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Sources say Lachy Groom is backing India startup Pronto at a $200 million valuation

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💥 Check out this trending post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Startups,pronto,Lachy Groom 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Pronto, an Indian instant home assistance startup, is finalizing a funding round led by tech investor Lachy Groom that would value the fast-growing company at about $200 million after investment, TechCrunch has learned. The deal is expected to bring about $20 million in new capital and would represent a sharp jump from the $100 million valuation at which the company raised $25 million in a Series B round led by Epiq Capital in early March, doubling its valuation in a matter of weeks,…

X launches standalone XChat app on iOS

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💥 Read this must-read post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Apps,Social,X,xchat 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: XChat, X's standalone messaging app, was launched to the public on Friday. The new app, which was initially available on iOS devices, allows users to connect with their X contacts for messaging, file sharing, audio and video calls as well as group chats. The company first began testing XChat publicly with a small group of beta users earlier this year to get their feedback on the new experience. The XChat app is a key part of the company's strategic vision, which sees the social network…

ComfyUI valuation reaches $500M as content creators seek more control over AI-generated media

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🚀 Check out this must-read post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: AI,TC,Venture,comfyui,Craft Ventures,Creators,Video 📌 **What You’ll Learn**: ComfyUI, a startup that helps content creators control image, video, and audio output from deployment models using a node-based workflow, has raised a $30 million funding round at a $500 million valuation. The round was led by Craft Ventures, with participation from other investors including Pace Capital, Chemistry and TruArrow. ComfyUI began as an open source project in 2023, shortly after deployment models were introduced. At the time, models like OpenAI's Midjourney and DALL-E barely worked, and often made major errors, such as…

Meta’s loss is thinking machines’ gain

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🚀 Check out this awesome post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: AI,TC 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Weiao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — where he helped build multimedia perception systems and contributed to open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D. His last day at Meta was last week, and he has since joined Thinking Machines Lab (TML). His move to TML comes as the AI startup expands on multiple fronts. It has just signed a multi-billion-dollar cloud deal with Google, giving it access to Nvidia's latest 300 GB chips and making it one of…

Steve Ballmer slams founder he supports who pleaded guilty to fraud: ‘I was cheated and I feel silly’

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🚀 Explore this must-read post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Climate,Fintech,TC,Venture,Aspiration,fraud,Steve Ballmer 📌 **What You’ll Learn**: Silicon Valley tends to tolerate a certain amount of founder hyperbole when pitching to investors, often dismissing it as part of selling a vision. But some choices go too far and can lead to prison for the founders and a scandal for investors. An example is Joseph Sanberg, whose high-flying fintech startup Aspiration Partners was backed by a roster of tech celebrities, including former Microsoft CEO and current Clippers owner Steve Ballmer. In August 2025, Sanberg pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud…

Palantir is said to be helping the IRS investigate financial crimes

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🔥 Explore this awesome post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Government & Policy,In Brief,irs,Palantir,Trump Administration 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Palantir has helped the Internal Revenue Service's Bureau of Criminal Investigation investigate a variety of financial crimes in the United States for much of the past decade, The Intercept reported. The IRS has paid the company $130 million since 2018 to use its data analysis software to examine financial records for investigative purposes, media outlets reported, citing public records detailing Palantir's IRS contract obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight. It was previously known that the IRS was using Palantir…

Two college kids raise $5.1 million seed round to build AI-powered social network iMessage

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✨ Explore this trending post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Apps,Startups,AI,Exclusive 📌 **What You’ll Learn**: Series, a social media app, announced it has raised a $5.1 million pre-funding round, with investors including Venmo co-founder Ikram Majdon Ismail, Pear VC, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and GPTZero founder Edward Tian. The company was founded early last year by Yale students Nathanio Johnson and Sean Hargro, both of whom are still seniors at the university. The chain bills itself as a next-generation social networking platform, not an AI application, and hails itself as one of the first companies to run entirely on iMessage,…

X-energy stock rose 27% on the first day of trading following its massive IPO

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💥 Explore this awesome post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Climate,Fundraising,IPO,nuclear power,X-Energy,nuclear fission ✅ **What You’ll Learn**: X-energy stock popped today in its Nasdaq debut, opening at $30.11 before closing at $29.20, up 27% from its initial public offering of $23 per share. It seems investors can't get enough of nuclear energy. Even the stock's initial price was revised upward from the $16 to $19 target the company put forth during its investor roadshow. In conclusion, the company's value reached $11.5 billion. Just five years ago, such interest in a nuclear startup would have come as a surprise to many.…

None offers an AI-powered dictation tool

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🔥 Read this insightful post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: AI,Apps,ai dictation,In Brief,nothing,Superwhisper,Wispr flow 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: In the past few years, AI-powered dictation tools have taken off. In addition to existing dictation apps like Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, Willow, and Monologue, new apps are launched every week. Hardware company Nothing on Thursday launched a competing product of its own called Essential Voice. The basic idea is similar to other dictation apps, as Essential Voice works in any app to convert your speech into rich text, removing filler words like "um" and "ah" along the way. You can also create…

Google invests up to $40 billion in Anthropic in cash and accounts

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💥 Discover this trending post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: AI,Enterprise,Anthropic,anthropic investment,chips,compute,Google,google cloud 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Google plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic and support the AI company's growing computing needs, Bloomberg reports. Its Alphabet subsidiary is committed to investing $10 billion now, at a $350 billion valuation for Anthropic, with another $30 billion if Anthropic meets certain performance targets, according to Anthropic. The promise of investment comes after Anthropic launched its latest model, Mythos, to a limited group of partners this month. Anthropic says Mythos is the company's most powerful model to date and has…