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X rolls out its real-time search tool, Radar, to Premium+ subscribers
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As competition from newcomers likeBlueskyandThreadsincreases, X launched a “Radar” trend analysis tool that aims to offer subscribers real-time insights into emerging trends and conversations on the platform. The tool, previously known as Insights, was initially targeted at Verified Organizations (businesses), allowing marketers to track
| 2024-10-21T18:24:25 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/21/x-rolls-out-its-real-time-search-tool-radar-to-premium-subscribers/
| 44 | 0.6 |
a824483f26c642ccd6be7cdff489469e
|
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Relativity Space CEO: Building a backlog isn’t ‘worthless,’ it’s the path to product-market fit
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Relativity SpaceCEO Tim Ellis is hitting back against recent comments from fellow aerospace exec Peter Beck, who calledlaunch contracts for un-flown rockets “basically worthless”earlier this month. In sharp contrast, Ellis argued in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch that building a backlog is the only way to validate product-market fit. “Deciding not to build a backlog is taking a business strategy that has failed pretty epically in history across other products, which is, ‘build it and they will come,’ without actually validating that your pricing and your product capabilities are something that solves the customer problem such that they’re willing to put up material cash up front,” he said. Eight-year-old Relativity has signed over $1. 8 billion across nine customer contracts for its Terran R rocket, which the company expects to start flying in 2026. It’s a substantial backlog, especially when compared to competing launch companies like Beck’s Rocket Lab, which has yet to announce any pre-sales for its Neutron rocket. Beck’s comments about pre-sale contracts being worthless was in response to an analyst’s inquiry during Rocket Lab’s last earnings call on when the company will announce a contract for Neutron, which is expected to make its debut in 2024. For context, Terran R will have a payload capacity of 23,500 kilograms in a reusable configuration and up to 33,500 kilograms in an expendable configuration, while Neutron will have a payload capacity of 13,000 kg. Both can be seen as a response to shifting market launch dynamics; in particular, the demand for higher payload capacity, high-flight-volume rockets that can serve mega-constellation customers. Beck offered further comment on such launch contracts: “We can go and sign a launch contract tomorrow with a number of customers, but it will be like, some thousand dollars down and cancellable anytime. But that really doesn’t mean anything. ” But Ellis strongly disputed this characterization, revealing the major divisions in how launch executives think about pre-sales and their go-to-market strategy. The contracts that Relativity signs with customers — which are known as launch services agreements (LSAs) — are a far stretch from something like a memorandum of understanding, Ellis said. (He added that the company stopped doing those many years ago. ) LSAs stretch over 60 pages; the ones that Relativity’s customers sign are the bog standard contract used by operational providers, like SpaceX. He added that the sales cycle for each contract is between six-18 months — no small effort — and involves, at least with Relativity, monthly or more meetings between the customer and the company’s engineering teams once the contracts are signed. “We’ve received material cash up front from those contracts,” Ellis said. “The way that contracts are structured is they’re not cancelable anytime, they actually work such that as long as we develop the product that we say we’re going to develop within a reasonable time period, these contracts are going to be executed. ” Ellis said that signing these LSAs also gives a greater look into a customer’s technical plans and what their requirements are. Relativity was able to see the need for a second launch provider for all the forthcoming telecom constellations — such as OneWeb’s,a company that announced a launch agreement with Relativity in June 2022— because it was in conversation with prospective customers, Ellis said. “There was this need and we saw that early,” he said. “Why we were able to see that early is because we were actually talking with customers, and we were actually working to sign launch deals with them. ” This inside information goes both ways: Prospective customers shopping for a rocket can visit companies’ factories, meet teams, see hardware up close, and examine infrastructure, test plans and launch site progress. This diligence matters because the credibility of both the launch provider and the customer is on the line, Ellis stressed. “Customers get the most transparent view into what state a company is actually at,” he said. “Ultimately, customers only care about you if you actually solve their problem and if they have confidence that this is the best choice. ” Beck said Rocket Lab had to introduce low introductory pricing for its operational rocket, Electron, prior to its commercial debut in 2018. But Ellis said dynamic pricing is “obvious,” and the company’s pricing for Terran R is now 50% higher than it was two years ago. “Our pricing has escalated [with] every deal we’ve signed. We took a deliberate strategy to offer the very earliest customers some incentives of course, that’s actually been a proven model in the launch industry. We expect every launch company has some introductory pricing, but we’ve been able to escalate pricing to higher than our desired list price, actually, because we see a shifting dynamic between supply and demand. ” By the time Terran R launches its backlog, it will have already collected 90% of the payment for each contract, a common incremental payment schedule across the industry. In a final refutation of Beck’s comments, Ellis said “to set the record straight” that the company has actually gone head-to-head against Rocket Lab’s Neutron for some of these contracts. “We have a 100% win rate against the competitors that were in those deals, trying to win them against us, and I can go on the record to say, Rocket Lab was absolutely in some of those deals. So the statement they’re not trying to build a backlog is not true, because we actually won against them several times. ” Regarding Ellis’ comments, a Rocket Lab spokesperson simply said: “We’re engaging many potential customers as we bring Neutron to market, but we’re not interested in signing launch contracts that have minimal financial commitment and loose cancellation terms. Our focus is on building a quality backlog. ” Topics Reporter, Space and Defense Aria Alamalhodaei covers the space and defense industries at TechCrunch. Previously, she covered the public utilities and the power grid for California Energy Markets. You can also find her work at MIT’s Undark Magazine, The Verge, and Discover Magazine. She received an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Aria is based in Austin, Texas. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-11-29T14:22:50 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/29/relativity-space-ceo-building-a-backlog-isnt-worthless-its-the-path-to-product-market-fit/
| 1,091 | 1 |
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Oura’s smart ring hits Target stores
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Oura on Monday announced that itssmart ring will be available in select Target storesin the U. S. The deal, which also brings the wearable to the retailer’s site, follows similar announcements with Amazon in March and Best Buy last April. It’s a good bit of validation for a company that almost singlehandedly legitimatized the smart ring as an alternative form factor to ubiquitous wrist-worn smartwatches and trackers. The retail push has been central to CEO Tom Hale, who took over the role in 2022, as interest in health trackers was on the rise amid the pandemic. The period also saw high-profile adoptions from sports leagues like the NBA, as the company touted health tracking that could potentially catch COVID-19 infections early. In March 2022, the nine-year-old company announced that it had soldits one-millionth ring. Target end caps will feature a “unique in-store sizing experience,” with dummy units on display. For those who purchase a $10 sizing kit through Target’s site, the retailer will send along a $10 gift certificate to offset the price. The Gen 3 rings start at $300, but Oura’s subscription service is where the real revenue comes from. The company faced pushback when it announced that it would require the monthly fee to access certain features, though such criticism doesn’t appear to have had any major negative impact onOura’s growth. More validation for the form factor arrived earlier this year, when Samsung announced that it is launching its own fitness ring. TheGalaxy Ringis set to hit the market later this year
| 2024-04-22T15:53:51 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/22/ouras-smart-ring-hits-target-stores/
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Boardy AI raises $8M seed round months after closing pre-seed
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Posted: Months after announcinga $3 million pre-seed, the AI networking startupBoardyis back with an $8 million seed announcement led by Creandum. The company connects users with other people when they call an AI agent who chats with them for a bit and then connects them with others it thinks they ought to know. Since announcing its launch and pre-seed in October, Andrew D’Souza, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said the company has made more than 10,000 phone calls, facilitated over 9,000 calls, and helped startups land partnerships and investments. D’Souza says what was important about this $8 million round is that investors reached out to him organically after trying out his product. “They spoke with Boardy directly before speaking with me or anyone on the team,” D’Souza said when reached via email. Others in the round include Andy Dunn, Leah Solivan, and Andrew Yeung. Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage. TechCrunch's AI experts cover the latest news in the fast-moving field. Every Monday, gets you up to speed on the latest advances in aerospace. Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly. By submitting your email, you agree to ourTermsandPrivacy Notice
