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Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is seeking to raise about $20 billion in what will be the largest fund in its history, to capitalize on global investors' interest in backing U.S. artificial intelligence companies, sources told Reuters. The tech investment firm, known informally as a16z, has told limited partners that the fund will be dedicated to growth-stage investments in AI companies and draw upon global investors keen on investing in American companies, the sources said. The record fundraising and the goal of capitalizing on foreign investment interest in the U.S. tech industry come against the backdrop of a sweeping tariff...

Evry, France-based Ÿnsect, a start-up focused on producing fish feed, pet food, and organic plant fertilizers from insects, announced on Thursday, 21 February it had raised USD 125 million (EUR 110 million) via a Series C funding round. The new fundraising comes on top of prior investments of USD 75 million (EUR ) since its founding in 2011 that allowed the company to build its primary insect farm in Amiens, Northern France, which grows mealworms, or molitor beetle larvae. The new round of funding came from Astanor Ventures, Bpifrance, Talis Capital, Idinvest Partners, Finasucre, and Compagnie du Bois Sauvage and...

A VC friend told me he estimates the average age of the entrepreneurs who pitch him is somewhere around 25, if only because most of the most valuable tech companies were launched by young entrepreneurs. Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he started Facebook. Bill Gates was 21 when he started Microsoft. Co-founder Paul Allen was a decrepit 23. Steve Jobs was 21 when he co-founded Apple. Co-founder Steve Wozniak was 26; "forgotten" co-founder Ronald Wayne was -- gasp -- in his 40s. Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Nvidia's Jensen Huang were 30. Yet he was hardly an exception. A study conducted...

Take what happened in the past two weeks: Charlie Javice, the founder of the financial aid startup Frank, was arrested, accused of falsifying customer data. A jury found Rishi Shah, a co-founder of the advertising software startup Outcome Health, guilty of defrauding customers and investors. And a judge ordered Elizabeth Holmes, the founder who defrauded investors at her blood testing startup Theranos, to begin an 11-year prison sentence April 27. *SNIP* When Javice was trying to sell her college financial planning startup, Frank, to JPMorgan Chase, she told an employee not to share exactly how many people used Frank’s service,...

A Silicon Valley flying car startup that received backing from Google's Larry Page and set out to revolutionize the way people get around is closing locations and laying off employees. Kittyhawk gave pink slips to 100 employees, according to a WARN notice filed with state labor officials on Sept. 22. The WARN notice posted with California's Employment Development Department also indicated that the company is permanently closing three offices, including two in Palo Alto at 821 San Antonio Rd. and 4062 Fabian Way and another in Mountain View at 2639 Terminal Blvd. The layoffs and closures were reported to the...

In the latest sign that the U.S. housing shortage is reaching crisis levels, a Bay Area startup is offering bunk-bed style pods at $800 a month for up to 14 people to live in a single home. Brownstone Shared Housing, an eight-month-old startup, bills itself as a short-term solution for students or people working on temporary jobs.

Would you donate to causes that work against everything you believe in? Would you give your hard-earned money to people who will use that money to fund objectionable actions? These seem like ridiculous questions, yet for millions of conservatives, this happens daily. Whether it's ordering a cup of coffee from Starbucks, which matches donations to Planned Parenthood; dining at a restaurant that refuses to serve police officers; or banking with a financial institution that fires its unvaccinated employees, tens of millions of freedom-loving Americans are spending their money daily on companies that hate their values.Some historians believe that the average...

A second juror on Wednesday was excused from the Theranos trial after the woman expressed religious concerns about Elizabeth Holmes being punished if she's found guilty. Juror No. 4 told U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila that she wanted to speak to him about concerns with her service. She said she was concerned she couldn't continue serving on the case because she's a Buddhist. "If she is found guilty and gets punishment from the government for that I feel guilty for that every day in my life," she told the judge.

The German startup Rocket Factory Augsburg, or RFA, has concluded another test of their RFA One rocket. In the test, the company performed a destructive cryogenic pressure test of their first stage prototype. The company has shown a video in which the prototype stage broke apart after it was fueled with cryogenic nitrogen to test the quality of the welds and determine the pressure at which the structure fails. The company previously switched from the gas generator cycle to a staged combustion design for their engine. The RFA One is a three-stage rocket currently in development. The current design calls...

