The partnership news comes with official acceptance into the prestigious UK-based Race2Space 2026 International Propulsion competition.

The University of Limerick (UL) Aeronautical Society High-Powered Rocketry Team (ULAS HiPR) has announced a partnership with UL and Irish Manufacturing Research (IMR) to design and produce the first additive manufactured (3D-printed) liquid rocket engine in the Republic of Ireland, called the Lúin of Celtchar.

The engine is a high-performance 2 kilonewton, water-cooled, IPA/nitrous oxide bi-propellant system, which has been designed entirely by the ULAS HiPR student team and is now being manufactured at IMR’s Advanced Manufacturing Lab in Mullingar using metal additive manufacturing. It will be returned to UL for precision machining and assembly. 

Established in 2022, ULAS HiPR has more than 100 members and is a combination of students from a range of disciplines, such as aeronautical, mechanical, software and design engineering – all of whom have an interest in designing, manufacturing and launching powerful rockets. 

The team has enjoyed some success having represented Ireland internationally at prestigious competitions, including Mach-24 and Euroc, the European Rocketry Challenge. Alongside the announcement of the partnership, ULAS HiPR has also officially been accepted into the UK-based Race2Space 2026 International Propulsion competition.

This is, according to ULAS HiPR, “a major milestone in advancing Irish student-led space propulsion capabilities”.

Speaking on the announcement, Jay Looney, the co-head of ULAS HiPR, said: “The acceptance of our project to Race2Space marks a defining moment not only for ULAS HiPR, but for Ireland’s student space community. 

“The selection of the first additively manufactured liquid rocket engine in the Republic of Ireland into the competition validates the technical ambition of our student team, and the strength of collaboration between Irish university students with industry. It demonstrates that world-class propulsion innovation can now be designed, manufactured and tested entirely here in Ireland.”

Mark Hartnett, a design for manufacturing senior technologist at IMR, added: “At IMR, supporting ambitious student teams like ULAS HiPR reflects our commitment to strengthening Ireland’s advanced manufacturing ecosystem and enabling the next generation of aerospace innovators. 

“These are vital platforms for advancing cutting-edge technologies and building Ireland’s future engineering capability, and this ULAS HiPR propulsion project demonstrates how emerging technologies can move rapidly from concept to high-performance hardware.”

In late February, Silicon Republic attended the official launch of Ireland’s first European Space Agency Phi-Lab, which is headquartered at IMR in Mullingar and run in collaboration with the AMBER Centre at Trinity College Dublin.

One of 10 European Phi-Labs, it is designed to be Ireland’s national platform for space technology development and to anchor the country’s ambitions within Europe and the world’s rapidly-expanding space economy.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

X is testing a new ad format that inserts a recommendation directly underneath a post that references the company or its products. The initial test, spotted by an X user in Europe, displayed a suggestion to “Get Starlink” beneath a post from a user that said Starlink’s satellite service works great in Portugal. The link, when clicked, directed users to Starlink’s website.

X head of product Nikita Bier confirmed the test, responding, “Trying to make an ad product that isn’t an ad.”

The Starlink ad is not visible to all users at this time, but the placeholder where the ad sits is.

If you visit X user @levelsio’s post from March 6 (screenshotted below in case of deletion), you’ll see an outlined box beneath the text of his post. This box currently showcases a random X post, unless you’re in the market where the ad test is live.

In places where the ad displays, several commenters noticed the new addition, with one asking, “lmao, did you add this Starlink button?”

In the thread, Bier also responded to a suggestion that X should allow affiliate links in this ad slot by saying, “No, then people will lie. I want to trust recommendations on here.”

X could not be immediately reached for comment. TechCrunch will update the article if the company responds.

The test follows news earlier this week that the company is rolling out “Paid Partnership” labels for creators. The labels can be applied to posts to comply with regulations around social media advertising, instead of requiring creators to use a hashtag like “ad” or “paid partnership.”

If creators’ sponsored posts were to be combined with an embedded link to an advertiser like the one being tested, X could potentially attract more marketers to the platform. That could boost creators’ use of the app, allowing it to better compete against larger social networks favored by creators, like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

X has been chasing creator content for some time — even before it was called “X” and before it was owned by Elon Musk. Yet the app has never quite found its footing in this space. So far, the company has rolled out a number of creator products, including payouts for viral content, ad-revenue sharing, creator subscriptions, and more. 

The company this week also revamped its Creator Subscriptions offering with a number of new features, including the ability to monetize individual threads.

In addition, X announced Friday that the integrated chatbot Grok is now capable of reading X’s long-form content, known as Articles. This feature, too, is underutilized, as creators who publish lengthy written text tend to prefer doing so through their own websites or newsletters.

Haier has introduced the Couture Care Collection, a two-product premium fabric care range comprising a stacked Laundry Centre and a wardrobe-style Clothes Drying Closet.

It’s a little boujee, but the collection is focused on offering complete fabric care for your clothes, rather than just traditional wash and dry functionality.

Retail investors are famously locked out of the startup world. Robinhood is attempting to change that by allowing the general public to invest in a portfolio of what it calls “some of the most exciting private companies operating today.”

To do this, the company that pioneered the commission-free brokerage model has secured access to eight startups—including Databricks, Stripe, Mercor, and Oura—grouping them into a vehicle called Robinhood Ventures Fund I. The fund, which also includes Ramp, Airwallex, Revolut, and Boom, set out last month with an ambitious $1 billion target, but demand for this novel way of investing in private companies was lower than expected.

On Thursday, Robinhood announced the fund had raised $658.4 million — which could reach $705.7 million if underwriters exercise their full allotment. The shares, priced at $25 in the offering, began trading on Friday and closed the day at $21, a 16% decline.

RVI’s reception on Wall Street stands in stark contrast to another attempt to give individual investors exposure to buzzy startups. When Destiny Tech100 — a publicly traded, closed-end fund holding stakes in 100 venture-backed companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, and Discord — direct-listed on the NYSE in March 2024, its shares surged from a reference price of $4.84 to an opening trade of $8.25, eventually closing its first day at $9.00.

Destiny Tech100 has kept climbing since its public debut. The fund closed trading on Friday at $26.61, a 33% premium to its net asset value of $19.97, meaning its shares trade well above the actual value of its underlying holdings.

So what explains why retail investors aren’t nearly as excited about Robinhood’s fund as they are about Destiny Tech 100? The most likely explanation is RVI’s lack of exposure to the companies widely expected to go public at enormous valuations: OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX.

Robinhood is looking to address this. RVI intends to add more startups to the fund, eventually aiming to hold what Robinhood Ventures President Sarah Pinto described to TechCrunch as “15 to 20 of the best late-stage growth companies out there.”  The company’s CFO, Shiv Verma, told Axios Pro on Friday that Robinhood is eyeing exposure to OpenAI.

But securing access to these high-profile companies is far from straightforward. Robinhood is aiming to get directly onto their cap tables directly through primary capital raises or secondary share sales — and that’s difficult even for a firm with deep roots in Silicon Valley.

A cap table — the official record of who owns equity in a company — is closely guarded at most high-profile startups, and winning a spot on one requires either being invited by the company or purchasing shares from existing investors with the company’s blessing.

“It’s very difficult to get into any of these companies, and the investment rounds are very expensive,” acknowledged Pinto.

That is just one of the reasons democratizing private markets is easier said than done, and why the companies most retail investors actually want to own remain, for now, out of reach.

Outlander season 8 is here! It marks the closing chapter of Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie’s (Sam Heughan) torrid love story – at least on the small screen. You can watch Outlander free in the UK and US but fans abroad needn’t miss out…

Here’s the secret: You can access your usual streaming service (and free trial) from anywhere with NordVPN – it let’s you select your location. Best of all, it’s cheaper than ever and our exclusive deal throws in a free Amazon gift card

San Francisco startup Anthropic continues to ship new AI products and services at a blistering pace, despite a messy ongoing dispute with the U.S. Department of War.

Today, the company announced Claude Marketplace, a new offering that lets enterprises with an existing Anthropic spend commitment apply part of it toward tools and applications powered by Anthropic’s Claude models but made and offered by external partners including GitLab, Harvey, Lovable, Replit, Rogo and Snowflake.

According to Anthropic’s Claude Marketplace FAQ, the program is designed to simplify procurement and consolidate AI spend. Anthropic says the Marketplace is now in limited preview and that enterprises interested in using it should reach out to their Anthropic account team to get started.

For customers interested in the Marketplace, Anthropic says purchases made through it “count against a portion of your existing Anthropic commitment,” and that the company will manage invoicing for partner spend — meaning enterprises can use part of their existing Anthropic commitment to buy Claude-powered partner solutions without separately handling partner invoicing.

In effect, Anthropic is positioning Claude Marketplace as a more centralized way for enterprises to procure certain Claude-powered partner tools.

Yet, the whole point of Anthropic’s Claude Code and Claude Cowork applications for many users was that they could shift enterprise spend and time away from current third-party software-as-a-service (Saas) apps and instead, they could “vibe code” new solutions or bespoke, AI-powered workflows. This idea is so pervasive that prior Claude integrations have on several recent occasions caused a major selloff in SaaS stocks after investors thought Claude could threaten the underlying companies and applications.

Claude Marketplace seems to be pushing against that idea, suggesting current SaaS apps are still valuable and perhaps even more useful and appealing to enterprises with Claude integrated into them.

The launch raises a broader question about how enterprises will choose to use Claude: directly through Anthropic’s own products and APIs, or through third-party applications that embed Claude for more specialized workflows.

Tool integration

Model and chat platforms have always sought to offer integrations, aiming to cut the time users spend building their app versions. 

OpenAI added third-party apps into ChatGPT and launched a new App Directory in December 2025. This brought in offerings from companies such as Canva, Expedia and Figma that users can invoke by using “@” mentions while prompting on the chatbot.

However, three months in, it’s unclear exactly how many people use ChatGPT Apps, particularly in enterprises — will Claude’s Marketplace be able achieve more success here, given rising enterprise adoption of Claude and Anthropic products?

ChatGPT’s focus in its integrated apps was on retail and individual consumer-focused tasks rather than the enterprise more broadly, but the company has also tried to appeal to that market with new plugins for ChatGPT released alongside its new GPT-5.4 this week.

Other AI tool marketplaces have also cropped up. Lightning AI launched an AI Hub last year following similar moves from AWS and Hugging Face. Many AI marketplaces, such as Salesforce’s, focus on surfacing AI agents that may already have the capabilities customers need. 

How does Anthropic’s solution stand out from these? Asked for comment a spokesperson responded:

“Claude is a model — it reasons, writes, analyzes, and codes. But Harvey isn’t just Claude with a legal prompt. It’s a purpose-built platform built for how legal teams actually work — with the domain expertise, workflow integrations, compliance infrastructure, and institutional knowledge that enterprises require. Same with Rogo for finance, Snowflake for enterprise data, or GitLab for software development. These partners have spent years building the product layer on top of Claude that makes it useful for specific industries and workflows.

That’s actually the point. Thousands of businesses use Claude to power their products — and the best ones have built something Claude alone can’t replicate. Claude Marketplace isn’t Anthropic trying to replace those products. It’s Anthropic investing in them — making it easier for enterprises to access the best Claude-powered tools without managing a separate procurement process for each one. Claude is the intelligence layer. Our partners are the product.”

Native vs app

Enterprise users adapted their Claude or ChatGPT platforms to recognize preferences, connect to their data sources and retain context. So much of how people use enterprise AI these days focuses on customizability, on making the system work for their needs.

Platforms like OpenClaw also allowed people to set up autonomous agents that can have full access to their computers to complete tasks and execute workflows. In other words, Claude and other platforms can already do much of the work that these new third-party Marketplace tools enable — provided they have the right context and data. 

However, third-party tools and integrations allow enterprise users to avoid doing the work themselves and instead invoke an existing tool to handle it. For those whose businesses are built around specific, tool-based workflows, the Marketplace may be exactly the right AI integration for them. In addition, there’s also a good chance that enterprises already paying for Claude may now take advantage of the new Marketplace to explore third-party tools and services they wouldn’t have otherwise.

While it’s still unclear what Claude Marketplace would look like in action, it’s possible that, with these tools, enterprises could use Claude as an orchestrator, where the platform acts as a command center that taps the right tool and accesses the right context without constantly prompting. 

Observers noted that Claude Marketplace offers enterprises a way to “pre-approve” apps, bypassing the often long and cautious approval process. 

Some people noted that Anthropic’s move tracks with how many businesses will want to work directly with the platforms without requiring users to move to their separate offerings. 

Anthropic’s biggest challenge with Claude Marketplace, however, is adoption. Many of the partners for its launch already have enterprise customers who deploy their tools through an API or already connect via MCP or other protocols for context.

Some users may have already vibe-coded apps that tap into these integrations. It’s now a matter of enterprise users showing they want to use these new tools within their Claude workflows.

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over assorted beverages to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.

In the news, we’ve launched a brand-new contest! Yes, the Green-Powered Challenge is underway, and we need your entry to truly make it a contest. You have until April 24th to enter, so show us what you can do with power you scrounge up from the environment around you!

On What’s That Sound, Kristina was leaning toward some kind of distant typing sounds, but [Konrad] knew it was our own Tom Nardi’s steam heat radiator pinging away.

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with an exploration of all the gross security vulnerabilities in a cheap WiFi extender, and we take a look inside a little black and white pay television like you’d find in a Greyhound station in the 80s and 90s.

We also discuss the idea of mixing custom spray paint colors on the fly, a pen clip that never bends out of shape, and running video through a guitar effects pedal. Finally, we discuss climate engineering with disintegrating satellites, and the curse of everything device.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

Episode 360 Show Notes:

News:

What’s that Sound?

• Congrats to [Konrad] who knew this was Tom Nardi’s radiator!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
• Kristina’s Picks:

Can’t-Miss Articles: