Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20%-30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning AI — during a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s LlamaCon conference on Tuesday.
Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft’s code is AI-generated today. The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C++.
When Nadella threw the question back at Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO said he didn’t know how much of Meta’s code is being generated by AI.
On Microsoft rival Google’s earnings call last week, CEO Sundar Pichai said AI was generating more than 30% of the company’s code. Of course, it’s unclear how exactly Microsoft and Google are measuring what’s AI-generated versus not, so these figures are best taken with a grain of salt.
Julie Wainwright has taken two companies public, a pretty incredible feat by any standard. Yet in her new memoir, Time to Get Real, she offers readers something even more valuable: a blunt look at the messy realities of leadership. Wainwright shares the kinds of tough truths that many high-achieving CEOs can relate to but rarely discuss publicly, including the aftermath of what many would consider her first major setback, which was shutting down Pets.com during the 2000 market crash.
If you’re of a certain age, you definitely remember it. The online pet supplies startup had become instantly recognizable thanks to its memorable sock puppet mascot and catchy slogan, “Because pets can’t drive.” But what seemed like just a fleeting moment in the dot-com bubble’s burst would cast a shadow over Wainwright’s career for nearly a decade. “When I would talk to recruiters, it was like, ‘No one’s going to hire you anymore,’” Wainwright said in an interview with this editor earlier this week.
It came as a shock, given that Wainwright’s career trajectory initially seemed unstoppable. After cutting her teeth at Clorox, she rose through tech companies in the ‘90s when female leadership in the sector was exceedingly rare. As CEO of Berkeley Systems and later the online video store Reel.com, she worked “tons of hours” but was happy and, by her telling, succeeding, including growing Reel.com’s revenue from $3 million to $25 million — a time during which the company was sold to Hollywood Video. “I just operated better without a boss,” she said.
Then came the collapse that would have permanently derailed many careers. In 2000, Wainwright took Pets.com public, only to shut it down later that same year during the dot-com bubble burst. The professional blow was exacerbated by a personal one: she says that on the very same day she informed employees of the company’s closure, her husband asked for a divorce.
“My work is gone, I’m getting a divorce, and I don’t have children,” Wainwright, then 42, recalls thinking as she faced what felt like total life collapse. Making matters worse, the media coverage was “incredibly negative and intrusive,” to the point that she says days after the company’s closure, reporters showed up at her doorstep.
Wainwright describes what followed as a kind of long winter, where she was only offered roles leading turnaround efforts at failing companies. But that crossroads led to a remarkable second act. In 2010, she founded The RealReal, helping in the process to pioneer the luxury consignment market online. Like a lot of founders, Wainwright first set up the company out of her own home, but it soon outgrew her living room, and today, it processes many hundreds of thousands of different luxury items each month that it aims to sell within 90 days out of its more than 1.2 million square feet of warehouse space and operations centers. It’s also a publicly traded company; in her second trip to Wall Street, in 2019, Wainwright took the outfit through the traditional IPO process.
Unfortunately, this triumphant comeback has its own harsh chapter. In 2022, Wainwright was abruptly pushed out of The RealReal by board members she had recommended – another twist she doesn’t shy away from sharing. Instead, she names names in the book, and earlier this week, she described the move as a “power play” by an investor who “didn’t get his money out of the company and thought he could run the company better.”
Wainwright — who fully supports the company’s current CEO (she was the company’s first hire) — is still pissed off. She noted in conversation that “no founder is ever going to say they need to be shot and removed,” and it’s that honestly that makes the book – and Wainwright herself — so refreshing. In the corporate world, where people often spin narratives to make themselves look bulletproof, Wainwright is a straight shooter; if she doesn’t like something, she isn’t going to hold back her punches. If someone spins the story differently than she sees it, she’ll call it out. Where she messes up, she says so.
