Tech Rookies Staff

Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter recapping noteworthy happenings in tech over the past few days. This week, TechCrunch viewed leaked documents out of SpaceX showing some questionable practices related to employee stock options. X CEO Elon Musk announced that he would open source Grok, X’s AI-powered chatbot meant to … Read more

At MWC 2024, Huawei’s Dr. Peter Zhou took the wraps off a number of new data storage products, including the company’s next-gen 10 Petabyte OceanStor Arctic magneto-electric storage solution. When we reported on it recently, details were incredibility light. We knew it would be a magneto-electric disk (MED) that probably spins, and the first generation … Read more

Gumroad, an e-commerce company for creators, updated its rules to more strictly limit NSFW content, citing restrictions from payment processors like Stripe and PayPal. For creators who sell adult art, like explicit comic books or lewd cosplay photos, these sudden policy changes can be detrimental, resulting in an unforeseen loss of income. “I’m concerned on … Read more

Pilot season has officially begun for the world of humanoid robotics. Last year, Amazon began testing Agility’s Digit robots in select fulfillment centers, while this January, Figure announced a deal with BMW. Now Apptronik is getting in on the action, courtesy of a partnership with Mercedes-Benz. According to the Austin-based robotics startup, “as part of … Read more

A startup out of Paris that began life building marketing tools has raised $22 million after making a successful pivot into billing — a space it discovered was even more broken among potential customers. Lago, developer of an open-source billing platform, has picked up the funding across two rounds of funding it’s revealing to coincide … Read more