The European Union will give tech and social media companies a “stress test” to see how they handle misinformation ahead of Germany’s election next month.

European Commission officials have invited tech companies, including X, Meta, Snap, TikTok, Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, to a meeting on January 31, according to multiple news outlets. During this meeting, European Commission officials will quiz these tech companies about how they would react to different scenarios that could interfere with the upcoming election, from AI-generated fakes to disinformation campaigns, according to Bloomberg.

TechCrunch has reached out to all the companies included for comment and will update this piece if we hear back.

This stress test will see whether tech companies are compliant with the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires companies to have safeguards and protocol in place to combat misinformation and illegal content on their platforms.

This test is ahead of Germany’s snap federal election in February; the results could have large implications on the broader EU, as Germany is the largest member of the bloc.

The EU is likely taking a closer look at how tech companies are complying with the DSA now after bloc member Romania annulled the results of the first round of its presidential election last year after evidence of Russian interference, which they think may have been boosted by TikTok’s algorithm, and the documentation of 85,000 attempted cyberattacks on election websites and IT.

Elon Musk, and X, have already played a role in this upcoming election in Germany. Musk recently interviewed Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right AfD party and a candidate in Germany’s upcoming election, on X.

This news comes just one day after President Donald Trump took aim at how EU regulators treat U.S. tech companies, including Google, Meta, and Apple, two of which have been invited to this stress test.

While speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump said that the regulation of U.S.-based tech companies by EU regulators was “a form of taxation.”

• Roli has a new Piano AI Assistant to go with its latest instruments.
• The Piano AI Assistant offers personalized, real-time help and lessons.
• The AI is there to make learning and creating music more intuitive.

Piano teachers of both the strict and whimsical variety are a staple of movies and television, but music technology company Roli now offers a piano tutor built right into the instrument. The new Roli Piano features personalized AI guidance underneath the 49-key, $800 keyboard.

Roli’s Piano AI Assistant does exactly what it sounds like: It makes learning music more straightforward and fun than practicing alone. It can guide players through scales, explain ways of varying a tune, and even explain some music history in the context of specific compositions. It’s like having a music teacher who never gets tired and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject.

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here.

This week was supposed to be a short one in the U.S., as it started with a holiday. But Inauguration Day kept some founders busy, and the following days brought us more than their fair share of startup news.

Most interesting startup stories from the week

This week reminded us that not all sales are created equal, and that it is often worth looking beyond the price tag. Plus, there were legal troubles for an AI decacorn.

No divvy: Divvy Homes, a rent-to-own startup backed by a16z, is selling to a division of Brookfield Properties for about $1 billion. However, some shareholders may not see a dime from the sale.

Beauty for sale: Consumer goods giant Hindustan Unilever agreed to acquire Peak XV-backed Indian skincare startup Minimalist for about $342 million — more than the $300 million valuation it reportedly sought in a fundraising attempt last year.

Big markdown: AI-powered parking platform Metropolis acquired computer vision company Oosto for a fraction of what the startup had raised to date. Formerly known as AnyVision, it had lost backers over its technology being used in controversial surveillance applications. 

Legal clash: Valued at $13.8 billion last year, Scale AI is facing its ​​third worker lawsuit of 2025, with contractors claiming they suffered psychological harm from writing prompts about disturbing content. A spokesperson for Scale AI said it had “numerous safeguards in place.”

Most interesting VC and funding news this week

Series B rounds announced this week varied greatly in size, with some of these exceeding other Series C rounds. And for companies that don’t quite feel like going public yet, there are still more letters in the alphabet.

Pre-IPO letters: Data analytics platform Databricks closed a $10 billion Series J equity funding round at a $62 billion valuation, with an additional $5.25 billion in debt financing. Meta is backing the company as a strategic investor.

From cat to unicorn: Neko Health, the Swedish body-scanning startup co-founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, and whose name means “cat” in Japanese, raised a $260 million Series B round of funding at $1.8 billion post-money.

Money to move: Lindus Health, a startup backed by Peter Thiel and Creandum that is currently moving its HQ from the U.K. to the U.S., secured a $55 million Series B round to “fix the broken clinical trial industry.” 

Spending less: AI-powered SaaS spend management platform Vertice raised a $50 million Series C round of funding led by Lakestar, at a valuation close to $500 million, according to sources.

Indian robotics: Indian-based autonomous mobile robots startup Ati Motors raised a $20 million Series B to grow internationally. The U.S. already dominates Ati’s revenues, and the company hopes to further benefit from demand for robotics manufactured outside of China.

Crypto crypto crypto: Capitalizing on crypto’s comeback, AngelList and CoinList teamed up to launch crypto special purpose vehicles and crypto roll-up vehicles that will let crypto founders raise capital using crypto coins.

Last but not least

AI is still red hot, but there are always subsectors that VCs are more interested in. To figure out which types of AI startups they’d most like to back this year, TechCrunch rounded up some findings from our recent survey of 20 enterprise VCs. In short: Think companies, not features.

Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,000 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today – or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc’s Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.

The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel the apps’ further development.

The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as the fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternative Mastodon. The latter saw increased signups and use after the company formerly known as Twitter sold to Elon Musk in October 2022 and during the X exodus that followed the U.S. presidential election.

In the months and years following that sale, open source and decentralized apps like Mastodon and Bluesky (which uses the newer AT Protocol), have continued to grow their user bases, as people sought alternatives to centralized social media apps controlled by billionaires like Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Seeing the writing on the wall, even Meta realized it needed to plant a flag in the fediverse. This led it to release its own X rival in 2023 called Instagram Threads, which is in the process of integrating with ActivityPub.

Now, Daniel Supernault, the Canadian-based developer behind the federated apps that challenge Meta’s social media empire, is seeking funds for continued development and support of his open social communities.

“Help us put control back into the hands of the people!” he said in a post on Mastodon where he announced the Kickstarter’s Thursday launch.

As of the time of writing, the campaign has raised $58,383 so far. While the goal on the Kickstarter site has been surpassed, Supernault said that he hopes to raise $1 million or more so he can hire a small team.

Supernault wants his set of apps to become the first in the fediverse to reach a network of a billion people, but of course, there’s still a long way to go before they can meet that lofty goal. Though Pixelfed has been around for years, it just launched the 1.0 version of its mobile app earlier this month, for instance, and Loops is still in alpha testing on Apple’s TestFlight. Sup, meanwhile, has not yet been released but is said to be “coming soon,” per its Instagram page.

Both Loops and Sup will be released to Kickstarter supporters.

A fourth project, PubKit, is also a part of these efforts, offering a toolset to support developers building in the fediverse.

It includes interactive tools and testing frameworks, allowing developers to mock popular activities on their service, set up an inbox for ingesting and debugging activities in real time, and tools to inspect, debug, and verify HTTP Signature implementations.

This is the first time Supernault has turned to Kickstarter to help with these efforts, which aim to also benefit the Pixelfed Foundation.

The stretch goal of the Kickstarter campaign is to register the Pixelfed Foundation as a not-for-profit and grow its team beyond volunteers. This could help address the issue with Supernault being a single point of failure for the project, which has raised concerns in light of recent behavior.

Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko made a similar decision earlier this month to transition to a nonprofit structure.

If successful, the campaign would also fund a blogging app as an alternative to Tumblr or LiveJournal at some point in the future.

The funds will also help the apps manage the influx of new users. On Pixelfed.social, the main Pixelfed instance, (like Mastodon, anyone can run a Pixelfed server), there are now more than 200,000 users, thanks in part to the mobile app’s launch, according to the campaign details shared with TechCrunch. The server is also now the second-largest in the fediverse, behind only Mastodon.social, according to network statistics from FediDB.

