• ElevenLabs CEO says the voice AI startup crossed $330M ARR last year

    ElevenLabs, the AI voice-generation startup, crossed $330 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), CEO Mati Staniszewski said in an interview with Bloomberg. “Really, what this [growth in ARR] shows is that trajectory across the company. We started the company in 2022 and launched the first product in 2023. It took us 20 months to reach $100 million in ARR, 10 months to reach $200 million, and five months to reach the current number,” he said. Staniszewski mentioned that both Fortune 500 companies and startups are adopting its voice agent technology, which uses company data and knowledge bases to power customer…

  • Doctors think AI has a place in healthcare — but maybe not as a chatbot

    Dr. Sina Bari, a practicing surgeon and AI healthcare leader at data company iMerit, has seen firsthand how ChatGPT can lead patients astray with faulty medical advice. “I recently had a patient come in, and when I recommended a medication, they had a dialogue printed out from ChatGPT that said this medication has a 45% chance of pulmonary embolism,” Dr. Bari told TechCrunch.  When Dr. Bari investigated further, he found that the statistic was from a paper about the impact of that medication in a niche subgroup of people with tuberculosis, which didn’t apply to his patient.  And yet, when…

  • Man to plead guilty to hacking US Supreme Court filing system

    A resident of Springfield, Tennessee, is expected to plead guilty to hacking the U.S. Supreme Court’s electronic document filing system dozens of times over several months.  Prosecutors say between August and October 2023, Nicholas Moore, 24, “intentionally accessed a computer without authorization on 25 different days and thereby obtained information from a protected computer,” according to a court document.  As of this writing, there aren’t any more details about exactly what information Moore accessed, nor how it was accessed. Moore is scheduled to plead guilty in court by video link on Friday. When reached, a spokesperson for the U.S. District Court…

  • Ring founder details the camera company’s ‘intelligent assistant’ era

    What does it take to bring a burned-out founder back to the company he sold to Amazon? For Jamie Siminoff of the video doorbell maker Ring, it was the potential of AI — and the Palisades fires that destroyed his garage, the birthplace of Ring itself. Siminoff’s vision: turn Ring from a video doorbell company into an AI-powered “intelligent assistant” for the entire home and beyond. A handful of new features that advance that goal shipped just ahead of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, including fire alerts, alerts about “unusual events,” conversational AI, facial recognition features,…

  • Ammobia says it has reinvented a century-old technology

    Ammonia might be the world’s most underappreciated chemical. Without it, crops would go unfertilized and billions of people would starve. Humans started making ammonia in large amounts just over a century ago, and since then the process used to make it, known as Haber-Bosch, hasn’t changed much. A new startup, Ammobia, says that it has tweaked the Haber-Bosch process to lower the cost by up to 40%. To prove the technology works on a larger scale, Ammobia has raised a $7.5 million seed round, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Investors include Air Liquide’s venture arm ALIAD, Chevron Technology Ventures, Chiyoda…

  • New York governor clears path for robotaxis everywhere, with one notable exception

    New York Governor Kathy Hochul plans to introduce legislation that would effectively legalize robotaxis in the state — except for its most populous metropolis: New York City.  Hochul, who made the comments Tuesday during her State of the State address, said the legislation would advance the next phase of the state’s autonomous vehicle pilot program.  Details on the proposed legislation and when it might be released are thin. However, there are some hints contained within a document that outlines an array of proposals and promises Hochul made in her State of the State address.  Among them is language to expand…

  • Microsoft announces glut of new data centers but says it won’t let your electricity bill go up

    Although public backlash against data centers has been intense over the past 12 months, all of the tech industry’s biggest companies have promised additional buildouts of AI infrastructure in the coming year. That includes OpenAI partner Microsoft, which, on Tuesday, announced what it calls a “community-first” approach to AI Infrastructure. Microsoft’s announcement, which comes only a day after Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta would launch its own AI infrastructure program, isn’t unexpected. Last year, the company announced that it planned to spend billions to expand its AI capacity. What is a little unusual are the promises the company has now…

  • A consumer watchdog issued a warning about Google’s AI agent shopping protocol — Google says she’s wrong

    Shortly after Google announced its new Universal Commerce Protocol for AI-powered shopping agents, a consumer economics watchdog sounded the alarm. In a now viral post on X viewed nearly 400,000 times, Lindsay Owens on Sunday wrote, “Big/bad news for consumers. Google is out today with an announcement of how they plan to integrate shopping into their AI offerings including search and Gemini. The plan includes ‘personalized upselling.’ I.e. Analyzing your chat data and using it to overcharge you.” Owens is executive director of the consumer economics think tank Groundwork Collaborative. Her concern stems from looking at Google’s roadmap, as well…

  • Google’s update for Veo 3.1 lets users create vertical videos through reference images

    Google on Tuesday updated its Veo 3.1 AI video-generation model with the ability to create native vertical videos for social platforms using reference images. The changes will also make the videos generated from reference images more expressive and dynamic. When producing AI-generated videos for YouTube Shorts or other platforms like Instagram or TikTok, Veo users can now natively choose the 9:16 vertical format to avoid any cropping. Google is also adding the feature directly to the YouTube Shorts and the YouTube Create app. Google first released Veo 3.1 in October 2025 with improved audio output and more granular editing controls…

  • Neo humanoid maker 1X releases world model to help bots learn what they see

    1X, the robotics company behind the Neo humanoid robot, has unveiled a new AI model that it says understands the dynamics of the real world and can help bots learn new information on their own. This physics-based model, called 1X World Model, uses a combination of video and prompts to give Neo robots new abilities. The video allows Neo robots to learn new tasks they weren’t previously trained on, according to 1X. This release comes as 1X is gearing up to release its Neo humanoids into the home. The company opened up pre-orders for its humanoids in October with plans…