<p>Data centers consumed 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 and are estimated to use up to 12% by 2028. The majority of the energy that data centers suck up is used to help transfer data from chip to chip. A company called Hyperlume is looking to make that process more energy-efficient while also speeding it [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Creating corporate training videos for software is a time-consuming ordeal, especially if you&#8217;re an organization with a lot of software licenses. Training videos can help get employees up to speed, but they&#8217;re a big lift. They often take entire teams to produce. Tel Aviv-based entrepreneur Yoav Einav thought there might be an alternative, cheaper way [&hellip;]</p>

<p>LG Electronics is betting on robotics as its next big growth driver. The South Korean electronics company said on Friday that it has agreed to acquire an additional 30% stake in Bear Robotics, a California-based startup it previously backed that is building AI-powered server robots for restaurants. The deal gives LG a majority ownership of [&hellip;]</p>

<p>After releasing two developer beta versions last year, Google introduced the first public beta for Android 16 on Thursday. New features include live updates on the lock screen (like Live Activities on iOS), Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec for high-quality video recording, and a framework for developers to make their apps adaptable for different screen [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Social network X has grown its in-app revenue over the past year, despite a decline in active users, new data shows. Global consumer spending in the X mobile app across both iOS and Android has climbed by 76.3% year-over-year, when comparing two similar periods in January, according to data from app intelligence firm Appfigures. However, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI CEO Sam Altman kicked off this year by saying in a blog post that 2025 would be big for AI agents, tools that can automate tasks and take actions on your behalf. Now, we&#8217;re seeing OpenAI&#8217;s first real attempt. OpenAI announced on Thursday that it is launching a research preview of Operator, a general-purpose [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Password managers have become commonplace at this point. But businesses often have different needs than consumers. Teams, after all, often have to share credentials to access resources, all while IT and security teams need ways to control who has access to them. Passbolt, which is announcing an $8 million seed round Thursday, aims to become [&hellip;]</p>

<p>It can be challenging for developers of fintech apps to integrate repayment, balance transfer, and bill pay functionality. Devs often have to deal with a patchwork of brittle screen-scraping APIs to extract data from users&#8217; financial institutions — or worse, tools to process mounds of physical checks and paperwork. Three friends and entrepreneurs — Jose [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A team at AI dev platform Hugging Face has released what they&#8217;re claiming are the smallest AI models that can analyze images, short videos, and text. The models, SmolVLM-256M and SmolVLM-500M, are designed to work well on &#8220;constrained devices&#8221; like laptops with less than around 1GB of RAM. The team says that they&#8217;re also ideal [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up&nbsp;here. OpenAI is making gains at the expense of its chief rivals. On Tuesday, the company announced the Stargate Project, a new joint venture involving Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, Oracle, and others to build AI infrastructure for OpenAI in [&hellip;]</p>

<p>This month, drama unfolded across mainstream social media platforms like TikTok, which briefly went dark in the U.S. before a rapid return. Instagram recently faced backlash after ending its third-party fact-checking program.&nbsp; At the same time, startups like Favorited are attracting attention from investors, creators, and viewers. On Wednesday, the livestream app announced its $1.3 [&hellip;]</p>

<p>As enterprises look at how they can best leverage AI to increase their employees&#8217; productivity, search is an obvious use case. In most companies, after all, data lives in multiple disconnected silos and the combination of large language models, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and enterprise-grade integration services now makes it easier than ever to not [&hellip;]</p>

<p>President Trump on Tuesday pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the infamous dark web exchange Silk Road, which was best known as a once-thriving online marketplace for illegal drugs. Trump announced the news in a Truth Social post, saying the pardon was in honor of Ulbricht&#8217;s mother and the Libertarian movement. In 2015, a federal [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!&nbsp; This week, we’re looking at just how much fintech startups raised in 2024, a slew of fundraising deals, Plaid’s reported revenue growth last year, and more! To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. PT, subscribe here. The [&hellip;]</p>

<p>French startup Karmen has secured a small funding round so that it can improve its instant financing products. The company offers short-term loans to small companies facing a working capital crunch. It’s a €9 million equity-and-debt round ($9.4 million at today’s exchange rates) with Seventure Partners buying a stake in the small startup. Financière Arbevel [&hellip;]</p>

<p>French startup Karmen has secured a small funding round so that it can improve its instant financing products. The company offers short-term loans to small companies facing a working capital crunch. It’s a €9 million equity-and-debt round ($9.4 million at today’s exchange rates) with Seventure Partners buying a stake in the small startup. Financière Arbevel [&hellip;]</p>

<p>French startup Karmen has secured a small funding round so that it can improve its instant financing products. The company offers short-term loans to small companies facing a working capital crunch. It’s a €9 million equity-and-debt round ($9.4 million at today’s exchange rates) with Seventure Partners buying a stake in the small startup. Financière Arbevel [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Distracted driving is one of the leading causes of car accidents and a major reason why auto insurance premiums are expected to increase in 2025. For commercial fleets, that’s a nightmare. But for California-based startup Netradyne, it’s a tailwind.&nbsp; Netradyne provides fleet owners, including big names like Amazon, with AI-enabled dashcams that collect vehicle data [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Distracted driving is one of the leading causes of car accidents and a major reason why auto insurance premiums are expected to increase in 2025. For commercial fleets, that’s a nightmare. But for California-based startup Netradyne, it’s a tailwind.&nbsp; Netradyne provides fleet owners, including big names like Amazon, with AI-enabled dashcams that collect vehicle data [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Read.cv, a social media platform for professionals that competed with LinkedIn, has been acquired by AI-powered search engine Perplexity. As part of the deal, Read.cv will begin to wind down operations Friday. Users will be able to export their data, including their profiles, posts, and messages, until May 16. &#8220;We&#8217;ve long admired Perplexity and believe [&hellip;]</p>