Sam Altman-backed Exowatt wants to power AI data centers with billions of hot rocks

The solar-thermal startup wants to deliver electricity for as little as one cent per kWh. But first it has to scale production to 1 million units per year.

Teen founders raise $6M to reinvent pesticides using AI — and convince Paul Graham to join in

Bindwell applies AI drug discovery techniques to invent new pesticide molecules.

Harbinger raises $160M, will build trucks for FedEx

The Los Angeles-based startup will build more than 50 electric truck chassis for the delivery giant by the end of this year.

Coding assistant Cursor raises $2.3B 5 months after its previous round

Cursor plans to use the capital to continue developing Composer, the AI model the vibe-coding startup released in October.

What startups want from OpenAI 

Marc Manara, OpenAI’s head of startups, says the reality of AI has advanced far beyond ideas and experiments. AI-native companies are hitting $200 million in annual recurring revenue, and product cycles have shrunk from two-week sprints to single days. And OpenAI is helping. Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Russell Brandom sits down with Manara at… Continua a leggere What startups want from OpenAI 

AI data startup WisdomAI has raised another $50M, led by Kleiner, Nvidia 

WisdomAI is offering AI-driven data analytics that can answer business questions from structured, unstructured, and even “dirty” data, meaning data not cleaned of typos or errors.

Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs speeds up the world model race with Marble, its first commercial product

Marble is different from competitors like Odyssey, Decart, and Google’s Genie because it creates persistent, downloadable 3D environments rather than generating worlds on-the-fly as you explore.

Microsoft-backed Veir is bringing superconductors to data centers

The Massachusetts-based startup is taking tech developed for long distance transmissions lines to solve an emerging problem for data center designers.

Teradar raises $150M for a sensor it says beats lidar and radar

Teradar’s sensor uses the terahertz part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and combines the best traits of radar and lidar sensors without some of the drawbacks.

Self-driving trucks startup Einride plans to go public via a SPAC

The Swedish startup just raised $100 million from investors last month.