March 18, 2025

Anthropic-backed AI-powered code review platform Graphite raises cash | TechCrunch

AI coding assistants are becoming wildly popular, with the vast majority of respondents in GitHub’s latest poll saying that they’ve adopted AI tools in some form. Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman recently claimed that a quarter of YC’s W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI. Sensing an opportunity, VCs are rushing to back startups developing AI-powered assistive programming tools. One of these startups, Graphite, on Tuesday announced that it raised $52 million in a Series

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Arcade raises $12M from Perplexity co-founder’s new fund to make AI agents less awful | TechCrunch

Arcade, an AI agent infrastructure startup founded by former Okta exec Alex Salazar and former Redis engineer Sam Partee, has raised $12 million from Laude Ventures. Laude is the new fund launched in 2024 by Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski, the UC Berkeley computer scientist who also co-founded Databricks. This isn’t the only check Laude has cut. But it is the first publicly announced one, Laude co-founder and general partner Pete Sonsini told TechCrunch. Sonsini is well-known for his

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Hardware

NVIDIA Unveils Blackwell Ultra GB300 Amped With 288GB Of HBM3e

NVIDIA’s Blackwell GB200 is an absolutely monstrous processor with up to 10 petaflops of dense FP4 tensor compute and 192GB of lightning-fast HBM3e memory delivering 8 TB/second of bandwidth per GPU. That number, though, that 192GB, is still limiting for hyperscalers building the latest, greatest AI models. For those companies that need ever greater memory specs, NVIDIA has just revealed the Blackwell Ultra GB300 GPU. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced Blackwell Ultra today on stage

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Robotics

Locus Array automates induction, storage for ‘zero touch’ fulfillment – The Robot Report

Array uses a LocusBot designed to pick from and to bins from warehouse shelving. Source: Locus Robotics CHICAGO — Locus Robotics is known for its goods-to-person automation, in which mobile robots assist human pickers. At ProMat yesterday, the company gave a sneak peek of Locus Array, a system using artificial intelligence and robots for high-density storage and throughput. “We’ve been working on this for the past several years,” said Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics.

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Robotics

Dexterity launches Mech dual-armed mobile manipulator for truck loading – The Robot Report

Mech can lift up to 130 lbs (around 59 kg) – 65 lbs (29 kg) per arm – and place boxes as high as 8 feet (2.4 m) in the air. | Source: Dexterity Dexterity Inc. Monday announced the launch of Mech, an industrial mobile manipulator. Made up of two arms mounted on a rover, Mech can navigate to workstations across warehouses or industrial sites and perform stressful, repetitive tasks. Redwood City, Calif.-based Dexterity engineered

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Vote for the speaker you want to see at Sessions: AI | TechCrunch

It’s time to make your voice heard. After receiving an overwhelming amount of applications for speakers at TechCrunch Sessions: AI, we have chosen six incredible finalists. TC Sessions: AI takes place on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley — and you have the power to decide who you want to take the stage to share their wisdom with 1,200 AI leaders and enthusiasts. Audience Choice voting lasts until March 21 at 11:59 p.m.

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Robotics

Anyware Robotics picks up $12M seed funding to automate container unloading – The Robot Report

The Pixmo mobile manipulator from Anyware Robotics uses a vacuum gripper and vision guidance to acquire boxes from the container. | Source: Anyware Robotics Anyware Robotics last week announced it has secured $12 million in seed funding. The funding fuels the expansion of Pixmo, the company’s multi-purpose mobile robot that automates container and truck unloading operations. Pixmo combines an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) base, a collaborative robot (cobot) arm, an array of 3D perception sensors,

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Exist is a new social wellness app that wants to help middle-age users find community | TechCrunch

A new iOS social wellness app called Exist wants to help middle-aged consumers connect and build meaningful communities with one another as they navigate their lives and the stresses that come with it. The app describes itself as the edgier cousin of Calm or Headspace, and its main feature is social journaling. The idea behind the app’s social and community-driven journaling is to help people heal together, rather than alone. Exist also features a daily

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Are Self-Driving Cars Closer Than We Think? Discover How Synthetic Data Is Paving the Way

4 min read Eliza Strickland is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum covering AI and biomedical engineering. Video synthesized by Helm.ai can be adjusted to train self-driving cars on different driving conditions. Self-driving cars were supposed to be in our garages by now, according to the optimistic predictions of just a few years ago. But we may be nearing a few tipping points, with robotaxi adoption going up and consumers getting accustomed to more and

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