Techin' Geek

Waymo has nearly finalized a new $16 billion funding round that will value the robotaxi company at $110 billion, according to the Financial Times.

More than three-fourths of that funding will reportedly come from a source close to home — Alphabet, where Waymo is a subsidiary. (The company was incubated as part of Alphabet’s “moonshot factory” X.)

The FT reports that Waymo is bringing on new investors Dragoneer, Sequoia Capital, and DST Global, with existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and Abu Dhabi sovereign fund Mubadala also participating in the round.

When contacted by TechCrunch, a company spokesperson said in a statement, “While we don’t comment on private financial matters, our trajectory is clear: with over 20 million trips completed, we are focused on the safety-led operational excellence and technological leadership required to meet the vast demand for autonomous mobility.”

The company is expanding quickly, including with a recent launch in Miami. That growth has come with some challenges, including a number of robotaxis that stalled at traffic lights during a widespread San Francisco blackout.

Waymo has more than $350 million in annual recurring revenue, according to the FT. The company last raised a $5.6 billion Series C in 2024, valuing the company at $45 billion.

Kofi Ampadu, the partner at a16z who led the firm’s Talent x Opportunity (TxO) fund and program, has left the firm, according to an email he sent to staff that TechCrunch obtained. This comes months after the firm paused TxO and laid off most of its staff.

“During my time at the firm, I was deeply grateful for the opportunity and the trust to lead this work,” Ampadu wrote in the email, sent Friday afternoon, with the subject line “Closing My a16z Chapter.”

“Identifying out-of-network entrepreneurs and supporting them as they sharpened their ideas, raised capital, and grew into confident leaders was one of the most meaningful experiences of my career,” he wrote.

Ampadu led the program, which launched in 2020, for over four years until its pause last November, taking over for the initial leader, Nait Jones. Afterward, Ampadu seems to have worked at a16z’s latest accelerator, Speedrun.

Ampadu’s departure perhaps signals the end of the TxO chapter. The fund and program focused on supporting underserved founders by providing access to tech networks and investment capital through a donor-advised fund. Though some founders spoke highly of the program, others criticized the controversial donor-advised structure. The program also launched a grant program in 2024 to provide $50,000 to nonprofits that help diverse founders.

Its last cohort was in March 2025, and its indefinite pause came as many top tech names reframe, cut, or eliminate prior public commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We’ve reached out to a16z and Ampadu for comment.

His full note below:

I moved to the United States three months before my 11th birthday. One month later, I started 6th grade in a school more than 5,000 miles from my home, my friends, and everything familiar. Recently, my mom reminded me that my school required me to enroll as an English-as-a-Second-Language student. My memory immediately returned to how confused I felt. Even at 10 years old, I knew it made no sense that a kid from Ghana, an English-speaking country, was being asked to learn a language he already spoke fluently.

This was a systems requirement, a blanketed assumption about what students from certain places could or could not do. That same type of systemic assumption is what we set out to challenge through the Talent x Opportunity Initiative. The venture ecosystem often relies on proxies such as schools, networks, and prior credentials, which can obscure exceptional founders who do not follow the most common paths. TxO invested in and supported these overlooked founders to bridge the gap between talent and opportunity.

During my time at the firm, I was deeply grateful for the opportunity and the trust to lead this work. Identifying out-of-network entrepreneurs and supporting them as they sharpened their ideas, raised capital, and grew into confident leaders was one of the most meaningful experiences of my career.

As I move on to my next chapter, I leave with pride in what we built and gratitude for everyone who helped shape it. Thank you for the trust, the collaboration, and the belief in what is possible. There is more work to do and I am excited to keep building.

A confidential informant told the FBI in 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a “personal hacker,” according to a document released by the Department of Justice on Friday.

The document, which was released as part of the Justice Department’s legally required effort to publish documents related to its investigation into the late sex offender, does not identify who the alleged hacker was, but does include several details about them. 

According to the informant, the hacker was an Italian born in the southern region of Calabria and specialized in finding vulnerabilities in iOS, BlackBerry devices, and the Firefox browser. 

The hacker allegedly developed zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools and sold them to several countries, including an unnamed central African government, the U.K., and the United States. The informant told the FBI that Epstein’s hacker sold a zero-day to Hezbollah, which paid him with “a trunk of cash.”  

Per the informant, the hacker “was very good at finding vulnerabilities.”

It’s important to note that this document contains allegations from only the informant, not from the FBI directly, so it’s unclear how trustworthy the information and allegations are. 

The FBI declined to comment when reached by TechCrunch. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. 

On Friday, the Justice Department announced the release of 3.5 million additional pages from the Epstein files. The newly released files, some heavily redacted, include more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. 

Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of software for selling life insurance, debuted on the Nasdaq on Thursday. As one of the year’s first major tech IPOs, the insurtech platform is being closely watched as a bellwether for the 2026 listing cycle.

The company and its selling shareholders raised approximately $200 million in the offering, selling 10.5 million shares at $19 each under the ticker symbol “LIFE” — one of the more on-the-nose choices in recent memory. The name fits. Ethos runs a three-sided platform where consumers buy policies online in 10 minutes without medical exams. It says over 10,000 independent agents use its software to sell those policies and that carriers like Legal & General America and John Hancock rely on it for underwriting and administrative services. Ethos itself isn’t an insurer — it’s a licensed agency earning commissions on sales.