... Steve Jobs’ history with LSD is well-documented; Bill Gates has even hinted at psychedelic use. But for Justin Zhu, co-founder of Iterable, a marketing startup valued at US$2 billion, instead of stirring a creative breakthrough, microdosing led to Zhu being ousted as CEO, reports Bloomberg.... Iterable co-founder Andrew Boni emailed staff to let them know of the decision and informed them that he would be replacing Zhu as CEO. The email was obtained by Bloomberg and while Boni praised Zhu as a “world-class innovator and creative thinker,” he also alleged that Zhu’s actions “undermined the board’s confidence in Justin’s...

Ohio has a lot riding on the success of Lordstown Motors. Last year, Gov. Mike DeWine declared the electric vehicle startup “the future” while visiting the plant, the site of a shuttered General Motors assembly plant near Youngstown, about six months before state officials approved it for $20 million in tax credits. Secretary of State Frank LaRose last week was the latest in a procession of state officials who, after touring the plant, lauded the company’s promise for the economically beleaguered Youngstown area. JobsOhio, the state’s private economic-development arm, has pledged $4.5 million in grants to the company. Former President...

Databricks' software helps companies prepare data for analysis and artificial intelligence models.Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Databricks Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Technology television interview in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2019.Databricks, a start-up whose software helps companies quickly process large sets of data and get it ready for analysis, said Monday it has raised $1 billion in fresh cash, including from a few prominent corporate investors. Amazon Web Services, Alphabet's CapitalG venture arm and Salesforce Ventures all joined in, according to a statement. Microsoft, which invested in Databricks earlier, is also participating in...

A startup near Tokyo has recently begun accepting orders for a service beginning next spring to fly customer items high into the stratosphere by balloon and capture images of them against the backdrop of Earth and outer space. Space Balloon Inc. based in Mito, northeast of Tokyo, will launch a balloon carrying remote-controlled cameras and objects of a customer's choice that will travel to an altitude of around 25,000 meters above sea level to capture images giving the impression that the items are floating in space. The balloon, inflated with helium gas and measuring about 2 meters in diameter, will...

Company develops money disinfection module on bank ATMs, removing 99% of bacteria, viruses, including novel coronavirusAn Istanbul-based tech company has manufactured a paper money disinfection module for ATMs to remove bacteria and viruses from paper money. "The module we developed makes all ATMs hygienic and environmentally friendly in 15 minutes," Furkan Erucan, the Co-Founder of Money Shower, told Anadolu Agency. With instant disinfection technology, we prevent people from being infected by all microorganisms, including the coronavirus, he said. "There are now 26,000 bacterias of 500 types on average on banknotes circulating in Europe. These numbers are enough to make people...

Howdy folks. A few years ago, I purchased a refurb Dell PC through Staples. Today, I'm stuck in the infinite startup-and-repair loop. With the refurb PCs, they don't supply physical media. I made a bootable USB on my laptop, but that doesn't work. I can repair only if I have an installation disc. Now, if I had purchased this software directly from MS, MS would allow me to directly download the ISO image after inputting my product key on the website. I have the product key -- the refurb company put a new label on the side of the PC....

<p>Theranos, the biotech company started by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, has another hurdle to cross in its whole "we're totally a legit blood-testing company" campaign. This time, it turns out that tens of thousands of blood tests were voided, making them totally invalid. Whoops!</p>

We haven't really written much about the insane Theranos scandal, though we discussed it on our podcast. The whole story is pretty crazy -- involving a heavily hyped up company that appeared to basically be flat out lying to everyone about what it could do. The company still exists, but barely. The company's founder and CEO, who was plastered across magazine covers and compared frequently to Steve Jobs, has been banned from running a lab for two years, and the company is now facing a $140 million lawsuit from its biggest partner, Walgreens, who claims that Theranos repeatedly lied to...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

It's worth asking why Elizabeth Holmes is still leading the embattled blood testing company Theranos Inc. But there may be a good reason why she still is in charge, one that has little to do with the scandal-ridden company's performance to date. Forget what venture capitalist Tim Draper — one of the first to invest in the Palo Alto company — implied this week that Holmes is being attacked because she's a young, female entrepreneur. The simple fact is that Theranos has not been able to deliver on its technology from a commercial, scientific or regulatory standpoint, and that falls...