Saturday, June 7, 2025

Jony Ive teams up with Rivian

Friday, June 6, 2025

Welcome back to TechCrunch PM! Today we're looking at how Jony Ive was involved with Rivian's new electric bike; a genetic testing startup that finds itself in controversy; and AMD's latest purchase. Have a great weekend!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Getty Images / Mario Tama

🚲 Love for cycling: Jony Ive's creative firm, LoveFrom, helped create Rivian's new electric bike, sources told us. The micromobility startup that spun out of Rivian's skunkworks program, called Also, has yet to show off its first vehicle designs.

🎰 X places a bet: Elon Musk's X has joined with Polymarket, a platform that lets users bet on real-life events using cryptocurrencies, to be the social media company's official prediction market partner. The companies didn't share any specifics on the partnership.

⚡️ Keep it clean: Despite some changing rhetoric in the U.S., this year is on track to see nearly twice as much investment in clean energy compared to fossil fuels. While fossil fuels will see a significant $1.15 trillion in investment, clean energy is expected to receive $2.15 trillion.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Getty Images / Cheng Xin

🍪 An acqui-hire: AMD has been busy. The semiconductor giant acquired the team behind Untether AI, a startup building AI inference chips. The company had raised more than $150 million in VC money. Just a few days ago, AMD acquired Brium, an AI optimization startup.

🔎 Congress for creators: Two representatives from Congress, one from each side of the aisle, launched the Congressional Creators Caucus on Thursday, which is meant to support the creator economy and give Congress more visibility into the growing industry.

🤝 Humans to the rescue (for once): Sarah Franklin, the CEO of employee performance software company Lattice, thinks that it's important for companies to find balance between AI augmentation and human employees to gain trust with their customers.

🪏 Digging into data: AI research organization EleutherAI released a massive set of training data for AI called the Common Pile v0.1. This dataset is made up of licensed or open domain data for training AI models. The dataset can be downloaded from Hugging Face or GitHub.

⛔️ No thank you: Genetic testing startup Nucleus Genomics never seems to be too far from controversy. Earlier this week, the company launched a new product called Nucleus Embryo that can test IVF embryos for things like future appearance or IQ. The internet — and VCs — reacted as you'd expect.

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Around the web

🚙 Time for a new car? China's restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals and magnets is wreaking havoc on both European and U.S. auto industries, which could "come to a standstill within weeks," according to The Verge.

📲 Deportation raids ramp up: Apps like Hack Latino are helping undocumented communities dodge ICE and access legal help. But growing scrutiny is forcing developers to weigh safety against support.