In 2023, defense tech recruiter Peterson Conway VIII pulled up to the offices of nuclear fusion startup Fuse in a black Suburban, donning his signature cowboy hat. He picked up a recent Fuse hire and proceeded to regale her with stories of his old recruiting days. One story involved prostitutes attending a recruiting event ('not for sex,' Conway clarified to TechCrunch). Fuse founder JC Btaiche caught wind of the conversation and agreed, promptly firing Conway ' although Btaiche told TechCrunch that telling the prostitution story wasn't the only inappropriate thing that Conway had done. But Conway, who has become one of the defense tech industry's biggest behind-the-scenes power brokers, didn't give up on Fuse. Conway has recruited for some of the buzziest defense and hard tech firms in Silicon Valley over the last decade, like Palantir and Mach Industries. He spent nearly half a decade doing recruitment at Joe Lonsdale's venture firm 8VC for the firm and its portfolio companies, and since last year, as the head of talent at venture firm A* Capital....

Welcome to 2025! The first half of the week was relatively quiet in terms of startup announcements, but activity is already starting to pick up. We're also gearing up for CES; if your hardware startup is attending, make sure to let us know. 2024's last mega-deal: World Wide Technology (WWT), a tech services company based in St. Louis, agreed to acquire Canadian IT provider Softchoice in an all-cash mega-deal at a valuation of approximately $1.25 billion. 2024's last curtain close: French food delivery startup Epicery ceased operations after nine years. Since 2021, it belonged to Geopost/DPDgroup, which recently sold last-mile delivery service Stuart at a significant loss. No done deal: The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened an investigation into IBM's planned acquisition of cloud software vendor HashiCorp, which the Federal Trade Commission is already investigating. Competition ahead: In an interview with TechCrunch, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev talked about his company's plans to increasingly compete with still-private prediction markets startups like Kalshi and Polymarket....

Dara Khosrowshahi is resigning from the board of autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora Innovation, citing a desire to focus on his ongoing responsibilities as CEO of Uber and reduce external board commitments, according to a Friday regulatory filing. The Uber chief executive and Aurora Innovation go way back. In 2020, Uber offloaded its own self-driving unit, Uber ATG, to Aurora. The deal at the time involved Uber handing over its equity in ATG and investing $400 million into Aurora, giving it a 26% stake in the combined company. Khosrowshahi joined Aurora's board as part of the deal. Through Uber Freight, Uber's freight brokerage platform that connects shippers and carriers, the ride-hail and delivery giant maintained its connection with Aurora. In June, Uber and Aurora announced a multi-year collaboration to put trucks powered by Aurora's technology on the Uber Freight network. Uber's relationship with Aurora, however, is not exclusive. The company also has a deal with Waabi, the self-driving truck startup founded by Raquel Urtasun, who had previously served as chief scientist and head of R&D at Uber ATG....

Investments in generative AI, which encompasses a range of AI-powered apps, tools, and services to generate text, images, videos, speech, music, and more, reached new heights last year. According to data from financial tracker PitchBook compiled for TechCrunch, generative AI companies worldwide raised $56 billion from VCs in 2024 across 885 deals. 'We aren't seeing a slowdown in generative AI funding, as big names like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI continue to secure major raises and release new, competitive products,' said Ali Javaheri, an emerging technology analyst at PitchBook, in an interview. Deal value in Q4 2024 soared to $31.1 billion with the closure of mammoth rounds like Databricks' $10 billion Series J, xAI's $6 billion Series C, Anthropic's $4 billion strategic investment from Amazon, and OpenAI's $6.6 billion round. Mergers and acquisitions were a small share of generative AI investments in 2024: $951 million, per PitchBook data. To be clear, that's exclusive of the various 'acqui-hire' deals executed by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to hire much of chatbot startup Character AI's staff and license its technology, while Microsoft is said to have spent $650 million licensing Inflection's AI models and hiring its CEO, Mustafa Suleyman....