Charles Rollet

Factories are all the rage in defense tech: Anduril announced a billion-dollar “megafactory” in Ohio earlier this year, while Saronic said last month it’s planning its own factory to mass-produce autonomous warships. Now, Anduril is considering building a factory in the U.K. as it expands beyond U.S. defense contracts. “If we get enough orders, absolutely we are planning to open a facility in the UK,” Rich Drake, Anduril’s general manager for U.K. and Europe, told

A senior research scientist at DeepMind who worked on robotics and AI has left Google to create his own robotics startup, called Generalist AI, and has already obtained investment from Nvidia, TechCrunch has learned. Pete Florence was listed as co-founder and CEO of Generalist AI at a panel at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose yesterday. The panel was for portfolio companies of Nvidia’s VC arm, NVentures. NVentures has become an especially active venture capital

Maju Kuruvilla, who left the CEO role of controversial one-click checkout startup Bolt last year, is back. He’s launching his own startup, focused on a different problem for online shoppers: what he calls “check-in.” When you click on an ad for something like a T-shirt, the experience afterward can feel a little clunky. The website you land on might not even have the product you clicked on to begin with. That causes many shoppers to

Creating a startup that competes with your former employer can be risky. Apple, for example, once sued a former chip design executive who founded his own chip startup in a case that was dropped in 2023. A recent case involving logistics unicorn Flexport and a new competitor formed by two former employees sheds light on those risks. Flexport is suing the pair alleging that they stole thousands of its documents along with its source code to create their

After Employer.com acquired bankrupt accounting startup Bench in a fire-sale late last year, CEO Jesse Tinsley pledged on LinkedIn and elsewhere to honor past customer payments. “We’re honoring all prepaid Bench services even though we will not have the revenue from that directly ourselves,” Tinsley said in an interview with founder and investor Julian Weisser. But some Bench customers say they’re being charged to get books or tax returns they previously paid for. A lawsuit

Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei is worried that spies, likely from China, are getting their hands on costly “algorithmic secrets” from the U.S.’s top AI companies — and he wants the U.S. government to step in. Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations event on Monday, Amodei said that China is known for its “large-scale industrial espionage” and that AI companies like Anthropic are almost certainly being targeted. “Many of these algorithmic secrets, there are $100

Discord — the chat app with over 200 million monthly users — is in early-stage talks to IPO, The New York Times reports. Discord’s discussions with investment bankers are still exploratory and plans could change, per the NYT’s sources. Discord understands there is a lot of interest about its plans, but does not comment on rumors or speculation, a spokesperson told TechCrunch.  This isn’t the first time Discord has mulled over an IPO.  The San

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is investigating the data-labeling startup Scale AI for compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act, TechCrunch has learned. That’s a federal law that regulates unpaid wages, misclassification of employees as contractors, and illegal retaliation against workers. The investigation has been active since at least August 2024, a document seen by TechCrunch shows. And it’s ongoing, according to a person directly familiar with the matter.  The mere existence of an

Shield AI, the San Diego defense tech startup that builds drones and other AI-powered military systems, has raised a $240 million round at a $5.3 billion valuation, it announced today. Shield AI says its Hivemind software already enables fighter jets and drones to fly autonomously. Now, Shield AI wants to sell Hivemind to a broader range of customers like robotics companies. The round’s investors include L3Harris, one of the U.S.’s biggest defense contractors, and Hanwha

Artificial intelligence is a big trend in cancer care, and it’s mostly focused on detecting cancer at the earliest possible stage. That makes a lot of sense, given that cancer is less deadly the earlier it’s detected. But fewer are asking another fundamental question: If someone does have cancer, is an aggressive treatment like chemotherapy necessary? That’s the problem Ataraxis AI is trying to solve. The New York-based startup is focused on using AI to