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Space-as-a-service startup Muon Space closed a $56.7 million fundraising round to scale its satellite platform, while also announcing a new deal with defense giant Sierra Nevada Corp. 

California-based Muon designs, builds and operates satellites in low Earth orbit on behalf of customers. Some customers, like Hydrosat, provide their own payloads, while others, like the nonprofit coalition Earth Fire Alliance, use Muon-developed payloads. Muon’s business model represents a new paradigm for access to space: Instead of spending years developing satellite hardware and flight software, mission operations, and data processing, customers can use Muon’s end-to-end service instead. 

The startup says it has secured over $100 million in committed contracts from customers this year alone for its Halo satellite platform. That includes $60 million in deals announced earlier this year to design 10 remote-sensing satellites for unnamed customers. More recently, the company also announced a new deal with Sierra Nevada for the development of three spacecraft for the Vindlér remote sensing constellation. The first Vindlér satellite built by Muon is scheduled to launch in 2025. 

The Series B round was led by Activate Capital, with participation from Acme Capital and participating investors Costanoa Ventures, Radical Ventures and Congruent Ventures. It brings the company’s total capital raised to over $91 million, including a 2022 Series A round and a seed round in 2021. 

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Google has suffered a major court defeat in the U.S. that could alter the way it does business, should the decision stand.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ruling in a case brought against Google by the Justice Department, said that Google had abused its monopoly power over the search business in part by paying companies to present its search engine as the default choice on their devices and web browsers. Mehta also agreed with the government’s arguments that Google collected data about consumers to cement its search engine’s dominance and illegally protected its monopoly over the ads that run inside Google Search results.

Google pays companies including Apple and Mozilla billions of dollars for prime placement in web browsers and on smartphones. According to The New York Times, Google paid Apple about $18 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones in 2021; Google shares 36% of search ad revenue from Safari with Apple.

“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his opinion filed Monday. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

The ruling caps off a years-long case — U.S. et al. v. Google — that resulted in a 10-week trial last year. The Department of Justice and a group of attorneys general from 38 states and territories, led by Colorado and Nebraska, filed similar but separate antitrust suits against Google in 2020, alleging that Google unfairly blocked out would-be search rivals like Bing and DuckDuckGo. The Department of Justice estimated that Google had a 90% share of the search market, a figure that Google disputed.

Judge Mehta has yet to decide remedies for Google’s behavior. But he could force the company to change the way it runs its search business — or order it to sell off parts of that business. The ruling could be appealed, of course, and the final verdict may differ significantly, as happened with Microsoft’s famed antitrust case in the 1990s.

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Safari’s newest feature, Distraction Control, can remove distracting elements from a website. The feature follows Browser Company’s Arc Browse’s addition of Boosts last year, which similarly lets users remove features from a site and further customize its appearance.

Apple is rolling out the early version of the feature this week through new developer betas of iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia.

Users can access the Distraction Control tool from the Page Menu in the Smart Search field. They then select the item on the website they want to remove. Safari will remember to remove the elements the next time they visit the site. The choice doesn’t currently sync across hardware, however, so users will have to hide the elements on each new device.

Users can click on the blue Hide icon in the search field and select “Show hidden items” to unhide any of the web page’s elements.

Apple said that the feature won’t remove ads or sections that have frequently changing content. It’s not clear if this tool will be able to remove, for example, a section like “Who to follow” or “Explore” on X, as these elements appear in the same place on the home page, but the content within those boxes is dynamic.

Arc Browser’s Boost tool was able to remove these sections during our last testing last year.

With iOS 18, Apple also introduced a redesigned reader for better listening and font controls. It also launched Highlights, a feature that will surface important information from a page, including quick links for driving directions, call information and summaries of TV show reviews mentioned on a page.

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A YouTube creator is seeking to bring a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the company trained its generative AI models on millions of transcripts from YouTube videos without notifying or compensating the videos’ owners.

In a complaint filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, attorneys for David Millette, a YouTube user based in Massachusetts, allege that OpenAI surreptitiously transcribed Millette’s and other creators’ videos to train the models that power the company’s AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT, and other generative AI tools and products. By collecting this data, OpenAI “profited significantly” from the creators’ work, the complaint alleges, while violating copyright law and YouTube’s terms of service that prohibit the use of videos for apps independent of its service.

“As [OpenAI’s] AI products become more sophisticated through the use of training data sets, they become more valuable to prospective and current users, who purchase subscriptions to access [OpenAI’s] AI products,” the complaint reads. “Much of the material in OpenAI’s training data sets, however, comes from works that were copied by OpenAI without consent, without credit, and without compensation.”

Millette, represented by the law firm Bursor & Fisher, is seeking a jury trial and over $5 million in damages for all YouTube users and creators whose data might’ve been swept up in OpenAI’s training.

