Slate Auto, the buzzy new EV startup that broke stealth this week, is close to locking in a former printing plant located in Warsaw, Indiana as the future production site for its cheap electric truck, a review of public records shows.
The company is expected to lease the 1.4 million-square-foot facility for an undisclosed sum. Economic development officials told local media earlier this year (without naming Slate) the factory could employ up to 2,000 people, and that the county offered the undisclosed company an incentive package.
It’s not immediately clear what that incentive package includes or if it has been finalized. Slate did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Peggy Friday, the CEO of the Kosciusko County Economic Development Corporation said in an email that she is “under a strict non-disclosure agreement with the project.”
Slate showed an aerial photo of the factory during Thursday’s event. The company did not say where it was located, but the photo matches a public listing for the facility available on the Indiana Economic Development Corporation’s website. TechCrunch previously reported that the company planned to make its EVs, which will cost under $20,000 after the federal tax credit, in Indiana.
“Our truck will be made here in the USA as part of our commitment to re-industrializing America,” Slate’s CEO Chris Barman said onstage while the factory photo was displayed on a screen behind her.
Slate’s focus on domestic manufacturing is embedded in the company’s DNA. The startup was originally created inside of Re:Build Manufacturing, a Massachusetts-based company focused on beefing up the country’s ability to make things.
The factory in Warsaw was built in 1958, and was occupied for decades by printing company R.R. Donnelly. It has been dormant for around two years, according to local media.
Converting a factory, especially one that was not previously pumping out cars, is no cheap or easy task. Slate has amassed a serious war chest to help tackle that goal. Backed in part by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Guggenheim Partners CEO Mark Walter, and powerhouse VC firm General Catalyst, the startup has raised well over $100 million to date.
The approach Slate is taking in designing and building its electric truck should help keep costs down, too. The company plans to sell wraps for the trucks instead of painting them, meaning it does not need to build a paint shop at the factory. That alone could save Slate hundreds of millions in the plant buildout process.
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Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, walked into the sunlight-lit hotel conference room in Brooklyn on Thursday to meet with a dozen youth leaders working in tech safety, policy, and innovation.
The young adults chatted away at black circular tables, many unaware of his presence until he plopped down at a table and started talking with them.
After making his way through various tables in the room, he took the stage to talk about the hopes and harms of this era of technological progress.
“Thank God you guys exist, thank God you guys are here,” he said. He spoke about tech platforms having become more powerful than governments; that these social media spaces were created based on community, yet said there has been “no responsibility to ensure the safety of those online communities.”
At one point, he said that there were people in power only incentivized by pure profit, rather than safety and well-being. “You have the knowledge and the skillset and the confidence and the bravery and the courage to be able to stand up to these things,” he said to the crowd.
The event yesterday was hosted by the Responsible Tech Youth Power Fund (RTYPF), a grant initiative to support youth organizations working to shape the future of technology. The Duke’s Foundation, Archewell, which he co-founded with his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, funded the second cohort of RTYPF grantees, alongside names like Pinterest and Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures.
TechCrunch received exclusive access to the event to chat with attendees, average age of around 22, about their work amidst the rapidly changing technological landscape.
The young people at the event were cautiously optimistic about the future of artificial intelligence, but worried about the impact social media was having on their livelihoods. Everything is moving so fast these days, they said, faster than the law can keep up.
“It’s not that the youth are anti-technology,” said Lydia Burns, 27, who leads youth and community partnerships at the nonprofit Seek Common Grounds. “It’s just that we feel we should have more input and seats at the table to talk about how these things impact our lives.”
Each turn of every conversation at the event led back to social media.
It’s consuming every part of a young person’s life, yet the clouds have the potential to become darker, the young people said at the event.
Adam Billen, 23, helps run the organization Encode, which advocates for safe and responsible AI. He’s worked on the Take It Down Act, seeking to tackle AI generated porn and other pieces of legislation, like California’s SB53 that wants to establish whistleblower protections for employees over AI-related issues. Billen, like the other young people at the event, is working fast to help the people in power understand new technology that is innovating even faster.
“As recently as two years ago, it was just not possible for someone without technical expertise to create realistic AI nudes of someone,” he told TechCrunch. “But today, with advances in generative AI, there are apps and websites publicly available for free that are being advertised to kids,” on social media platforms.
He’s heard of cases where young people simply take photos of their classmates, fully clothed, and then upload them to AI image platforms to get realistic nudes of their peers. Doing that is not nationally illegal yet, he said, and guardrails from Big Tech are loose. On these platforms, he said, it’s all too easy to see advertisements for tools to create deep fake porns, meaning it’s all too easy for children to find it too.
Sneha Dave, 26, the founder of Generation Patient, an organization that advocates for the support of young people with chronic conditions, is also worried about the sharp turn social media has taken. Influencers are doing paid advertisements for prescription medications, and teenagers are being fed pharmaceutical ads on social media, she said.
“We don’t know how the FDA works with these companies to try to flag to make sure there’s not misinformation being spread by influencers advertising these prescription medications,” Dave told TechCrunch, speaking about Big Tech platforms.