New funds will help expand the storage, CDNs, and compute power needed for the growing user base and accelerate development. In addition, they’ll help Supernault dedicate more of his time to the apps and the fediverse as a whole while also expanding the moderation, security, privacy, and safety programs that social apps need.

As a part of its efforts, Supernault also wants to introduce E2E encryption to the fediverse.

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

Waymo lobbyists had a busy 2024.

A recent review of lobbyist disclosure data by the San Francisco Examiner revealed Waymo paid lobbyists to meet with San Francisco government officials 348 times last year, more than double the 137 times it reported in 2023.

The pop in lobbyist activity is in sync with Waymo’s expansion in San Francisco — and its ambitions for the larger Bay Area. Waymo has had a presence in the San Francisco area since 2009, but it wasn’t until August 2023 that the company was able to charge customers — 24 hours a day and throughout the city — for rides in its fleet of self-driving Jaguar I-Pace vehicles. 

Since then, Waymo has expanded its footprint and the number of customers it serves. Waymo dumped its waitlist last June for its San Francisco robotaxi service, removing the final obstacle for customers keen to use the self-driving technology. Last year, the company expanded its coverage area by another 10 square miles to include Bay Area cities and began testing driverless vehicles on SF freeways.

Waymo also wants to be able to pick up and drop off customers at the San Francisco Airport, as TechCrunch reported last July; lobbyist disclosure data separately shows an uptick in visits with airport authority officials.

• Google’s Gemini app now controls smart homes through a Google Home extension
• Gemini can understand natural language to complete tasks
• The aim is to make smart homes more intuitive and easier to manage

Google wants Gemini to control your smart home devices and has upgraded the Gemini app with a new Google Home extension to manage all of your connected devices the same way you’d ask the AI assistant to answer any other query. So if you have the Gemini app and devices controlled by Google Home, you can link Gemini to your Google Home account.

The extension links Gemini with your lights, thermostats, and any other smart home devices, but with the benefit of Gemini’s more flexible conversational ability. That means you could say, “It’s too bright in here,” and have Gemini dim the lights instead of needing to command setting the lights to 50% specifically. You can also manage multiple devices with more casual language. Rather than individually tweaking device settings, you can say, “Dim the living room lights, turn on the bedroom lamp, and lower the blinds.” Gemini can grasp the three commands for three sets of devices and act accordingly.

Audi has revealed a new dual-motor electric off-road vehicle concept based on the Q6 E-tron that looks ready for a snowpocalypse. The automaker built a working prototype that lifts the vehicle by 6.3 inches and widens it by 9.8 inches, giving it a stance that wouldn’t be out of place if it appeared in Truck Country, USA.

Audi’s CEO Gernot Döllner calls the “Q6 E-Tron Off-road concept” a “reinterpretation of Quattro,” which is the company’s marketing term for its all-wheel-drive models.

The extra ride height is courtesy of four bespoke portal axles integrated into the wheel hub assemblies at the front and rear that Audi says increase torque at the wheel by 50 percent. Each axle is powered by an electric motor with a combined power output of 380kW and up to 9,883 lb ft of torque at its peak. That’s up 3,245 lb ft of torque from the normal Q6 E-tron, which is Audi’s first vehicle built on Volkswagen’s modular Premium Platform Electric (PPE) platform (also used in the new A6 E-tron and Porsche Macan EV).

The vehicle is designed to climb hills as steep as 45 degrees but the company did nerf the Q6’s top speed a bit down to 108 mph. Still, no one should drive that fast anyway in a vehicle lifted this high. This also makes the Off-road concept a much more realistic one compared to more sci-fi Audi concepts like the Activesphere coupe / pickup truck combo with a mixed reality cockpit or the truly apocalyptic all-terrain “AI:Trail” that has drones for headlights.

Audi’s Q6 E-tron Offroad concept will be featured at the FAT International Ice Race in Austria on February 1st. The company will also show it in action via its social media channels.