Also: Revolut gets pulled into the Rippling-Deel fight
Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we're looking at the latest entrant in the ongoing Rippling-Deel drama; Archer's plans for air taxis in NYC; how the Trump admin is working to kneecap China's AI industry; Rivian's latest commercial EV partner; new updates for Grok, and more. Let's dive in! – Rebecca | | | Image Credits: Archer Aviation | 1. Rise above the traffic: Archer Aviation plans to launch an air taxi network in NYC to help people skip the traffic to the airport, and it has partnered with United Airlines to get started. Archer's aircraft are still to be flight approved by the FAA, so this dream will remain one for a while yet. Read More 2. Popular AI coding assistant Windsurf is reportedly in talks to be acquired by OpenAI for $3 billion. If the deal goes through, it could jeopardize the credibility of OpenAI Startup Fund, which had invested in Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, which competes with Windsurf. Read More 3. This could be a TV show: The legal drama between Rippling and Deel is getting juicier. The Rippling employee who claimed Deel paid him to spy said he was paid via UK fintech Revolut. Now, Rippling wants Revolut to reveal the source of those payments. Read More | | | Image Credits: tupungato / Getty Images | 📴 Undoing the damage: A judge has ordered federal agencies to "turn the funding spigots back on" after Trump froze congressionally authorized grants and contracts under Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. Read More ❤️🩹 Privatize everything: Chapter, a Medicare advisory startup co-founded by Vivek Ramaswamy that has ties with Vice President J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel, has closed a $75 million funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation. A lot to unpack there. Read More 🇨🇳 Sinophobia galore: The Trump admin is reportedly looking for ways to kneecap China's DeepSeek by limiting its ability to buy Nvidia's AI chips, and potentially banning Americans from accessing its AI services. It's part of the larger anti-China sentiment championed by the Trump admin. Read More 🍯 Like glue: Wasp wants to bring together the fragmented dev tooling landscape. The company has raised $3.7 million to expand its full-stack web app developer tool that acts as the glue between the different platforms developers are already using, like React and Node. Read More ✊ Fight the power: Former top US cybersecurity official Chris Krebs said he's going to fight back against a federal investigation that Trump ordered on him after Krebs refused to tow the party line that the 2020 election was stolen. Krebs said the probe was about "the government pulling its levers to punish dissent." Read More 🚐 HelloRivian: Rivian has its first commercial customer that's not Amazon. HelloFresh, a meal-kit delivery company, has added 70 electric Rivian vans to its fleet. It's a big deal for the EV maker, which ended its exclusivity deal with Amazon in November 2023. Read More | | | 🧠 Step aside Neuralink: Brain-computer interface company Precision Neuroscience says its device was cleared by the FDA late last month for limited uses. The approval brings its tech a step closer to becoming a commercially available technology that could allow people to control computers or devices with just their thoughts, reports Bloomberg. Read More 🤓 Enough scraping: Wikimedia Foundation wants AI companies to stop scraping its websites, so it has gone and released a dataset specifically optimized for training AI models, per The Verge. Wikimedia partnered with Google-owned Kaggle to publish a beta dataset of structured content in English and French. Read More 🤝 Anything to keep the line going up: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doesn't seem ready to take the hits from Trump's new chip export rules. The Financial Times reports that Huang visited Beijing on Thursday to meet with DeepSeek and Chinese vice-premier He Lifeng to discuss continued cooperation. Read More | | | 🤖 AI never forgets: Elon Musk's AI company xAI announced a "memory" feature for Grok that enables the bot to remember details from past conversations with a user. You can now ask Grok to tell you what it knows about you and choose what you want it to forget. Though we wouldn't bet on Grok actually "forgetting" any info about you. Read More | | | Featured jobs from CrunchBoard | | | Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter. | | | Update your preferences here at any time | | Copyright © 2024 TechCrunch, All rights reserved.Yahoo Inc. 680 Folsom Street,San Francisco,CA | | | | |
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