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Flipkart’s Super.money quietly partners with troubled Juspay as it expands its reach

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Super.money, a financial service platform spun off last year by Walmart-owned Flipkart, has quietly partnered with payments infrastructure firm Juspay as it expands into direct-to-consumer (D2C) checkout and targets $100 million in annual revenue by 2026. The partnership comes as Juspay works to rebuild momentum after facing pushback from major payment companies earlier this year — a dispute that complicated its fundraising efforts. Last week, Super.money launched its D2C checkout product, Super.money Breeze, which promises merchants a one-click checkout experience and aims to speed up online purchases by removing one-time passwords and repeated logins. The company did not disclose any…

Andreessen Horowitz denies report of India office, calls it ‘fake news’

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Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has pushed back on local media reports suggesting it plans to open an office in India, with a general partner calling the coverage “entirely fake news.” Earlier on Thursday, Indian media outlets reported that a16z was preparing to establish a physical presence in the country by setting up an office in Bengaluru. The reports, which cited unnamed sources, also said the firm was in the process of hiring a local partner. However, Anish Acharya, a Bay Area-based general partner at a16z who has spent the last six years with the firm, dismissed the reports.…

Stoke Space’s $510M round shows the future of launch belongs to defense

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Stoke Space announced a massive capital raise on Wednesday that might seem, at first glance, like just another bet on the commercial launch market. The details tell a different story. Led by billionaire Thomas Tull’s U.S. Innovative Technology (USIT), a fund that explicitly invests in technologies tied to national security, the $510 million Series D round underscores a larger shift in the launch industry. The old assumption was the winners of launch would be the companies that capture the lion’s share of commercial payloads. While there is still demand on the commercial side from private constellation developers and for emerging…

Italian businessman’s phone reportedly targeted with Paragon spyware

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A prominent Italian businessman was targeted with Paragon spyware, according to local news reports. On Thursday, Italian online investigative website IrpiMedia and newspaper La Stampa reported that Francesco Gaetano Caltagirone was among around 90 people who received a notification from WhatsApp in January, alerting him that he had been targeted with spyware made by Paragon Solutions. It’s not immediately clear for what reason Caltagirone was targeted, and a spokesperson for his holding company, Caltagirone SpA, did not respond to a request for comment. Caltagirone’s namesake holding company owns several firms across different industries, including construction, real estate, finance, and publishing,…

India pilots AI chatbot-led e-commerce with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude in the mix

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India has kicked off a pilot to let consumers shop and pay directly through AI chatbots, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT leading the rollout and integrations with Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude in development, as the South Asian nation becomes the next major market for global AI companies. On Thursday, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the federal body behind the country’s widely used Unified Payments Interface (UPI), partnered with OpenAI and fintech firm Razorpay to enable consumers to shop and pay directly through ChatGPT. Razorpay confirmed to TechCrunch that the pilot is being rolled out nationwide and will become widely…

OpenAI’s affordable ChatGPT Go plan expands to 16 new countries in Asia

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OpenAI is rapidly expanding its affordable ChatGPT Go plan, which costs under $5, to 16 new countries across Asia. The subscription tier is now available in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, East Timor, and Vietnam. In select countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Pakistan, the company is allowing users to pay in local currencies. In the remaining countries, users must pay in USD at a price of approximately $5, with the final cost varying based on local taxation. Image Credits: OpenAI ChatGPT Go gives users…

Battlefield alum DevAlly raises €2M to help companies with Europe’s feisty new accessibility law

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Many businesses that provide goods and services to the EU’s 450 million consumers must comply with new accessibility standards that took effect in June. Like the GDPR before it, this new act had companies scrambling to adjust their websites, e-commerce platforms, and banking apps. But despite similar standards existing in the U.S., many still have a long way to go. “One thing that surprised us was companies, even massive companies, coming to us two weeks before [the deadline] saying, ‘Oh we didn’t know anything about this,’” said Irish entrepreneur Cormac Chisholm. His startup, DevAlly, is among the first to leverage…

Novoloop’s upcycled plastic takes a step closer to production

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Plastic recycling startup Novoloop has inked a deal with a major manufacturer to produce its upcycled thermoplastic polyurethane at commercial scale, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The agreement helps nudge the Menlo Park-based Novoloop through the so-called “valley of death” that many climate tech startups must slog through. Startups that depend on hardware are particularly susceptible to stumbling in the valley, the dreaded moment when they’ve proven their initial technology and have not generated sufficient revenues from selling their product. Under the terms of the deal, Novoloop will supply Huide Science and Technology with a chemical building block used to make…

Sora’s downloads in its first week was nearly as big as ChatGPT’s launch

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After OpenAI’s video-generating app Sora surged to the No. 1 position on the U.S. App Store, it has now, technically, experienced a bigger first week than ChatGPT on iOS, according to new data from app intelligence provider Appfigures. Its estimates show that Sora saw 627,000 iOS downloads in its first seven days of availability, compared with ChatGPT’s 606,000 iOS downloads during its first week. This isn’t the fairest comparison, however, because ChatGPT was available only in the U.S. during its first week, while Sora is currently offered in the U.S. and Canada at launch. Still, Appfigures says that Canada contributed…

Even after Stargate, Oracle, Nvidia, and AMD, OpenAI has more big deals coming soon, Sam Altman says

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At nearly the same moment as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was expressing surprise over OpenAI’s multibillion-dollar deal with competitor AMD — shortly after his company agreed to invest up to $100 billion into the AI model maker — Sam Altman was saying that more such deals are in the works. Huang appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Wednesday. When asked if he knew about the AMD deal before it was announced, he answered, “Not really.” As TechCrunch previously reported, OpenAI’s deal with AMD is unusual. AMD has agreed to grant OpenAI large tranches of AMD stock — up to 10%…