Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes that sovereign AI — where countries and companies hang on to their own data used in AI models — will remake data centers everywhere. Venturebeat

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. TechCrunch

Newo.ai's groundbreaking service merges AI-driven agents with robotics, creating versatile 'digital employees' for modern workplaces. Venturebeat

House staging is a significant part of the real estate industry, and while Realtors have traditionally staged houses physically before posting a listing, TechCrunch

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger had a fireside chat with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about the future of AI. Venturebeat

Google has apologized (or come very close to apologizing) for another embarrassing AI blunder this week, an image-generating model that injected diversity TechCrunch

In a rocky funding market, VC firms like a16z Games and 1AM Gaming are teaming up with creators to stack the deck in their favor. Venturebeat

A court filing in the U.S. Department of Justice's case against Google over its alleged monopoly in the search market has revealed a few notable tidbits TechCrunch

Jasper will integrate the entire set of capabilities Clipdrop has on offer into its AI copilot, creating a much better experience for designing campaigns. Venturebeat

What was planned internally to be an exciting new chapter ended up being somewhat of a PR nightmare for Techstars.  TechCrunch

The company is further expanding the marketplace to include user ratings and more builder profile information — but no revenue sharing yet. Venturebeat

Well-known accelerator group Techstars announced a slew of changes to its operations this week, including the shuttering of some of its city-based programs.  Criticism from former members of its decisions lit social media channels who argued that the famed startup accelerator has lost focus on the very thing that historically made it so successful. TechCrunch

Allocations, an AI-powered alternative investing platform, just crossed $2 billion in assets as it transforms private capital fundraising with machine learning. Venturebeat

Intuitive Machines' spacecraft touched down yesterday on the lunar surface . . . sideways. CEO Steve Altemus confirmed during a press conference Friday TechCrunch

Today Salesforce announced the general availability of its Tableau Pulse technology, bringing the power of multiple forms of AI, including generative AI to help organizations get more business intelligence insights from their data. Venturebeat

As a part of a multi-part series, TechCrunch is highlighting women innovators — from academics to policymakers — in the field of AI. TechCrunch

Riot has renamed its upcoming League of Legends 2v2 team-based fighting game 2XKO, hinting at its esports ambitions ahead of its 2025 launch. Venturebeat

Irene Solaiman, profiled as part of TechCrunch's series on women in AI, builds and leads AI policy at startup Hugging Face. TechCrunch

Palworld has surpassed the 25 million-player mark on Steam and Xbox even as it apparently competes for attention with Helldivers 2. Venturebeat

Groover offers a platform for independent musicians to connect with music curators and be able to better promote themselves. TechCrunch

Salesforce says users from companies like SpotOn and Uber have used Slack AI to save about 97 minutes per week on an average. Venturebeat

Leveraging resources such as virtual data rooms and shared labs makes it easier for biotech startups to grow. This is good news. TechCrunch

Overworld announced that it's raised $10 million to develop its free-to-play, anime-inspired web3 action-RPG. Venturebeat

In this edition of Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch's weekly news roundup, we cover OpenAI's new Sora model, a credit score-based dating app, and more. TechCrunch

Mark Zuckerberg posts video takedown of Apple's Vision Pro. Venturebeat

Few categories are as ripe for automation-fueled disruption as construction. The industry is valued at around $2 trillion a year, in the U.S. alone. Much TechCrunch

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’re looking at a new finance-based dating app, Robinhood's earnings results and the TechCrunch

Amid the speculation that Xbox is planning for multiplatform game launches, let's check on PlayStation and see how it would benefit. Venturebeat

Eva Maydell, profiled as part of TechCrunch's series on women in AI, is a member of European Parliament and advisor on the EU AI Act. TechCrunch

Enterprises working with Rasa in the banking and financial sectors have built assistants to help their end-users with tasks like managing accounts, sending money, checking balances and replacing cards. Venturebeat

With Twilio under pressure from activist investors, it's looking at whether to sell Segment, the company it bought in 2020 for $3.2 billion. TechCrunch

Maximum Entertainment consolidated its labels into a unified brand and unveiled its robust game launch roadmap for 2024. Venturebeat

The company made advancements in its proprietary dairy seed system to leverage interactions between recombinant dairy casein and native plant proteins. TechCrunch

Vectara's platform takes a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach with its Boomerang vector embeddings to provide the most up-to-date information and reduce the risk of hallucination. Venturebeat

It's every parent's worst nightmare. Earlier this week, the 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, was found dead at UC Berkeley of an TechCrunch

