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From TechCrunch
By Haje Jan Kamps
May 10, 2024
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday.
Look, I know this is our startups weekly newsletter, and as the most valuable company in the world, Apple is kind of the ultimate “not a startup,” but judging by the traffic on the site, y’all are such rabid fans that it seems rude not to do a quick roundup: Apple ran a short, 40-ish minute event this week, where it showed off new iPad Airs, new iPad Pros (with a fancy new stacked screen technology), a new Magic Keyboard, a new Pencil Pro, brand-new M4 chips, and much more. Oh, and they finally “admitted” that iPads are more like little laptops than big iPhones, so the company moved the camera to the landscape edge — where it shoulda been all along, honestly.
Ooh! And I have some fun personal news: I’m joining the TechCrunch Equity podcast as a co-host, alongside the formidably wonderful (and wonderfully formidable) Mary Ann Azevedo. You know, just in case you wanted my zany humor in your ear-holes, in addition to into your eye-holes.
Buckle up for a wild ride as we delve into the saga of Newchip, an accelerator that promised startups a golden ticket to success, but instead led them straight to bankruptcy court. Lacey Hunter thought she’d hit the jackpot with her AI humanitarian aid startup TechAid when she joined Newchip’s program. Spoiler alert: She didn’t. Instead of accelerating to glory, Newchip filed for bankruptcy and auctioned off warrants from 1,000+ startups in an equity yard sale. And poor Hunter? She had no choice but to shut down TechAid amid this hot mess.
In a spicy turn of events, Microsoft just hit CTRL + Z on U.S. police departments using its Azure OpenAI Service for facial recognition. This update to their T&Cs was as subtle as a rhino in a china shop. In a nutshell: If you have a badge, a handlebar mustache and a pair of mirror aviators, then no AI face games for you!
Henrik Fisker’s EV startup, Fisker Inc., is having a bit of a midlife crisis. After launching two prototypes last August — the Pear and Alaska — it has allegedly stiffed the engineering firm that helped develop them. The firm, Bertrandt AG, filed a $13 million lawsuit claiming Fisker stopped payments and held on to their intellectual property like some jilted lover refusing to return your favorite sweatshirt. It seems it isn’t just a one-off: It’s more like an episode of “Judge Judy” with over 30 lawsuits alleging lemon law violations, claims for unpaid wages from former employees and suppliers suing for overdue bills. Even though Fisker’s VP of communications insists Bertrandt’s lawsuit is “without merit,” this smorgasbord of legal troubles suggests there may be more cracks in the company than in Humpty Dumpty after his unfortunate wall incident.
Iconiq Capital, the private office that’s been babysitting Mark Zuckerberg’s and Jack Dorsey’s cash piles since 2011, has just raised a whopping $5 billion across two funds for its seventh flagship fund. This hefty fundraise puts them in the spotlight while other big players like Tiger Global tripped on their shoelaces with a mere $2.2 billion haul (their smallest since 2014, after attracting criticism that it was deploying its cash too fast).
Every week, there’s always a few stories I want to share with you that somehow don’t fit into the categories above. It’d be a shame if you missed ’em, so here’s a random grab bag of goodies for ya:
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Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model
AI company Sesame has released the base model that powers Maya, the impressively realistic voice assistant. The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions. Called CSM-1B, the model generates “RVQ audio codes” from text and audio inputs, according to Sesame’s description on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. RVQ refers to “residual vector quan
Mar 13, 2025
Y Combinator’s police surveillance darling Flock Safety raises $275M at $7.5B valuation
Flock Safety and one of its long-time VCs, Bedrock Capital, announced Thursday that the startup raised a fresh $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation. Flock makes computer vision-enabled video surveillance technology used by law enforcement as well as businesses, property management companies, and so on. It’s best known for its automatic license plate recognition tech, but Flock also makes gunshot detection tech marketed to schools, and recently acquired public safety drone company Aerodome.
Mar 13, 2025
Y Combinator urges the White House to support Europe’s Digital Markets Act
Y Combinator, one of the world’s most prolific startup accelerators, sent a letter on Wednesday urging the Trump administration to openly support Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a wide-ranging piece of legislation that aims to crack open Big Tech’s market power. The DMA designates six tech companies as “gatekeepers” to the internet — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft — and limits these technology kingpins from engaging in anticompetitive tactics on their platforms, in
Mar 13, 2025
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