Even better about this memoir — in this reader’s opinion — is Wainwright’s ability to offer not just personal revelations but practical wisdom. She walks readers through her decision to bonus her sales staff a certain way, and shares her learnings about a leadership-evaluation quadrant she gleaned from McKinsey executives, including the realization she had hired one of the worst types: a “dumb aggressive” exec, meaning, in her words, someone whose “need to bully and coerce and to be on top supersede their abilities.”
There’s also an interesting new chapter unfolding. Wainwright is continuing her entrepreneurial journey with Ahara, a nutrition company that’s developing personalized dietary recommendations based on genetics and individual needs.
You can find our full conversation here, via TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC Download podcast. In the meantime, if you’re interested in a compelling read that’s both memoir and manual, offering founders something far more valuable than idealized success stories, you can pick up the book here.
Said Wainwright when we spoke, “I personally wrote it for entrepreneurs to give them a realistic view and hopefully inspire them and, you know, maybe they’ll think twice and not make the mistakes I made.”
Tech and consulting giant IBM was not immune to the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) cuts.
IBM had 15 of its federal contracts canceled due to DOGE-related cuts during the first quarter of 2025, according to reporting from Reuters and Bloomberg. These cuts amount to $100 million in future payments, per Bloomberg. Federal contracts represent between 5% and just under 10% of IBM’s consulting practice.
After being peppered with questions during IBM’s earnings call Wednesday, Arvind Krishna, IBM’s CEO, clarified that the cancellations were related to cutbacks at USAID. Both Krishna and James Kavanaugh, IBM’s CFO, then proceeded to downplay the potential impact of DOGE on the company’s future business.
“We’ve had a handful of contracts, either statement of work, or cancel and on our annualized backlog of over $30 billion in total consulting,” Kavanaugh said. “This is like less than $100 million of backlog over a duration of multiple years. So while no one’s immune, we are absolutely focused on monitoring the identity dynamic process. We’re prudently cautious around consulting for the year.”
IBM’s consulting business made up 34% of the company’s revenue in Q1. Krishna added that the company’s federal government consulting contracts largely focus on crucial areas.
“The vast majority is critical work — we actually process veterans benefit claims,” Krishna said. “We help process how the [General Services Administration] does procurement. We help implement payroll systems. I don’t think of these as optional. Now, are there some areas around the edges which could be viewed as discretionary? Yes. But in our case that is the minority of our business, not the majority.”
IBM’s consulting revenue was down 2% overall in Q1, according to the company’s first-quarter results. Revenue from consulting in Q1 was slightly over $5 billion.
“The diversity across our business positions us well to navigate the current climate,” Krishna said. “Our portfolio and track record of execution reinforce my confidence on this next chapter of our growth. I look forward to sharing our progress as we move through the rest of the year.”
One of the founders of startup accelerator Y Combinator offered unsparing criticism this weekend of the controversial data analytics company Palantir, leading a company executive to offer an extensive defense of Palantir’s work.
The back-and-forth came after federal filings showed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategy — is paying Palantir $30 million to create what it’s calling the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, or ImmigrationOS, to help ICE decide who to target for deportation, as well as offering “near real-time visibility” into self-deportations.
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham shared headlines about Palantir’s contract on X, writing, “It’s a very exciting time in tech right now. If you’re a first-rate programmer, there are a huge number of other places you can go work rather than at the company building the infrastructure of the police state.”
In response, Palantir’s global head of commercial Ted Mabrey wrote that he’s “looking forward to the next set of hires that decided to apply to Palantir after reading your post.”
Mabrey did not discuss the specifics of Palantir’s current work with ICE, but he said the company started working with the Department of Homeland Security (under which ICE operates) “in the immediate response to the murder of Agent Jaime Zapata by the Zetas in an effort dubbed Operation Fallen Hero.”
“When people are alive because of what you built, and others are dead because what you built was not yet good enough, you develop a very different perspective on the meaning of your work,” Mabrey said.
