Groq raises $350M to fuel its pivot from AI chips to neocloud
9:15 AM PDT · August 17, 2026
Startup Groq has raised $350 million as it continues to pivot from an AI chipmaker to a neocloud company that provides powerful GPUs and AI infrastructure services.
The new capital, led by investment firm Disruptive with planned participation from Nvidia, values the company at $3.5 billion. That’s down from the $6.9 billion Groq was valued at last September, just a few months before Nvidia hired the startup’s founder and CEO, Jonathan Ross, and other top talent as part of a licensing deal.
A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch that despite the difference in valuation, the company doesn’t see it as a down round, but rather as establishing a new valuation for the “post-Nvidia-lincensing-deal version of Groq.”
Groq was focused on building its own chips, dubbed LPUs (language processing units), to compete with Nvidia on inference — the type of compute needed to run AI workloads in real time. After it lost its star team, Groq shifted from being a pure AI chipmaker into a cloud and data center provider that operates Nvidia systems, making the remaining Groq company an Nvidia customer.
In June, Groq raised a $650 million round to kick off its pivot. The company intends to scale from 54 megawatts to more than 200 megawatts by 2027.
Today, Groq operates 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, serving more than 6 million developers, enterprises, and AI-native companies. Groq says the fresh funds will support “those seeking usage of medium and larger sized clusters of Nvidia accelerated computing for training and inference.”
“We are building Groq into the world’s leading AI inference cloud,” Alex Davis, Groq’s chairman and CEO of Disruptive, said in a statement. “Inference will without a doubt become the largest and most critical layer of AI infrastructure.”
While inference is in high demand as enterprises scale AI workloads, it’s an open question whether neoclouds will be a profitable enough business to provide returns on their considerable investment in the long term. CoreWeave reported strong second-quarter revenue growth and recently landed major contracts, including with Meta and Anthropic. However, investors remained concerned about the company’s high capital expenditures, heavy reliance on debt, and exposure to rapidly depreciating hardware, and its ability to turn growth into free cash flow.
Groq’s financials are still private for now, but its pivot puts the company directly inside Nvidia’s AI infrastructure ecosystem. That’s not exactly a unique relationship among neoclouds today. Nvidia supplies the GPUs powering clouds from CoreWeave, Lambda, and Nebius, while also investing billions into some of those companies as they race to build more capacity.
TechCrunch has reached out to Groq for more information.
Topics
AI, data centers, Fundraising, groq, neocloud, nvidia
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WordPress.com targets the next generation of web creators with a free student plan
7:56 AM PDT · August 17, 2026
WordPress.com maker Automattic is expanding into education with a new, free product designed for teachers and their classes called WordPress.com Education. The suite for classrooms includes a full WordPress.com domain for each student, plus free domain names (on the .blog or .art domains) and plug-in support.
Teachers can provide students with access to the program for free for the first year, without having to put a credit card down or enter a trial.
This allows teachers to use the technology in courses that teach students how to build websites, or for other classroom needs such as group projects that incorporate website-building.
Unveiling the product at its annual WordCamp US conference on Monday, the company noted that the new Student plan isn’t a stripped-down version of its product. It includes 6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, and other tools, as well as support for plugins, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync.
Automattic’s best known for its website and blog hosting service, WordPress.com, which runs the open-source WordPress software that powers about 43% of all sites on the Internet. Despite its ubiquity, though, WordPress is not necessarily the go-to platform of choice these days for young people establishing their web presence for the first time. Instead, those users often opt to simply set up social media profiles.
More importantly for Automattic, the student plan will let WordPress be integrated into the classroom to train the next generation of website professionals. And, because it’s free, it can make inroads in underfunded schools as well.
When the first year of use has ended, students can choose to subscribe to the service for $2 per month ($24/year). If they don’t, their work won’t disappear; their site will just drop down to a free WordPress.com site on a free domain. All their web pages, posts, comments, and uploaded media will stay intact.
The company says it piloted the program with 5,000 students across 27 countries, and the majority of educators (88.9%) said access to the program improved their students’ employability. A further 81.5% apparently said the program improved students’ entrepreneurial capacity.
Topics
Apps, Commerce, students, WordPress, wordpress.com
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Uber adds Zipline drones to its Eats delivery network
6:18 AM PDT · August 17, 2026
Uber is investing in, and partnering with, drone delivery company Zipline with the goal of making one million deliveries per day using the startup’s drones by the end of 2029.
Zipline drones will make the first deliveries on the Uber Eats platform by the end of this year, the companies said on Monday. These deliveries will start in Zipline’s existing markets, and the companies want to expand into “dozens of U.S. cities.”
The companies didn’t disclose the investment amount.
Uber has been taking on multiple drone delivery partners as it looks for ways to keep growing Uber Eats. The ride-hail giant is replicating the early business model it’s adopted for robotaxis and other services built around autonomous vehicles, which is to essentially bring as many companies on to its platform as possible.
This approach has helped Uber stay at the forefront of these new technologies despite selling off its own programs like the aerial ridesharing service, Uber Elevate, and Uber Autonomous Technologies Group, which was working on autonomous vehicles. Investments have been a huge part of the strategy, with Uber committing more than $10 billion to dozens of autonomous vehicle providers.
