All posts tagged: startup

AI Startup Says It Will Pay People ,000 A Month to Masturbate… Yes, Really

AI Startup Says It Will Pay People $2,000 A Month to Masturbate… Yes, Really

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Jason Nelson via Decrypt.co, Joi AI is hiring 10 “masturbation consultants” at $2,000 for a month to test an AI-guided masturbation feature and document its effects on stress, sleep, mood, and confidence. The feature uses mood-matched AI voice sessions, and consultants would submit written feedback and questionnaires directly to the company. Joi AI says the campaign is intended to collect product feedback while drawing attention to AI’s growing role in sexual wellness and digital intimacy. Joi AI says it will pay people $2,000 a month to masturbate. Yes, you read that right. The AI companion startup is hiring 10 “masturbation consultants” to test a feature called Daily Guided Masturbation, which uses mood-matched AI voice sessions to guide users through the experience. Participants would document how regular use affects stress, sleep quality, mood, and confidence. The four-week role is open to adults 18 and older in the U.S. and the U.K. “The role is real, and we’ve had great responses since the posting went live,” Joi AI Head of Brand and Communication Julie Levin told Decrypt. we’re …

The pitch trick that helped an eSports startup raise M when VCs only wanted AI

The pitch trick that helped an eSports startup raise $20M when VCs only wanted AI

Published by skeptic

Earlier this year, Lucra Sports founder and CEO Dylan Robbins did something that no one else has ever done. He landed famed public investor Cathie Wood and her ARK Invest Venture Fund as a lead in a startup fundraising round. Lucra announced last month that it raised a $20 million Series B, led by the ARK fund, with participation from several other VCs. Robbins attracted ARK even though the fund had previously gotten badly burned on a similar eSports company: Skillz, a skill-based gaming platform in which the fund invested heavily before divesting at a loss. On top of that, Dylan landed this big fish as an investor even though his company is not in the one area that all VCs are currently chasing: AI. Lucra offers white-label interactive gaming competitions as a novel kind of loyalty program for businesses that serve consumers. Rather than, say, earning points toward a coupon, Lucra’s clients offer online tournaments for prizes, or supports friendly wagers between their customers on who will win games. Its customers include Five Iron Golf, …

Startup Battlefield 200 applications close before May 27  | TechCrunch

Startup Battlefield 200 applications close before May 27  | TechCrunch

Published by skeptic

The deadline to apply or nominate for Startup Battlefield 200 is Friday, May 27. This program is your shot at VC access, global visibility, TechCrunch coverage, and $100,000 in equity-free funding. If you’re building a breakout startup — or know a founder who is — now is the time to move. Apply today for the opportunity to take the TechCrunch Disrupt Stage alongside 200 of the world’s most promising early-stage startups. Image Credits:TechCrunch Final countdown for early-stage founders Pre-Series A founders, this is your last call: the strongest startups are already entering the arena, and the application window is closing fast. If your startup has already been nominated, don’t wait to finish your application. The final week always moves quickly, and last-minute submissions risk getting buried as applications surge ahead of Friday’s deadline. Know a startup that deserves the spotlight? Nominate them now so they still have time to apply before May 27. The companies that define categories rarely start polished Some of the most consequential companies in tech history didn’t launch with splashy fundraising announcements. They started with a pitch. Dropbox demoed to a room full of skeptics. Cloudflare took the stage before most people understood what …

Nuclear startup Deep Fission says it’s going public, again, and I have questions

Nuclear startup Deep Fission says it’s going public, again, and I have questions

Published by skeptic

One news headline this week had a whiff of déjà vu about it. Nuclear startup Deep Fission announced that it was going public, hoping to garner investor support to build subterranean reactors to power AI data centers. Wait, didn’t I already write that story? I could have sworn that I did.  Oh right, I did. Last September, Deep Fission said that it had gone public via a reverse merger with Surfside Acquisition, a Delaware shell company, a transaction in which a private company acquires an existing publicly listed entity to gain a stock market listing — raising $30 million in a concurrent private placement at $3 a share. Now it’s seeking $157 million in a Nasdaq IPO at $24 to $26 a share. You can see my confusion. Turns out the previous public listing was public in name only. The reverse merger with Surfside was completed, making Deep Fission a reporting company with SEC obligations, but its stock never actually traded. The company had said it intended to list on the OTCQB, a marketplace for …

New Interactive AI Startup Make Believe Develops Entertainment Content

New Interactive AI Startup Make Believe Develops Entertainment Content

Published by Daniella Wilson

A YouTuber-turned tech executive is launching an AI media lab that is betting on interactive video as the future of entertainment. Ben Relles, who channeled a career as an early YouTube creator into an executive role at the video platform, is launching Make Believe, an AI lab that will focus on creating tech that enables videos that can talk back to viewers, betting that it will enable forms of entertainment never previously possible. “A lot of the conversation in Hollywood is around how AI will make things cheaper and faster for movies and TV, and I would say for us we’re more focused on what formats were impossible before AI existed,” Relles tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. Imagine, for example, a cooking video where you can ask the chef questions as you prepare the dish at home, or a fitness creator who can critique your form, or a guitar coach helping guide you as they teach you a song. “Some of this we can already do, and some of this we need to …

