Tech

Endurance Energy raises $54M to harness a massive untapped energy source

Published

2 months ago

June 11, 2026

After you’ve worked on rockets that find their way to outer space, it can be hard to come up with a second act. For SpaceX alumni Andrew Redd, it meant looking deep in the ocean.

Redd, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, a region affected by uncharacteristic heat waves and catastrophic fires in recent years, knew he wanted to tackle something in renewable energy.

“But the experience at a very hardcore company like SpaceX made me realize that I can’t just come up with an incremental solution. It actually has to be brand new and it has to be approached from first principles,” according to Redd, who was an engineer on Dragon and Starship at SpaceX.

Redd left SpaceX and founded Endurance Energy, a startup that has raised a $54 million Series A to eventually harness terawatts of geothermal energy deep in the ocean, TechCrunch has learned. Founders Fund led the round with participation from 72 Ventures, Construct Captial, Felisis Ventures, First Round Capital, Riot Ventures, and Voyager Ventures. The new funding will allow the company to develop its plans for power plants at a time of surging energy demand from AI data centers, electric vehicles, and heavy industry.

Since founding the company last year, Redd has grown the team to 21 employees, 11 of whom used to work at SpaceX. The company’s vice president of engineering previously worked at Helion Energy, the fusion startup.

Geothermal energy isn’t a new idea — humans have been using the Earth’s heat for millennia, whether it be from spa-like hot springs or geothermal power plants. But Redd, drawing on his experience at SpaceX, figured there was another opportunity people were overlooking.

Here’s how he distilled the problem: Any future energy source should be renewable, or at least non-polluting, in his opinion. “That’s my non-negotiable,” said Reed, who is CEO of Endurance. It should also be available 24/7 — or baseload power, as the industry calls it — and it should quickly deployable and able to generate tens or hundreds of gigawatts of electricity, according to Redd.

He quickly ruled out nuclear power because regulatory and construction timelines can stretch on for years. Solar and wind aren’t available 24/7 without batteries, and hydropower is limited in where it can be built (plus all the good spots have been taken). That left geothermal.

“Geothermal is the only real deployable, baseload renewable,” he said. “But why is it only 0.4% of U.S. energy?”

There are other startups pursuing geothermal, including Fervo and Zanskar. But those companies need to drill thousands of feet into the Earth’s crust to access temperatures hot enough to drive a power plant. So far, the best opportunities for many geothermal startups has been in the Western U.S., far from large population centers.

The best places to drill, where the crust is thin and magma flows close to the surface, like in Iceland or California, have long been claimed. More recently, startups like Fervo Energy, XGS Energy, and Sage Geosystems have found other sites, but to find rocks that are hot enough to drive a power plant, they need to drill thousands of feed deeper. Those locations have so far been away from large population centers.

But no one has tapped the oceans.

At several points around the globe, the Earth’s tectonic plates are spreading apart, allowing hot magma to flow to the surface. The U.S. West Coast, Japan, and a good chunk of Southeast Asia are near the so-called Ring of Fire, the geologically active zone that encircles the Pacific Ocean.

Heading out to sea poses several challenges. Operating underwater, at the depths Endurance is proposing, isn’t easy. Robots will need to do much of the work. Saltwater is famously corrosive, so anything placed down there will have to be hardened against both water pressure and corrosion.

But Redd said those are surmountable hurdles, pointing to the oil and gas industry’s decades of experience drilling in the ocean. Endurance’s work should pose less risk to the surrounding ocean, he points out. “If we have a blowout — quote unquote — you’re leaking hot water into the ocean, which is already leaking out in terawatts all over the Earth,” Redd said.

Some of the geothermal resources Endurance is eyeing are a few dozen miles from shore, while others are a few hundred. Which get developed will be the product of an optimization algorithm that balances the cost of the submarine cable with the scale of the resource and the size of the market on shore. (Redd says the company plans to avoid sensitive habitats like those near hydrothermal vents.)

If Endurance taps just a fraction of the geothermal potential out there, it could generate a significant amount of electricity. Redd estimates there’s about 6 terawatts that could be developed in the next five to 10 years around the Ring of Fire. To put that in perspective, the world uses an average of about 20 terawatts across all energy sources at any given moment.

“The idea is that you could support any major coastal city on the Ring of Fire,” Redd said.

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Tech

Cursor capitalizes on Github frustration, launches rival hosting platform

Published

11 hours ago

August 18, 2026

qasimgillani

For as long as anyone can remember, Github has been the de facto code host preferred by a majority of developers. However, in recent times, the platform has struggled with widely reported outages and performance degradation and, as it drops the ball, Cursor is waiting to pick it up.

The AI startup, which is now officially a part of SpaceXAI, launched Origin this week — a new code hosting platform designed to do all of the things that developers typically use Github for: collaboratively work on codebases, browse and edit them, handle pull-requests (edits made by others asking to be added to the main codebase) and store them in repositories.

This seems like a natural next step for Cursor, whose primary focus up until this point has been selling automated web development services through its AI Code Editor. Cursor has also said that “agent native” features will soon be available for Origin, although hasn’t shared many details yet. The company also says it is building a wider “app ecosystem” to support broader coding efforts within Origin.

Interestingly enough, using Origin doesn’t require a user to stop using Github. Indeed, Origin is designed to allow developers to work alongside Github and pass code back and forth between the two in an interoperable manner.

“Your GitHub repos can sit alongside the ones Cursor hosts,” Cursor says in its blog. “Connect GitHub to Cursor, pick your org, and you’ll see the repos you can sync. Select one and Cursor pulls it in.”

The launch of Origin coincides with ongoing frustration over a perceived dip in Github’s services. Indeed, on the same day that Cursor launched its new platform, Github suffered a quite lengthy worldwide outage. For over six hours, the site’s functions were reportedly degraded, with a nearly 20 percent error rate worldwide.

This isn’t the first time in recent times when this has happened either. Earlier this year, after a rash of outages, Github announced new actions to sate unhappy coders as its availability problems seemed to escalate. More broadly, the platform has suffered 257 outages over the past year, a recent analysis by LeadDev states. Such persistent issues have led to “a visible exodus of high-profile users” writes LeadDev’s reporter Charles Humble.

Still, if Cursor wants to compete with Github, it will have its work cut out for it. According to Github’s own metrics, some 180 million developers use its platform as of last October. The platform, which was founded in 2007 and was acquired by Microsoft in 2012, continues to be the largest source code hosts in the world.

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Tech

DOJ’s probe into Andreessen Horowitz over board seats baffles VCs

Published

13 hours ago

August 18, 2026

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The Justice Department has launched a probe into Andreessen Horowitz regarding the firm’s partners serving on the boards of competing companies, Bloomberg reported.

The nearly year-long investigation focuses specifically on the firm’s board seats at Databricks, which is valued at $190 billion, and Fivetran, which combined with dbt Labs in June. The firm’s co-founder, Ben Horowitz, serves on the board of Databricks, while partner Martin Casado serves on the board of Fivetran.

Several VCs told TechCrunch they were surprised by news of the probe. Databricks and Fivetran are competitors now, but the two companies weren’t rivals when a16z invested in the startups, according to another Databricks investor who spoke on condition of anonymity. Databricks is largely known for its cloud storage products but, with its Lakeflow product, has expanded into AI data pipelines and application connectors. That’s Fivetran’s main business.

Given that Andreessen Horowitz has backed hundreds of companies, it’s almost inevitable that some startups will pivot or expand into the same markets, becoming competitors.

While backing direct rivals has become more acceptable recently, as evidenced by the many VCs that funded both Anthropic and OpenAI, holding a board seat on competing startups creates a far greater conflict of interest. Directors are generally privy to much more sensitive strategic information than non-board investors ever see.

Such conflicts can be resolved by having a partner step down from one of the boards. However, because Databricks and Fivetran have different individuals from the same VC firm on their boards, a16z can institute a so-called Chinese wall between Horowitz and Casado, which would prevent the two partners from sharing confidential information about the two companies with each other, one investor said.

The investigation invokes Section 8 of the Clayton Act, a 112-year-old law stating that an individual or entity is barred from serving on the boards of competing companies. Since regulators have rarely targeted venture capital with this rule, the industry is watching the DOJ’s probe closely. If a16z is forced to surrender a seat, founders may place less value on board commitments from top-tier VCs, given that those investors might be forced to step down if a portfolio overlap creates a future conflict.

a16z did not immediately respond to our request for comment, nor did it respond to Bloomberg. Databricks and DOJ declined comment.

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Tech

TikTok explores peer-to-peer payments via DMs, report says

Published

14 hours ago

August 18, 2026

qasimgillani

TikTok is developing a feature that would allow users to send each other money via direct messages, according to a new report from Bloomberg. If rolled out, the feature would use the social media service’s TikTok Pay offering, which is already available in Southeast Asia for TikTok Shop purchases.

References to the potential feature were found in code hidden within the current version of TikTok’s U.S. iPhone app, according to the report. The code indicates that recipients would be able to “tap to accept” payments, while senders could include messages with their payments, similar to Venmo.

TikTok told Bloomberg that the feature is not being tested, which suggests that it’s in early development. Given that the feature is still under development, it’s unknown when or if TikTok plans to widely release peer-to-peer payments.

TikTok did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time TikTok has tried to push further into financial services. Reuters reported earlier this year that TikTok had applied to Brazil’s central bank for approval to operate as a financial technology company offering lending and payment services.

Although TikTok is widely described as a social media giant, it has gradually expanded beyond that category thanks to additions such as robust search, TikTok Shop, a local discovery map, games, hotel bookings, and more. By introducing peer-to-peer payments, TikTok would be competing with services like Venmo and Zelle.

TikTok isn’t the only social network pushing into financial services, as X, formerly known as Twitter, recently launched X Money to allow users to send each other money.