Techin' Geek

On Wednesday, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department revealed that OpenAI and its former subsidiary Statsig have reached a settlement that mandates three years of oversight concerning the hiring practices of the AI organization.

The DOJ has claimed that these entities employed various strategies to bar U.S. citizens from applying for positions occupied by immigrant workers while they were being sponsored for permanent residency in the U.S. Though the companies did not acknowledge any wrongdoing, they consented to pay $3.2 million. Out of this amount, $1.2 million constitutes a fine, while the remainder of $2 million will be reserved for compensating U.S. citizens who applied for those roles, provided the DOJ identifies any individuals harmed.

The DOJ asserted that OpenAI and Statsig violated sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) by failing to genuinely seek qualified U.S. citizens for these positions before initiating permanent residency applications (PERM), as mandated by the INA. According to the DOJ, they did not post vacancies on public job boards, promoted roles during late-night radio segments, and insisted on paper applications instead of electronic formats.

Despite there being fewer than 10 positions involved, the DOJ noted that under the terms of the settlement, the entities are required to pay the fine and undergo departmental oversight concerning their PERM positions. Oversight entails tasks such as creating and obtaining approval for their hiring policies for PERM roles and submitting biannual reports. These reports must detail how many applications for foreign workers were pursued, the number of U.S. citizens interviewed, along with additional statistics.

OpenAI took over AI A/B testing firm Statsig in September 2025 and subsequently divested part of the enterprise in May 2026. Nevertheless, the DOJ indicates it began investigating both firms separately prior to the acquisition, in August 2025, involving five cases against OpenAI from 2023 to 2025, and one related to Statsig.

The DOJ states that this settlement is a component of its intensified approach towards companies on this issue. However, the INA, instituted in 1952, has been upheld by various administrations against other major tech firms. For example, during the Biden administration, both Facebook and Apple entered into comparable settlements, although in those instances, the DOJ claimed the violations were extensive and systematic.

Moove’s transformation from a vehicle financing company to ride-hailing and delivery services in Africa, and now encompassing autonomous vehicles, might appear as a significant shift. However, co-founder and co-CEO Ladi Delano explained that the background in financing and operating human-driven ride-hailing fleets served as perfect preparation for the company’s new venture.

The company has successfully secured $250 million at a valuation of $2.1 billion to expand this part of its business.

Established in 2020 in Nigeria and currently based in Dubai, the company announced that Mubadala Investment Company was the lead investor in this latest Series C funding round, along with Woven Capital and Ion Pacific as co-leads.

Moove continues to focus heavily on human-driven ride-hailing. It manages a fleet of 42,000 vehicles across 14 different countries. With a workforce of 3,300 globally, the company still offers vehicle financing to gig economy drivers.

Its move into autonomous vehicles began in early 2023 following a thorough analysis of the sector and its four primary stakeholders: the AV developers, vehicle manufacturers, platforms like Uber, and consumers. According to Delano, none of these entities are interested in “owning the metal,” referring to the vehicles.

“In this scenario, who possesses the vehicle? Who runs the vehicle? Who coordinates the vehicle? Who handles servicing, maintenance? Who looks after lost items? Who cleans?” Delano queried. He noted that it became evident that Moove’s expertise in managing extensive fleets and providing financing could be relevant to the operations of autonomous vehicles.

“Let’s build a product where we own, operate, and coordinate autonomous vehicles, and let’s find partners for this endeavor — that’s essentially our approach,” Delano stated. “By 2023, we began discussions with virtually every AV company imaginable, and, as fate would have it, we successfully partnered with Waymo first.”

Moove acts as the fleet operator for Waymo in cities like Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas, with plans to extend to London in the future. While the company does not currently own the Waymo vehicles, it has plans to do so. Moove is looking to utilize debt financing for acquiring the robotaxis. Delano did not provide a specific timeline for the acquisition of Waymo robotaxis but mentioned that Moove already owns robotaxi vehicles from a different AV developer, without disclosing the name of the company.

“Ultimately, our goal is to possess, you know, hundreds of thousands of vehicles,” he indicated, referring to robotaxis.

This recent funding will be allocated to expand the company’s autonomous vehicle fleet management operations, including hiring approximately 350 new employees. (Delano mentioned that its traditional mobility sector is on track to reach full profitability this year.) A portion of the funds will also support the development of automated depots that are termed “nests.” These “nests” will operate 24/7 and employ robotics for vehicle charging, maintenance, and servicing tasks.

