A new lawsuit filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is a showcase of how hard it's become to police the app stores for scammy apps. The suit alleges that a company known as Genesis Tech defrauded consumers and routed revenues overseas through the use of shell companies designed to conceal its identity and hide its assets. Genesis Tech's network allegedly included a series of subsidiaries incorporated in Cyprus and operating in Ukraine, which marketed its apps to U.S. consumers. Among its brands were fitness and nutrition apps MadMuscles, Harna, and Unimeal by Amo Apps Limited; PDF Guru and PDF Master from GuruDocs Limited; fashion app Lumi from Bramol Limited; horoscope app Nebula by Obrio Limited; habit and personal productivity apps under the brand Wisey by Koflimin Limited; and others. The case highlights a growing challenge for Apple and Google, as subscription scams evolve beyond individual apps into intricate networks of shell companies. Genesis Tech, for instance, registered new corporate entities and created multiple merchant accounts to hide its identity, the suit claims, and would then transfer the money it made across borders among its various corporate affiliates....

I sold my AI research company while I was qualifying as a lawyer in the U.K. I built Safe Sign Technologies with researchers from Cambridge, DeepMind, Harvard and MIT who believed in the mission enough to trust a 21-year-old law student to lead the ship. Getting there was painful, though. Our published papers put the model among the best in the world at legal reasoning, and we trained it for a fraction of what the large labs were spending. We had been a quieter version of 'the DeepSeek story,' developing very capable models using novel algorithms with huge capital efficiency. None of that counted for much in the rooms I walked into. Investors always asked about the product and the traction. U.K. investors passed, and I ended up raising most of our funding in the United States. I back founders now, and the things I weigh have stayed consistent. As a founder, I was told again and again that science meant little until it was bolted onto a product. That test was wrong then and I believe it is fatal now....

Editor's note: This article is the second in a three-part series on the state of venture investment to Black-founded startups in 2026. Driving these reports is data from Crunchbase's Diversity Spotlight feature, which offers insight into diversity in startups' and investment firms' leadership teams. Read Part 1, exploring the data on funding to Black founders, here. Part 3 will be published next week. Only around $942 million ' or just 0.32% of total U.S. venture funding ' went to startups with a Black founder or co-founder last year, per Crunchbase data. That's one of the lowest shares in years, and down more than two-thirds from just three years prior. This year has started off on a slightly rosier note, with $643 million raised by U.S.-based startups with a Black founder or co-founder as of May 20. The majority of that was raised in the first quarter, marking the most raised in a single quarter since Q2 2022, when $653 million was raised by Black founders or co-founders. The consistently low numbers have led some Black founders to turn to investing in an effort to help level the playing field. Crunchbase News talked with two such founders to hear more about their experiences in raising capital and what they've learned from investing....

Chi-Hua Chien has spent more than two decades as a venture capitalist, but he thinks like a cultural anthropologist. As a co-founder of Goodwater Capital, a firm focused exclusively on consumer and prosumer technology, he has built a portfolio spanning entertainment, healthcare, fintech, and live experiences ' with investments in companies like MIDI Health, Fever, and Monzo. He was also, as a 27-year-old associate at Accel, the person who initially found a six-person company launched from Harvard called The Facebook. That ability to read human behavior at scale informs everything from his view that Americans will never trust a single app with both their social lives and their finances, to his belief that the gap between the most advanced AI model and what you can run on your phone ' once as wide as two years ' will shrink to three months within the next year. These days, he is also willing to say out loud what many in venture capital are only thinking: that the commoditization of the model layer is already underway and that the biggest winners of the AI era won't be the companies selling AI at all....