Krafton, South Korea’s gaming giant known for titles including PUBG: Battlegrounds and Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), has acquired a controlling stake in 12-year-old Indian gaming studio Nautilus Mobile for $14 million in an all-cash deal. On Friday, the South Korean gaming company confirmed to TechCrunch that it has acquired a “north of 75% stake” in…

Certification platform Certiverse raised an $11 million Series A led by Cherryrock Capital, it announced this week. The company was founded by Ruben Garcia, Pablo Meyer, and Federico Lopez in 2023. It lets organizations develop certification exams at, its founders say, far less cost than traditional methods.  Certifications are an age-old method to gain technical…

Mexico City-based Mendel has raised $35 million in a Series B round of funding, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. Corporate spend management platform Mendel last raised in December 2021 — a $15 million Series A round and $20 million in debt — after participating in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 cohort. With this latest capital infusion, the…

NHS vendor Advanced will pay just over £3 million ($3.8 million) in fines for not implementing basic security measures before it suffered a ransomware attack in 2022, the U.K.’s data protection regulator has confirmed.  It’s half the fine that the Information Commissioner’s Office had initially sought in August 2024, when the data watchdog said it…

It’s only been a day since ChatGPT’s new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.” In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen AI-generated images representing…

Nvidia is looking to get into the server rental market. The semiconductor giant is reportedly nearing a deal to acquire Lepton AI, a company that rents out servers that are powered by Nvidia’s AI chips, according to The Information. The deal is reportedly worth several hundred million dollars, according to The Information, which cited unnamed…

Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the advent of large language models and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+ along with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to broaden its scope and invest more in AI startups. In a blog post Amazon shared with TechCrunch…

Microsoft is introducing a “deep research” AI-powered tool in Microsoft 365 Copilot, its AI chatbot app. There’s been a raft of deep research agents launched recently across chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok. Powering them are so-called reasoning AI models, which posses the ability to think through problems and fact-check themselves —…

Fintech Block laid off 931 people Tuesday, according to a leaked message from the company seen by TechCrunch. The news was announced to staff in an email from Block’s co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey. Dorsey told staff that Tuesday, Block will be “making some org changes, including eliminating roles and beginning the consultation process in…