Perplexity received 780 million queries in May, CEO Aravind Srinivas shared onstage at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit on Thursday. Srinivas said that the AI search engine is seeing more than 20% growth month-over-month. “Give it a year, we’ll be doing, like, a billion queries a week if we can sustain this growth rate,” Srinivas said. “And…
Europe likely just suffered a setback in its attempt to reach another milestone in the commercial race to use lunar resources. Tenacious, which was set to become the first European-made rover to land on the moon, was aboard a lander that lost contact during its landing attempt — a strong sign that something went wrong. If…
President Donald Trump and his biggest political supporter Elon Musk are breaking up in the most public and 21st century way — via their own social networks. And while many predicted the Trump-Musk pair-up would eventually sour, it’s still worth asking and trying to answer, “How did we get here?” Until recently, Musk has been…
Circle, one of the world’s largest issuers of USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, ended its first trading day as a public company at $83.23 per share, 168% above its IPO price of $31 set the previous day. The IPO pop demonstrates public market investors’ interest in cryptocurrencies and stablecoins in particular amid…
Anysphere, the maker of AI coding assistant Cursor, has raised $900 million at a $9.9 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. The round was led by a returning investor Thrive Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Accel and DST Global. The massive round is Anysphere’s third fundraise in less than a year. The three-year-old startup secured its…
Well, it finally happened. This town wasn’t big enough for the two towering egos of billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, and now they’re duking it out publicly, albeit from their own separate corners of the web. Musk is taking to his own social media platform, X, to take jabs at Trump, and Trump…
Wing, the on-demand drone delivery company owned by Alphabet, is spreading its commercial wings with help from Walmart. The two companies announced Thursday plans to roll out out drone delivery to more than 100 Walmart stores in five new cities: Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa. Walmart is also adding Wing drone deliveries to its…
Bonfire Social, a new framework for building communities on the open social web, launched on Thursday during the FediForum online conference. While Bonfire Social is a federated app, meaning it’s powered by the same underlying protocol as Mastodon (ActivityPub), it’s designed to be more modular and more customizable. That means communities on Bonfire have more…
Google on Thursday announced an update to its Gemini 2.5 Pro preview model that the company claims is better at certain programming tasks. The company’s calling it an “updated preview,” building on the upgrade to Gemini 2.5 Pro that Google announced around a month ago. Google says the model will roll out in general availability…
Founders Fund has led another, enormous round for defense tech startup Anduril with a $1 billion investment as part of a new $2.5 billion raise, the largest check the firm has ever written. Existing investors also piled in, an Anduril spokesperson tells TechCrunch. Anduril has now doubled its valuation to $30.5 billion with this series…
