Companies and governments are looking for tools to run AI locally in a a bid slash cloud infrastructure costs and build sovereign capability. Quadric, a chip-IP startup founded by veterans of early bitcoin mining firm 21E6, is trying to power that shift, scaling beyond automotive into laptops and industrial devices, with its on-device inference technology. That expansion is already paying off. Quadric posted $15 million to $20 million in licensing revenue in 2025, up from around $4 million in 2024, CEO Veerbhan Kheterpal (pictured above, center) told TechCrunch in an interview. The company, which is based in San Francisco and…

Tiger Global and Microsoft are primed to fully exit PhonePe, the Walmart-backed Indian payments startup which has updated its IPO filing, offering investors and market watchers a rare peek at how global investors are cashing out of the venture boom via India’s public markets. On Wednesday, PhonePe updated its IPO prospectus (PDF), detailing how many shares are up for sale. Tiger Global and Microsoft are offering up their full stakes in the company, while Walmart is choosing to retain its majority stake, and selling up to 45.9 million shares (about 9% of the company). Up to 50.66 million shares are…

For a new generation, 2016 is now known as “the last good year.“ Since the new year, Instagram has been taken over by a 2016-themed “add yours” sticker, which prompts users to post throwback photos from 2016. Users have posted more than 5.2 million responses, creating enough buzz to spill over onto other platforms. On Spotify, user-generated “2016” playlists have increased 790% since the new year, and the company now boasts in its Instagram bio that it’s “romanticizing 2016 again.” In fairness, 2016 does seem like a simpler time. Donald Trump had not yet served a day in the White…

VCs who have backed OpenEvidence are apparently not worried about new health information products from OpenAI and Anthropic.  On Wednesday, the startup announced that it raised an additional $250 million in Series D funding at a $12 billion valuation, co-led by Thrive Capital and DST.   That’s double the valuation from its last raise in October: $200 million at $6 billion, led by GV. It has now raised a total of $700 million, the company says, from backers including Sequoia, Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, Blackstone, Bond, Craft Ventures, Mayo Clinic, and others.  OpenEvidence is an AI-powered medical information platform, similar to what…

AI detection startup GPTZero scanned all 4,841 papers accepted by the prestigious Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), which took place last month in San Diego. The company found 100 hallucinated citations across 51 papers that it confirmed as fake, the company tells TechCrunch.  Having a paper accepted by NeurIPS is a résumé-worthy achievement in the world of AI. Given that these are the leading minds of AI research, one might assume they would use LLMs for the catastrophically boring task of writing citations. So caveats abound with this finding: 100 confirmed hallucinated citations across 51 papers is not…