Tech
Radian Aerospace completes ground tests of prototype space plane
Radian Aerospace has moved one step closer to achieving the “holy grail” of spaceflight: a reusable space plane that can take-off from an airfield and land on a runway like a conventional airplane. The startup just announced completion of a series of ground tests in Abu Dhabi earlier this summer.
The tests were completed with a sub-scale prototype flight vehicle that the company is calling PFV01. The main purpose of the testing was to generate data on how the vehicle would fly and handle, and to compare this data to simulations the company’s been doing over the last several years. While the vehicle did not fly, it did perform a series of small hops on the runway, executives told TechCrunch in a recent interview.
PFV01 is much smaller than the final vehicle at around 15 feet long, but the data still helps inform key pieces of the final design and flight control systems, like where the landing gear should be located, or where the center of gravity should be to maximize stability midair, cofounder CTO Livingston Holder explained.
“This vehicle gives us the ability to adjust the center of gravity forward and aft, up and down, it gives us the ability to adjust the location of the landing gear. Those adjustments give us real world feedback into what our analytical data says,” he said. “Wherever there’s ambiguity… that’s one of the things that the PFV really gives us the opportunity to do, is drive uncertainty down so that we have better fidelity with our analytical processes as we go faster with the vehicle and do more flights.”
The plan is for the Radian One space plane to take off from a roughly two mile-long rail sled, ignite engines on orbit, then return to Earth back on a normal runway. The concept is considered a holy grail because removing the necessity for a launch vehicle makes space, in a way, as accessible to space vehicles as the upper atmosphere is to airplanes.
The economics are promising, too: a reusable space plane could take trips to and from space on a daily basis or even more frequently, and with better margins to boot. It’s been tried before; one of the most notable examples is NASA’s X-33 program to develop a suborbital space plane. Holder led Boeing’s X-33 effort.
“The least interesting thing this system has the potential to do is launch satellites,” Radian cofounder and CRO Jeff Feige said. “What’s really impressive about Radian is that it’s a system that can do a wide, wide range of missions so it basically accesses a much larger market than a traditional rocket. Not only could you potentially launch something, but you can service it, you can recover it. We can bring entire payloads or satellites down from space. We can carry people up. We can dip in the atmosphere and theoretically, either drop things or observe things on the planet. So there’s just a much wider range of capability.”
The design is dramatically different from a vertical rocket, and this means the development process differs as well, noted Feige: “You have to retire a lot of risk early.” So while rocket companies must build full-scale vehicles, the stepwise fashion of spaceplane development more closely resembles how an airplane is developed.
The Seattle-based startup isn’t disclosing any technical specs of the tests, like the top speeds of the vehicle or how long it was taxiing for, but Holder did say PFV01 “reached its velocity for takeoff.” Now the company will spend some time analyzing all the data it collected from the tests before embarking on a series of higher-speed taxi tests and the start of actual flight testing. Parallel to that, the company will be working on getting regulatory approval to operate out of a different UAE-based airport and fly there.
Company executives say they are hoping to start full scale flights of the Radian One space plane in 2028. The company has raised $27.5 million to date in known funding from investors including Fine Structure Ventures, EXOR, The Venture Collective, Helios Capital, SpaceFund, Gaingels, The Private Shares Fund, Explorer 1 Fund, and Type One Ventures.
Tech
Bluecore Energy raises $10M to build portable nuclear reactors on barges
Maritime nuclear energy startup Bluecore Energy on Tuesday said it had raised $10 million in a pre-seed funding round that was led by Slauson & Co.
Founded seven months ago by Kofi Asante, who previously worked with Uber Freight, Bluecore is building small nuclear reactors (SMRs) on floating barges with an aim to provide clean power to ports and nearby infrastructure. The reactors heat water and transfer the resulting steam into a generator, which then spins a turbine to generate electricity, Asante explained. The system is water-cooled in a closed-loop.
The energy expected to be produced on Bluecore’s barges can be moved by ship to its next location, reducing the emission involved in its transport to zero, Asante claims. Plus, he said the entire system behind the nuclear power plant only needs to be refueled once every few years.
Bluecore’s barges can also be docked near communities, and can connect to the power grid via subsea cables. The goal is to try to power the “equivalent of approximately 15,000 homes or scale to meet the power needs of a major port,” he told TechCrunch.
“We are able to utilize existing water-cooled nuclear technology that has been operating for over 70 years,” he said. “With a production line of small modular reactors that can be rapidly deployed on water, there is a pathway to provide clean energy to the majority of the country.”
Bluecore will be using the fresh capital to deploy its product. It has already secured a port terminal, barge, and test reactor pressure vessel, Asante said. “The test vessel allows us to simulate flow with water, which is the cooling source of the system. We are combining hardware with software testing to validate and verify the foundation of our design,” he added.
The startup is working with regulatory agencies to “embed the safest design decision” into its first product. Asante said the startup is building many layers of “safety and redundancy,” like having the uranium clad and protected in a thick steel pressure vessel and then padded with concrete shielding and steel lining.
Asante is hoping Bluecore may be able to help with the increasing power demand sparked by the ongoing data center buildout. “AI data center execs have shared with me that they would not need to pull water or energy from communities around them if they are able to receive their own source of electricity and have access to water that is provided at sea,” he said.
Other investors in the round include Harlem Capital, Precursor Ventures, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, and actor Kevin Hart’s HartBeat Ventures, as well as a few angel investors.
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Tech
Music streamer Deezer says more than 50% of daily uploads are AI-generated
Music streaming company Deezer has been tracking the number of AI-generated tracks uploaded on the platform since last year, and the number has constantly gone up. Today, the company said that AI music now represents more than 50% of downloads.