Social media in general has become a mental health crisis, the young people told us. Yoelle Gulko, 22, is working on a film to help people better understand the dangers of social media. She said walking through college campuses these days, she hears of numerous people simply deleting their social media accounts, feeling helpless in their relationship to the online world.
“Young people shouldn’t be left to fend for themselves,” Gulko said. “Young people should really be given the tools to succeed online, and that’s something a lot of us are doing.”
Leo Wu, 21, remembers the exact moment that led him to start his nonprofit, AI Consensus.
It was back in 2023 when hype around ChatGPT was becoming widespread. “There was all this press from universities and media outlets about how it was destroying education,” Wu told TechCrunch. “And we just had this feeling that this was not at all the way, the attitude to take.”
So he launched AI Consensus, which works with students, tech companies, and educational institutions to talk about the best ways students can use AI in school.
“Is it a teenager’s fault for being addicted to Instagram?” Wu told us, capturing what many young people felt when asked. “Or is it the fault of a company that is making this technology addictive?”
Wu wants to help students learn how to work with AI while still learning how to think for themselves.
Working to push regulation was the main way the attendees we spoke to were looking to advocate for themselves. Some were, however, building their own organizations, putting the youth perspective at the forefront.
“I see youth as the bridge between our current government and what the responsible tech future is,” said Jennifer Wang, the founder of Paragon, which connects students with governments looking for perspectives on tech policy issues.
Meanwhile, Generation Patient’s Dave is pushing for more collaboration between the FDA and FTC. She’s also working to help pass a bill through Congress to protect patients from deceptive drug ads online.
Encode’s Billen said he’s considering supporting bills in various states that will require disclosure boxes so people know they are talking to AI and not a human, as well as ones like the bill in California, looking to ban minors from using chatbots. He’s watching the Character.AI lawsuit closely, saying a verdict in that case would be a landmark in shaping future AI regulation.
His company, Encode, along with others in the tech policy space, filed an amicus brief in support of the mother suing Character.AI over the alleged role it played in her son’s death.
At one point during the event, the Duke sat next to Wu to talk about the opportunities and dangers of AI. They spoke about the need for more accountability and who had the power to push for change. That solution was clear.
“The people in this room,” Wu said.
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Flex, a startup that offers personal finance software for business owners, has acquired Maza, a finance app aimed at Spanish speakers in the U.S., for $40 million, the companies told TechCrunch exclusively.
At first glance, the pairing may seem a bit curious. Flex’s software and payments infrastructure is to help business owners have a single app to conduct all their finances. Maza started out helping Spanish-speaking consumers — immigrants included — do things like open a bank account, get a debit card, and provide those who needed it with an individual tax identification number (ITIN).
So how did the mission of these two companies intersect? Over time, Maza realized that many of the users of its app and services were actually small business owners, or solopreneurs. So the startup focused on developing business software for its Spanish-speaking customers and their small businesses, running part of their operations on its tech stack. Examples included landscapers, cleaning services, and construction subcontractors, among others.
In 2024, Maza said it was scaling revenue at a 290% year-over-year growth rate and had 250,000 customers.
The scale that Maza experienced in the solopreneur segment caught the attention of Flex, which saw it as a gateway for Flex’s own offering, noted Luciano Arango, co-founder and CEO of Maza.
Over time, Flex has been building tools to serve the person behind the business.
“As both companies gravitated toward the same user — business owners with consumer needs — the lines between the two began to blur,” said Flex founder and CEO Zaid Rahman. “Rather than build a parallel product, it made more sense to combine forces and scale from day zero to year ten.”
As a combined company, the founders hope to “accelerate” their “shared roadmap,” said Rahman.
Maza will rebrand as Flex Consumer, and Maza’s founders — Arango, Robbie Figueroa, and Siggy Bilstein — will take on executive roles within the combined entity.
“As founders, we’ve felt the pain of fragmented financial tools. Maza and Flex were building from opposite ends of the same problem,” Arango said. “Joining forces was the logical next step.”
Maza’s pivot was a natural one, according to Arango.
“What surprised us most was how durable the customer base became,” Arango added.
So Maza continued building in that direction, using the proceeds of a previously undisclosed $15 million Series A round of funding that it raised in 2024. Wellington led that round, which included participation from existing and new backers such as Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Tusk Venture Partners, and Titanium Ventures, as well as singer Anderson Paak and the former CEO of Amex Bank, Anré Williams.
Since its 2022 inception, Maza has raised a total of $24 million in equity. Also founded in 2022, Flex has secured $45 million in equity and $300 million in credit facilities with the debt exclusively funding its credit card offering. Flex was valued at $250 million as of March. Titanium Ventures led its last raise, a $25 million equity round announced in March.
Ninety-five percent of Maza’s 22-person team has been integrated into Flex, which had 64 employees at the end of 2024.
Merger-and-acquisition deals in the fintech sector have picked up in the last two quarters, according to CB Insights’ State of Venture Q1 2025 report. In the fourth quarter of 2024, the sector saw 191 global M&A transactions. And in the first quarter of 2025, it saw 184 M&A deals. By contrast, there were 143 fintech M&A deals reported in the third quarter of 2024.
More recently, embedded finance platform Pipe acquired Glean.ai, which marketed itself as “accounts payable with a brain,” for an undisclosed amount. Checkr also recently signed a definitive agreement to acquire Truework, an income and employment verification startup.
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Chess.com reaches a new membership milestone as it nears its 20th birthday.
Chess.com, the online chess platform that was founded in 2005 and launched in 2007, has surpassed 200 million members. Of those 200 million members, 1.5 million are paying users. More than 6 million games of chess are played every day on the platform.
“[Chess has] got this durability to it,” Albert Cheng, the chief growth officer at Chess.com told TechCrunch. “It’s been played for over 1,500 years, which is just amazing. And even Chess.com is not a brand new company. It’s been around for almost 20 years. It feels really dynamic.”
The company has expanded a lot since its roots as an online forum for IRL chess players to discuss their matches. Chess.com now offers full chess matches against other people or bots, daily games and puzzles, news about the chess world, the ability to stream chess competitions, and more.
Cheng credits the company’s continued product innovation as one of the reasons it has seen strong and sustained growth. For example, the company released an AI game review feature in 2021 — yes, there is always an AI angle — that uses AI to summarize how a player did in a game and to flag potential improvements. He added that the majority of new users on Chess.com are beginners, and while the platform is designed for players of all levels, such features can help foster a love for the game for these new members.
The company has also been able to ride the increased interest in chess over the past few years. Chess, along with many other games, gained a lot of popularity during the pandemic as people looked for online ways to entertain themselves through COVID-19 lockdowns. In response, Chess.com had to bulk up its infrastructure to be able to support the new demand.
Netflix’s chess-focused miniseries, “The Queen’s Gambit,” further fueled interest when it was released in 2020. Since then, numerous events have sparked new interest in the game. In 2022, the chess world was rocked by a cheating scandal involving five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen. Competitive chess will also be featured in the Esports World Cup for the first time this year.
The game has also gotten increasingly global, Cheng said, with around 85% of new user registrations coming from outside the U.S. The current grand master, Gukesh Dommaraju, hails from India.
Cheng — the former head of product, growth, and monetization at Grammarly and Duolingo — added that he seems to hear of a new “high-profile” chess player every day and cited the recent chess match between F1 racing stars Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc playing online chess against each other.
“I think the sky’s the limit here, and the more that we can continue to grow the game by leveraging that organic interest that already exists in these adjacent communities, we’d be foolish not to explore it,” Cheng said. “So I’m really excited by those opportunities.”
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In the span of a decade, direct air capture technology that draws CO2 out of the atmosphere has gone from wildly expensive to somewhat expensive. Companies like Microsoft, which set a target to eliminate its emissions by 2030, are happy to pay more to get the ball rolling. But smaller companies would still balk at the prices.
A startup may have an answer, one that’s been inspired by batteries. RepAir Carbon is developing a new form of carbon capture the company says could drive the cost down as low as $70 to $80 per metric ton of carbon removed. That’s a significantly lower price than other approaches, which experts estimate cost around $600 per metric ton.
RepAir recently raised a $15 million extension to its Series A, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The round was led by Exantia Capital and Taranis Carbon Ventures with participation from Ormat Technologies and Repsol. The Israeli Innovation Authority also contributed a $3 million grant.
The potential cost advantage comes from the way RepAir uses electricity to capture carbon. Most companies rely on a solvent to remove CO2 that must be heated to release the gas so it can be transported and stored. RepAir, on the other hand, uses electricity to drive the chemical reaction.
The device is “more like a fuel cell, but operated more like a battery,” co-founder and CEO Amir Shiner told TechCrunch.
Inside, two electrodes are separated by a membrane. As air or flue gas is drawn into the reaction chamber, it encounters a nickel-based electrode with a current running through it. There, hydroxide is waiting to attract carbon dioxide, converting it into carbonate and bicarbonate ions with negative electrical charges. These then pass through the porous electrode and separator, attracted to the other electrode’s positive charge.
When the ions hit the positive electrode, they revert back to CO2 and hydroxide. The CO2 is then drawn off to be stored while the hydroxide builds up until there’s enough that the reactor can be reversed and the process repeated in the other direction.
Compared with other carbon capture technologies, RepAir’s reversibility could give it an edge.
Other capture devices typically need time to heat the solvent to release CO2, a process known as regeneration, and that downtime requires more modules to capture a given amount of carbon.
“We regenerate while working,” Shiner said.
Each of RepAir’s reaction chambers are filled with multiple stacks of anode-separator combos, and the company can apply varying amounts of electricity to ensure they’re operating at peak performance.
Shiner said the technology works to capture carbon from the atmosphere and from exhaust streams from power plants and the like. RepAir is currently in talks with developers to add its technology to gas turbines to help eliminate carbon emissions from data centers.
“It’s early, but it’s something we’re working on and we have strong interest coming from that specific area,” he said.
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