Relativity Networks raises $22 million to bring a faster kind of fiber to data centers

In Brief Posted: 4:56 PM PDT · August 17, 2026 Image Credits:Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto / Getty Images Anthropic’s revenue continues not just to grow at an historic pace but to accelerate. The model maker’s annualized revenue run rate — a projection of a full year’s revenue based on a recent, shorter period —surpassed $65 billion at the end of July, Bloomberg reported on Monday, up from $47 billion in May and just $9 billion at the end of last year. Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment. The company’s investors expect it to continue to grow at approximately the same rate for the remainder of the year, finishing 2026 between $100 billion and $120 billion, the Financial Times reported. Meanwhile, rival OpenAI has doubled its revenue to $40 billion, from $20 billion at the end of 2025, Bloomberg reported last week. The two companies may calculate their revenue metrics differently, but Anthropic’s growth rate has captivated investors far more than OpenAI’s has. Both companies have filed confidential IPO paperwork, Anthropic is expected to hit the public markets ahead of OpenAI —possibly as soon as this fall. Anthropic will be seeking a public valuation of $2 trillion or more, according to the Financial Times, which would make it the largest market debut on record. Anthropic was last valued at $965 billion in late May, when it raised a $65 billion round. Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Latest in AI

The race to produce more chips is on, and Europe is in. ASML, the Dutch company that has a near-monopoly on manufacturing the machines used for chipmaking, may soon no longer be an isolated success story. Like its U.S. counterpart, the European Chips Act aims to foster the semiconductor industry — in part thanks to state subsidies. One of the beneficiaries is QuantumDiamonds, a German startup that applies a novel approach to inspecting chips. With the approval of the European Commission, it has been granted €76 million in non-dilutive funding provided by Germany’s federal economy ministry and the state of Bavaria. The startup will use it to set up a new facility for the production of semiconductor testing equipment in Munich as part of a $178 million investment plan it had already announced. A spinout from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), QuantumDiamonds has also raised a €15 million equity round led by VC firm World Fund, TechCrunch learned exclusively. The company declined to disclose its valuation but said its round was also backed by Bayern Kapital and existing investors including Creator Fund, Earlybird, First Momentum, IQ Capital, Onsight Ventures and UnternehmerTUM. CEO Kevin Berghoff told TechCrunch that raising the round was a fairly quick process, as QuantumDiamonds was able to demonstrate customer pull. “We work with almost everyone in the chip ecosystem,” he said. With huge demand for all kinds of chips, there’s just as much demand for solutions to speed up the manufacturing process and improve the output. By compressing a defect detection process that usually takes weeks into a two-minute inspection that doesn’t stop production lines, QuantumDiamonds claims that it can help the likes of Taiwan-based Foundries and Korea’s Memory Makers save hundreds of millions of dollars. This means that its hardware is typically paid back entirely within a couple of months, Berghoff said. It also leaves room to cover the subscription fee that the startup charges for on-site support and for its software, which interprets the data and usually gives clients a strong indication of what they should address in their manufacturing process. Behind the scenes, this happens to be one of the first actual use cases of quantum technology — unlike chips, quantum sensing is already operational in its ability to generate magnetic fields that detect defects with high precision, and that’s all customers care about. “They couldn’t care less about it being quantum,” Berghoff said with a laugh. Presumably, neither do they care about the diamonds — but in case you are wondering, these are synthetic. What QuantumDiamonds does is leverage their tiniest properties to observe how electricity is flowing through chips. Compared to current inspections, which look at the top layer of a chip with a microscope of sorts, this has the advantage of detecting defects through all layers, without destroying the chip in the process. This capability could be particularly relevant as chips are increasingly multi-layered. Startups such as Semron have been developing 3D chips, and the industry seems to agree this is the way to go for AI data centers, Berghoff said. “The thing is that the transistors cannot get smaller, so in order to get the same power and the same compute, you start to add more and more layers.” Large competitors including “100 billion market-capped U.S.-based inspection companies” will likely adapt at some point, but QuantumDiamonds has first-mover advantage, Berghoff said. “There is no U.S. or Asian company that has shipped those tools.” The startup is already out of the lab, and on its way to moving from its clients’ labs to their fabs — the semiconductor manufacturing plants. “What we have now is a tool for a lab environment, where you do sample-based testing, and test maybe one out of a million chips,” Berghoff said. “What we now aim for is to also do high-throughput testing, meaning you can do 100% quality control in the fab its

Earlier this year, shares of traditional SaaS companies tumbled amid investor fears that software built with AI could eventually displace those businesses. Despite such concerns, Bending Spoons, a company that acquires and revitalizes stagnating but well-known tech firms, saw its shares surge in its market debut. It closed at $40.50 on Wednesday, nearly 40% above its $29 IPO price. At that price, the 13-year-old Milan, Italy-based company has a market capitalization of $25.7 billion, more than double its last private valuation of $11 billion. The company raised $1.68 billion in its offering. Bending Spoons has grown rapidly by acquiring aging, but once popular, brands like AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, Meetup, and Vimeo, then turning them profitable, typically through aggressive cost-cutting, launching new features and raising prices. While the company’s approach is similar to private equity, there is one key difference: Bending Spoons has no plans to sell these businesses. The company’s disclosed financials show it has indeed turned its growing portfolio of assets profitable. Bending Spoons reported $601 million in revenue for Q1, generating $27.4 million in net income. That’s a significant turnaround from the same period last year, when the company reported a $112 million net loss on $259 million in revenue, according to the SEC filing. Bending Spoons, whose name comes from a scene in the science-fiction movie The Matrix, generated the majority of its revenue from subscriptions, which accounted for 84% of its business last year. Before the offering, Baillie Gifford was Bending Spoons’ largest outside shareholder, followed by smaller stakes from buyout fund Renaissance Partners, Cox Enterprises, Durable Capital Partners, Fidelity, and T. Rowe Price. The IPO also represents a significant windfall for Bending Spoons’ five co-founders: Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella, and Tomasz Greber. Besides Bending Spoons, other investors follow the strategy of acquiring, fixing, and holding stalled software firms, often referred to as “venture zombie” companies. These firms include Constellation Software, Curious, Tiny, SaaS.group, Arising Ventures, and Calm Capital. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she wrote about VC for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned a CFA charterholder designation. You can contact or verify outreach from Marina by emailing marina.temkin@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at +1 347-683-3909 on Signal. View Bio

