Author: GT

A new report by the nonprofit All Raise found that the percentage of women and nonbinary individuals in partner roles at leading firms has doubled in the past few years, despite market headwinds. All Raise CEO Paige Hendrix Buckner chatted with TechCrunch’s Dominic-Madori Davis about what’s driving the shift on this week’s Equity.  “There are two pieces to it,” she said of the progress being made for women. She said much of it is to do with firms looking to become more efficient and looking to internally promote the best people within their firms. The second part is that firms…

Amazon is now letting shoppers in 1,000 cities across the U.S. order perishable food items through its Same-Day Delivery service, as the e-commerce giant seeks to compete more directly with Instacart and Walmart+ in the growing quick-commerce space. Amazon plans to expand the option to over 2,300 cities by the end of the year. Users can now order fresh grocery items, including produce, dairy, meat, seafood, baked goods, and more, alongside everyday household products, electronics, and other items available for Same-Day Delivery. Amazon says its “specialized temperature-controlled fulfillment network” will ensure that shoppers receive perishable groceries intact, and that orders…

Eight years ago, orthopedic surgeon Dr. William Kapp attended a medical conference that changed his professional life.  He had gone from a private-practice doctor to co-founding a company that built critical care hospitals to then selling that company. It gave him an interest for both sides of healthcare: the medicine and business sides, he told TechCrunch.  So he went to the annual conference hosted by famed physician-scientist Dr. Daniel Kraft to learn about new tech that could improve results while lowering costs. Dr. Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, was on stage that year with Dr. Bob…

Anthropic has acquired the co-founders and most of the team behind Humanloop — a platform for prompt management, LLM evaluation, and observability — in a push to strengthen its enterprise strategy. The terms of the deal were not shared, but it appears to follow the acqui-hire playbook we’re increasingly seeing in the tech industry amid the war for AI talent. Humanloop’s three co-founders — CEO Raza Habib, CTO Peter Hayes, and CPO Jordan Burgess — have all joined Anthropic, alongside around a dozen engineers and researchers.  Anthropic is growing fast in the enterprise space as it leads in agentic and…

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — No matter the offense, states must educate students in juvenile detention. It’s a complicated challenge, no doubt — and success stories are scarce.In Florida, where more than 1,000 students are in long-term confinement, the state last year put those kids’ schooling online. That’s despite strong evidence that online learning failed many kids during the pandemic. The state juvenile justice system contracted with the Florida Virtual School, one of the nation’s oldest and largest online learning systems.State leaders were hoping Florida Virtual School would bring more rigorous, uniform standards across their juvenile justice classrooms. When students left…

Voltify plans to build a series of energy microgrids to power its locomotive batteries, as shown in this computer-generated image.VoltifyDaphna Langer has a bold ambition: To decarbonize the rail industry in less than a decade.How? By convincing U.S. freight railroad companies to switch from diesel power to rechargeable batteries — part of a business model Langer estimates could make her company, Voltify, as much as $10 billion a year.The rail industry needs to reduce its emissions by 5% a year by 2030 to reach net-zero goals, according to a 2023 report by the International Energy Agency. In addition, switching to…

Eric Migicovsky, the original creator of the Pebble smartwatch, on Wednesday showed off the new designs for the upcoming watch, now known as the Pebble Time 2. Although the company originally branded its new watches as the Core 2 Duo and Core Time 2 when it first announced its plans to return to the market in March, Migicovsky says the company has since been able to regain the Pebble trademark. That means the new watches will instead be called the Pebble 2 Duo and the Pebble Time 2. Migicovsky’s company, Core Devices, had also shown off early ideas for the…

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — To earn his freedom, 15-year-old Cayden Gillespie had to complete three school assignments a day. But school had gone virtual for Cayden and other incarcerated young people in Florida. And sometimes, he didn’t understand it.One day last summer, he kept failing an online pre-algebra test. There were too many words to read. He didn’t know how to find the value of x. And there were no math teachers to show him.“I couldn’t figure it out, and it kept failing me,” Cayden says. He asked the adult supervising the classroom for help. “She didn’t understand either.”Frustrated, Cayden…

India-based audio series platform maker Pocket FM aims to be the Netflix of audio. That is, the company intends to match its audio series with hundreds of episodes to its users’ tastes. For that to work, it needs to release content rapidly — something it’s now turning to AI to help with. The Lightspeed-backed startup is giving its writers an AI tool set that can do things like suggest better endings to an episode or make the narrative more engaging. The hope is that the tools will speed up the story-writing process. Pocket FM already uses some AI tools like…

For decades, NASA built and flew its own relay orbiters and spacecraft to ferry valuable data back to Earth. Now the agency is shifting to buying connectivity as a service, much like it does for launch and astronaut transport. That pivot has sparked a race, with major contenders pitching ways to keep Mars missions online. What’s at stake isn’t a single contract: it’s the data pipe to Mars. This new approach, which will mix NASA assets and commercial infrastructure, would gradually replace the patchwork relay network the agency relies on today. Generally, that works by orbiters like Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter…