Ati Motors on Wednesday announced a $20 million raise. The funding arrives as the Indian-based autonomous mobile robots (AMR) startup looks toward global expansion. The firm hopes to tap into increased demand for domestic manufacturing in the U.S., India, and Southeast Asian nations, as countries look to lessen their dependence on China.

In 2023, the Indian IT ministry proposed a nationwide policy titled National Strategy for Robotics to position the South Asian nation as a global robotics leader by 2030. The country ranks as the seventh largest robotics market, with a 59% YoY growth in annual industrial robotics installations, with 8,500 units in 2023, per the International Federation of Robotics. However, it still lags significantly behind China, Japan, and the U.S.

“Our competitor is always the status quo, not really another robot,” Saurabh Chandra, founder and CEO of Ati Motors, said in an interview. “Typically, we are displacing manual operation or somebody driving a vehicle or often somebody pushing it by hands.”

The 7-year-old startup, which has a manufacturing and R&D facility in Bengaluru, has developed seven distinct robots, two of which are currently in testing and will be available starting this quarter. The robots can move trolleys, bins, and pallets in a factory or warehouse.

Ati Motors’ robots come with 3D lidar sensors and have spatial awareness. This enables these robots to work even in a tough environment where harsh weather, including rain, can impact manufacturing. The robots can also move on various flooring conditions and even handle gradients, cracks, or oil spills in their path, Chandra told TechCrunch.

“We do the full stack ourselves,” he said. “That has been our USP that we are able to do complete multi-disciplinary engineering.”

Ati Motors has designed the software and hardware for its robots in-house, including their sensor-fusion algorithms. Like many others in the space, the company relies on Nvidia’s Jetson platform for edge computing. It also offers dedicated fleet management software that can work with other companies’ mobile robots to provide customers interoperability.

“The future is such that millions of robots are going to go into factories. No one company is going to make all the millions of robots alone. And should we want to play with other people from day one? Yes,” Chandra said.

Founded in February 2017, Ati Motors started its journey with a tugging robot. However, based on customer feedback and demand, it expanded into pallet movers and lifters.

The startup offers a robots-as-a-service (RaaS) model to let companies lease its AMRs. Customers can also buy the systems outright.

Ati Motors says it has deployed “hundreds” of its Sherpa robots across 40 manufacturers as its customers, including Airbus, Ceat Tyres, Forvia, Hyundai, Samsung, and TVS Motor. Of its total customer base, 80% are in the automobile sector and the U.S. dominates its revenues. Therefore, the startup plans to expand its North American presence in Detroit.

The all-equity Series B funding was co-led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and NGP Capital. It also featured existing investors, including True Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners, Athera Venture Partners, and Blume Ventures.

• Samsung wants to expand Knox beyond its traditional enterprise remit
• Three tiers are now available with basic plan available on all Samsung Galaxy devices at no extra cost
• Base, Essentials, and Enterprise plans are tailored to address varying levels of security and management needs

Samsung has announced a new update for Knox Suite, its enterprise security and management solution for Galaxy business smartphones.

The updates introduce a tiered plan system, designed to cater to businesses of various sizes across multiple industries, from small businesses with a cybersecurity checklist through large enterprises.

Secondhand phones with TikTok installed are being listed on eBay for thousands of dollars. And it appears that some people might actually be buying them.

Despite US president Donald Trump signing an executive order on Monday delaying any potential ban of the social media app for 75 days, TikTok remains absent from all US app stores—with Apple and Google giving no hints on whether it will return. That means if you are in America and delete the app or lose your phone, you are currently locked out, with no way to download it again. For content creators, brand marketers, and social media managers, that could spell disaster. And an expensive one at that.

Opportunistic eBayers have taken the chance to cash in on this misfortune. A quick search for “TikTok phone” brings up more than 9,000 listings of used smartphones from the likes of Apple and Samsung, all with the TikTok app already installed.

This is possible by the seller signing out of the iCloud or Google account associated with the device rather than wiping the phone back to factory settings. Any buyer would then need to be careful not to sync to any existing cloud backup, to avoid losing the app they’ve paid so much to get.

Some of these phones are listed for as much as $50,000 under eBay’s Buy It Now selling format, but it’s hard to believe anyone could truly think their phone would sell for that—and there’s no sign that they have.

There are many more listed in the $2,000 to $5,000 range, but as to whether anyone is actually buying them at this price, it still seems unlikely.