| 2025-01-14T15:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/14/boardy-ai-raises-8m-seed-round-months-after-closing-pre-seed/
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Emmett Shear, the ex-Twitch CEO tasked with stabilizing OpenAI, has some spicy social history
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Emmett Shear, the interim CEO of OpenAI, may be out of a job by the end of the hour, day or week given how fast and unexpectedly things are moving at the world’s hottest hot mess artificial intelligence company. But for now, he is the person at the helm after a dramatic three days in whichSam Altman was fired on Friday(with CTO Mira Murati put in to replace him), much speculation abounded about Altmanreturningafter all (only for Altman and Greg Brockman to officiallyjump to OpenAI investor and partner Microsoft) and Murati — late Sunday — got replaced by Shear. “Today I got a call inviting me to consider a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to become the interim CEO of @OpenAI,” hepostedon X (the site formerly known as Twitter) in the wee hours of Monday morning. Shear was previously a co-founder of Justin. tv and had been the CEO of its second life as Twitch untilMarch 2023, which feels like a world away from the drama of OpenAI. Now, he’s got a lot of work ahead (if he remains in the role). Fundraising was in the works (we heard the company has been looking to raise a lot more money, with names like SoftBank in the mix alongside financial investors and possibly even more backing from its big investor Microsoft, which has already ploughed many billions into OpenAI, if the terms could be balanced without triggering antitrust investigations). The company is in the very center of the conversation around AI regulation. There is more R&D on the roadmap. And there are of course more contracts to sign, making sure those who are playing around with GPT commit to becoming long-term customers of it. But first thing’s first, the new CEO is starting with a business classic, a three-point plan that can be summed up as what is the issue? how do you correct it? and how do you create a benefit from it getting corrected? He needs to figure out WTF is going on and make sure it doesn’t spiral the rest of the company out of control. In his case, in the next 30 days, he said the company plans to hire an independent investigator — which implies that there are still some unanswered questions, even inside the company, about exactly what happened. The investigator will “dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report. ” The plan then is to try to take but also bring down the temperature in the room — which also implies that there has indeed been some pushback and negative reactionnot just internally, but externally as well. He will “speak to as many of our employees, partners, investors and customers as possible, take good notes and share the key takeaways. ” Last but not least, he will hustle hard to make sure OpenAI does not bleed customers and partners — the core of how it generates revenues — which implies that, with AI applications and the use of generative AI still very much in its hype-filled early days, is a genuine concern. In Shear’s words, OpenAI will “reform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures into an effective force to drive results for our customers. ” Shear double-confirmed other reporting from over the weekend that whatever the issues were that lead to Altman’s removal, they were not related to safety, or at least not insofar as it was related to running the business. “I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models,” he said. Shear said it took “just a few hours” for him to decide to take the job when he was offered it over the weekend. As it happened, it also took just a few hours for people to start digging up some of his spicier positions on technology and life, leading many to wonder if OpenAI’s board also spent more than just a few hours itself coming up with its succession plan. He does not support Nazis but he did unnervinglybring them upas a better option to other risks and endings while debating hypothetical end-of-world scenarios on Twitter. People have also picked over conversations he’s had where he has tackled some other hot-button issues likewomen’s consent. Regardless of where you sit on his positions (and what his positions happen to be) given the spotlight on OpenAI, ethics in AI and all kinds of controversy around the space… it’s an interesting choice for a successor. Less controversially, but confusingly, Shear also said that he was “in favor of slowing down” AI development. It’s unclear how much impact Shear will have on the course of AI development at the startup he now leads — and again, there is every chance that the story can change again given how fast it has moved. But at the least, his support of stepping back from breakneck advancement raises questions about how the company’s CEO feels about OpenAI’s current commercial strategy, as laid out just the other week during the company’sfirst developer eventwhen it unveiled 100 million weekly users of ChatGPT and a raft of new ways for third parties to build their own AI applications on OpenAI’s