The startup's technology is a twist on the virtual power plant concept, in which batteries are aggregated and portions of the whole are sold off to various customers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AWS CEO Matt Garman has harsh words for remote workers: return to the office or quit. The Amazon executive recently told employees who don’t like the new five-day in-person work policy that, “there are other companies around,” presumably companies they can work for remotely, Reuters reported on Thursday. Amazon’s top boss, Andy Jassy, told employees...

Days after 159 people accepted Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg’s offer of a six-month severance package to employees who wanted to leave, the company floated a new offer late on October 16 of a nine-month severance package to anybody who quit immediately. Employees had four hours to decide whether they wanted to take the deal. In […] © 2024 TechCrunch....

Despite Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights abuses, some investors are warming up to investing in the country’s startups. General Catalyst is planning to invest in Lean Technology, a Saudi Arabia-based fintech startup, the firm’s first investment in the Middle Eastern nation, the Information reported. Other Saudi Arabian startups that U.S.-based investors...

Stripe is in talks to acquire stablecoin platform Bridge for a whopping $1 billion, according to Forbes. The talks are reportedly in advanced stages, although nothing has been finalized.  Bridge, co-founded by Coinbase alumni Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, has built an API that helps companies accept stablecoins. The pair raised $58 million from investors...

On Wednesday, social network X (formerly Twitter) updated its Privacy Policy to indicate that it would allow third-party “collaborators” to train their AI models on X data, unless users opt out. While X owner Elon Musk trained xAI’s Grok AI chatbot on X user data, leading to an investigation by the EU’s lead privacy regulator, […] © 2024 TechCrunch....