TechCrunch Startup News

"I think we're still kind of feeling out the space," CEO Brian Chesky told investors on the Q2 earnings call.

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Coding assistant startups are highly unprofitable, says a source familiar with Windsurf financials.

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AI-generated “brain rot” videos are popping up all over the internet and getting a lot of attention. Currently gaining traction among younger users, these clips feature wild characters, like a shark wearing sneakers and a ballerina with a cappuccino for a head. One startup driving this trend is OpenArt, founded by two former Google employees in 2022. It touts around 3 million monthly active users. In other news, OpenAI astounded the tech industry for the second time this week by launching its newest flagship model, GPT-5, just days after releasing two new freely available models under an open source license. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went so far as to call GPT-5 “the best model in the world.” That may be pride or hyperbole, as TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff reports that GPT-5 only slightly outperforms other leading AI models from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI on some key benchmarks, and slightly lags on others.

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Lava is a digital wallet that lets merchants use credits to facilitate transactions.

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Celebrity Lockets is a new feature where celebrities can engage with their most loyal followers on their home screens. Also, Tavity, the one-year-old startup raised a Series A led by Insight Partners.

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This is a juicy competitive move for both companies after AWS faced an onslaught of criticism over its progress with AI.

In other news, the AI audio-generation unicorn ElevenLabs announced the launch of a new model that allows users to generate music that's cleared for commercial use.

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-The AI sales automation startup raised fresh funds, led by CapitalG, just months after its last round.

-While the ActivityPub integration is a main selling point for Ghost 6, this major release includes a number of other changes and new additions.

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OpenMind is building humanoid robot operating software designed for robots that interact with people and other robots.

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Germ's new app lets users send end-to-end encrypted messages on Bluesky. TechCrunch speaks with the Germ founders to hear why they came up with the idea.

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Indian startup Jeh Aerospace has secured $11 million in a new funding round to help ease global supply chain bottlenecks.

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