platform. His months out from under the corporate eye of Amazon may have had Shear wandering the badlands of social media, but one thing could have made him attractive to the OpenAI board regardless was that, when needed, Shear knows how to play nice with corporate overlords. To that end, he notes in his “hello” post that “Our partnership with Microsoft remains strong, and my priority in the coming weeks will be to make sure we continue to serve all our customers well. ” Given how many employees are now threatening to move over to Microsoft, which owns just under half of OpenAI, it will be interesting to see how that friendly position shifts for the company if it really believes in staying independent of its strategic backer. (We’ve reached out to OpenAI with questions related to this story and will update as and when we get responses. )
| 2023-11-20T17:45:21 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/20/openai-emmett-shear-ceo/
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Researchers say they found spyware used in war for the first time
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Security researchers and digital rights organizations believe the government of Azerbaijan used spyware produced by NSO Group to target a government worker, journalists, activists and the human rights ombudsperson in Armenia as part of a years long conflict that has at times broken out into an all-out war. The cyberattacks may be the first public cases where commercial spyware was used in the context of a war, according to Access Now, a digital rights group that investigated some of the cases. The hacks happened between November 2021 and December 2022. The skirmish between Armenia and Azerbaijan — known as theNagorno-Karabakh conflict— has been going on for years, and it flared up again in May 2021, when Azerbaijani soldiers crossed into Armenia and occupied parts of its territory. “While a number of infected individuals are also members of the Armenian opposition or are otherwise critical of the current government, the infections took place at critical times in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict and a deep political crisis caused by the conflict, which resulted in a significant uncertainty over the future of the country’s leadership and its position on Karabakh,” Natalia Krapiva, the tech legal counsel at Access Now, told TechCrunch. “Some of the victims worked closely in or with [Armenia’s] Nikol Pashinyan’s administration and were directly involved in the negotiations or investigation of human rights abuses committed by Azerbaijan in the conflict. ” The Azerbaijani embassy in Washington, D. C. did not respond to a request for comment. NSO Group did not respond to a request for comment. Access Now was aided by Citizen Lab, another digital rights organization specialized in investigating spyware; Amnesty International; CyberHUB-AM, an Armenian cybersecurity organization that helps civil society; and local cybersecurity researchers. According to Access Now, the victims include Kristinne Grigoryan, the top human rights defender in Armenia; Karlen Aslanyan and Astghik Bedevyan, two Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) Armenian Service journalists; two unnamed United Nations officials; Anna Naghdalyan, a former spokesperson of Armenia’s Foreign Ministry (now an NGO worker); as well as activists, media owners and academics. Samvel Farmanyan, the former co-founder and host of an opposition television in Armenia, told TechCrunch that the hack he suffered “is a form of terror. ” “It is not only a clear violation of human rights, my rights of privacy and private communication, but it had [an] enormous psychological effect,” he said in an online chat. “It is difficult what you feel when you are sure that you are illegally under surveillance with no knowledge which government may stand behind and what the real purposes are behind that illegal intervention. ” Farmanyan, as well as other victims, realized they were victims of a hack when Apple sent them a notification that they may have been targeted with government spyware,as the company did with several other victims in other countries. They then reached out to Access Now, Citizen Lab or Amnesty International to get their phones checked. In the case of Armenia’s top human rights defender Grigoryan, Access Now said that her phone “was infected not long after she shared her phone number with her Azerbaijani counterpart. ” Over the last few years, there have been countless cases of abuse of NSO spying tools in Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Bahrainand many other countries, but Access Now considers this a special case. “Providing Pegasus spyware to either of the sides in the context of a violent conflict carries a substantial risk of potentially contributing to and facilitating serious human rights violations and even war crimes,”the organization wrote in its press release. There isn’t conclusive evidence that the Azerbaijan government is behind these attacks, but a coalition of media organizations known as the Pegasus Projectshowed that the country is one of NSO’s customers. Yet, Ruben Muradyan, a mobile security researcher who analyzed the phones of five victims in Armenia, said that some of them believe the government