Former senior SpaceX executive Tom Ochinero is teaming up with SpaceX alum-turned-VC, Achal Upadhyaya, and one of Sequoia’s top finance leaders, Spencer Hemphill, on a new venture called Interlagos Capital, TechCrunch has learned. There is little public information available about Interlagos, and the trio did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. The company was … Read more
Tesla has ended discounts on inventory across its electric vehicle lineup — even as sales for EVs have flagged — as part of a larger and vague plan by CEO Elon Musk to “streamline the whole Tesla sales and delivery system.” “It has become complex and inefficient,” Musk wrote in a post on X, the … Read more
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has pronounced the agency’s $11 billion, 15-year mission to collect and return samples from Mars… insufficient. But the strategy shift could be a huge boon to space startups, to which much of that planned funding will almost certainly be redirected. “The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, … Read more
Can generative AI designed for the enterprise (e.g. AI that autocompletes reports, spreadsheet formulas and so on) ever be interoperable? Along with a coterie of organizations including Cloudera and Intel, the Linux Foundation — the nonprofit organization that supports and maintains a growing number of open source efforts — aim to find out. The Linux … Read more
Climate investor Bay Bridge Ventures is raising a new $200 million fund, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Bay Bridge filed paperwork Monday for the new climate fund with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The raise comes at a time when venture investors are increasingly bullish on climate tech. Though the last few years have been … Read more
Betaworks is embracing the AI trend not with yet another LLM, but instead a clutch of agent-type models automating everyday tasks that nevertheless aren’t so simple to define. The investor’s latest “Camp” incubator trained up and funded 9 AI agent startups they hope will take on today’s more tedious tasks. The use cases for many … Read more
Cybersecurity has had a rough go of it lately, with investment in the sector dropping a precipitous 40% compared to the year prior. But there’s promising early — if preliminary — signs of a recovery. The vast majority of chief information security officers reported higher budgets for 2024, according to the cybersecurity-focused VC firm NightDragon. … Read more
Bay Area artist Danielle Baskin is not a first-time founder – but this is the first time she’s started a tech company that isn’t a performance art piece, or an elaborate joke. Still, she has a tongue-in-cheek tagline to pitch her latest venture: “It’s SaaS for witches.” She’s not kidding. Moonlight is a free online … Read more
Hotel chain giant Omni Hotels & Resorts has confirmed cybercriminals stole the personal information of its customers in an apparent ransomware attack last month. In an update on its website posted on Sunday, Omni said the stolen data includes customer names, email addresses, and postal addresses, as well as guest loyalty program information. The company … Read more
Spotify isn’t the only one to dabble with AI playlists — on Tuesday, Amazon announced it would do the same. Amazon Music is now testing Maestro, an AI playlist generator, allowing U.S. customers on both iOS and Android to create playlists using spoken or written prompts, which can even contain emojis. Amazon suggests that in … Read more