Femtech startup Perelel is acquiring Founders Fund-backed sexual health startup LOOM

Women's health company Perelel announced on Wednesday the acquisition of LOOM a women's educational health platform, for an undisclosed amount. LOOM’s founder Erica Chidi will join Perelel as a strategic advisor.  Chidi co-launched LOOM in 2017 as an in-person experience, offeri

Motier Ventures unveils La Maison, a community space for the French tech ecosystem

On Tuesday evening local time, Motier Ventures, an early stage tech investment firm based in Paris, unveiled a startup hub called La Maison. This relatively new investor in the French tech ecosystem is the family office of the Houzé family — the owners of upmarket fashion retailer the Galeries L

Peak XV trims fund size and fees as Indian market overheats

Peak XV, the largest India and Southeast Asia-focused venture firm, is reducing the size of a handful of its funds and lowering fees as it seeks to become “deeply aligned” with its limited partners. The firm, which secured capital commitments totaling $2.85 billion in mid 2022, informe

Palmer Luckey: Every country needs a ‘warrior class’ excited to enact ‘violence on others in pursuit of good aims’

After a three-minute hype video, complete with HD footage of drones colliding and military vehicles exploding, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey stepped onto the stage at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, on Tuesday afternoon. In an hour-long conversation with Pepperdine University president

Threads users can now see who follows them from other fediverse servers

Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Tuesday that users who have connected their accounts to the fediverse, also known as the open social web, can now see who follows them and likes their posts from other fediverse servers, such as Mastodon and Pixelfed.  The company said users will

Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Durk Kingma

Durk Kingma, one of the lesser-known co-founders of OpenAI, today announced that he’ll be joining Anthropic. In a series of posts on X, Kingma revealed that he’ll be working mostly remotely, from the Netherlands (where he’s based), but didn’t say which Anthropic org he̵

Direct ocean capture may be the next frontier for carbon removal

For the past few years, direct air capture has been seen as a potential silver bullet to the climate crisis. But now a startup originally from the snowy wastes of Iceland is taking a new approach: removing carbon from seawater.  The industry standard for removing carbon with direct air capture me

OpenAI’s DevDay brings Realtime API and other treats for AI app developers

It’s been a tumultuous week for OpenAI, full of executive departures and major fundraising developments, but the startup is back at it, trying to convince developers to build tools with its AI models at its 2024 DevDay. The company announced several new tools Tuesday, including a public beta

Pinterest rolls out genAI tools for product imagery to advertisers

Image inspiration and shopping site Pinterest is the latest tech company to roll out generative AI products to its advertisers, following similar moves by Google, Amazon, and others. At its Pinterest Presents advertiser event on Tuesday, the company unveiled new features for its Pinterest Performan

Aspect Build gets $3.85M to help developers create software with Bazel

Monorepos are becoming an increasingly popular way to manage source code, but they require a slightly different toolset. Google developed its own internal build and test tool on top of its monorepo and then, in 2015, open sourced it as Bazel. Nine years on, there is a thriving ecosystem of Bazel-ad

Runware uses custom hardware and advanced orchestration for fast AI inference

Sometimes, a demo is all you need to understand a product. And that's the case with Runware. If you head over to Runware's website, enter a prompt and hit enter to generate an image, you'll be surprised by how quickly Runware generates the image for you — it takes less than a second.

Acceleron Fusion has raised $15M to take a stab at colder fusion, filing reveals

Fusion startups have been on a fundraising tear lately, and a young startup, Acceleron Fusion, is joining the pack, having raised $15 million of a targeted $23.7 million round, according to an SEC filing. The fusion sector recently has been showered with interest from investors, who no doubt have

Numa raises $32M to bring AI and automation to car dealerships

Sometimes, a pivot ends up being the smartest decision company leaders can make. See Netflix’s pivot from DVDs to streaming, or Corning’s pivot from lightbulbs to touchscreens. The list of extremely successful startup pivots goes on. And on. And on. A less-prominent (b

How the FBI and Mandiant caught a ‘serial hacker’ who tried to fake his own death

In the early hours of January 20, 2023, a doctor’s user account logged onto the Hawaii Electronic Death Registration System from out of state to certify the death of a man named Jesse Kipf. The death certificate listed the cause as “acute respiratory distress syndrome” due to COVID-19 a w