The strategy is not a panacea, though. Uber recently clashed with one of its highest-profile partners so far, Waymo, and the companies are now expected to walk away from each other when their contracts expire in 2028. Uber and Waymo are also on different sides of a growing fight over autonomous vehicle regulation.
The ride-hail giant had tested the waters of drone delivery when it still had its Elevate division. The company dipped back into the idea late last year when it announced a partnership with Israeli startup Flytrex, which also came with a minor investment.
Uber thinks Zipline’s drones can fulfill orders on Uber Eats within five to 10 minutes. “Truly quick commerce is proving to be an even bigger market than the original food market was,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. “We think this can be an enormous tailwind for the next leg of growth for Eats.”
Zipline, based in San Francisco, recently closed an extended Series H funding round of $800 million, pushing its valuation to $7.6 billion.
“Every great transportation revolution has changed where people live, how businesses operate, and how economies grow,” Zipline co-founder Keller Cliffton said in a statement. “Together with Uber, we’re taking the next step toward building a world where getting what you need is as fast and effortless as sending a text, no matter where you are.”
Topics
Apps, Commerce, Transportation, Uber, zipline
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Wispr raises $280M at $2B valuation as it looks beyond dictation
6:10 AM PDT · August 17, 2026
Wispr, a startup known for its AI dictation tool, raised $280 million in Series B funding, led by Menlo Ventures, at a $2 billion valuation, the company announced on Monday. The funds will allow Wispr to increase its footprint as it ventures into new areas, such as meetings, with its newly released note-taker tool.
With this latest round, the company has raised $361 million to date. Its last round was less than 10 months ago.
The new capital comes at a time when there is increased competition in the dictation space from apps like Willow, Monologue, Aqua, and Superwhisper, among others. In addition, several developers are creating free or lower-priced tools for prosumers.
Existing investors, including Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC, and MVP Ventures, doubled down in the latest round. The company also gained new investors such as Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund, and PLUS Capital.
Alongside the funding news, Wispr announced it’s launching a new model to improve the quality of speech understanding. For the last few weeks, several users have complained about a quality dip in Wispr Flow’s dictation output. The company said its new model, called Canto, will reduce error rates from 30% to less than 10%.
Since last November, Wispr has released its dictation app on Android and has scaled its go-to-market teams in regions like India and the U.K.
It’s also partnering with hardware makers, like the Oasis ring, to let customers dictate on their devices without speaking loudly. Separately, with its meeting notetaker, it’s taking on others in the space like Granola, Fireflies, and Read AI. While Wispr’s notetaker can display summaries and action items, there is scope for it to integrate with other tools and make updates or create documents or email drafts.
Last month, the startup announced Wispr Interface Labs under Ariya Rastrow, who was one of the people to work on Amazon Alexa in its early days. With this lab, Wispr aims to explore new interfaces for human-computer interaction.
Topics
AI, Funding, Fundraising, Wispr
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Crypto hardware wallet owners face fresh security risks after recent spate of personal data thefts
6:00 AM PDT · August 17, 2026
Data breaches at two shipping companies has put cryptocurrency owners with physical hardware wallets at greater risk of having their funds stolen, highlighting weaknesses in the broader tech ecosystem relied on by the crypto industry.
In recent weeks, makers of hardware crypto wallets Trezor and SafePal reported that collectively thousands of their customers had their personal data and shipping information stolen during separate data breaches at their shipping partners. The crypto wallet makers provided their customers’ names, home addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers to the shipping companies for mailing out their hardware wallets.
The hacks did not affect the security of the wallets, a hardware device that stays offline to make it far more difficult for hackers to compromise from over the internet. Instead, the hackers targeted the broader supply chain of tech companies to obtain personal information about where high-net worth crypto holders live.
By stealing the names and home addresses of hardware wallet customers, the hacks expose crypto owners to physical attacks that rely on physically obtaining the seed phrase stored on the wallet by force or violence.
Known as wrench attacks (referring to the use of weapons), these kinds of real-world attacks are on the rise as criminals increasingly seek out crypto belonging to high-net-worth individuals. Blockchain security company CertiK confirmed dozens of reported wrench attacks during 2025, up by 75% on the previous year, with robbers stealing upwards of $40 million. Crypto forensics giant Chainalysis puts this year’s figures at closer to $30 million so far, with gangs using kidnapping and home invasions to demand a person’s crypto seed phrase.
With knowledge of a person’s seed phrase, the attackers can irreversibly take control of the person’s crypto on the public blockchain.
Both Trezor and SafePal also warned customers to stay vigilant against phishing attacks, which rely on sending targeted messages to a person’s phone number or email address in an attempt to steal their crypto.
In a separate attack on a hardware wallet earlier this month, hackers stole more than $130 million in cryptocurrency directly off the blockchain by guessing the passwords set by Coinkite’s Coldcard hardware wallet.
The hackers, who have not yet been identified, were able to predict the seed phrases that Coldcard wallets would generate offline for their customers. Even though the wallets and seed phrases never touched the internet, the hackers were able to generate customer wallet passwords on the fly and pluck their funds directly off of the blockchain.
One victim said in a post on X that they had done “everything right,” but that “none of it mattered… all because the hardware that created the seed phrase originally had one line in their code from 2021 that had a vulnerability.”
Topics
crypto, cybersecurity, Security, wrench attacks
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