Moove currently has around 15 depots under various stages of development. Delano refrained from specifying when the automated, “lights-out” depots would be operational, stating that this is a forthcoming product.

Other participants in this funding round include BlueCrest Capital Management, Sona Asset Management, Raptor Group, BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton, Uber, Left Lane, Silverbacks Holdings, Square Associates, The Latest Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst, and the Ontario Power Generation Pension Plan. 

Earlier this year, Lightspeed garnered attention when it declared that Claire Zau, an investor and well-known tech content creator, would be joining the venture firm. She boasts over 100,000 followers on TikTok and more than 250,000 followers on Instagram, where she analyzes the most significant tech trends of the day. 

Lightspeed partners Josh Machiz and Zau visited the Equity studio to discuss the strategy fueling their expanding social media presence; their podcast, Lightwork; and how it all began with a direct message on Instagram.

“Many individuals are eager to partake in the future and are enthusiastic about technology,” Zau expressed to Equity. “They simply lack access to the information in a comprehensible format. That’s hopefully the role I feel incredibly fortunate and honored to fulfill.” 

Zau represents, in many respects, a new generation of venture operators utilizing social media to engage with fresh audiences, whether they are merely tech enthusiasts or potential founders who might subsequently seek investment from Lightspeed.

The podcast she co-hosts with Machiz, Lightspeed’s CMO, is part of a burgeoning media trend that numerous venture firms are adopting, where firms assume a more active role in assisting their portfolio companies in narrating their stories to the public. 

“There’s an ever-decreasing amount of traditional journalism out there due to layoffs and media consolidation,” Machiz stated. “For startups, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to get their story out. Availability of platforms to share their narratives is dwindling. There are now significant barriers to communicating your funding story. Thus, we aspire to offer another avenue to convey your tale in this new media landscape.” 

Thus far, the duo — and the firm — have observed certain advantages to broadening the Lightspeed media domain. Engaging with emerging founders is the primary benefit, but being active online also allows them to receive immediate feedback on investments and innovative technology. For instance, Zau mentioned that within the Silicon Valley bubble, there was much excitement about funding a new AI startup, yet upon discussing the investment online, she recognized that Gen Z was rather skeptical of AI. 

“It was, I would even characterize it as humbling,” she remarked about the direct feedback she received on some of her videos. “Having essentially real-time insight into how people are interacting with these technologies and which narratives resonate is incredibly valuable.” 

Machiz and Zau also shared with Equity their thoughts on what lies ahead for them. Another podcast? A TV show someday? “Our ambition is to become the place where future founders hopefully learn about venture and grasp the ecosystem,” Machiz shared. “We’re still in the early stages.” 

Tune in to catch more of the discussion — and what Machiz and Zau have in store for the future. 

Klaviyo, a publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation company, has reached an agreement to acquire Agency, an AI-focused customer success startup founded by experienced entrepreneur Elias Torres three years ago. The specifics of the acquisition deal were not revealed.

Established in 2023, Agency had garnered $32 million in funding from various investors, including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the acquisition took place.

As a result of this agreement, Torres (depicted left) will step into the role of chief product officer at Klaviyo, overseeing Agency’s team of 25 to expedite the growth and development of Klaviyo’s AI tools: Composer, which creates marketing initiatives, and Customer Agent, responsible for post-sale assistance such as returns and order tracking.

“Elias and the team have created an excellent product with Agency,” shared Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki (shown right) in a statement to TechCrunch. “We intend to integrate that with our agent products and aim to deliver this to 200,000 businesses — and ideally to millions more within the next few years.”

For Torres, joining Klaviyo represents a full-circle moment in his career. Familiar with M&A ventures, he co-founded Performable (which was acquired by HubSpot in 2011) and later Drift, where he functioned as CTO for eight years until its $1.2 billion acquisition by Vista Equity in 2021.

In 2010 at Performable, Torres recruited Bialecki, who had completed his degree at Harvard just two years prior, as one of the first engineers of that startup. Torres guided Bialecki through the nuances of early-stage startup operations. “He absorbed it in a very short period,” Torres reminisced about their collaborative experience.

Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo, initially self-funding it, soon after departing from Performable. When Klaviyo secured its first external funding in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to invest in the seed round as an angel backer.
Klaviyo subsequently achieved a significant IPO in September 2023, valued at $9.2 billion.

Despite Klaviyo’s stock facing challenges like other SaaS enterprises, Torres and Bialecki are confident that the platform’s years of accumulated customer data provide its AI agents with a competitive edge over rivals like Decagon and Sierra.

