TechCapsules

Everbloom’s new fiber, renoa, blends waste protein from cashmere, wool, down, and feather lint with a biodegradable biopolymer, then extrudes it to mimic natural fibers. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission approved renoa as the first new fiber classification in 25 years, marking a regulatory milestone. The startup has tested the material in garments such as a cashmere‑like sweater, gloves, and a durable scarf that survived tumble drying. Production is scaling, with the first commercial blends expected in [...]

The TechCrunch Founder Summit, presented by Fidelity Private Shares, will take place on November 4 at Boston’s SoWa Power Station, offering a full day of structured networking for founders and venture capitalists. Powered by Braindate, the event’s Networking Lounge lets participants pre‑schedule one‑on‑one and small‑group talks on specific topics, turning session insights into follow‑up conversations. Additional formats include topic‑driven roundtables, breakout panels that field audience questions, an Expo Hall for partner interactions, and a closing reception for informal [...]

Zest, a restaurant‑discovery startup founded in November 2024, launched an AI‑powered “restaurant concierge” that operates entirely through SMS. The agent draws on users’ credit‑card transaction data—imported via Plaid—to infer dining preferences, then offers personalized venue suggestions, checks real‑time availability, and books tables through integrations with OpenTable, Resy and SevenRooms. Users can engage the concierge by texting a shortcode, add it to group chats to aggregate multiple tastes, and even run in‑thread polls to settle group decisions. The [...]

Satlyt, a startup founded by former Google and SpaceX engineer Rama Afullo, demonstrated its orbital data‑center software in a NASA‑funded test earlier this month. The experiment, conducted with the University of Houston, used a single onboard computer to simulate a network of four hosts, four users and eight services, assigning tasks based on available compute and communication links. The software generated a processing plan and returned results to Earth, proving it can schedule workloads in orbit. Satlyt [...]

A two‑year‑old AI‑first law firm, Crosby, has submitted a bid to acquire select assets of the dissolving Wall Street stalwart Weil, Gotshal & Manges, including its trademark, brand and unspecified internal data, TechCrunch reports. Crosby also aims to recruit a portion of Weil’s 1,200 lawyers as the legacy firm prepares to vote on dissolution after its heir‑apparent declined leadership, top‑producing partners departed, and a planned merger with Willkie Farr & Gallagher fell through. Founded in 2023, Crosby [...]

Ollie, a privacy‑focused AI assistant startup, announced it will cease operations on November 6, a week after co‑founder and CEO Bill Lennon posted the notice on X. The company, which raised a $7.5 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures, offered a subscription‑based, text‑based assistant that integrated with users’ email and calendar to manage appointments, meal planning, bill payments, and later household budgeting. Ollie distinguished itself by achieving SOC 2 compliance, a rare privacy audit for consumer apps. Despite these [...]

Percepto, the Israeli‑U.S. drone‑inspection firm, unveiled Axion, a hardware‑agnostic AI platform that shifts the company to a software‑first model. Axion ingests inspection data from any third‑party drone, fixed or mobile sensor and legacy archives, then applies more than 160 AI models to deliver asset‑level condition insights and plain‑language query results. The SaaS service is aimed at critical‑infrastructure operators in oil‑and‑gas, power transmission and similar sectors, allowing them to prioritize maintenance without purchasing Percepto hardware. New CEO Julien [...]

South Korea is intensifying its push for a sovereign AI hardware ecosystem, leveraging domestic memory giants SK Hynix and Samsung and nearby fabs such as TSMC and Rapidus. Two home‑grown startups, Rebellions and FuriosaAI, have already shipped silicon—Rebellions’ Rebel100 matches Nvidia’s three‑year‑old H200, while Furiosa’s RNGD delivers 2.25 × the performance‑per‑watt of an older A100. This week Furiosa announced a $620 million Series D round to scale RNGD production to about 20,000 units this year and double output by 2027, with [...]