Last week, President Donald Trump claimed a secret US mission had moved 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz while it was blockaded. The claim landed in an industry already consumed by the question of how much oil is actually getting out—and nobody, it turns out, can answer that with confidence.“No one’s experienced this kind of disruption,” said Matt Stanley, head of market engagement at Kpler, the commodity intelligence and ship-tracking firm. The reason the numbers are so hard to pin down is what the industry calls the dark trade—vessels running without their AIS transponders on, moving at night, closer to the Omani border, sometimes with naval escort.There are ways to detect portions of outgoing oil anyway. Different grades of crude can only originate from specific fields. The UAE’s Murban crude can be exported via Fujairah, outside the strait. Another type of crude, Upper Zakum, cannot. One oil market analyst noted that their team has seen Upper Zakum crude oil appear in other markets. Those sightings are happening, yet the scale remains unknown.Stanley says it’s possible that 100 million barrels made it through the Strait of Hormuz since the first of May. “When you put into context, pre-conflict, it was about 20 million barrels a day that was going through, so five days worth of oil, in a normal traffic environment, and it’s taken over a month. 100 million barrels, it’s a good number, but it’s a relative drop in the ocean, literally, compared to previous traffic.”Why Prices Haven’t Exploded YetThe world’s most important oil chokepoint has been effectively shut for more than 100 days. World Trade Organization data shows a 95 percent reduction in crude oil shipments from Arabian Gulf ports and a 99 percent reduction in liquified natural gas carriers. The International Energy Agency has called it “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” Yet Brent crude sits at $87.55 per barrel—the lowest since before the conflict began.This is because of buffers. China has approximately 1.3 billion barrels in storage, drawing it down at around a million barrels a day, Stanley says. “We see their demand, about 7 million barrels a day from May, June, and July. They were buying 12.5 million barrels a day in December.” The US, Brazil, and Canada have also stepped in to fill part of the void.The three analysts interviewed agree that the oil market’s response has been robust. “The oil market responded to this outage significantly well in terms of cutting parts of demand,” says Iman Nasseri, managing director, Middle East of FGE NexantECA, an energy and chemical advisory company. “There is also a significant amount of stock that has come to market, but we doubt that they will continue to do that. We expect that by July [if the strait remains closed], things will change.”The buffers will run out. One analyst said stocks are approaching what the industry calls operationally critical levels—where oil in storage and additional supply needs to be replenished. They added that the US, currently acting as a swing producer, faces its own deadline as the end of the year approaches, and the US will have to prioritize its own domestic production to accommodate people needing to heat their homes.“People looking at October, you really think that it would be sorted out by the middle of August,” Stanley says. “That’s what I think the market is hoping for.”Back OnlineGlobal oil supply fell 10.1 million barrels per day in March, with OPEC+ production dropping by 9.4 million barrels per day month-on-month. The harder question is how much comes back, and when.Analysis by S&P Global CERA estimates restart timelines of 10 weeks to seven months for fields shut down for two months. IEA executive director Fatih Birol has said more than 80 energy facilities have been damaged, and recovery “could take as long as two years.” The UAE’s national oil company estimates full Hormuz flows won’t resume until 2027.Stanley adds that

Image Credits:Bruno de Carvalho/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images 6:00 AM PDT · June 9, 2026 Europe’s fast-growing vibe coding startup, Lovable, tells TechCrunch it has surpassed $500 million in annualized revenue run rate. Lovable last discussed its revenue in February, when the company said it crossed $400 million. In August, 2024, Lovable said it could hit $1 billion in annualized revenue within 12 months. It may not be on track to double that figure by summer, but it is still reporting jaw-dropping growth; the company, founded in late 2023, hasn’t yet hit its three-year anniversary. The company also claims it has been used to build over 50 million projects and says usage has accelerated to one million new projects a week. According to a survey of those projects that run on the company’s blog, Lovable says its users are primarily non-technical, yet are increasingly building software they intend to monetize or use in their businesses. Its users are founders, designers, and salespeople building websites and e-commerce storefronts, as well as internal tools like CRMs, inventory systems, and HR platforms, the company says. That list tells a story. AI vibe coding platforms have been seen as a threat to legacy SaaS software. Why buy expensive annual contracts when you can just vibe code it yourself? Lovable’s survey appears to offer some data that this is indeed happening. Of course, Lovable — therefore most of the projects built on it — isn’t old enough to answer the harder question about vibe-coded software: will such an approach prove short-lived? That’s because it’s not the initial building part that’s the problem — it’s the maintaining part. Software operates almost like a living organism: even well-written, well-designed code that isn’t AI slop runs atop an ever-shifting stack of dependencies, third-party services, and infrastructure — all of which is constantly being updated, which means end-user software is always breaking. That’s why so many companies choose to buy instead of build. They want others to be responsible for keeping it running. We’ll have to see if Lovable and other vibe coders will transparently report abandoned projects as their platforms mature — aka the not-as-flattering stuff. If those abandonment rates are low, that will be the true indication that the so-called SaaSpocalypse is here and here to stay. Topics When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.