Author: GT

Rising-star defense tech Mach Industries has announced a new $100 million round of funding at a $470 million valuation. TechCrunch first reported this deal was in the works last month. New investor Keith Rabois from Khosla Ventures joins existing investor Geoff Lewis of Bedrock Capital to lead the round. Existing investor Sequoia also participated. The fresh funding brings the startup’s total raised to about $185 million to date.  The round represents a modest step up from the company’s previous valuation. When Mach announced its Series A funding in October 2023, investors assigned the company a $335 million post-money valuation. This…

The U.K. data protection watchdog has fined 23andMe £2.31 million ($3.1 million) for failing to protect U.K. residents’ personal and genetic data prior to its 2023 data breach. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said on Tuesday it has fined the genetic testing company as it “did not have additional verification steps for users to access and download their raw genetic data” at the time of its cyberattack. In 2023, hackers stole private data on more than 6.9 million users over a months-long campaign by accessing thousands of accounts using stolen credentials. 23andMe did not require its users to use multi-factor…

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One after departing early from the the G7 summit in Canada to return to Washington, June 17, 2025. Kevin Lamarque | Reuters Hopes of a quick ceasefire between Israel and Iran were dashed by several social media posts from U.S. President Donald Trump. As he took an early departure from the Group of Seven summit, Trump said it “certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire” and that he was involved in something “much bigger than that.”What’s bigger than a ceasefire? An escalation in conflict on the prospect of…

Food distribution giant United Natural Foods (UNFI) said it is making “significant progress” in recovering from a cyberattack that occurred almost two weeks ago, as grocery stores across North America reliant on the distributor continue to report food shortages. UNFI said in an update on Sunday that it was restoring its electronic ordering systems, which its customers use to place orders for their grocery stores and supermarkets. The company, which provides more than 30,000 stores across the United States and Canada with fresh produce and other products, was hit by a cyberattack on June 5, which the company disclosed several…

Sword Health, an AI-powered digital health startup, has raised $40 million at a $4 billion valuation, a 33% jump from the $3 billion price tag it earned just a year ago. The funding was led by returning investor General Catalyst. Even though 10-year-old Sword Health is cash-flow positive, its CEO and founder, Virgílio Bento, told TechCrunch that he opted to raise additional capital for two key reasons: to update the company’s valuation, and have funds readily available for strategic acquisitions. Sword Health, which began as a virtual physical therapist and has since expanded into offering pelvic health and mental health…

Social networks are bolstering their terms of service against scrapers and bots that crawl the website to train AI models. Days after Elon Musk-owned X updated its terms to explicitly prohibit AI model training, decentralized social network Mastodon today updated its own rules to bar any kind of model training, as well. “We explicitly prohibit the scraping of user data for unauthorized purposes, e.g. archival or large language model (LLM) training. We want to make it clear that training LLMs on the data of Mastodon users on our instances is not permitted,” Mastodon said in an email sent to users.…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate passed legislation Tuesday that would regulate a form of cryptocurrency known as stablecoins, the first of what the industry hopes will be a wave of bills to bolster its legitimacy and reassure consumers.The fast-moving legislation, which passed by a 68-30 vote and will be sent to the House for potential revisions, comes on the heels of a 2024 campaign cycle in which the crypto industry ranked among the top political spenders in the country, underscoring its growing influence in Washington and beyond. Eighteen Democratic senators crossed the aisle to vote for the legislation on Tuesday,…

Amazon Web Services is set to announce an update to its Graviton4 chip that includes 600 gigabits per second of network bandwidth, what the company calls the highest offering in the public cloud.Ali Saidi, a distinguished engineer at AWS, likened the speed to a machine reading 100 music CDs a second.Graviton4, a central processing unit, or CPU, is one of many chip products that come from Amazon’s Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas. The chip is a win for the company’s custom strategy and putting it up against traditional semiconductor players like Intel and AMD.But the real battle is with Nvidia…

One month after the House passed its version of a reconciliation bill, Senate Republicans released their take on the budget bill Monday night. The Senate Finance Committee’s language would take a sledgehammer to some parts of the renewable-friendly Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) while sparing others.  Solar, wind, and hydrogen bear the brunt of the impact. On the other side of the ledger, geothermal, nuclear, hydropower, and long-duration energy storage emerge relatively unscathed. Carbon capture ended up somewhere in the middle. Senate Republicans are moving to swiftly end residential solar tax credits, giving people just 180 days after the bill is…

NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk ’s X sued Tuesday to try to stop New York from requiring reports on how social media platforms handle problematic posts — a regulatory approach that the company successfully challenged in California.New York’s law, which Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed late last year, is poised to take effect later this year. X maintains that the measure impinges on free speech rights and on a 1996 federal law that, among other things, lets internet platforms moderate posts as they see fit. New York is improperly trying “to inject itself into the content-moderation editorial process” by…