“We hire believers,” Mabrey continued. “Not in the sense of homogeneity of belief but in the intrinsic capacity to believe in something bigger than yourself. Belief is required because 1) our work is very, very hard and 2) you should expect to weather attacks like this all the time; from all sides of the political aisle.”
Graham then pressed Mabrey to “commit publicly on behalf of Palantir not to build things that help the government violate the US constitution,” though he acknowledged in another post that such a commitment would have “no legal force.”
“But I’m hoping that if they [make the commitment], and some Palantir employee is one day asked to do something illegal, he’ll say ‘I didn’t sign up for this’ and refuse,” Graham wrote.
Mabrey in turn compared Graham’s question to “the ‘will you promise to stop beating your wife’ court room parlor trick,” but he added that the company has “made this promise so many ways from Sunday,” starting with a commitment to “the 3500 enormously thoughtful people who are grinding only because they believe they are making the world a better place every single day as they see first hand what we are actually doing.”
On February 18, 2024, Ian Laffey posted on X that he and two others he’d just met built a cheap drone at a hackathon that calculated its coordinates simply by using its camera and Google Maps. He and his colleagues, Sacha Lévy and Carl Schoeller, were all engineers under the age of 25.
The tech had clear potential to combat rampant GPS jamming of drones in Ukraine. Instead of GPS, drone operators there have to use high-tech goggles to guide their drones by sight. But that leads to lots of problems, especially under poor conditions like thick fog or at night.
At the end of the hackathon, Schoeller wished his two teammates well and parted, hoping their paths might cross again.
But the tweet went viral and changed their lives. A day later, the three decided to apply to Y Combinator, successfully getting into its Spring 2024 cohort.
Now, their San Francisco-based company, Theseus, has just raised $4.3 million in seed funding in a round led by First Round Capital, with additional backing from Y Combinator and Lux Capital, it exclusively told TechCrunch.
A drone at a us special forces base using theseusImage Credits:Theseus
Theseus says it doesn’t build drones, but focuses on the hardware components and software that will enable pretty much any military drone to fly unmanned without GPS. Schoeller, Theseus’ CEO, told TechCrunch the company doesn’t build targeting systems. Its software is not deciding whether a certain spot is a legitimate military target or not — the sole focus is getting a drone from point A to B.
Theseus hasn’t won any U.S. military deals yet, and hasn’t been deployed in an actual battlefield. So it’s using its fresh capital to focus on further building out its tech, hiring for three engineering roles.
However, the viral hackathon tweet did get Theseus noticed by U.S. Special Forces, which has entered into an agreement for early testing and development. Theseus says it recently went to a secret Special Forces base to test out its latest system, sending TechCrunch a photo of it in action.
Overall, starting a company with people you’ve known for under a week “generally isn’t advised,” but in Theseus’ case, it warranted the leap of faith, Schoeller wrote on LinkedIn.
As robotics has advanced, industry has steadily adopted more robots to automate away many kinds of grunt work. More than 540,000 new industrial robots were installed worldwide in 2023, taking the number of total industrial robots active to above 4 million, per IFR.
Industrial robots typically excel at repetitive tasks, but they find it challenging to perform precise tasks, handle delicate materials, and adjust to changing conditions — a robot in a restaurant’s kitchen would get in the way more than be helpful, for example. That is why many industrial processes are still manual.
South Korean startup RLWRLD aims to solve this problem with a foundational AI model that it has built specifically for robotics by combining large language models with traditional robotics software. The company says this model will enable robots to make quick and agile movements and perform some amount of “logical reasoning” as well.
“Using RLWRLD’s foundation model, processes that require a lot of manual work can be completely automated by learning and copying human expertise, making work environments more efficient,” Jung-Hee Ryu, founder and CEO of RLWRLD, said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch.
The startup is now coming out of stealth with 21 billion KRW (about $14.8 million) in seed funding. The round was led by venture capital firm Hashed, and Mirae Asset Venture Investment and Global Brain also invested.