Deezer said that AI-generated track uploads were at a peak in June 2026, representing a monthly average of 90,000 tracks per day.
The rapid rise of AI-generated music has forced streaming services to decide how much of it they want on their own platforms. There is no single consensus yet on that front. Some take strict steps, like Bandcamp banning such tracks or Tidal cutting off monetization. Meanwhile, Apple Music has a voluntary AI-tagging system, and Spotify developed its own policy about how much AI was used in music-making.
Deezer’s latest move on this front will involve taking down AI-generated tracks that haven’t been streamed in the past six months or are involved in fraudulent streams to drive up revenue.
“Deezer has been at the frontline of fighting fraud and reducing payment dilution related to AI music for almost two years. Now that half of all daily uploads are AI-generated tracks, we are taking additional steps to safeguard the rights of artists and songwriters, while maintaining focus on music that fans actually love,” Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a statement.
The streamer first released stats around AI music uploads in January 2025, when the daily upload volume was around 10,000 tracks, or 10% of daily uploads. The number grew to 20,000 tracks, or 18% of daily uploads, in April 2025. It then climbed to 30,000 tracks, representing 28% of daily uploads in September 2025, followed by 50,000 daily uploads, or 34% of daily uploads, in November 2025.
This year, it grew again to 60,000 tracks, or 39% of daily uploads, in January 2026. As of April 2026, the figure reached 75,000 tracks, or 44% of daily uploads.
Deezer started labeling AI music on its platform last year, and said that its detection tech can also identify tracks generated with models from Suno and Udio, AI-music startups that are embroiled in copyright lawsuits. Earlier this year, Deezer made its detection tech available to other platforms, but it’s not clear if any of the major platforms are using the tool just yet. Last month, it also released a tool that can sift through Apple Music and Spotify playlists for AI-generated tracks.
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Tech
The Xteink X4 Pro could be the tiny e-reader of your dreams
Xteink’s tiny e-readers have gone viral among book lovers on social media, and for good reason: What could be more delightful than an e-reader that can fit in your wallet? Xteink has the answer. The Chinese hardware maker has now improved upon its existing e-readers with the Xteink X4 Pro, a swift response to widespread feedback from users who really wanted a touchscreen and a front light.
If you haven’t seen Xteink’s existing X3 and slightly larger X4, let’s catch you up to speed: They’re likely the smallest e-readers you can buy; small enough to magnetize to the back of your phone or toss in your pocket on your way out the door. Ideally, having this device on hand will help you read a few pages of a book instead of scrolling Instagram while you’re waiting in line at the store. Though the X3 and X4 were promising enough to cultivate a cult following, I wouldn’t call them user friendly — their button-based navigation is clunky. Still, the idea of a magnetic, pocketable e-reader was so promising that I couldn’t wait to see what Xteink would do next.
Fortunately, the wait for a fix wasn’t long. The addition of the touchscreen and front light makes the Xteink X4 Pro more viable as a device that you can use as your main e-reader, rather than just an on-the-go companion to your Kindle. At 72 grams and 5.95 mm thin, the X4 Pro is about the same size as the X4.
Every night before I go to bed, I turn off the lights and read on my Kindle until I’m sleepy enough to close my eyes. But with the added front light, the X4 Pro has firmly wedged itself into my nightly routine — during the review period, I almost exclusively read on the X4 Pro before bed, using the front light on the dimmest setting (which is still a bit brighter than I’d like for bedtime reading), with the color temperature tinted slightly warm. I’ve since reverted back to my Kindle solely because I’m re-reading the Odyssey, and let’s face it, it would be pretty annoying to read poetry with line breaks on a 4.26-inch screen.
When I read with the X4 Pro before I fall asleep, I feel like I’m mimicking my old bad habit of scrolling in bed. You can interpret this as either a good or a bad thing. On one hand, this goes to show just how comfortable and easy it feels to read on the X4 Pro — you can turn the pages either by tapping on the side of the screen or by using the side buttons, which gives you more flexibility with how you want to hold your X4 Pro. But also, like a phone, the e-reader is so small that you have to hold it closer to your face to read than you would a Kindle. I worry this might impact my sleep, though it’s still far easier to fall asleep after looking at a dimly lit e-ink screen than an iPhone.
Like other e-ink devices, the X4 Pro has pretty great battery life — I’ve been using my device most days for about three weeks, and I’m only down to 60% battery. Naturally, the light means that the battery will dwindle a bit more quickly than its predecessors, but I barely notice the difference. What people will notice, however, is that the X4 Pro charges using a magnetic pogo charger, while the X4 had a USB-C. This isn’t a big deal to me, since the device has to charge so infrequently, but if you’re really passionate about the universality of USB-C, this could be a dealbreaker.
The X4 Pro also comes with updated software, which is a big upgrade from the previous models, but the device also will continue to allow users to load open source code. The process of uploading content via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth is doable, though it remains a bit clunky — I find it easier to just remove the micro SD card and use the provided micro SD to USB adapter to add files from my computer.
If you’re used to more mainstream e-readers, it’s also worth mentioning that you’re probably not going to be able to read library e-books on the X4 Pro. Xteink can’t integrate directly with apps like Libby, and even if you borrow an e-book from the library, you won’t be able to add it to your X4 Pro (libraries use protected versions of .epub files that you can’t copy). But if you buy an .epub file from a publisher, you’ll be able to add it to your Xteink device without a problem. (Just don’t try buying books on Amazon. It’s a walled garden, so you can only read Amazon e-books on Amazon devices, even though you literally purchased the book! Booooo!)
The Xteink X4 Pro costs $99, and at launch, it’s only available on Xteink’s website.
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Bluecore Energy raises $10M to build portable nuclear reactors on barges
