Expense management startup Ramp is being considered for a charge card pilot program by the U.S. government’s General Services Administration, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The government’s internal expense card program, dubbed SmartPay, is a $700 billion program. It is estimated that the charge card pilot program contract for which Ramp is being...
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April 18, 2025April 18, 2025Tech Crunch
Defense tech Theseus landed Y Combinator, the US Special Forces, and $4.3M from a tweet
On February 18, 2024, Ian Laffey posted on X that he and two others he’d just met built a cheap drone at a hackathon that calculated its coordinates simply by using its camera and Google Maps. He and his colleagues, Sacha Lévy and Carl Schoeller, were all engineers under the age of 25. The tech...
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April 18, 2025April 18, 2025Tech Crunch
OpenAI pursued Cursor maker before entering into talks to buy Windsurf for $3B
When news broke that OpenAI was in talks to acquire AI coding company Windsurf for $3 billion, one of the first questions on the mind of anyone following the space was likely: “Why not buy Cursor creator Anysphere instead?” After all, OpenAI Startup Fund has been an investor in Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, since the...
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April 18, 2025April 18, 2025Tech Crunch
OpenAI launches Flex processing for cheaper, slower AI tasks
In a bid to more aggressively compete with rival AI companies like Google, OpenAI is launching Flex processing, an API option that provides lower AI model usage prices in exchange for slower response times and “occasional resource unavailability.” Flex processing, available in beta for OpenAI’s recently released o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, is aimed at...
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April 18, 2025April 18, 2025Tech Crunch
Carbon removal startup Holocene bought by oil and gas giant Occidental
The deal was executed through Oxy Low Carbon Ventures for an undisclosed amount.
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April 17, 2025April 17, 2025Tech Crunch
Trump administration reportedly considers a US DeepSeek ban
The Trump administration is considering new restrictions on the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek that would limit it from buying Nvidia’s AI chips and potentially bar Americans from accessing its AI services, The New York Times reported on Wednesday. The restrictions are part of the Trump administration’s effort to compete with China on AI. Months after...
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April 17, 2025April 17, 2025Tech Crunch
Chapter, a Medicare startup with links to Vance, Thiel, and Ramaswamy, just raised a round at $1.5B valuation
Chapter, a Medicare advisory startup co-founded by former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, has closed a $75 million funding round at a valuation of $1.5 billion led by private equity and venture firm Stripes. The startup helps seniors choose Medicare health plans analyzing doctors, hospitals, and prescription drug coverage. Unlike many other Medicare insurance brokers,...
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April 17, 2025April 17, 2025Tech Crunch
Zoom restores service after an hours-long outage
Zoom says its platform is back online after suffering an outage for much of Wednesday afternoon. “Service has now been restored after the earlier outage, and we sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding,” Zoom said in a post on X at around 2 p.m. Pacific. The trouble began around 11:40 a.m., according to The Verge,...
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April 17, 2025April 17, 2025Tech Crunch
xAI adds a ‘memory’ feature to Grok
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is slowly bringing its Grok chatbot to parity with top rivals like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. On Wednesday night, xAI announced a “memory” feature for Grok that enables the bot to remember details from past conversations with a user. Now, if you ask Grok for recommendations, it’ll give more personalized...
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April 17, 2025April 17, 2025Tech Crunch
Smashing, the reading curation app by Goodreads’ founder, shuts down
Smashing, an AI-powered app that lets users build a curated list of news and posts, is shutting down, because of its inability to scale rapidly enough.