Also: HoneyBook may have earned its ZIRP-era valuation
Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we've got a presidential pardon, a startup with ARR to match its valuation, and how open source devs are fighting back against AI crawlers. We've also got consolidation in the gaming industry, the growing market for certifications, yet another startup addressing medical pain points, and more. Let's go! — Rebecca | | | Image Credits: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg / Getty Images | 1. Pardons for everyone: U.S. President Donald Trump has issued yet another presidential pardon – this time for Trevor Milton, the founder of bankrupt EV company Nikola who was convicted of defrauding investors. Milton had donated $920,000 to the Trump 47 Committee in 2024, plus $2 million to Republicans, and his lawyer is U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi's brother. Read More 2. Leave it to the internet: Open-source software developers see AI crawlers that ignore robots.txt protocols as the cockroaches of the internet, and some have found fun ways to fight back. Enter tools that do everything from block bots from Git servers to ones that enact vengeance. Read More 3. Rolling in money: HoneyBook looks like it is one of the few startups with ZIRP-era valuations to actually come out the other side intact. The business management software startup was valued in late 2021 at $2.4 billion, and today it says it's hit $140 million in ARR. Read More | | | 🧩 Patched up: Mozilla has seen to a security bug in the Windows version of its Firefox browser that was "being exploited in the wild." People exploiting the bug could escape Firefox's sandbox and access other apps and data on a user's computer. Read More 🎮 All your share are belong to us: South Korean gaming giant Krafton has acquired a controlling stake – "north of 75%" – in Indian gaming studio Nautilus Mobile for $14 million in cash. Nautilus develops the popular Real Cricket franchise. Read More 🤓 The struggle is real: With tech evolving as fast as it is, employees everywhere are racing to boost their skills and certifications. Enter Certiverse, a certification platform that just raised $11 million in a Series A led by Cherryrock Capital. Read More 🩺 Dozens of startups have cropped up to help reduce the administrative burden in healthcare, and the latest to the field is Taxo, an app with a "reasoning engine" that doctors and nurses can use for getting prior authorizations from insurers, patient intake, and medical billing. Read More | | | 🏆 Good guy AI: Wired's Steven Levy profiled Daniela and Dario Amodei, the sibling co-founders of Anthropic who defected from OpenAI to form the AI startup. They want to create AGI that will never go rogue, "a good guy, an usher of utopia." Read More ↘️ Unexpected: CoreWeave has priced shares at $40 in its IPO, raising $1.5 billion, per CNBC. It's nothing to sneeze at, but the IPO price is lower than the $47 to $55 CoreWeave had planned to sell shares for. Read More 🧑⚖️ No deleting: Reuters reports that a U.S. judge has ordered the Trump administration to preserve messages sent on the Signal messaging app discussing attack plans against the Houthis in Yemen that became public after leaders accidentally shared them with The Atlantic's editor Jeff Goldberg. Read More | | | 💸 Your billing, your choice: Google is giving Google Play developers in the U.K. the ability to use third-party billing options instead of Google's own system. It's a long-awaited response to an investigation from the U.K.'s competition regulator into Google's app store monopoly. 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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