An ongoing Microsoft outage is preventing enterprise customers from accessing email inboxes, files, meetings, and other Microsoft cloud services. The technology giant said in a post on X around 2:30 p.m. ET that the outage was caused by a “portion of service infrastructure in North America that is not processing traffic as expected.” Microsoft didn’t provide specific details of the cause of the outage, but said it was “working to restore the infrastructure to a healthy state to achieve recovery.” Microsoft said on its status page that the outage affects its Exchange Online email service, searching files within SharePoint Online…

The creators of the open source project vLLM have announced that they transitioned the popular tool into a VC-backed startup, Inferact, raising $150 million in seed funding at an $800 million valuation. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, confirming TechCrunch’s earlier reporting that vLLM has raised capital from a16z. Inferact’s debut mirrors the recent commercialization of the SGLang project as RadixArk, which sources told us secured capital at a $400 million valuation led by Accel, as we reported on Wednesday. As the focus in AI shifts from training models to deploying them in applications, a…

There’s a feeling of schadenfreude in Silicon Valley when a unicorn stumbles. So when the WSJ broke the news Thursday afternoon that Capital One will acquire Brex for $5.15 billion in cash and stock (Capital One issued an official release confirming the details 30 minutes later), you could practically hear the collective snickering from Sand Hill Road to San Francisco’s South Park. That figure represents less than half of Brex’s last private-market valuation of $12.3 billion from its 2022 Series D-2 round. Before everyone sharpens their knives, consider that for the VCs who backed Brex at its outset, the sale…

Vimeo, the video-hosting platform, is laying off some of its global staff, according to a report from Business Insider. The move comes shortly after the company’s acquisition by the Italian tech conglomerate Bending Spoons, which purchased it in an all-cash deal last year for $1.38 billion. Bending Spoons confirmed the layoffs to BI but wouldn’t share how many people would lose their jobs. The Verge reports that the cutbacks will impact a “large portion” of the company’s total workforce, citing a LinkedIn post from Vimeo’s former VP of Global Brand and Creative, who stated that he, “along with a large…

Kais Khimji has spent most of his professional career as a venture investor, including six years as a partner at the prominent VC firm Sequoia Capital. But just like several other former Sequoia partners — including David Vélez, who founded the Brazilian digital bank Nubank — Khimji (pictured left) has always wanted to be a startup founder. On Thursday, he announced that he has revived an idea he began working on as a student at Harvard about 10 years ago, turning it into the AI calendar-scheduling company Blockit. In a major vote of confidence, Khimji’s former employer, Sequoia, led the…

Defense tech company Anduril on Thursday announced its plans to expand its Southern California presence with a major campus in Long Beach, the coastal town where founder Palmer Luckey grew up. The expanded campus will eventually support about 5,500 jobs. Luckey told TechCrunch that these will be new jobs, not transfers from other operations. Anduril’s headquarters is nearby, in Costa Mesa, California, and it also has a massive manufacturing facility in Ohio. The Long Beach campus will span 1.18 million square feet across six buildings, combining office space and industrial areas dedicated to R&D. It is expected to be ready…

OpenAI has reorganized some of its leadership and picked a familiar face to lead its push into selling AI to business customers as the company looks to catch up to its rivals in 2026. The company appointed Barret Zoph to lead its efforts to sell its AI to enterprises, according to reporting from The Information, citing an internal OpenAI memo. TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for confirmation and more information. Zoph returned to OpenAI last week after leaving Thinking Machine Labs, former OpenAI co-founder Mira Murati’s AI startup where Zoph had served as a co-founder and chief technology officer since…

General Motors is shuffling where its vehicles are made in a move that will shift production away from China and Mexico and to a U.S. factory in Kansas. That change will also mean the end of its rebooted Chevrolet Bolt EV, the only vehicle currently built at the Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas. The factory musical chairs reflect an economic and political environment, shaped by the Trump administration’s tariff policy and its decision to end the federal EV tax credit, which provided up to $7,500 off qualifying electric vehicles. These changes have made it more expensive to build vehicles in…

LiveKit, a developer of infrastructure software for real-time AI voice and video applications, has announced the raise of $100 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation. The round, which comes 10 months after LiveKit’s previous fundraise, was led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investors, including Altimeter Capital Management, Hanabi Capital, and Redpoint Ventures. LiveKit powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT voice mode. The startup’s other customers include xAI, Salesforce, Tesla, as well as 911 emergency service operators and mental health providers. The company was founded in 2021 by Russ d’Sa and David Zhao as an open source software project for…

It’s been nearly two years since Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted AI would replace knowledge work — the white-collar jobs held by lawyers, investment bankers, librarians, accountants, IT and others. But despite the huge progress made by foundation models, the change in knowledge work has been slow to arrive. Models have mastered in-depth research and agentic planning, but for whatever reason, most white-collar work has been relatively unaffected. It’s one of the biggest mysteries in AI — and thanks to new research from the training-data giant Mercor, we’re finally getting some answers. The new research looks at how leading AI…