What can be said is that, in spite of the inflated prices, there is interest. These phones are selling, but for exactly how much is harder to ascertain. Select the “sold” filter on eBay’s search and there are plenty of sales that appear to be completed, but pretty much all of them have an undisclosed “best offer accepted” note connected to them.

Any finished auctions with incredibly inflated prices look to have been relisted shortly after, suggesting an unsuccessful sale, with only those that sit at close to market value for secondhand phones looking to have actually sold.

A quick glance at auctions that are currently running also show much more reasonable prices than an initial search might suggest.

The true impact of any TikTok premium is somewhat unclear, then, but that isn’t stopping people from trying. Results for the TikTok phone search term went up by over 2,000 items during the course of writing this article—a sense of urgency no doubt pushed along by the fact the app could be returned to the app stores at any time.

At the moment, a TikTok search on either app store is met with statements from Google and Apple citing legal requirements as the reason the app is not available on their stores. This is despite Trump’s executive order clearly instructing the Department of Justice to “take no action to enforce the Act or impose any penalties against any entity for any noncompliance with the Act.”

Whether TikTok reappears before the 75 days is up remains to be seen—as does any deal Trump cuts in the meantime—but those exiled are not completely without options. This week, thousands of users have flocked to another Chinese-owned social media platform, RedNote, leaving the app scrambling to hire English moderators.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has also been doing its bit to take lost TikTokers under its wing, introducing a flurry of new familiar features and even offering big influencers as much as $5,000 to join its platforms.

Chris Young, Microsoft’s head of business development and its venture unit, resigned from his role on Wednesday, the company said.

Young led Microsoft’s M12 venture fund, and was what’s known as a named officer. Microsoft’s other named officers include CFO Amy Hood, top lawyer and vice chair Brad Smith, head of sales Judson Althoff, and CEO and chairman Satya Nadella.

Because Young was a named officer, Microsoft was legally obligated to publicly report his compensation, responsibilities, and departure. On Wednesday, Microsoft announced Young’s resignation in an SEC filing.

When Microsoft filed its annual proxy report in October, it listed Young’s accomplishments as increasing M12’s “engagements” in areas like AI and data infrastructure, working with company leadership in emerging tech, closing a strategic partnership, and helping the company make progress on its big sustainability goals. The company also said that Young “championed diversity and inclusion within the business development organization and across the company.”

Young was formerly CEO of McAfee. He joined Microsoft in 2020 to replace the company’s previous dealmaker, Peggy Johnson, who founded M12. M12 was originally created by the Seattle tech giant to keep tabs on emerging Silicon Valley tech and rising startups through typical venture investment. Under Young, it became more like an extension of Microsoft’s business development team.

The SEC filing did not indicate why Young was leaving. It did say that he would be staying on as an employee until March to assist with the transition, although no longer in his former job. Young did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

“We are deeply grateful for the significant impact Chris had at Microsoft over the past 4 years,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “During Chris’ tenure, he led hundreds of strategic partnerships, fostered a culture of innovation, and laid the groundwork for our future growth. We support Chris’ decision to pursue a new endeavor.”

Addressing a single executive order from Donald Trump’s voluminous first-day edicts is like singling out one bullet in a burst from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the gut. That is “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency.’’ The acronym for that name is DOGE (named after a memecoin), and it’s the Elon Musk–led effort to cut government spending by a trillion bucks or two. Though DOGE was, until this week, pitched as an outside body, this move makes it an official part of government—by embedding it in an existing agency that was formerly part of the Office of Management and Budget called the United States Digital Service. The latter will now be known as the US DOGE Service, and its new head will be more tightly connected to the president, reporting to his chief of staff.

The new USDS will apparently shift its former laser focus on building cost-efficient and well-designed software for various agencies to a hardcore implementation of the Musk vision. It’s kind of like a government version of a SPAC, the dodgy financial maneuver that launched Truth Social in the public market without ever having to reveal a coherent business plan to underwriters.

The order is surprising in a sense because, on its face, DOGE seems more limited than its original super ambitious pitch. This iteration seems more tightly centered on saving money through streamlining and modernizing the government’s massive and messy IT infrastructure. There are big savings to be had, but a handful of zeros short of trillions. As of yet, it’s uncertain whether Musk will become the DOGE administrator. It doesn’t seem big enough for him. (The first USDS director, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn, “’I’d like to congratulate Elon Musk on being promoted to my old job.”) But reportedly Musk pushed for this structure as a way to embed DOGE in the White House. I hear that inside the Executive Office Building, there are numerous pink Post-it notes claiming space even beyond USDS’s turf, including one such note on the former chief information officers’ enviable office. So maybe this could be a launch pad for a more sweeping effort that will eliminate whole agencies and change policies. (I was unable to get a White House representative to answer questions, which isn’t surprising considering that there are dozens of other orders that equally beg for explanation.)

One thing is clear—this ends United States Digital Service as it previously existed, and marks a new, and maybe perilous era for the USDS, which I have been enthusiastically covering since its inception. The 11-year-old agency sprang out of the high-tech rescue squad salvaging the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the hellish failure of a website that almost tanked the Affordable Care Act. That intrepid team of volunteers set the template for the agency: a small group of coders and designers who used internet-style techniques (cloud not mainframe; the nimble “agile” programming style instead of the outdated “waterfall” technique) to make government tech as nifty as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving lucrative Silicon Valley jobs, were lured by the prospect of public service. They worked out of the agency’s funky brownstone headquarters on Jackson Place, just north of the White House. The USDS typically took on projects that were mired in centi-million contracts and never completed—delivering superior results within weeks. It would embed its employees in agencies that requested help, being careful to work collaboratively with the lifers in the IT departments. A typical project involved making DOD military medical records interoperable with the different systems used by the VA. The USDS became a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its affiliation with cool nerddom.

During the first Trump administration, deft maneuvering kept the USDS afloat—it was the rare Obama initiative that survived. Its second-in-command, Haley Van Dyck, cleverly got buy-in from Trump’s in-house fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record talk early in 2017, I ran into Van Dyck in the West Wing; she gave me a conspiratorial nod that things were looking up, at least for the moment. Nonetheless, the four Trump years became a balancing act in sharing the agency’s achievements while somehow staying under the radar. “At Disney amusement parks, they paint things that they want to be invisible with this certain color of green so that people don’t notice it in passing,” one USDSer told me. “We specialized in painting ourselves that color of green.” When Covid hit, that became a feat in itself, as USDS worked closely with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx on gathering statistics—some of which the administration wasn’t eager to publicize.

By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint was wearing thin. A source tells me that at one point a Trump political appointee noticed—not happily— that USDS was recruiting at tech conferences for lesbians and minorities, and asked why. The answer was that it was an effective way to find great product managers and designers. The appointee accepted that but asked if, instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” on the reimbursement line, could they just say LWT?

Earthblade, the next game from the developers of Celeste, has been canceled. The fantasy-inspired game got its first trailer in late 2022, and the game would have let you explore a “free-roaming, dynamically-loading map,” Extremely OK Games’ Maddy Thorson said at the time. But the team decided to cancel the game in December after a team conflict and because of the pressure of trying to follow up on Celeste, Thorson says in a post detailing what happened.

The “disagreement” was between Thorson and Noel Berry (Thorson refers to the two of them as “us”) and Pedro Medeiros over “the IP rights of Celeste,” Thorson says. “We eventually reached a resolution, but both parties also agreed in the end that we should go our separate ways,” and Medeiros is currently working on a game called Neverway. “Losing Pedro wasn’t the only factor in cancelling the game, but it did prompt us to take a serious look at whether fighting through to finish Earthblade was the right path forward,” Thorson says.

The huge success of Celeste also “applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a large part of why working on it has become so exhausting,” Thorson says. “Pedro isn’t to blame for this — in fact the split with him has given us the clarity to see that we have lost our way, and the opportunity to admit defeat.”

Thorson and Berry want to refocus on “smaller-scale projects” and are “prototyping again” to try and “rediscover game development in a manner closer to how we approached it at Celeste’s or TowerFall’s inception.”

In 2015, the blogging site Tumblr launched a GIF discovery feature called Tumblr TV as an experimental product. Now, with the U.S. TikTok ban leaving the fate of the short-form video app uncertain, Tumblr has decided it’s finally time to launch Tumblr TV, which has since evolved to support video, to all its users as one of its standard features.

The company on Tuesday announced the product’s graduation from its experimental projects home known as Tumblr Labs, explaining how the tab would become available to everyone. New users will see the tab in a fairly prominent third position in the app. Meanwhile, existing users will be able to toggle Tumblr TV on or off in their Dashboard Tabs configuration settings, Tumblr said.

The decision to promote the video product from an experiment to a core feature nearly 10 years after its creation has a lot to do with the demand for TikTok alternatives in the wake of the U.S. law that banned the app and others with Chinese ownership in the country.