Generative AI models like OpenAI’s have no real intelligence. Fed an enormous number of examples (e.g. movies, voice recordings, essays and so on), models “learn” how likely data is to occur based on patterns, including the context of any surrounding data.

Most models are trained on data sourced from public websites and data sets around the web. Companies argue that fair use shields their efforts to scrape data indiscriminately and use it for training commercial models. Many copyright holders disagree, however — and they’re filing suits aimed at halting practice.

Video transcriptions have become a key training data ingredient as other data wells dry up, so to speak.

More than 35% of the world’s top 1,000 websites now block OpenAI’s web crawler, according to data from Originality.AI. And around 25% of data from “high-quality” sources has been restricted from the major data sets used to train AI models, a study by MIT’s Data Provenance Initiative found. Should the current access-blocking trend continue, the research group Epoch AI predicts that developers will run out of data to train generative AI models between 2026 and 2032.

In April, The New York Times reported that OpenAI created its first speech recognition model, Whisper, for the purpose of transcribing audio from videos to collect additional training data. An OpenAI team that included company’s president, Greg Brockman, transcribed more than a million hours of video from YouTube using Whisper, according to The Times, and used the transcripts to train OpenAI’s text-generating and -analyzing model GPT-4.

Some OpenAI staffers discussed how such a move might go against YouTube’s rules, per the Times.

In July, Proof News reported that companies including Anthropic, Apple, Salesforce and Nvidia used a data set called The Pile, which contains subtitles from hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos, to train generative AI models. Many YouTube creators whose subtitles were swept up in The Pile weren’t aware of and didn’t consent to this; Apple later released a statement saying that it didn’t intend to use those models to power any AI features in its products.

Google, YouTube’s parent company, has also sought to use transcripts to train its models.

Last year, Google broadened its terms of service (ToS) partly to allow the company to tap more user data for generative AI model training. Under the old ToS, it wasn’t clear whether Google could use YouTube data to build products beyond the video platform. Not so under the new terms, which loosen the reins considerably. 

We’ve reached out to OpenAI and Google for comment on the class action suit and will update this piece if they respond.

It’s been a rough start to the month for OpenAI.

Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk on Monday filed a new suit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman accusing the company of abandoning its original nonprofit mission by reserving some of its most sophisticated tech for commercial customers. Musk made the same claims in a February lawsuit against OpenAI, but the new suit alleges that OpenAI is engaging in racketeering activity, as well.

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India’s fast-growing quick commerce market is getting a new deep-pocketed entrant: Walmart-owned Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce firm.

Flipkart has started to roll out Flipkart Minutes, its quick commerce service, in parts of Bengaluru. The new service offers customers the ability to have a wide range of items, from grocery to smartphones, delivered to them within 10 to 15 minutes. The e-commerce firm is offering customers free delivery on orders priced at Rs 100, or $1.20.

Flipkart is the latest entrant to the instant commerce market, which is quickly making inroads in India even as the model has failed in many other markets. Quick commerce players, which rely on hundreds of small warehouses or “dark stores” strategically located near residential and business areas for rapid deliveries, have expanded to numerous categories in recent months, including fashion and electronics, increasingly entering Amazon’s and Flipkart’s traditional territory.

Flipkart didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. TechCrunch reported in March that Flipkart was working on a quick commerce offering.

This move comes at a time when the quick commerce sector in India is showing remarkable resilience and growth. The convenience of 10-minute grocery deliveries has struck a chord with urban Indian consumers, leading to encouraging signs for companies like Zomato-owned Blinkit, StepStone-backed Zepto and SoftBank-backed Swiggy Instamart.

Analysts and investors love the space, too. Goldman Sachs estimates that Blinkit, the leading quick commerce player in India, is already worth more than its parent firm’s eponymous food delivery operations. Zomato’s stock hit all-time high to as much as $30 billion in market cap last week after the firm, which acquired Blinkit for less than $600 million in 2022, reported a quarterly profit of about $30 million.

Flipkart MinutesImage Credits: TechCrunch

Flipkart leads the e-commerce market in India, but Amazon has a stronger grip on urban Indian customers. The Bengaluru-based startup sees quick commerce as a way to win some of Amazon’s top India customers, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Amazon, for its part, has shown little interest in entering the quick commerce space in India, instead focusing on same-day delivery for Prime members and questioning the quality of products from “fast” delivery services in its marketing campaigns. The world’s largest e-commerce firm is separately in talks to acquire a stake in Swiggy, which has confidentially filed for an initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter.

A recent TechCrunch analysis found that many of Amazon India’s bestselling items were available on quick commerce platforms, meaning that the company stands to lose some business and traffic to quick commerce companies.

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