Aseon Labs’ robotaxi pods, parking-space-sized automated units designed to inspect, clean, and charge autonomous vehicles in situ, have secured $10 million in seed funding, a bet that distributed servicing infrastructure could solve one of the industry’s most stubborn cost problems. The round, announced on 26 June 2026, was led by Crane Venture Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Garrett Camp’s firm Expa, Robin Hood Ventures, and Founders Capital, whose Jeremy Hindle joined the round according to the Aseon Labs seed round announcement. Angel investors include Adrian Aoun, Mercury founder Immad Akhund, Zimride co-founder Rajat Suri, and operators from Anthropic, Nuro,…
Author: Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale has been filing general news for the better part of fifteen years. He started at a regional evening paper, moved to a mid-sized digital outlet covering UK news, and spent three years as a general assignment reporter before going freelance. He has covered inquests, council elections, infrastructure announcements, and the kind of stories that sit on page five but matter on page one. He writes about public services, housing, local government, and the institutional stories that take six months to develop and thirty seconds to read. He prefers facts to angles and considers that unfashionable. Marcus lives in Bristol. He still reads the local paper and thinks that makes him an endangered species.
The GPT-5.6 White House approval process has turned OpenAI’s latest model launch into something the company did not volunteer for: a government-gated rollout in which the Trump administration signs off on access customer by customer. The Information first reported the arrangement, and OpenAI has since confirmed it in its own words. In a memo to staff, CEO Sam Altman wrote: The Decoder reports he said, ‘We’ve made clear to the U.S. government that this is not our preferred long term model, and will work with them and others in industry to achieve a more sustainable approach for future releases.’ Altman…
Base Power’s Illinois expansion puts the startup squarely inside the most strained grid in the United States. The Austin-based energy storage company began selling its home battery systems to Illinois residents this week, marking its first move into the territory operated by PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. grid operator by territory. The timing is not accidental. Wholesale electricity prices across PJM have nearly doubled over the past year, driven by a surge in data centre demand and a shortage of new generation capacity. Northern Virginia, one of the densest data centre regions on the planet, sits squarely within PJM’s footprint.…
The Netris Series A funding round of $15 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz, lands at a moment when everyone from telecoms giants to contract manufacturers is trying to stand up a GPU data centre before the AI window closes. Standing one up quickly, it turns out, is a different problem from standing one up at all.Netris, founded in 2018 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, sells software that runs directly on network switches and a platform that automates the setup, configuration, and ongoing operations of those switches. The idea is to strip out the months of manual network engineering that…
The Cellebrite Russia phone hack of opposition politician Andrey Pivovarov has thrown a harsh light on a question the surveillance-tech industry would rather not answer: what happens to your tools after you walk away from a customer? Researchers at the Citizen Lab, a digital rights group based at the University of Toronto, say they found forensic evidence that a Russian government investigative unit used Cellebrite’s UFED phone-extraction tool to break into Pivovarov’s iPhone 12. The hack occurred on or around 17 June 2021, according to the Citizen Lab’s analysis, carried out with high confidence. The timing is the problem. Cellebrite…
The ASML MATCH Act export controls debate landed in Washington this week in the form of a Dutch trade minister, a round of congressional meetings, and a quietly pointed warning: the bill could cause serious damage to Europe’s most valuable company. Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma travelled to Washington to meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress, urging them to reconsider the Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware (MATCH) Act. ‘It’s exceptional that I’m coming here to broadly outline our concerns to Congress,’ Sjoerdsma told Bloomberg after the meetings. ‘The stakes for the Netherlands may be…
The Facebook Creator Studio app is being reimagined as a stand-alone AI companion, Meta announced Wednesday, rebuilt from the ground up to help creators grow their audiences without ever leaving Facebook. The move is a direct play to keep creators loyal on the platform as it competes for their time and output against TikTok and YouTube. The original Creator Studio tool was shuttered in 2023 before Meta revived it in this new AI-powered form. Consider that a hint at how seriously the company is now taking the creator side of its business. What the Facebook Creator Studio App Actually Does…
The Zoox robotaxi upgrades announced this week are, by design, the kind of thing most passengers will only notice once they stop noticing them. Amazon’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary has refreshed the interior and exterior of its custom-built robotaxi ahead of a hoped-for commercial service launch later this year, with changes ranging from ergonomic seat padding to enlarged cupholders. There is, as ever, a rather large regulatory asterisk attached to that timeline. What’s Changed Inside and Out The fundamentals remain intact. The cube-shaped vehicle still has no steering wheel, still drives bidirectionally with four-wheel steering, carries four passengers, and can reach…
Two of the more candid voices in early-stage AI sat down last week to walk through their AI startup investing strategy, and neither of them made it sound remotely straightforward. Carter Reum, co-founder of M13, and Chang Xu, a partner at Basis Set Ventures, appeared at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening in El Segundo, Los Angeles. M13 manages $2.5 billion in assets and has backed 17 unicorns at seed or Series A. Basis Set launched in 2017 as one of the first early-stage funds focused exclusively on AI and recently closed its fourth fund at $250 million, up from $185 million for…
Flipkart Minutes quick commerce network has hit 1,000 micro-fulfilment centres less than two years after launch, with Walmart’s Indian arm targeting 1,500 by the end of 2026, and it has Amazon breathing down its neck the entire way.The milestone was announced Wednesday. Orders on the platform have grown about 400% year-on-year, according to Kunal Gupta, head of Flipkart Minutes, who spoke to TechCrunch. Entrackr, citing the company separately, puts that figure at 5x, or 500%; the lower figure comes from Gupta directly. Customer retention is up 20% year-on-year, the company said.Gen Z is a big part of the story. The…