What happens to the humans of Humane

Thursday, February 20, 2025 Posted by bloggerdaddy

Thursday, February 20, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we have more on Humane's chaotic closing chapter; we dig into the founder of electric aircraft company Beta Technologies; and we learn about a new venture firm backing underrepresented founders. Onward!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Humane

Humane's final hours: After AI hardware startup Humane announced it was being partially acquired by HP on Tuesday, some of its employees were offered roles with sizable raises at the new parent company, while others were told they were out of a job. Read more

Beta's plan: Beta Technologies, an electric aircraft company, is doing things a bit differently. Rebecca Bellan has a great profile out today about the company's founder and CEO, Kyle Clark, including why he decided to build Beta in Vermont and ignore venture funding. Read more

Figure's new model: Robotics company Figure unveiled a new machine learning model for humanoid robots. The "generalist" vison-language-action model uses images and speech to instruct robots to do household chores. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Everyone's exposed: Cocospy and Spyic, two stalkerware apps, have a bug that allows anyone to access the personal information from devices that are compromised by either software. The bug also exposes the emails of anyone who signed up to use these stalkerware apps. At least it's even, right? Read more

Early bird gets the worm: When Arize AI launched its AI observability platform in 2020, the market looked very different. Arize was a few years early and has seen explosive growth over the last two, including $70 million in fresh funding. Read more

Cash for Cherryrock: Cherryrock Capital is a new venture firm launched by former Taskrabbit CEO, Stacy Brown-Philpot. It will back startups led by diverse founders at the Series A and Series B stages. Read more

FTC calls censorship: The Federal Trade Commission announced today that it will launch a public inquiry into "censorship by tech platforms." It's currently soliciting comments from people who have been banned — or felt censored — by a tech platform due to their affiliations and views. Read more

A hack!: U.K. healthcare company HCRG Care Group is investigating a cybersecurity incident after a ransomware gang claims to have breached the company's system. Medusa, the ransomware gang, claims to have 2TBs of HCRG's data. Read more

Around the web

Turkish translators: The translation industry is feeling the pressure of AI. Rest of World reports that translators in Turkey are increasingly working to help AI companies improve their translation abilities, even as other opportunities for them in the industry shrink. Read more

Deleting DEI: Ziff Davis, the media company that owns publications such as CNET and PCMag, is the latest company to scrub DEI from its websites. However, the company is trying to assure its employees that nothing has actually changed. Read more

Before you go

Image Credits: Dinendra Haria/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

Amazon what?: Did you know that Amazon had its own Zoom alternative that launched back in 2017? I certainly didn't. It seems other people didn't know either, leading the company to shut down the Chime platform. Read more