​Bradley Tusk, co-founder and managing partner at Tusk Venture Partners, told TechCrunch in today’s episode of Equity that VC as we know it is dead. And it has been for the last four years.  “Maybe there’s some VC that I’ve never heard of that’s awash with liquidity the last couple of years, but we haven’t […]  

​Digital banking startup Mercury has raised $300 million in primary and secondary funding at a $3.5 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday. The valuation is more than double the startup’s valuation when it last raised capital — a $120 million Series B round in 2021 that valued the company at $1.62 […]  

​YouTube is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts to give creators a deeper understanding of how their short-form content is performing, the company announced on Wednesday. Shorts views will now count the number of times a creator’s Short starts to play or replay. In the past, a view had been counted after a […]  

​Since the integration of Google Assistant for Waze on iOS in 2020, iPhone users have faced ongoing issues that the company has struggled to resolve for “over a year,” Waze wrote in a post, apologizing for the “prolonged inconvenience.”  On Wednesday, the navigation app officially discontinued the feature. Many users had previously reported on Reddit […]  

​Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the advent of large language models and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+ along with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to broaden its scope and invest more in AI startups. In a blog post Amazon shared with TechCrunch […]  

​It’s getting easier to build new applications on ATProto, the protocol that powers Bluesky’s social network and a growing number of other apps. At ATmosphere, the ATProto community conference held over the weekend in Seattle, Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee offered attendees a glimpse of what’s ahead for the protocol’s development and how those will help […]  

​Audio startup Krisp on Wednesday said it is launching a new feature that uses AI to change a user’s accent during calls. The company is initially rolling out support for changing Indian English accents to U.S. English. The startup says the accent conversion process preserves the speaker’s voice and only switches phonemes to match American […]