TechCrunch Startup News

As AI companies race to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) and apps built on top of them, a startup that has emerged as a key partner in that effort is announcing a significant round of funding. Turing, which works with armies of engineers to contribute code to AI projects

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CoreWeave’s initial S-1 document for its upcoming IPO is full of surprises. Backed by Nvidia, CoreWeave runs an AI-specific cloud service from its network of 32 data centers that together have more than 250,000 Nvidia GPUs as of the end of 2024, according to the company.

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A U.K. startup, originating from founder Jacob Nathan’s high school science project on using enzymes to break down plastic waste, has secured an oversubscribed $18.3 million in Series A funding. Founded in 2019 in London, Epoch Biodesign now a 30+ strong multidisciplinary team of chemists, biologists and software engineers.

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The drive to decarbonize our economies through electrification and clean energy continues to generate momentum around battery technologies, as storage has a key role to play in enabling the green transition. While renewables are clean sources of energy compared to burning fossil fuels, their power output isn’t always consistent.

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Sequoia-backed Mach Industries, the defense tech founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, landed a contract with the U.S. Army and has plans for its first factory, Thornton told TechCrunch. The factory will be 115,000 square feet in Huntington Beach, California, where Mach’s headquarters is located, CEO Thorton said.

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With just a few words, AI models can be prompted to create a story, an image, or even a short film. But according to Weber Wong, these models are all “made by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative.” In other words, they’re not built for actual creative professionals.

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The software supply chain is notoriously porous: a reported 81% of codebases contain high- or critical-risk open source vulnerabilities. A single vulnerability can have a far-reaching impact on the wider software supply chain, as evidenced by the likes of the Log4Shell exploit that saw millions of applications exposed to potential remote code execution hacks

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Fintech has fragmented into increasingly specialized, cucumber-sliced micro-services, ranging from embedded buy-now-pay-later loans to specialized neo banks to yet more payment processing systems. What opportunities remain for innovators in such a fragmented landscape? One U.K. startup, Just Move In, zoomed out and realised that the home had been overlooked by everyone in the industry.

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AI has the power to transform how people work, but getting tangible value out of AI isn’t as easy as throwing any AI application at any workflow. It can be hard for enterprises to figure out which AI applications help their business and which are just hype. Workhelix wants to solve that problem.

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Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a “DLM” for short.

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