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Look, I know this is our weekly startup newsletter, and as the most valuable company in the world, Apple is sort of “not a startup,” but judging by the site’s traffic, you’re all such rabid fans that it seems rude to skip a quick recap: Apple held a compact 40-minute event this week where it showed off the recent iPad Air, recent iPad Pro (with fancy recent stacked display technology), recent Magic Keyboard, recent Pencil Pro, all-new M4 chips, and much more. Oh, and they finally “admitted” that iPads are more like diminutive laptops than huge iPhones, so the company moved the camera to the horizontal edge – where, honestly, it should have been all along.
Oh! I also have some fun personal news: I’m joining the TechCrunch Equity Podcast as a co-host with the incredibly wonderful (and wonderfully powerful) Mary Ann Azevedo. You know, in case you want my crazy humor to reach your ears in addition to your eye sockets.
The most engaging startup stories of the week
Buckle up and go on a wild ride as we delve into the history of Newchip, the accelerator that gave startups a golden ticket to success but instead took them straight to bankruptcy court. Lacey Hunter thought she was hitting the jackpot with her AI humanitarian startup TechAid when she joined Newchip. Spoiler alert: she didn’t. Instead of accelerating to glory, Newchip filed for bankruptcy and auctioned off warrants from over 1,000 startups in a capital sale. And impoverished Hunter? She had no choice but to lock TechAid in this balmy mess.
In a piercing turn of events, Microsoft has just hit CTRL+Z on US police departments using Azure OpenAI for facial recognition. This update to the Regulations was as subtle as a rhinoceros in a china shop. In compact: if you have a badge, a driving mustache and a pair of mirror aviators, then yes no AI face games for you!
- Rabbit R1 isn’t supposed to be good (yet): Rabbit r1 is an AI gadget that apparently came out of the oven faster than a batch of undercooked cookies. Packed with more quirks than app integration, this little carrot chewer makes you wonder if it could have just been another app on your phone. But that’s the point for now, argues Devin.
- I have 99 problems, but technique is not one of them: Rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake have taken their feud to a recent level – or should we say, depth? It’s all fun and games until Tupac gets deeply spoofed in your track.
- On his bike: On today’s episode of “How to Beat a $50 Billion Company,” Peloton, once the shining star of home fitness, continues on its sorrowful treadmill of misfortune. They are laying off 15% of the workforce (about 400 people for those allergic to percentages), proving that math is indeed a cruel mistress.
Trouble in the transport trenches
Fisker Inc., Henrik Fisker’s electric vehicle startup, is having a midlife crisis. After releasing two prototypes – Pear and Alaska – last August, he allegedly charged the engineering firm that helped develop them. Bertrandt AG filed a $13 million lawsuit alleging that Fisker withheld payments and kept its intellectual property like a jilted lover refusing to return his favorite sweatshirt. It appears this isn’t a one-off: It’s more like an episode of Judge Judy, with over 30 lawsuits involving lemon law violations, unpaid wage claims from former employees, and vendors suing for overdue bills. Although Fisker’s vice president of communications insists that Bertrandt’s lawsuit is “baseless,” this set of legal problems suggests that the company may have more cracks than Humpty Dumpty after the unfortunate wall incident.
- Tesla’s flirtation with lidar: Oh, delicious irony! Elon Musk once called lidar sensors the “mainstay” of autonomous cars, but Tesla is currently Luminar’s main customer. The company exploited this supposedly redundant technology so much that it accounted for over 10% of Luminar’s revenue in the first quarter of 2024. That’s $2 million worth of bullets! However, Luminar itself is struggling and has just laid off 20% of its staff.
- Rivian on the ropes: I thought my financial skills were questionable, but despite earning a staggering $1.2 billion in revenue in the first quarter, they still managed to lose $1.45 billion! It looks like their cost-cutting measures need a little more effort before they can even dream of profitability.
- Hyundai breaks the piggy bank: Meanwhile, Hyundai, in an effort to save us from the fear of our driving skills, spent almost a billion dollars on Motional. This “generous” investment will give Hyundai a majority stake and enable the development of this autonomous vehicle startup (pun intended). It’s like a Cinderella story, but instead of a pumpkin turning into a carriage, your cash turns into autonomous vehicles.
The most engaging collections this week
Iconiq Capital, the private office that has looked after Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey’s cash piles since 2011, just raised a whopping $5 billion from two funds for its seventh flagship fund. This sizeable fundraising puts them in the spotlight while other massive players like Tiger Global stumbled, raising just $2.2 billion (the lowest since 2014, after facing criticism for moving too quickly expenditure of funds).
- The cloud makes it rain: Alternate Clouds are the chilly recent kids on the block, people! CoreWeave just raised a whopping $1.1 billion and is now valued at $19 billion. Why? Because GPUs (those high-priced tech powerhouses) are popular hardware for training AI models, but not everyone has deep enough pockets to buy their own.
- Let’s take a look inside: Remember when Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, boldly declared that radiologists would be obsolete in five years thanks to artificial intelligence? Yes… about that. It turns out that we haven’t achieved this goal yet (shock!). Now, perhaps realizing that robots aren’t quite ready to play doctor, Khosla is investing $50 million in Rad AI, a startup that aims to make radiologists’ lives easier without having to replace them (yet) with machines.
- Evaluate the roof: Itai Ben-Zaken is living proof that stumbling in a startup is just the cha-cha dance of entrepreneurship: He’s back with Honeycomb Insurance, using artificial intelligence to turn aerial photos of roofs into property inspections for owners, winning $36 million for Series B companies
Other stories you can’t miss on TechCrunch…
Every week there are always a few stories I want to share with you that somehow don’t fit into the above categories. It would be a shame to miss them, so here’s a random bag of goodies:
- All deepfakes, all the time: While we’re used to seeing Katy Perry dressed like an enchanted chia animal, she wasn’t there at all this year – but you wouldn’t know it from the 10 million views her counterfeit photo in a mossy dress received on social media.
- Newer saw the sun shining so brightly: Looks like Jack Dorsey scared Bluesky away faster than a Tinder date who just discovered you have a tarantula. Mr. “I’m too chilly for social media platforms” accidentally dropped in a conversation on X that he had left the board of his pet project, Bluesky. He didn’t even bother to give a reason or tweet some cryptic haiku about change and evolution – he just replied with a plain elderly “no” when asked if he was still on the board.
- The recent Apple ad is disgusting: Apple’s latest ad has won our hearts by literally squishing a pile of innovative tools and analog items into the shape of an iPad. Oh, we get it, Apple! You say that this skinny (who asked for it?) recent iPad could replace all of this, but your vision of a future without physical instruments and paper books seems quite dystopian and we don’t like it.
- A tail with a joyful ending: In the latest episode of “Actually a Whale,” scientists eavesdrop on sperm whales with a little facilitate from machine learning. Turns out these mammoth chatting mammals exploit their own secret language! A series of clicks (called “codes,” if you’re so inclined) make the whales create words and sentences we’ve never understood before. What a chilly flutter.
- LMGTFY: Stack Overflow decided to play with OpenAI. After initially launching ChatGPT due to fear of spammy replies, they changed their mind (or code?). Now they’re teaming up to improve AI’s responses to programming tasks.
