Apple’s design studio has lost nearly every Jony Ive-era designer. Incoming CEO John Ternus says he’ll fix it.
Apple’s design studio has lost nearly every Jony Ive-era designer. Incoming CEO John Ternus says he’ll fix it.

Apple’s industrial design studio, once the most influential product design operation in the technology industry, has been gutted. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the team no longer has a true seat at the executive table, has less influence and cre…

NASA’s new rover prototype drove 16 miles in a week, 10 times faster than anything it has on Mars
NASA’s new rover prototype drove 16 miles in a week, 10 times faster than anything it has on Mars

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has built a rover prototype that covered 16 miles in 37 hours of driving, making it roughly 10 times faster than any rover the agency currently operates on Mars. The four-wheeled machine, called ERNEST, reached speeds o…

17 fusion startups have now raised over $100M each, and the total keeps climbing
17 fusion startups have now raised over $100M each, and the total keeps climbing

The number of fusion startups that have raised more than $100 million has reached 17, according to a TechCrunch tally published Thursday, with total private investment in the sector now exceeding $13 billion. Two of the most recent rounds, Helion Energ…

The bet against bigger models: Aether AI lands $20mn for causal AI
The bet against bigger models: Aether AI lands $20mn for causal AI

Most of the AI industry is betting that bigger models mean smarter machines. A new startup is betting the opposite. Aether AI, based in San Diego, has raised a $20mn seed round to chase a different idea entirely. Its founder thinks the next leap will n…

A startup betting on a different material for AI’s optics problem just raised $80mn from the people who build the hardware
A startup betting on a different material for AI’s optics problem just raised $80mn from the people who build the hardware

AI’s next bottleneck is not the chips. It is the wiring between them. As clusters grow to hundreds of thousands of GPUs, the copper links that shuttle data between them are running out of road. So the industry is racing to move that traffic onto light …

France just put another €13bn into the funding model the rest of Europe wants to copy
France just put another €13bn into the funding model the rest of Europe wants to copy

France has found another €13bn for its tech sector. And it barely cost the state a thing. The money comes through Tibi, a programme that nudges French insurers and pension funds to back venture and growth funds instead of safer, lower-yield assets. The…

A startup says it cracked the maths bottleneck holding back AI. It finally has the receipts.
A startup says it cracked the maths bottleneck holding back AI. It finally has the receipts.

A Miami startup says it has cracked a maths problem that has made AI models slow and power-hungry for almost a decade. The claim was bold enough to draw comparisons with Theranos. Now, though, the company has independent test results that back much of …

GitHub for the factory floor: Copia raises $26M to protect the code that runs industry
GitHub for the factory floor: Copia raises $26M to protect the code that runs industry

Ask an industrial engineer how their plant would recover if a controller’s code got corrupted or encrypted, and the honest answer is often grim: a backup on someone’s laptop, in a folder named “final_backup_2”. Copia Automation wants to replace that wi…

Architect Labs raises $24M to let any company design its own AI chip
Architect Labs raises $24M to let any company design its own AI chip

Designing a chip is hard. It takes years, hundreds of millions of dollars, and a tiny pool of experts. Most of them sit inside a few large companies. Architect Labs wants to change that with AI. The Palo Alto startup left stealth on Thursday with a $24…

While Helsing and Anduril chase billion-dollar valuations, Comand AI raised €32M for the layer above them
While Helsing and Anduril chase billion-dollar valuations, Comand AI raised €32M for the layer above them

The defence-tech land grab has a new front, and it sits above the drones and sensors that get the headlines. Comand AI, a Paris startup building AI software for military command, has raised a €32mn Series A led by Blossom Capital, with a strategic inve…