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…

A group of YouTubers who are suing tech giants for scraping their videos without permission to train AI models has now added Snap to their list of defendants. The plaintiffs — internet content creators behind a trio of YouTube channels with roughly 6.2 million collective subscribers — allege that Snap has trained its AI systems on their video content for use in AI features like the app’s “Imagine Lens,” which allows users to edit images using text prompts. The plaintiffs earlier filed similar lawsuits against Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance over similar matters. In the newly filed proposed class action suit,…

The 2026 Game Developers Conference is shaping up to be a little less international this year if commentary on social media platforms like LinkedIn is an indicator. Many members of the international games industry have announced they will skip the event, mainly over concerns about safety, tougher U.S. immigration rules, and a stronger immigration and Customs Enforcement presence. Developers, past GDC attendees, and other industry professionals have taken to platforms like LinkedIn to publicly voice their concerns. ICE activity in numerous U.S. cities as well as the recent fatal shootings in Minneapolis involving ICE agents have compounded concerns. Renee Nicole Good…

Ricursive Intelligence, a startup building an AI system to design and automatically improve AI chips, has raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation. The company said Monday the round was led by Lightspeed. Ricursive says the system will be able to create its own silicon substrate layer and speed up AI chip improvements. Rinse and repeat to get to AGI, the founders say. The Series A comes just two months since the company formally launched with a seed investment led by Sequoia. It has raised $335 million total, reports The New York Times. Ricursive was founded by former Google…

People around the world now spend hours a day on their smartphones. On average, daily smartphone use exceeds three hours, and for many adults, total screen time climbs to six hours or more, according to research. This constant close-up screen exposure has been linked to a growing list of eye-health issues, including dry and irritated eyes, eye fatigue, blurred vision, headaches, and the worsening of nearsightedness, per reports. Edenlux, a South Korea–headquartered startup, has developed technology to address eye and ear health issues caused by screen-heavy digital lifestyles. The company’s mission is personal. Edenlux founder and CEO Sungyong Park knows…

As demand grows for privacy-first enterprise AI that can run without sending sensitive data to the cloud, SpotDraft has raised $8 million from Qualcomm Ventures in a strategic Series B extension to scale its on-device contract review tech for regulated legal workflows. The extension values SpotDraft at around $380 million, the startup told TechCrunch, nearly double its $190 million post-money valuation following its $56 million Series B in February of last year. Across regulated sectors, enterprises have moved quickly to test generative AI, but privacy, security, and data governance concerns continue to slow adoption for sensitive workflows — especially in…