Moonbeam Network is moving into Web3 gaming through a partnership with game studio Animo Industries. Venturebeat

TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter about the future of transportation. This week, read about Ford, Lucid, Waymo, and more. TechCrunch

My.Games said its Hawked extraction shooter has debuted today on early access on Steam on the PC, PlayStation 4 and 5 and Xbox Series X/S. Venturebeat

Over 150 investors, including Singapore's sovereign fund Temasek and Malaysia's Khazanah, gathered at Mumbai's five-star Trident Oberoi hotel on a recent In wide-ranging interviews, Lightspeed partners examine right-sizing VC funds in India, spectrum of startup investing and the country's prospects in the global AI race. TechCrunch

Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the gaming industry’s top leaders? Learn more about GamesBeat Summit sponsorship opportunities here.  MeetKai and National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) are launching their metaverse experience ahead of the NBA All-Star Weekend. Los Angeles-based MeetKai joined forces with Think450, an innovation partner for the NBPA, to […]…

Partech has closed its second Africa fund at €280 million ($300 million+), solidifying its position as the largest Africa-focused fund. TechCrunch

Stardust, a web3 gaming infrastructure and user acquisition service provider, has announced a seamless integration with Sui. Venturebeat

The European Union is formally investigating TikTok's compliance with the bloc's Digital Services Act (DSA), the Commission has announced. Areas the TechCrunch

All signs indicate that Apple is creating the grounds for a platform shift that will enable it to become a major player in on-device generative AI. Venturebeat

SoftBank Group's Masayoshi Son has made no secret of his intent to double down on red-hot artificial intelligence industry. Now, he's fundraising for his TechCrunch

Alembic uses pandemic-era contact tracing math to attribute marketing spend to sales outcomes and revolutionize ROI predictions. Venturebeat

Dili is a new, Y Combinator-backed startup that aims to automate different aspects of the due diligence process using AI. TechCrunch

Google unveils Gemini 1.5, a next-generation AI model with a million-token context window for dramatically improved long-form reasoning. Venturebeat

The journey of building a startup is an adventure filled with unexpected twists and turns, much like the construction of a dream home. TechCrunch

True Source is launching an AI-based large language model (LLM) based on Robert Jordan's renowned The Wheel of Time series. Venturebeat

MariaDB is the subject of a potential takeover bid, as the company confirmed it has received an offer from K1 Investment Management. TechCrunch

Feeding the widespread hunger for Nvidia GPU access is big business — minting new unicorns and even inspiring a new Craiglist for clusters. Venturebeat

Bret Taylor's new startup, Sierra, is building autonomous AI agents that can help customers resolve issues and complete tasks without human help. TechCrunch

HiOperator introduces QAScout, a cutting-edge AI quality assurance tool designed to revolutionize customer service by providing real-time, comprehensive interaction scoring, enhancing customer satisfaction and agent performance. Venturebeat

Antithesis, a new startup, is developing an automated platform for testing software in a reliable, ostensibly safe way. TechCrunch

Gabe Amatangelo gave a talk on lessons learned from leading Poland’s most famous game studio. Venturebeat

Instacart announced today that it's laying off around 250 employees, or roughly 7% of the company's global workforce. TechCrunch

Videos showing Sora's capabilities at replicating mundane but recognizable moments of human life are shockingly realistic. Venturebeat

Nearly 40% of active Airbnb listings no longer charge cleaning fees, the company said on Tuesday. TechCrunch

While Zocks has just come out of stealth, the CEO of the company says it has already seen significant traction with more than 150 companies joining its early adopter program. Venturebeat

Waymo is issuing its first-ever recall after two of its autonomous vehicles crashed into the same towed pickup truck in December. TechCrunch

Xbox revealed in a podcast today that it's planning to release only four games on other consoles, but exclusives are less important than before. Venturebeat

In November, Airbnb acquired a stealth AI firm launched by Siri's co-founder, called GamePlanner.AI. The deal valued the secretive startup at around $200 TechCrunch

During today's update on Xbox, the company's leaders announced that Diablo IV is coming to Game Pass on March 28. Venturebeat

With its first moon mission, Intuitive Machines is looking to succeed whether others have failed. TechCrunch

In the wake of 1,900 layoffs at Microsoft's game businesses and more layoffs across the industry, Phil Spencer offered his thoughts on the Xbox business update. Venturebeat

Foundry Group, an 18-year-old venture firm with nearly $3.5 B in assets, has quietly decided to shut down and not raise any more funds. TechCrunch

Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela posted two words on X in response to today's demo drop of OpenAI's Sora video AI model: 'game on.' Venturebeat

Andrej Karpathy, a widely respected research scientist, has quit OpenAI for the second time to focus on personal projects. TechCrunch

Currently, over 5,000 companies use LangChain's LLMOps platform every month, including known industry names such as Rakuten, Elastic, Moody’s and Retool. Venturebeat

Mark Zuckerberg tried Apple's Vision Pro headset and his verdict is that the Meta Quest 3 is a better product. TechCrunch

Google today launched an 'AI Cyber Defense Initiative and made several AI-related commitments, following a charge by Microsoft and OpenAI. Venturebeat

Roam will scale assembly of its Move buses launched last year, months after the company set-up a new and larger motorcycle assembly plant. TechCrunch

Shortly after the Call of Duty League's teams filed a lawsuit seeking $680M, Activision Blizzard denied the allegations. Venturebeat

Germany-based Earlybird Health announced the final closing of its second fund of €173 million (around $185 million). This is more than twice the size of Earlybird's first healthcare-focused fund. TechCrunch

Baldur's Gate 3 took Game of the Year at the prestigious Dice Awards, the academy-voted game event in Las Vegas today. Venturebeat

The London-based wellness brand uses functional mushrooms and nootropics to create a line of powder blends that it touts enhances energy and relaxation. TechCrunch

Google is launching a new Gemini app for Android smartphones and mobile devices, while Apple iOS users can find it in the existing Google app. Venturebeat

KTrust, a Tel Aviv–based security startup, is taking a different approach to Kubernetes security from many of its competitors in the space. Instead of TechCrunch

Lightforge Games announced the development of Project O.R.C.S., an online role-playing game with collaborative storytelling. Venturebeat

Bold provides low-cost payment terminals, called dataphones, that enable small and medium businesses to accept link payments. TechCrunch

Rize’s AI coach helps users work smarter and healthier by using machine learning to analyze and improve their work patterns. Venturebeat

After raising massive funding rounds, Alan, a French startup that exemplifies the French tech ecosystem, says profitability is in sight. TechCrunch

Brilliant Labs, the developer of AI glasses, has launched Frame, the world's first glasses featuring an integrated multimodal AI assistant. Venturebeat

TikTok will launch localized election resources in its app to reach users in each of the European Union's 27 Member States next month and direct them TikTok will launch localized election resources in its app to reach users in each of the European Union's 27 Member States next month and direct them towards “trusted information”,…

Supervillain Labs has received an investment from Aptos Labs and it has also partnered with Aptos to launch new Web3 games. Venturebeat

Before the world became fixated on artificial intelligence, thanks to generative AI's advances, cryptocurrency was the darling of many investors. So when TechCrunch

Monty Python humor meets Medieval manuscripts in turn-based strategy game Inkulinati, launching on PC and consoles on February 22, 2024. Venturebeat

Native iOS design app Play has launched new features for its app to let developers share prototypes of their apps easily through App Clips. TechCrunch

Dubai wants to be the center for games and esports. We checked it out and interviewed an economic development adviser about it. Venturebeat

The breach notification letters land a year after TechCrunch reported a huge spill of unclassified emails from a U.S. government cloud. TechCrunch

The Biden Administration announced the creation of the US AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC) with over 200 leading firms on board. Venturebeat

Slack is embedding generative AI deeper into the platform with new channel summarization and AI-fueled search. TechCrunch

Ginger Joy, the web3 spinoff of Matchingham Games, has raised £1M ($1.26M) to fund its interoperable mobile-native web3 gaming ecosystem. Venturebeat

Grammarly is laying off 230 employees as part of a “business restructuring,” the company announced this week. TechCrunch

While the AI copilot will hit GA in Q2, Acceldata says that some of its largest customers are already using it in preview to streamline data observability. Venturebeat

Multiple shocks to global supply chains brought about first by the pandemic and more recently by Iran-backed Houthis targeting cargo ships in the Red Sea TechCrunch

Grand Theft Auto V has passed 195M copies sold per Take Two's Q4 2023 earnings. Acticipation for GTA VI has sparked renewed interest. Venturebeat

20PRODUCT includes a group of eight people who come from companies like Shopify, Nubank, Spotify, Snap, LinkedIn, Ramp, Match and Xiaomi. TechCrunch

Take-Two reported results for the third fiscal quarter ended December 31 that fell short as mobile ads and NBA 2K24 revenues were off. Venturebeat