“Elias and I came together on the vision of providing agents for businesses that they can offer to their customers,” Bialecki stated, expressing enthusiasm to collaborate with Torres once again, just as they did at the onset of the cloud era. “This is the next major technology revolution: agents. Let’s reunite and build.”

Jeff Dean, one of the most senior and impactful executives at Google, is resigning from the tech giant to establish his own AI startup.

Joining him as co-founders are several prominent researchers from the company, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a leading engineer and senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a vital AI researcher and one of the founders of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean reportedly intends to take on the role of CEO.

The team is launching Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aiming to harness AI to accelerate scientific research.

Discovery Loop states it will utilize high-performance algorithms to initiate and complete thousands of experiments concurrently, aiming to partially automate the research process and increase the scale of experimentation.

The startup is also keen on employing AI to assist in the creation of more robust AI (a process termed recursive self-improvement), which would entirely eliminate human iteration from the process.

“While science and engineering have greatly advanced society in recent centuries, progress has typically depended on slow, sequential iterations by humans, creating a substantial bottleneck,” the company mentioned in a press release. “Discovery Loop is building sophisticated AI systems that utilize immense computational power to radically change the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating entire experimental cycles.”

Utilizing AI to speed up scientific discovery has been a major focus of both the science and technology sectors for many years, but until lately, it was largely a field of experimentation with limited commercial potential.

The company has garnered financial backing from various sources, including Google’s parent company Alphabet. The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the company announced on Wednesday. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also took part.

“The next significant frontier for AI is to go beyond merely answering questions to actually making discoveries,” the founding team stated in a joint declaration. “By significantly expediting the processes of engineering and scientific discovery, we can bring the advantages of transformative technologies to the world far sooner.”

Dean has been with Google since 1999 and was the company’s 30th employee. Over the years, he has played a key role in Google search’s fundamental infrastructure, including its crawling and indexing systems and its query-serving system. He has also significantly influenced Google Gemini’s multimodal models and was instrumental in the company’s early AI research.

“We believe there is potential for AI to more completely automate what has traditionally been a labor-intensive human experimental loop,” Dean informed the New York Times. “You’ll achieve both a greater quantity and higher quality of experiments, leading to scientific breakthroughs and progress.”

The innovative deep learning methods utilized in LLMs have also enabled weather simulations to be conducted on laptops instead of supercomputers, transforming the field of meteorology. However, the greater challenge for AI might be simplifying the process for individuals and organizations to utilize those forecasts effectively.

WindBorne Systems, a startup that gathers data using the world’s longest-flying weather balloons and integrates it into a robust forecasting model, has secured a $37 million Series B funding round to tackle that challenge, CEO John Dean informed TechCrunch.

This new round was co-led by Khosla Ventures and Galvanize, with contributions from TransLink Capital, Lux Capital, and prior investors, valuing the company at $250 million following this funding round.

Established in 2019, WindBorne began with a strategy to gather a unique set of weather data using its affordable weather sensors and long-endurance balloons. The advancements in AI weather forecasting models over the past four years have enabled them to produce their own forecasts, which was previously unattainable for most private firms due to the prohibitive costs of supercomputers that were needed to model the atmosphere.

Currently, the company operates 20 launch sites globally and has around 600 balloons airborne at any time, collecting data in inaccessible regions, such as the center of a typhoon. The company is now starting to deploy aerial sensor packages that can descend into the ocean and persist in collecting data as floating buoys.

The unique data set produced by this “planetary nervous system,” as Dean refers to it, establishes a competitive edge for their weather model, which also incorporates data sets generated by governmental weather agencies worldwide.

“We showed that when you include balloons in the forecast, you achieve more precise predictions, and the value of each data point is significantly higher than that from satellites,” Dean stated. “We’ve also been increasing our revenue while doing this, which mitigates the risk for VCs regarding the demand signal.”

Currently, the company’s primary clients are government entities. The U.S. National Weather Service acquires the company’s data, while the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy engage with WindBorne through research collaborations, including initiatives to develop forecasting models operable onboard vessels that may experience sporadic connections to the broader world.

The next step involves entering the commercial sector — primarily targeting investment funds that leverage weather data to forecast commodity prices and other business results. In addition to expenditures on computing and efforts to transition from the balloon network’s satellite communications to a mesh radio system, this funding round will enable WindBorne to grow its go-to-market team to widen its customer reach in the private sector.

