Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Waymo expands its scope in California

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we learn that Waymo is expanding its service area in multiple California cities; we dig into a ton of funding news from companies big and small; and we look at impending layoffs at Intel.

TechCrunch Top 3

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😳 Whoa, Waymo: While Waymo is temporarily restricting its services to certain areas of Los Angeles, due to ongoing protests, it's expanding its overall service area by 80 square miles in multiple California cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, and Silicon Valley.

🍽️ Gobbling up cash: Elon Musk's xAI is allegedly looking to raise $4.3 billion in new equity funding after raising $6 billion just six months ago. This is in addition to the $5 billion of debt financing Musk is looking to raise for the combined entity of X and xAI.

🗡️ No IPO for Sword: Digital health startup Sword Health raised $40 million in a new funding round at a $4 billion valuation. Despite the 10-year-old company being cash-flow positive, it decided to stay private and put a potential IPO off until at least 2028.

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Afternoon must-reads

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😔 More layoffs at Intel: Semiconductor giant Intel will lay off between 15% and 20% of its Intel Foundry workers starting in July. This isn't super surprising: Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan's philosophy is that the best leaders get the most done with the fewest people.

🚀 Streaming soars: Streaming service viewership exceeded both cable and network television viewership in May for the first time. Last month, streaming services accounted for 44.8% of all television viewership. YouTube was the most watched within streaming services.

🥕 Fresh funds: Autonomous vehicle software company Applied Intuition raised a $600 million Series F round that values the company at $15 billion. It works with most of the major automakers, as well as autonomous vehicle companies such as Gatik and Kodiak.

⌨️ More usage: Anysphere launched a new subscription plan for its AI coding tool, Cursor. The company says that people on the new $200-a-month subscription plan, Ultra, will get priority access to new features.

⛔️ Say no to AI training: Decentralized social media network Mastodon updated its terms of service today to bar any AI model from scraping its users' data to train LLMs. This comes after Elon Musk made a similar term change over at X.

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Around the web

🤨 Too good to be true: The Trump administration announced that it plans to release a $499 phone that is fully made in America. The Verge argues that unless there is a domestic mobile phone supply chain everyone somehow missed, this isn't possible.

🏠 Hidden in plain sight: The political assassination of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband is stirring up an old debate after it was discovered that the suspected killer found their address through public people search sites. Why are these sites legal?