As families across the U.S. prepare to celebrate Mother’s Day this Sunday, Allison Stern is looking beyond the single day of appreciation.

Stern just closed $10 million in commitments for her debut early-stage fund, Mother Ventures, which focuses exclusively on the mother as a consumer.

“In the U.S., moms are responsible for 85% of household purchases and have $2.4 trillion in spending power,” Stern (pictured below) told TechCrunch. “The numbers say that moms are the buyers, and they really are a very unique economic engine.”

Stern, a mother of two, is tapping into that spending clout by backing startups that reflect the needs of modern mothers. Since launching Mother Ventures two years ago, she has already deployed $4 million into 13 startups. Her portfolio includes Coral Care, which allows instant booking of pediatric specialists for children with developmental delays, and Tin Can, a popular Wi-Fi-enabled “landline” designed as a retro-style phone for kids.

Before launching her own fund, she co-founded Tubular Labs, a social video analytics startup she helped grow to $25 million in annual recurring revenue prior to its 2023 acquisition by private equity, and served as an operating partner at The Chernin Group (TCG), a consumer-focused growth equity firm.

Part of TCG’s investment thesis included backing companies serving “overlooked unique audiences with spending power,” such as Barstool Sports, which originally targeted Boston sports fans, she said.

When Stern set out to launch her own fund, she identified mothers as a similarly underserved market with the potential to deliver superior returns. “I felt like motherhood is the ultimate niche that’s not really a niche,” she said,

Stern convinced Tony James, the former president and COO of Blackstone and current board chair of Costco, to back Mother Ventures as an anchor LP. Other backers of the fund include Jessica Rolph, founder of the child development startup Lovevery, as well as female executives from Netflix, Rent the Runway, and Sesame Street, she said.

She argues that millennial and Gen Z mothers expect a different set of products, from on-demand transportation services such as Zum, to ready-meal delivery from DoorDash, and fintech tools like Greenlight that allow parents to instantly fund a child’s debit card.

“We want healthy things. We want subscription things. We want digital communities,” she said.

However, Stern doesn’t want her fund to be perceived as one that invests only in parenting tech. “It’s a consumer fund, and focus on the mom as the consumer allows us to be wider in our bets,” she said.

Porsche is closing three of its subsidiaries as it copes with falling sales and declining profits, the German automaker announced Friday.

The automaker’s battery subsidiary, Cellforce Group, is perhaps the highest-profile casualty. The division had already been through a “realignment” in August after Porsche dropped plans to make its own batteries, turning Cellforce into a research and development arm. Now, Porsche says it’s pursuing a “technology-open powertrain strategy” — corporate-speak that indicates the automaker will rely more heavily on other companies for its batteries.

Porsche eBike Performance, which made e-bike drive systems, and Cetitec, a networking software subsidiary that served both Porsche and the wider Volkswagen Group, will also be shut down.

More than 500 people, who are employed at the three subsidiaries, will lose their jobs.

“We must refocus on our core business,” Porsche CEO and Executive Chair Michael Leiters said in a statement. “This is the indispensable foundation for a successful strategic realignment. This forces us to make painful cuts — including our subsidiaries.”

It’s a message that Leiters, who became CEO early this year, first delivered in March when the company announced plans to realign its business. “We will comprehensively reposition Porsche, make the company leaner, faster and the products even more desirable,” he said at the time.

Since then, Porsche has extracted itself from several endeavors, including an agreement reached in April to sell its equity stakes in Bugatti Rimac and Rimac Group to a consortium led by New York-based investment firm HOF Capital.

Porsche’s electrification efforts got off to a strong start with the Taycan in 2019, but the company soon ran into trouble developing follow-on EVs. The Macan Electric was delayed by nearly two years as software development within Volkswagen’s Cariad division lagged behind expectations.

The entire company has suffered declining sales in key markets, including North America, where sales fell 11%, and China, where deliveries were off 21% in the first quarter of this year. European sales were also down 18%, though they rose slightly in Germany.

Porsche has blamed EV adoption for its woes, though the company’s continued poor performance in China, where electric vehicles have claimed more than half the market, suggests that consumer acceptance of EVs may not be the root cause.

