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Eleven Labs has made a name for itself by building realistic AI voices. What started as two Polish engineers struggling with bad movie dubbing has grown into a highly profitable company with a value of $6.6 billion, doubling from just nine months ago. The company recently announced a $100 million tender offer led by Sequoia and ICONIQ with participation from a16z and others. The company’s technology powers everything from Fortnite characters to customer service bots, and it’s taking on OpenAI to become the default voice for AI. Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, we bring you a conversation with CEO Mati…
A breakthrough battery technology could significantly improve the safety of batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs) and improve the stability of the energy grid, scientists say.Researchers have made a breakthrough during the development of solid-state sodium ion (Na ion) batteries. This battery could one day complement and replace the lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries used in many everyday devices today.The new batteries promise greater safety and lower costs if researchers can solve the problem of producing them at scale with long life cycles. The researchers published their findings in two studies. The first was published in Advanced Materials on May 19th, and…
Neanderthals were the world’s first innovators in fire technology, a small body of evidence from Britain suggests. Fragments of pyrite found at a more than 400,000-year-old site in Suffolk, eastern England, push back on archaeologists’ evidence of controlled fire-starting and suggest that significant human brain development began much earlier than previously thought.”We are a species that has used fire to really shape the world around us,” study co-author Rob Davies, a paleolithic archaeologist at the British Museum, said at a press conference on Tuesday, December 9. Davis said that “the ability to make fire would have been very important” in…
Apple on Wednesday released its annual list of the most downloaded apps and games of the year. In the US market, OpenAI’s ChatGPT topped the ranking of most installed free iPhone apps (excluding games) in 2025. AI apps were followed by Threads, Google, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google’s Gemini. ChatGPT ranked fourth last year, but lost the top spot to Chinese shopping app Temu. Despite the AI app being released on iPhone in May 2023 and having a strong debut, it did not make it to the top 10 list in 2023. The fact that ChatGPT…
AI agents are being sold as a solution for planning trips, answering business questions, and solving all kinds of problems, but getting them to interact with tools and data outside of a chat interface has been difficult. Developers have to piece together various connectors to keep them running, which is a brittle approach that is difficult to scale and poses governance issues. Google claims it is trying to solve this problem by launching its own fully managed remote MCP server, which will make it easier for agents to connect its Google and cloud services, such as Maps and BigQuery. The…
Oboe, the learning startup from Anchor co-founders and former Spotify executives Nir Zicherman and Michael Mignano, today announced that it has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by a16z, with participation from existing investors Eniac, Haystack, Offline, and Factorial. The round also saw investment from individuals such as Adam DiAngelo, Gary Tan, Lenny Racitzky, Matty Staniszewski, Mikey Schulman, Jared Hecht, and MG Siegler. The platform, which officially launched in September, allows users to define learning goals and use AI to create courses for them. The startup’s funding comes three months after the app launched and a year after…
Unacademy, once one of India’s best-known edtech startups, may now be worth less than $500 million, down 85% from its peak pandemic-era valuation, as the company undergoes a major reset and explores merger and acquisition options. The company’s valuation has plummeted from a peak of $3.5 billion three years ago to less than $500 million today, Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal said Wednesday in a detailed note posted on X to mark the startup’s 10th anniversary. He also confirmed that the startup is in M&A negotiations. India’s edtech landscape has been disrupted since the pandemic, with the sector seizing a rare…
In recent years, new helpers have arrived at the North Pole. It’s AI. Tavus, an AI startup that uses voice and facial cloning technology to create digital replicas, has launched its AI Santa experience for the second year in a row. This allows parents and children to video chat with a virtual version of Jolly Old Saint Nick. After signing up for a free account, users will be able to interact with the AI Santa via text, phone, or video chat. Users can tell AI Santa what they want for Christmas, share their holiday plans, and find out if they’re…
Pet wellness company Petco has taken portions of its Vetco Clinics website offline after a security flaw exposed large amounts of customers’ personal information to the open web. After TechCrunch alerted the company that data about Vetco customers and their pets had been compromised, Petco confirmed in a statement that it was investigating the data breach at its veterinary services company and declined further comment. This security lapse allowed anyone on the Internet to download customer records from Vetco’s website without requiring the user’s login information. At least one customer record has been published and indexed by Google, allowing anyone…
December 10, 2025Ravi LakshmananHardware security/vulnerabilities Three security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) Integrity and Data Encryption (IDE) protocol specification that could expose local attackers to significant risk. According to the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG), this flaw affects PCIe Base Spec Revision 5.0 and later, a protocol mechanism introduced by an IDE Engineering Change Notice (ECN). “Depending on the implementation, this could result in one or more of the following security breaches for the affected PCIe components: (i) information disclosure, (ii) privilege escalation, or (iii) denial of service,” the consortium notes. PCIe is a…