Amazon adds gasoline discounts for Prime members, EV charging savings to follow

Amazon is challenging Walmart+ by offering Prime members a discount on fuel to combat high gas prices.  The company announced on Wednesday that Prime members will receive a 10 cents per gallon discount at around 7,000 Amoco, AM/PM, and BP gas stations across the U.S., potentially saving them

Fixify blends automation and human analysts to tackle IT problems

Matt Peters has spent more than a decade working for cybersecurity vendors. He was a team lead at Check Point, climbed the corporate ladder to VP of worldwide operations at FireEye, and spent over four years at Expel, a managed detection and response firm, as chief product officer. Peters says a s

Sensei reels in $16M to expand its contactless store platform in Europe

While Amazon Go helped popularize the concept of completely contactless stores, the arena is growing with others like 7-Eleven and Walmart entering the category, as well as several startups such as Standard Cognition, Zippin, AiFi, Grabango, and Trigo.  In Europe, Portuguese startup Sensei has b

Ro CEO Zachariah Reitano says the benefits of being a private company are growing

Ro co-founder and CEO Zachariah Reitano said while he’d “never say never” about potentially taking the 7-year-old telehealth company public, he thinks the benefits of being a private company are growing. Reitano dodged multiple questions from Axios reporter Dan Primack about whet

Feds clear way for EVTOL startups to bring flying vehicles to U.S. airspace

Federal regulators have cleared the path for electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft to share U.S. airspace with planes and helicopters — a win for the burgeoning industry and a timely decision for startups like Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation that are expected to launch air taxi net

Cement startup Furno lands $20M grant to build low-carbon micro-kilns in Chicago

Cement startup Furno will receive a $20 million grant from the Department of Energy, funds that will help the company build up to eight micro-kilns at a concrete plant in Chicago.  Chicago might not seem like the sort of place where cement is hard to come by. But with the nearest kiln 100 miles a

LinkedIn confirms the ‘follower purge’ was just a bug that’s now resolved

LinkedIn users on Tuesday began noticing a problem with their follower counts on the platform: They were dropping rapidly, and sometimes by many hundreds of users at once. With no official word at the time from LinkedIn, many began speculating that the situation was the result of LinkedIn purging f

Farewell to Foursquare’s app

“I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I have been in a real funk these last few days over this news,” writes Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, speaking about the company’s plan to sunset the Foursquare City Guide app later this year in favor of focusing on its check-in a

SEC fines four companies $7M for ‘misleading cyber disclosures’ regarding SolarWinds hack

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced on Tuesday that it charged and imposed penalties on four companies for making misleading disclosures linked to the 2019 SolarWinds espionage attack.  The four companies charged are cybersecurity firms Check Point, which will pay a civil penal

Researchers link Polyfill supply chain attack to huge network of copycat gambling sites

One of the biggest digital supply chain attacks of the year was launched by a little-known company that redirected large numbers of internet users to a network of copycat gambling sites, according to security researchers.  Earlier this year, a company called FUNNULL purchased Polyfill.io, a d

Artiphon's new Orba instrument can sample sounds live

Almost exactly two years after releasing the Orba 2, Artiphon is completing the trilogy. The newly announced Orba 3 finds the Nashville-based startup baking live sampling into its clever handheld instrument. The feature arrives by way of a built-in microphone, which lets users record their voice, i

The US AI Safety Institute stands on shaky ground

One of the only U.S. government offices dedicated to assessing AI safety is in danger of being dismantled if Congress doesn’t choose to authorize it. The U.S. AI Safety Institute (AISI), a federal government body that studies risks in AI systems, was created in November 2023 as a part of Pr

Anthropic’s new AI model can control your PC

In a pitch to investors last spring, Anthropic said it intended to build AI to power virtual assistants that could perform research, answer emails, and handle other back-office jobs on their own. The company referred to this as a “next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching” — one it beli

Ex-SpaceX engineers land $14M to scale new method for 3D printing metal

3D printing objects using metal is a well-established technique, but it tends to be too complex, expensive, or imprecise to match traditional methods at scale. Armed with $14 million from Nvidia and Boeing, Freeform aims to change that by building a new metal additive printing process that it says