Notably, RLWRLD has attracted a long list of big strategic investors — Ana Group, PKSHA, Mitsui Chemical, Shimadzu and KDDI from Japan; LG Electronics and SK Telecom from Korea; and Amber Manufacturing from India.
RLWRLD said the seed funding will be used to fund proof-of-concept projects with its strategic investors; secure computing infrastructure like GPUs, purchase robots, and devices to collect extensive data; and hire top research talent. The startup will also use the new money to develop advanced hand movements involving five-fingers — a capability that’s not yet been demonstrated by its competitors like Tesla, Figure AI and 1X, Ryu said.
image credits: RLWRLD
Ryu said RLWRLD is also working with its strategic investors to explore ways to automate different human-centric workflows using its AI model. They are together preparing a humanoid-based autonomous action demonstration, scheduled for later this year, Ryu said. In addition, the company is working to develop a platform that can support various kinds of robots, including industrial, collaborative, autonomous mobile robots and humanoids.
When asked what inspired him to start a new company again, Ryu said he noticed how quickly AI startups were increasing in number in the U.S, Europe and China, while comparable AI startups in Korea and Japan were relatively absent.
He spoke with over 30 AI professors from Korea and Japan about their challenges — everything from the lack of infrastructure like data and GPUs, and the obstacles that discouraged them to launch a venture — and the opportunities available.
“I determined that it would be strategically beneficial to prioritize robotics foundation models (RFM) over the technologically saturated field of LLMs, capitalizing on Korea and Japan’s notable global strengths in manufacturing,” he said.
Soon afterwards, he brought on board six professors from top-ranked institutions in South Korea, including KAIST, SNU, and POSTECH, along with their research teams, to launch RLWRLD.
RLWRLD isn’t alone in tackling this problem. Startups like Skild AI and Physical Intelligence are building similar foundational models for robotics, as are larger firms like Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Nvidia.
But Ryu believes his startup has a good start, as it already has the AI and robotics experts it needs to develop foundational models for robotics, as well as humanoid robots with high degree of freedom (DoF).
“Additionally, [such companies] typically rely on low-DoF robots such as two-fingered grippers. RLWRLD has already secured a high-DoF reference robot, and therefore expects superior performance outcomes,” he said.
Ryu also said that thanks to its strategic investors, RLWRLD can quickly gather valuable data from manufacturing sites located nearby. In 2024, a report indicated that Japan and South Korea collectively accounted for 9.2% of worldwide manufacturing production.
RLWRLD aims to generate revenue as early as this year through proof-of-concept (PoC) projects and collaboration demonstrations with strategic partners.
The startup’s long-term goal is to cater to factories, logistics centers, and retail stores, and even robots that can be used in domestic environments to help with household chores. In the meantime, the priority is to target industrials since they are willing to pay the most and have strong demand for automation.
Thirteen years ago, Forerunner Ventures began helping to usher in a new era of consumer startups, including Warby Parker, Bonobos, and Glossier. None has gone through a traditional IPO process. Warby Parker was taken public through a special purpose acquisition vehicle. Bonobos was acquired by Walmart. Glossier is still privately held, along with many other design-forward brands in Forerunner’s portfolio.
That’s not a failure, according to Forerunner founder Kirsten Green. In today’s landscape, nearly every alternative to the traditional IPO has become the new norm.
Consider that companies like fintech Chime and smart ring outfit Ōura, founded in 2012 and 2013, respectively, were also early bets for Forerunner and have achieved valuations north of $5 billion, proving their staying power in crowded markets. But while Chime has confidentially filed to go public, Ōura’s CEO has said there are no immediate plans for an IPO.
At TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening late last week, Green made it clear she doesn’t mind. Asked specifically whether she is bothered by Ōura’s CEO, Tom Hale, repeatedly telling the media the company is not preparing an IPO anytime soon despite strong sales, she called the outfit an “off-the-charts phenomenal company,” adding that “we haven’t even gotten to the thought around our table about selling, because we’re here for the growth that’s happening.”
She suggested instead that investors long ago adapted to a world with fewer conventional public offerings, including by turning increasingly to the once-secondary secondary market to manage liquidity and exposure.
“We’re engaged in the secondary market, buying and selling,” Green said of Forerunner’s team, characterizing the shift as both practical and strategic. “Companies are waiting so long to go public. The venture model is generally 10-year fund lifecycles. If you now need to be a double-digit billion-dollar company to [stage] a successful IPO or [become traded] in the public markets, it takes time to get there.” The secondary market is “continuing to drive the industry” and allowing “people to unlock returns and liquidity.”
For longtime industry watchers, it’s a remarkable shift. In the past, firms could expect a major liquidity event within a few years: an acquisition, a classic stock market debut. Yet the growing reliance on the secondary market isn’t just a response to public markets that reward scale and favor already high-performing companies.
Another major benefit, Green suggested last week, is that price discovery is more efficient when there are more participants involved — even if it ultimately means a discount to one of her deals.
Green addressed, for example, Chime, the neobank that became a household name during the fintech boom. Its valuation has zigzagged wildly in recent years, from $25 billion in 2021 when it last closed a primary round of funding from a small group of venture investors, down to a reported $6 billion valuation last year on the secondary market, which typically features many more participants. More recently, it reportedly climbed again to $11 billion.
“In terms of the prices,” Green said, “if you think about it, the round that gets done, the Series D, that was a negotiation between the company and an investor. With the secondary market, you’ve got more people in the mix, right? And then when you [eventually] go to the public markets, you’ve got everybody” setting the price for what they perceive to be the value of a company.
Green can afford to be a little less invested, so to speak, in those later valuations. While it’s always nice to be associated with eye-popping numbers, the firm’s strategy of partnering as early as possible with startups gives it more wiggle room than other venture firms might enjoy. “We try to be early,” Green said, pointing to the firm’s framework of identifying major shifts in consumer behavior and pairing them with emerging business models.
It worked in the early 2010s, when DTC brands like Bonobos and Glossier rode the mobile-social wave to breakout success. It worked again with subscription-first plays like another Forerunner company, The Farmer’s Dog, which sells gourmet dog food and is reportedly both profitable and seeing $1 billion in annualized revenue. And it’s what the firm is betting on now, with a focus on the intersection of invention and culture, as Green describes it.
Great companies, Green noted, need time to develop and not all growth paths look the same. Venture capital, once eager for exits, is learning to wait and, when necessary, to trade.
(You can listen to our conversation with Green from this same sit-down right here, via the StrictlyVC Download podcast; new episodes are published each Tuesday morning.)
If you ever call 911 from an area that’s hard to get to, you might hear the buzz of a drone well before a police cruiser pulls up. And there’s a good chance that it will be one made by Brinc Drones, a Seattle-based startup founded by 25-year-old Blake Resnick, who dropped out of college to run the company.
Brinc, which was founded in 2017 and counts OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a seed-stage investor, just announced today that it has raised $75 million in new funding led by Index Ventures.
This brings the startup’s total funding to $157.2 million. While Brinc isn’t disclosing its exact valuation, Resnick told TechCrunch it’s an “up-round” compared to its most recent round, a $55 million Series B in 2022. Brinc was last valued at $300 million in 2023, Bloomberg reported.
Brinc sells a variety of drone systems to police and public safety agencies. It’s part of a broader trend of U.S. drone startups manufacturing domestically due to increasing restrictions against Chinese companies that dominate the commercial drone industry. (Resnick briefly interned at DJI, by far the biggest Chinese player, a few years before founding Brinc.)
With this funding, Brinc is launching a “strategic alliance” with Motorola Solutions, which also invested in the round. Motorola Solutions is a giant in the U.S. security industry whose software powers many 911 call centers. The partnership will integrate Brinc drones directly into those centers, allowing operators to dispatch drones for certain emergency calls if they’re cleared by an existing Motorola AI system.
