Author name: Julie Bort

Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately

Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately

Artificial Intelligence /

It’s hard to find programmers these days who aren’t using AI coding assistants in some capacity, especially to write the repetitive, mundane bits. But those who refused to try the tools when Coinbase bought enterprise licenses for GitHub Copilot and Cursor got promptly fired, CEO Brian Armstrong said this week on John Collison’s podcast “Cheeky

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AI crawler Firecrawl raises $14.5M, is still looking to hire agents as employees

AI crawler Firecrawl raises $14.5M, is still looking to hire agents as employees

Artificial Intelligence, Startups /

Firecrawl’s co-founder and CEO Caleb Peffer knew the exact moment he found the investor to lead his Series A.  He was in a coffee meeting with Nexus Venture Partner’s Abhishek Sharma at the Blue Bottle in San Francisco’s South Park (a favorite VC haunt). While describing the future of the company, he was gesturing so

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Perplexity offers to buy Chrome for billions more than it’s raised

Perplexity offers to buy Chrome for billions more than it’s raised

Artificial Intelligence, Startups /

In a moonshot move, AI search engine Perplexity has offered to buy Chrome from Google for $34.5 billion cash in an unsolicited offer, Reuters reported, and Perplexity has confirmed to TechCrunch. Perplexity tells TC the terms of the offer include a commitment to keep Chrome’s underlying engine, Chromium, open source and continue to invest in

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Cohere hits a $6.8B valuation as investors AMD, Nvidia, and Salesforce double down

Cohere hits a $6.8B valuation as investors AMD, Nvidia, and Salesforce double down

Artificial Intelligence, Startups /

Cohere on Thursday announced that it had raised an oversubscribed $500 million round, bringing its valuation to $6.8 billion. This is up from the $5.5 billion valuation it landed a little over a year ago when it raised its previous round, also $500 million. Toronto-headquartered Cohere was one of the first breakout LLM model makers

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Buzzy AI startup Multiverse creates two of the smallest high-performing models ever

Buzzy AI startup Multiverse creates two of the smallest high-performing models ever

Artificial Intelligence /

One of Europe’s most prominent AI startups has released two AI models that are so tiny, they have named them after a chicken’s brain and a fly’s brain. Multiverse Computing claims these are the world’s smallest models that are still high-performing and can handle chat, speech, and even reasoning in one case.  These new tiny

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Sam Altman, OpenAI will reportedly back a startup that takes on Musk’s Neuralink

Sam Altman, OpenAI will reportedly back a startup that takes on Musk’s Neuralink

Artificial Intelligence, Startups /

Image Credits:Darrell Etherington with files from Getty under license 5:30 PM PDT · August 12, 2025 Sam Altman is in the process of co-founding a new brain-to-computer interface startup called Merge Labs and raising funds for it with the capital possibly coming largely from OpenAI’s ventures team, unnamed sources told the Financial Times.  The startup

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