This young startup is taking on a fragrance industry that hasn’t changed in a almost half century

This young startup is taking on a fragrance industry that hasn’t changed in a almost half century

Published by skeptic

Fragrance tech company Patina says it has raised $2 million in funding investors, including Betaworks and True Ventures.  The company focuses on creating new scent molecules using advanced molecular design, machine learning, and scent research. Today, most of the scent molecules used in consumer products are created by a small number of specialized labs, which then sell those molecules to fragrance houses or cosmetics companies — the brands that ultimately turn them into perfumes, candles, or flavored products. Patina is trying to shake that up, entering an area that has seen little innovation in the past half century. The company was founded by Sean Raspet and Laura Sisson. Raspet is an artist and perfumer who, over time, developed an obsession with human senses and began creating new scent and flavor molecules as a creative pursuit. Sisson, meanwhile, came from a background in food and software engineering, and became obsessed with human senses after discovering an entire scientific field dedicated to modeling them. The two met, naturally, at a scent art gallery in New York in …

Green steel startup Boston Metal is doubling down on critical metals

Green steel startup Boston Metal is doubling down on critical metals

Published by skeptic

In addition to steel, Boston Metal has also worked to use its technology with other metals, and a subsidiary (Boston Metal do Brasil) is setting up a commercial facility in Brazil to produce niobium, tantalum, and tin. The funding will help support that facility’s operation as well as future efforts to produce critical metals like vanadium, nickel, and chromium, says CEO Tadeu Carneiro. The funding comes after the company faced cash-flow problems following an industrial accident at the Brazil facility earlier this year. Boston Metal’s core technology is called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE). It involves running electric current through a reactor filled with ore dissolved in a molten electrolyte. The electricity heats everything up to about 1,600 °C (3,000 °F) and drives chemical reactions that separate the desired metal (or metals) from the ore. The metal gathers at the bottom of the reactor, where it can be siphoned off. In early 2025, Boston Metal completed the largest run of its pilot industrial cell in Woburn, Massachusetts, producing about a ton of steel. But the focus …

AWS nabs white hot gen AI media creation startup fal, becoming its preferred cloud provider

AWS nabs white hot gen AI media creation startup fal, becoming its preferred cloud provider

Published by skeptic

Generative AI’s rapid transition from text-based chatbots to high-fidelity media—spanning images, video, spatial 3D, and audio—has exposed a glaring bottleneck in the modern tech stack: infrastructure. Rendering pixels in real-time requires a staggering amount of compute, and developers are increasingly struggling to manage fragmented GPU clusters just to keep their applications online. Enter fal, a generative media creation platform that has quietly become the connective tissue for 2.5 million developers across the globe, offering literally hundreds of leading AI image, video, and audio creation and editing models — from proprietary ones like OpenAI’s ChatGPT-Images-2.0 and Google’s Nano Banana Pro 2 to open source rivals — all through its unified interface and APIs. Today, the San Francisco-based startup, recently valued at a massive $4.5 billion following a $300 million Series D round led by Sequoia Capital, announced it has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider. While the financial terms of the deal weren’t made public, the move signals a maturation in the generative media space, shifting the focus from simply building foundational …

Your Windows laptop is probably wasting performance on startup — here’s where to look

Your Windows laptop is probably wasting performance on startup — here’s where to look

Published by skeptic

It’s easy to think slow boot means your laptop is old or your SSD is dying. That was my first assumption, too, until I started timing things and realized the hardware was fine. The real problem was everything Windows was doing before and after I saw my desktop, and most of it was invisible to me. The frustrating part is that the usual advice doesn’t help much. You disable a few startup apps in Task Manager, run a cleanup tool, and the boot still drags. That’s because the startup apps list in Task Manager only shows a fraction of what actually runs at boot, and a chunk of the delay happens in places Task Manager can’t see at all. So instead of guessing, I went looking for where the time was actually going. If “Last BIOS time” is high, Windows tweaks won’t save you The delay before Windows even starts loading I spent a while trimming startup apps before I noticed something I had been ignoring. In Task Manager’s Startup apps tab, in the top-right …

Anthropic has acquired the dev tools startup used by OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare

Anthropic has acquired the dev tools startup used by OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare

Published by skeptic

Anthropic announced Monday it has acquired Stainless, a startup founded by former Stripe engineer Alex Rattray whose software is widely used by rival AI labs, including OpenAI and Google. Anthropic didn’t disclose terms of the deal. However, The Information reported last week that the company was in talks to acquire Stainless, which is backed by Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, for more than $300 million. The acquisition will take a key infrastructure supplier out of the hands of Anthropic’s competitors. The company told TechCrunch it will wind down all hosted Stainless products, including its SDK generator. An Anthropic spokesperson said Stainless customers will still own the SDKs they’ve generated to date and have full rights to modify and extend them however they wish. The New York-based startup, founded in 2022, rose to prominence in the emerging AI industry for automating the creation and maintenance of software development kits, or SDKs — the libraries developers use to interact with APIs. Rattray developed software that could take API specifications and turn them into production-ready SDKs across multiple …