Author: GT

We’ve been blown away by the overwhelming response to speak at TechCrunch All Stage on July 15 at SoWa Power Station in Boston. After thorough consideration, we’ve selected six standout finalists. The power to choose who will take the stage and share their startup scaling expertise is now in your hands! This Audience Choice voting will be open until May 2 at 11:59 p.m. PT. You get one vote, one speaker — make it count!  Meet the finalists Get to know the six exceptional Audience Choice finalists and their proposed sessions, and vote for the speaker you think should take…

Most mortgage lenders would rather people didn’t pay off their mortgages early. After all, that’s how they make their money. Indeed, overpayment is positively discouraged and sometimes even penalized. What if there was a solution that solved the technology behind it, alongside the financing arrangements? That’s the idea behind the Sprive fintech app. This is a “mortgage overpayment” platform aimed at the U.K. market that helps users repay their mortgages faster using automation and cash-back rewards. It claims to save users an average of £10,000 each over the lifetime of the mortgage. Sprive, which launched in October 2021, now closed…

Bitcoin (BTC) returned to positive territory for the year for the first time in almost two months, approaching $95,000 and erasing a drop of as much as 18%. Its current performance, up less 1.5% since Dec. 31, places it between gold, which has gained 24% and the Nasdaq 100, which is down over 7%. As a result, the narrative positioning bitcoin as either a leveraged tech stock or digital gold is leaning slightly toward the digital gold narrative. But only just. Analyzing bitcoin’s correlation coefficients over a 30-day moving average, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization now shows a strong…

Palo Alto Networks signage displays on the screen at the Nasdaq Market in New York City, U.S., March 25, 2025. Jeenah Moon | ReutersPalo Alto Networks announced on Monday its intent to acquire Protect AI, a startup specializing in securing artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, for an undisclosed sum. The deal is set to close by the first quarter of fiscal year 2026.”By extending our AI security capabilities to include Protect AI’s innovative solutions for Securing for AI, businesses will be able to build AI applications with comprehensive security,” said Anand Oswal, senior vice president and general manager of…

News about Android is being relegated to a side show at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, next month. On Monday, the company announced it would share information about the latest updates coming to the Android ecosystem at an upcoming virtual event called “The Android Show: I/O Edition,” airing on May 13. The decision to move the Android portion of Google I/O to its own separate event ahead of the start of I/O suggests this year’s developer conference could be even more AI-heavy than usual. AI news and updates were already taking up an increasingly longer portion of the Google…

Crypto lender Nexo said it is reentering the U.S., marking a comeback two years after regulatory friction forced its exit. “America is back and so is Nexo,” Co-founder Antoni Trenchev said at a press event Sunday in Bulgaria with Donald Trump Jr., crediting what he described as a more favorable environment for innovation under the Trump presidency. “Thanks to the vision and leadership of President Donald J. Trump, his administration, and his family, the United States is once again a place where innovation is championed, not stifled. A place where pioneers are celebrated,” Trenchev said, according to a press release.…

By Francisco Rodrigues (All times ET unless indicated otherwise) Bitcoin (BTC) was little changed Monday, adding less than 1% amid renewed trade tensions and concerns of geopolitical instability that spread into the Indian subcontinent, where India and Pakistan are exchanging small-arms fire. The cryptocurrency rose 0.75% in the past 24 hours, turning positive for the year and decoupling from traditional risk assets as investors questioned the durability of the U.S.’s role as the global financial anchor. The broader market, measured through the CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index, rose 2.2%. Stock-index futures in the U.S. are pointing to a slight drop and…

AI-based coding has exploded in popularity on the promise that it will make developers’ jobs faster and easier. But AI coding has also resulted in something else: a vast increase in lines of code, and thus the likelihood of bugs resulting in crashes or other mishaps. On Monday, an Israeli startup called Lightrun, which has built an observability platform to identify and debug (remediate) code before those problems arise, announced a Series B of $70 million. The funding underscores not just the gap in the market for tools like these, but also Lightrun’s traction in meeting that demand.  New backer…

Arvind Krishna, chief executive officer of International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), during a Bloomberg Television interview at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025. Christopher Pike | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesInternational Business Machines Corporation on Monday announced it will invest $150 billion in the U.S. over the next five years, including more than $30 billion to advance American manufacturing of its mainframe and quantum computers.”We have been focused on American jobs and manufacturing since our founding 114 years ago, and with this investment and manufacturing commitment we are ensuring that IBM remains the epicenter…

The UK fintech sector is on a bit of roll. Allica Bank – a London-based fintech – recently announced it had doubled its profits in 2024, bringing in £29.9 million, while Neobank Revolut announced a £1bn profit in 2024. Companies of this nature continue to spring out of London, a city which has become a fintech global leader, partly because of its long financial heritage but also because it was a pioneer of Open Banking. There are now over 185 UK fintech startups valued over £1 billion, according to research from HSBC Innovation Banking.  So it’s with that context that Volution, a…