Samsung this morning announced that the Galaxy Watch line has received FDA approval for sleep apnea detection. The move is a big one for the smartwatch TechCrunch

Ubisoft says it had a solid financial quarter, beating its targets thanks to Assassin's Creed Mirage and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Venturebeat

Xyte's pitch deck has a lot of slides, but how much of it was actually useful? Let's take a look. TechCrunch

AR/T House announced the inaugural use of its AI-powered Smart Avatar technology, which engage users as well as provide information. Venturebeat

2023 was the year social networks realized that they were sitting on massive troves of data. And some companies, such as Twitter (now X) and Reddit, TechCrunch

CodeSignal Learn is a new platform that offers practice-based, mastery-oriented learning experiences for tech skills, powered by CodeSignal’s skill assessment engine. Venturebeat

It's clear that this year will be a turning point for DEI. TechCrunch

Left Fielder Media (LFM) has unveiled Member 16, a new sci-fi Web3 entertainment project that includes diverse storytelling. Venturebeat

Meta doesn't want its new app Threads to become another Twitter, full of heated political debates and the resulting toxicity that entails. In an TechCrunch

Stoke Games has raised $5.5 million in funding to pioneer a strategic shooter game. Venturebeat

Internal documents viewed by TechCrunch show a series of problems with the Fisker Ocean SUV including sudden power loss and brake problems. TechCrunch

The move allows Vercel users to integrate Perplexity LLMs into the applications they plan to develop on the platform. Venturebeat

Over the years, AR & VR has failed to take hold in business at scale. Apple hopes to change that with the Apple Vision Pro. TechCrunch

Global investment firm Carlyle and CVC have agreed to sell Runescape maker Jagex to CVC Capital Partners Fund VIII and Haveli Investments. Venturebeat

Broadcasting company Sinclair sold off its free, ad-supported streaming TV service, STIRR to startup Thinking Media. TechCrunch

Gaming veteran Chris Heatherly has raised $3 million for his new casual game studio Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. Venturebeat

Papaya Global bought a Super Bowl ad slot with the hope of the commercial driving brand recognition for the software company. TechCrunch

Skybound, the multi-platform entertainment company behind mega hit franchises like The Walking Dead, has hired an acquisitions specialist. Venturebeat

We’ve finally had our mittens on Apple’s face-wearable computer. And, what can we say, it’s pretty astonishing. TechCrunch

Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the gaming industry’s top leaders? Learn more about GamesBeat Summit sponsorship opportunities here.  When Disney shut down its metaverse division on March 28, 2023, the end of the 50-person division was interpreted as doom for the metaverse, the over-hyped universe of virtual worlds that are […]…

Twitter/X alternative Bluesky is gearing up for one of the biggest weekends in social media with the launch of custom feeds prepped for Super Bowl fans. TechCrunch

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's efforts to boost AI chip capacity would require an 'astronomical' quantity of water and rare earth minerals. Venturebeat

Oregon may soon become the latest state to pass right-to-repair legislation. Last month, Google lent its support in an open letter, calling Senate Bill TechCrunch

Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the gaming industry’s top leaders? Learn more about GamesBeat Summit sponsorship opportunities here.  A jury has awarded Skillz a $42.9 million judgment in its patent infringement lawsuit against rival AviaGames. The jury found that Skillz provided a preponderance of evidence that AviaGames willfully infringed one […]…

A casino app's database containing customers' personal data was left on the internet without a password, until a security researcher found it. TechCrunch

Gamefam announced its Super Bowl LVIII event it built in partnership with the NFL last week. Here's how the game works within Roblox. Venturebeat

Every company or organization putting out an AI model has to make a decision on what, if any, boundaries to set on what it will and won't discuss. Goody-2 TechCrunch

The class-action copyright case filed by artists against companies providing AI art generators and their underlying models takes a new turn. Venturebeat

In March 2008, a roboticist in winter wear gave Big Dog a big kick for the camera. The buzzing DARPA-funded robot stumbled, but quickly regained its TechCrunch

Xbox might be making a big announcement about its future business next week. Rachel Kaser speculates on what that could be. Venturebeat

With its massive new partnership with Disney, the stars are aligning for Epic Games' grand Fortnite plans. TechCrunch

Given Altman's impressions, it makes a lot of sense that OpenAI already shipped a visionOS version of the ChatGPT app last week. Venturebeat

Notion announced that it has acquired Skiff, a platform that offers end-to-end encrypted file storage, docs, calendar events, and email.  TechCrunch