The closure of Cellforce captures the change of fortunes for Porsche’s EV program. The German automaker had originally started the subsidiary to develop and manufacture batteries that would distinguish its EVs from other companies.

“The battery cell is the combustion chamber of the future,” Oliver Blume said in 2022 when he chaired Porsche’s executive board.

After struggling to develop EVs in a timely manner, Porsche has shifted much of its new vehicle efforts to reviving some of its internal combustion platforms, which were originally intended to constitute a minority of sales by 2030. The company is still planning to roll out new EVs though, and will soon sunset the gas-powered version of the Porsche Macan. Porsche is expected to bring an all-electric version of the Cayenne, and several variants, to market this year.

Cloudflare on Thursday joined a growing list of tech companies — including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — that have reported increased revenue alongside massive layoffs, attributing both trends to their use of AI.

Cloudflare, which provides internet security and performance services to millions of websites worldwide, announced it was cutting its workforce by approximately 20%, which equates to 1,100 people, it said as part of its first quarter 2026 earnings report on Thursday.

“We’ve never done something like this in Cloudflare’s history,” co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said Thursday on the quarterly conference call, marking the first mass layoff in the company’s 16-year history. The company is cutting people from all teams and geographies except for salespeople who carry revenue quotas, CFO Thomas Seifert detailed on the call.

The news of the workforce cuts came as the company reported quarterly revenues of $639.8 million, a 34% year-over-year increase and the highest single quarter in the company’s history. However, this was coupled with a loss of $62.0 million compared with losing $53.2 million in the year-ago quarter.

That widening loss, even as revenue surged, highlights a familiar paradox in Cloudflare’s story: The company is growing fast but has yet to turn a consistent profit. But the loss was a smaller percentage of revenue, and the quarter was coupled with a lot of other positive indicators. For instance, Cloudflare reported that it had over $2.5 billion in “remaining performance obligations,” a year-over-year growth of 34%. RPO is the favorite metric these days to indicate revenue under contract but not yet delivered.

Hence, Prince insisted, the 20% cuts were not to reduce expenses but were strictly because of its use of AI.

“Today’s actions are not a cost-cutting exercise or an assessment of individuals’ performance; they are about Cloudflare defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates and creates value in the agentic AI era,” Prince and Cloudflare co-founder and president, Michelle Zatlyn, wrote in a related blog post about the layoffs.

Prince acknowledged on the call that even though Cloudflare has been selling AI-powered products, it was at first cautious about adopting AI itself.

“Internally, the tipping point was last November. At that point, across our teams, we began to see massive productivity gains, team members that were two, 10, even 100 times more productive than they had been before. It was like going from a manual to an electric screwdriver,” he described.

“Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone,” he added.

Prince highlighted the internal use of AI coding, saying that virtually the entire R&D team is now using the company’s own Workers platform — a tool that lets developers build and run software directly on Cloudflare’s global network — including its vibe coding feature. He also noted that 100% of the code produced this way and deployed for use in Cloudflare’s products is “now reviewed by autonomous AI agents.”

But it’s not just developers who are using AI internally, he said. “Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done.”

As a result, these highly productive, AI-powered employees require fewer support staff, he argued.

“A lot of the support people that provide support behind them, those roles aren’t going to be the roles that, you know, drive companies going forward,” Prince said.

Interestingly, Prince says that Cloudflare “will continue to hire people, and we’ll continue to invest in them because the people that are embracing these tools are just so much more productive than we’d ever seen before. I would guess that in 2027 we’ll have more employees than we did at any point in 2026.”

Cloudflare said it ended its first quarter before layoffs with a headcount of about 5,500.

The pattern Prince described — deploying AI gains as justification for workforce reductions even during a period of strong revenue growth — is fast becoming a familiar script across the tech industry. Whether it reflects true structural transformation or acts as convenient cover for cost discipline is a question that investors and employees will be wrestling with for some time to come.

When asked by an analyst on the call why the company needed to cut so deeply after such a good quarter, Prince said, “Just because you’re fit doesn’t mean you can’t get fitter.”