Investing in overlooked European ecosystems

John Tsioris sold Instashop to Delivery Hero for $360 million. Nate Clarke took Tyme from startup to global digital bank. In this candid conversation at the StrictlyVC event in Athens, the two entrepreneurs open up about what drives them, how they’re choosing their next bets, and why they’re investing in ecosystems that others overlook.

Scaling startups in the European market

From cybersecurity and aerospace to generative 3D, startup leaders are scaling ambitious companies from European soil and taking on global markets. In this conversation at the StrictlyVC event in Athens, we talked to three founders about what it takes to go from idea to impact while navigating the continent’s unique challenges — and why building […]

TechCrunch All Stage 2025: Prepare 4 VC’s Jason Kraus will instruct on how to turn chaos into momentum

Being a founder often feels like you’re building the plane midflight. You’re juggling fundraising, product-market fit, marketing strategy, hiring — while quietly wondering if you’re even doing it right. TechCrunch AllStage 2025, which is happening on July 15 at the SoWa Power Station in Boston, is built to answer those questions. Whether you’re pitching VCs, […]

Aurora co-founder Sterling Anderson is leaving the self-driving truck startup

Sterling Anderson, a veteran of the nascent autonomous vehicle sector and co-founder of Aurora, is resigning just a week after the company launched its commercial self-driving truck service in Texas. Anderson held the chief product officer position at Aurora. The resignation was posted in a regulatory filing along with the company’s first-quarter earnings report. His […]

Microsoft employees are banned from using DeepSeek app, president says 

Microsoft employees aren’t allowed to use DeepSeek due to data security and propaganda concerns, Microsoft vice chairman and president Brad Smith said in a Senate hearing today. “At Microsoft we don’t allow our employees to use the DeepSeek app,” Smith said, referring to DeepSeek’s application service (which is available on both desktop and mobile). Smith […]

One of Elon Musk’s longtime VCs is suing his former employer after allegedly being fired

Josh Raffaelli, who has deep roots as a Silicon Valley investor and has backed a number of Elon Musk companies, is suing his former employer, the massive trillion-dollar AUM Brookfield Asset Management, reports The New York Times.  Much of Raffaelli’s complaint concerns how Brookfield covered pandemic-related real estate losses and alleges the company fired him […]

Stripe unveils AI foundation model for payments, reveals ‘deeper partnership’ with Nvidia

Fintech giant Stripe announced Wednesday a slew of new product launches at its annual Stripe Sessions user event. The highlights include a new AI foundation model for payments; stablecoin-powered accounts; a new Orchestration offering, and a recent migration with chip behemoth Nvidia. Stripe’s payments foundation model has been trained on tens of billions of transactions, […]

Fastino trains AI models on cheap gaming GPUs and just raised $17.5M led by Khosla

Tech giants like to boast about trillion-parameter AI models that require massive and expensive GPU clusters. But Fastino is taking a different approach. The Palo Alto-based startup says it has invented a new kind of AI model architecture that’s intentionally small and task-specific. The models are so small they’re trained with low-end gaming GPUs worth […]