Though enforcement of that ban is currently on hold after President Trump’s intervention, it’s still unclear whether TikTok will agree to a deal — despite its many suitors — to keep the app live in the U.S. after the 75-day deadline extension is up.

Like many apps, Tumblr noted it saw a surge of users joining its service on the day of the TikTok ban on January 19, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. As a result, the blogging service saw a roughly 35% increase in iOS app installs and a 70% increase in new users joining Communities, a feature that allows users to join various groups focused on specific interests.

In fact, some newcomers even established Tumblr Communities, like TikTok Repository, aimed at those who wanted a place to back up and share their TikTok videos. Another Community, TikTok Refugees, was active with both new and returning users, the company said.

As a competitor to TikTok, however, TumblrTV falls short. Though the company made many improvements while the service was a Labs feature — including the addition of lightbox support, improved scrubbing, and video support — the final product doesn’t feel all that much like TikTok, where original creator content dominates.

Tumblr’s video feed does allow for vertical swipe-based navigation within its channels (like Art or Sports) when viewed on mobile, similar to TikTok. But the GIFs featured in this full-screen viewing mode are naturally grainy, while many of the videos featured aren’t formatted for vertical viewing because they were never recorded for a vertical video app in the first place.

Still, the company hopes that a video feed could make TikTok users feel a little bit more at home if they decide to move to Tumblr.

Of course, with TikTok back online in the U.S. for the time being, the demand for a backup app is likely waning.

Panic over the US TikTok ban increased usage and downloads of a slew of alternative social media apps, including Texas-based Clapper, Chinese-owned RedNote, and Likee, a little-known platform out of Singapore with an AI-powered video feed similar to TikTok’s, according to new market research.

People in the US could not access TikTok for about 14 hours on late Saturday into Sunday after a federal law aimed at curbing China’s alleged influence over the app went into effect and triggered an unprecedented incident of internet censorship in a country that prizes free expression. About 63 percent of US teens and a third of US adults use TikTok, according to Pew Research Center.

Among the places some of them took refuge was Likee, a TikTok clone launched by the profitable Singaporean tech company Joyy in 2017. Likee had about 33.9 million monthly users as of November, most of whom were outside the US. But on Saturday, Likee drew 143 percent more downloads and 37 percent more usage in the US than the previous day, according to Sensor Tower, which estimates figures by gathering data from a sample of devices. The trend continued into Sunday, when Likee usage ticked up 11 percent from a day earlier.

Estimates from Apptopia, another company that studies the app industry, show that for months, Likee recorded less than 10,000 downloads per day in the US before jumping to nearly 167,000 on Sunday and about 286,000 on Monday. Apptopia also estimated similar bumps for TikTok competitors Clapper and Flip.

On Tuesday, shares of Likee’s parent company, Joyy, closed up about 3 percent, outpacing the average gain among its Nasdaq peers. Joyy does not break out Likee’s financials, but it and some of its other sibling apps collectively generated about $73 million in sales during last year’s third quarter from advertising and user purchases. Likee did not respond to a request for comment.

Other less-frequented apps, including Clapper and Snap’s Snapchat, drew increased interest over the weekend to the tune of double-digit gains in user activity. TikTok’s biggest rivals, Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, saw more modest single-digit boosts. YouTube and X, meanwhile, experienced little change in usage.

RedNote, another Chinese app that Americans had flocked to in protest during the days before the ban, added 80 percent more users Sunday than the day before, according to Sensor Tower. In the first two days of the rush earlier in the week, over 700,000 new users joined RedNote, Reuters reported. Known as Xiaohongshu in Chinese, it ranked in recent days as the most-downloaded free app on the Google and Apple app stores in the US.

TikTok came back online in the US on Sunday after president-elect Donald Trump promised to provide a temporary reprieve of the new law when he took power the following day. The statute, signed by former President Biden last year, effectively bans TikTok by threatening to fine web hosting providers and app stores that work with its parent company, Chinese tech giant ByteDance, unless it divests its ownership in TikTok. Users came back to TikTok in droves on Sunday, with daily active users up 17 percent over Saturday, the Sensor Tower data show.

On Monday, Trump issued an executive order providing for 75 additional days to sort out the dilemma over TikTok. But the legality of his decree remains in question, and TikTok is still unavailable in US app stores. But when users search for TikTok, they’re greeted by a list of alternatives—Likee, Clapper, and others among them.