Obvious Ventures, the firm co-founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams, has raised a fifth fund, and this one, just like its predecessors, comes with a “fun” number: $360,360,360. “We invest in the frontiers of math and science and physics, and we like to celebrate math in our fund numbers as well,” James Joaquin (pictured far right), the firm’s co-founder and managing director, told TechCrunch. The firm’s first fund was $123,456,789, and the second was $191,919,191 (a palindromic number that reads the same forward and backwards). The third was $271,828,182 (which mathematicians and engineers instantly recognize as e, or Euler’s number), while…

Space is an increasingly crowded place thanks to the constant influx of new satellites and it’s only to get more cramped as the cost to get to orbit falls. Those dynamics have brought attention to startup Northwood Space, which has spent the last few years developing more modern and efficient ground-based communications infrastructure. The startup capitalized on that interest in two ways this week. The El Segundo, California-based company announced on Tuesday it has closed a $100 million Series B funding round, led by Washington D.C.-based firm Washington Harbour Partners (which has been on a run of space investments) and…

A new risk assessment has found that xAI’s chatbot Grok has inadequate identification of users under 18, weak safety guardrails, and frequently generates sexual, violent, and inappropriate material. In other words, Grok is not safe for kids or teens.  The damning report from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that provides age-based ratings and reviews of media and tech for families, comes as xAI faces criticism and an investigation into how Grok was used to create and spread nonconsensual explicit AI-generated images of women and children on the X platform.  “We assess a lot of AI chatbots at Common Sense Media,…

Electric bike company Rad Power Bikes has reached a deal to sell itself to a company called Life Electric Vehicles Holdings (or Life EV) for around $13.2 million, a little more than a month after entering the bankruptcy process. Florida-based Life EV bills itself as a “developer, manufacturer, and distributor in the light electric vehicle industry.” It offers a number of electric bikes for sale on its website, although most of them were labeled as “sold out” at the time this article was published. A filing to the bankruptcy docket over the weekend shows that five entities participated in an…

President Donald Trump said he would make countering immigration one of his flagship policies during his second term in the White House, promising an unprecedented number of deportations.  A year in, data shows that deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection have surpassed at least 350,000 people.  ICE has taken center stage in Trump’s mass removal campaign, raiding homes, workplaces, and public parks in search of undocumented people, prompting widespread protests and resistance from communities across the United States.  ICE uses several technologies to identify and surveil individuals. Homeland Security has also leveraged the shadow…