However, that is not always straightforward. Over the last ten years, various startups have attempted to scale sensing operations like earth observation satellite networks but struggled to penetrate the private sector, as extracting value from that data necessitates expertise and established procedures. Many revert to government agencies accustomed to utilizing that data already.

Private weather forecasting companies exist but primarily generate revenue by repackaging or refining government forecasts for media use, specialized applications such as aircraft de-icing and maritime navigation, or the aforementioned speculators. However, this may shift as AI tools enhance data analysis efficiency.

Saloni Multani, a partner at Galvanize who co-led the funding round, noted that the private weather market has remained constrained because “integrating weather forecasts into larger business decision-making has historically been costly and complex. We believe AI alters that dynamic. Superior forecasts make the endeavor worthwhile, and AI significantly simplifies connecting those forecasts to business decisions.”

Amid rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns that challenge Asia’s water-heavy rice cultivation, Mitti Labs, a climate-tech startup with headquarters in New York and Bengaluru, has secured $9.5 million in funding led by Aramco Ventures, the investment branch of Saudi Aramco, to grow its presence throughout Asia with a platform that merges satellite imagery, AI, and on-field operations to assist farmers in decreasing water consumption and methane emissions.

The Series A round also saw participation from current investor Lightspeed India, alongside Godrej Industries Group, Cisco, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle. With this recent investment, Mitti Labs has increased its total funding to $12.5 million, which includes a $3 million seed investment received in July 2024.

Rice, consumed by over half of the global population, is notably one of the most water-demanding crops. Continuously flooded rice fields also contribute significantly to agricultural methane emissions.

Since the initiation of its programs in 2023, Mitti Labs has aimed to address the high water usage and methane production linked to rice agriculture through a platform that integrates satellite radar imagery with extensive on-ground data collected by its teams. The startup claims this technology develops digital representations of individual rice fields, enabling the monitoring of crop health, water consumption, and methane emissions across numerous smallholder farms, with the average farm size being about one hectare.

Mitti Labs’ GeoAI platform leverages synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery from both public and commercial satellites, with resolutions varying from 50 centimeters to 10 meters, along with years of field measurements gathered by its teams. According to co-founder Xavier Laguarta in an interview, the startup’s advantage lies not only in the satellite imagery itself but also in the unique datasets it has constructed to train its AI models, which facilitate remote monitoring of crop development, soil moisture, and flooding on smallholder farms.

Mitti Labs has expanded from collaborating with around 8,000 farmers in its inaugural season in 2024 to over 100,000 this current season across multiple states in India, Laguarta informed TechCrunch. He mentioned that the goal is to reach millions of smallholder farmers by 2030.

The startup now employs more than 150 staff members, primarily based in India, where field teams engage directly with farmers and local organizations to guide them in transitioning to alternative irrigation methods.

Farmers enrolled in Mitti Labs’ initiatives are adopting alternative irrigation methods that the company claims can lower water consumption by approximately 40% and reduce methane emissions by over 50% without compromising yields, while also generating carbon credits that provide an extra revenue stream.

Mitti Labs earns revenue from both carbon credits and its GeoAI platform. Its clientele includes carbon marketplace Cool Effect, which collaborates with companies such as Google and American Airlines, along with rice producer Ebro Foods and agricultural firm Syngenta, both of which utilize Mitti Labs’ data and analytics to enhance water resilience throughout their supply chains.

This progress has also helped draw the interest of Aramco Ventures, whose investment represents its inaugural engagement with an Indian startup. Laguarta mentioned to TechCrunch that the Saudi energy multinational’s venture arm was attracted to Mitti Labs’ commitment to mitigating methane emissions, bolstering water resilience, and implementing AI in agriculture within emerging markets. He noted that this partnership could also enable the startup to leverage Aramco Ventures’ connections in carbon markets and potentially collaborate with Aramco itself in the future.

“Clearly, Aramco is one of the largest corporations globally, and having them as a partner and potential customer over time is a very intriguing position for us,” Laguarta stated.

With the new funding, Mitti Labs intends to commence operations in the Philippines later this year, before progressing into Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets in 2027. According to Laguarta, this expansion will enable Mitti Labs to cater to compliance carbon markets in addition to the voluntary market within which it presently operates, while tailoring its operational strategy to various agricultural systems and irrigation networks.

“At the end of the day, we really are a data company,” Laguarta remarked. “When you pursue these expansions, you are generating and collecting data from distinct ecosystems.”