Though the company’s stock closed its first day as a public company at $16.85, 11% below its IPO price of $19, Ethos co-founders Peter Colis and Lingke Wang still have plenty to celebrate, having grown the 10-year-old business to public-market scale.

“When we launched [the business], there were like eight or nine other life insurtech startups that looked very similar to Ethos, with similar Series A funding,” Colis told TechCrunch. “Over time, the vast majority of those startups have pivoted, been acquired at subscale, remain at subscale or gone out of business.”

For instance, Policygenius, which raised over $250 million from investors, including KKR and Norwest Venture Partners, was acquired by PE-backed Zinnia in 2023. Meanwhile, Health IQ, a startup that secured more than $200 million from prominent VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, filed for bankruptcy that same year.

Ethos, which has raised over $400 million in venture capital, could have easily succumbed to a similar fate. Instead, the company remained laser-focused on reaching profitability as the era of cheap capital and easy fundraising came to an end in 2022. “Not knowing what the ongoing funding climate would be, we got really serious about ensuring profitability,” Colis said.

That financial discipline transformed it into a profitable company by mid-2023, according to its IPO documents. Since then, Ethos has also maintained a year-over-year revenue growth rate of more than 50%. In the nine months ending September 30, 2025, the company generated almost $278 million in revenue and just under $46.6 million in net income.

Still, the company ended its first day as a public company with a market capitalization of about $1.1 billion, a valuation that’s significantly below the $2.7 billion it garnered in its last private round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in July 2021.

When asked why Ethos went public, Colis said that a big part of the reason was to bring “additional trust and credibility” to potential partners and clients. He explained that because many major insurance carriers are over a century old, being publicly traded signals the company’s staying power.

The largest outside shareholders of Ethos include prominent firms, including Sequoia, Accel, Google’s venture arm GV, and SoftBank, as well as General Catalyst and Heroic Ventures. Sequoia and Accel did not sell shares in the IPO, the company disclosed.

Fintech firm Marquis told customers that it plans to seek compensation from its firewall provider after blaming the company for a breach that allowed hackers to steal its customers’ personal and financial data.

In a memo shared with customers this week and seen by TechCrunch, Marquis said it believes that its August 2025 ransomware attack happened because the company’s firewall service provider SonicWall had its own data breach that exposed critical security information about its customers’ firewalls. That earlier breach of SonicWall allowed hackers to obtain credentials needed to launch a ransomware attack against Marquis, the memo said.

Marquis said its third-party investigation determined that the hackers obtained information about its firewall during the breach at SonicWall, which Marquis claims was used to circumvent its firewall. Marquis confirmed in the communication that it stored a backup of its firewall configuration file in SonicWall’s cloud. 

The company was “evaluating its options” regarding its firewall provider, including the “recoupment of any expenses spent by Marquis and its customers in responding to the data incident,” according to the memo.

When reached for comment, Hanna Grimm, an agency spokesperson representing Marquis, did not address or dispute the company’s recent communication to customers, but reiterated the claim linking its breach with an earlier theft of its firewall configuration.

“In September 2025, after the data security incident affected our systems, our firewall service provider, an industry-leading cybersecurity company, publicly disclosed that a threat actor had earlier in the year gained unauthorized access to its cloud backup service,” the statement said. 

“Marquis had recently begun using this provider’s firewalls to help protect our network,” the statement added. “While the provider initially reported that fewer than 5% of customers were affected, it later clarified in October 2025 that firewall configuration data and credentials associated with all customers using the cloud backup service, including Marquis, had been accessed.”

When contacted by TechCrunch, SonicWall spokesperson Bret Fitzgerald said that the company has asked Marquis for evidence to substantiate its claims and said it would continue to engage with its customer.

“We have no new evidence to establish a connection between the SonicWall security incident reported in September 2025 and ongoing global ransomware attacks on firewalls and other edge devices,” Fitzgerald said.

The Texas-based Marquis, which allows hundreds of banks and credit unions to visualize their customers’ data, began notifying hundreds of thousands of people last month that their information was taken during its ransomware attack.

The company has access to large amounts of data belonging to consumer banking customers across the U.S., including personal information, financial data, and Social Security numbers, which the hackers stole.

SonicWall conceded in October that an earlier breach of its systems had in fact affected all of its customers who backed up their firewall files to SonicWall’s cloud. It had previously said hackers stole only a fraction of its customers’ firewall configuration files containing policies and settings.

In the communication seen by TechCrunch, Marquis said it called in a third-party to investigate whether a patch it had failed to roll out at the time of the breach could have been to blame, but concluded that the patch related to a flaw that was not exploitable in a way that could have allowed hackers to access the company’s data.

Marquis’ spokesperson declined to provide a number of how many individuals are affected by its data breach. The number of individuals known to be affected by the breach is expected to rise as new data breach notifications are submitted to state attorneys general. 

Do you know more about the Marquis data breach? Do you work at Marquis or a company affected by the breach? We would love to hear from you. To securely contact this reporter, you can reach out using Signal via the username: zackwhittaker.1337