When it comes to the competition, Resnick tells TechCrunch that there’s plenty of room for growth in a market that is otherwise dominated by Chinese players. Beyond the Motorola partnership, he says Brinc offers its share of unique features, like the ability to break windows or deliver emergency medical devices.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) plans to host a hackathon next week focused on the creation of a “mega API” that will provide access to taxpayer data, according to Wired.
Wired says the hackathon is being organized by two DOGE staffers at the Internal Revenue Service — Gavin Kliger and Sam Corcos, who’s also CEO at healthtech startup Levels. Corcos has reportedly been telling others at DOGE that his goal is to build “one new API to rule them all.”
This would make it easy for cloud providers to access IRS data including taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, tax returns, and employment information, which could all be exported to external systems. According to Wired, a third-party party vendor would manage parts of the project, with Palantir “consistently” brought up as a candidate.
“It’s basically an open door controlled by Musk for all Americans’ most sensitive information with none of the rules that normally secure that data,” an anonymous IRS worker reportedly told Wired.
Aetherflux, the space solar startup founded by Baiju Bhatt, the billionaire co-founder of Robinhood, has raised $50 million in a Series A round as it works to launch its first low Earth orbit demonstration in 2026.
The San Carlos, California-based startup, which came out of stealth last October, aims to eventually launch a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites that can collect and transmit solar energy directly to “ground stations” on Earth. It’s an idea that was initially triggered by Isaac Asimov’s 1941 short story “Reason.” Bhatt is focused on turning this science fiction-inspired concept into reality.
But first, Aetherflux needs to get a satellite to orbit to prove out the tech, to “demonstrate that we have made this transformative progress of going from humans not having power from space to, for the very first time, there being power from space for humans,” Bhatt, the startup’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
At least, that’s the goal with next year’s launch, which will be supported by the fresh capital Aetherflux has raised. The round brings Aetherflux’s total funding to $60 million after Bhatt invested $10 million of his own funds into the company. The Series A round was led by Index Ventures and Interlagos, with participation from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and NEA, as well as some other interesting names like Jared Leto rounding it out.
Bhatt, who joined us on the TechCrunch Equity podcast earlier this year, told TechCrunch that Aetherflux will use the funds to hire more engineers and invest in the technology and infrastructure needed for its first several missions.
“Our team is primarily focused right now on building the payload that sits on top of the bus … that takes all the power that the satellite bus generates and turns it into laser power,” Bhatt said.
Aetherflux is using Apex Space’s Aries satellite bus. A satellite bus is the core structure and system of a satellite that provides essential functions for its operation, like power, propulsion, and communications. Most buses generate power through solar panels, and Bhatt says that power — as much as a kilowatt of energy — will be sent back to Earth via lasers.
On the receiving end will be Aetherflux’s “ground stations,” made up of photovoltaic arrays that convert sunlight to energy that is stored in batteries for later use. Bhatt said his team, which is made up of engineers and researchers from NASA, SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, Anduril, and the U.S. Navy, is also working on building out Aetherflux’s first ground station. The startup doesn’t have a location for the station yet, but it’s evaluating military sites where there’s more controlled air space.
In the future, Bhatt says the goal is to build small, portable ground stations — anywhere from 5 to 10 meters in diameter — to bring electricity to even the most remote locations.
“The thing we want to demonstrate [with the first mission] is the end-to-end power linking,” Bhatt said. “We want to be able to demonstrate that we actually have electricity on the ground and use that to light up a light installation or do some electronic stuff on the ground.”
Few have accomplished the feat of sending solar power from space to Earth. One of the only successful missions was in 2023 when researchers at Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project demonstrated wireless power transfer from low Earth orbit using microwave beaming. That proved the concept but falls short of Aetherflux’s pitch for a scalable, commercial system.
Aetherflux’s raise comes off the back of an award from the Department of Defense’s Operational Energy Capability Improvement Fund to develop space solar power for the U.S. military.