of Armenia could be behind the hacks, since they were being critical of the local government at the time. The Armenian embassy in Washington, D. C. did not respond to a request for comment. In any case, it’s unclear whether using spyware such as Pegasus in the context of an armed conflict constitutes a violation of international law, according to Anna Pagnacco, a cybersecurity policy researcher at Oxford Information Labs. “International law is silent on the topic of peacetime espionage, which is broadly criminalized at the national level; yet all states still conduct espionage. Intelligence activities carried out by members of a belligerent party’s armed forces in uniform during international armed conflict are legitimate — i. e. spying is not a war crime,” Pagnacco told TechCrunch. Do you have more information about NSO Group? Or another surveillance tech provider? We’d love to hear from you. You can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Wickr, Telegram and Wire @lorenzofb, or email lorenzo@techcrunch. com. You can also contact TechCrunch viaSecureDrop. Topics Senior Reporter, Cybersecurity Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-05-25T10:00:12 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/25/researchers-say-they-found-spyware-used-in-war-for-the-first-time/
| 895 | 1 |
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OpenAI launches API that lets developers build ‘assistants’ into their apps
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At its developer conference, OpenAI announced a new API, the Assistants API, that it characterizes as a step toward helping developers build “agent-like experiences” within their apps. Using the Assistants API, OpenAI customers can build an “assistant” that has specific instructions, leverages outside knowledge and can call OpenAI generative AI models and tools to perform tasks. Use cases range from a natural language-based data analysis app to a coding assistant or even an AI-powered vacation planner. Powering the new Assistants API is Code Interpreter, OpenAI’s tool that writes and runs Python code in a sandboxed execution environment. Launched in March forChatGPT, Code Interpreter can generate graphs and charts and process files, letting assistants created with the Assistants API run code iteratively to solve code and math problems. The Assistants API can also tap a retrieval component that augments dev-created assistants with knowledge from outside OpenAI’s models, like product information or documents provided by a company’s employees. And it supports function calling, which enables assistants to invoke programming functions that a developer defines and incorporate the responses in their messages. The Assistants API is in beta and available to all developers starting today. The tokens used for the API will be billed at the chosen model’s per-token rates, OpenAI says, with “tokens,” here, referring to parts of raw text (for example, the word “fantastic” split into “fan,” “tas” and “tic”). In the future, OpenAI says that it plans to allow customers to provide their own assistant-driving tools to complement Code Interpreter, retrieval component and function calling on its platform
| 2023-11-06T18:15:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/06/openai-launches-api-that-lets-developers-build-assistants-into-their-apps/
| 258 | 0.9 |
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Electro-hydraulic muscles help these robot legs stand straight on uneven terrain
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Researchers at ETH Zürich are very good at keeping robots standing upright. Back in 2022, the school’s robotics team taught the quadrupedal ANYmal robothow to hikeup mountains without falling over. New research from the school, published in collaboration with the Stuttgart-based Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, takes a unique approach to the problem of traversing uneven terrain. Artificial muscles showcased by the schools are powered by a hybrid electro-hydraulic system. Along with the ability to adjust automatically to the surface they’re traversing, the legs move faster and jump higher than their more standardized electric counterparts, all without requiring additional sensors or controls. The legs’ actuators are surprisingly simple. The teams describe them as “oil-filled plastic bags, similar to those used to make ice cubes. ” Those bags are then covered in electrodes. Honestly, the whole thing sounds a bit like a school science project. “[A]s soon as we apply a voltage to the electrodes, they are attracted to each other due to static electricity,” says grad student Thomas Buchner. “Similarly, when I rub a balloon against my head, my hair sticks to the balloon due to the same static electricity. ” The bags then expand or contract, based on the voltage being applied. Unlike standard electric actuators, the system doesn’t generate a lot of heat. So the actuators help the system traverse uneven terrain and help it jump high. In terms of real-world use, however, the system still has a long way to go. “Compared to walking robots with electric motors, our system is still limited. The leg is currently attached to a rod, jumps in circles and can’t yet move freely,” says Christoph Keplinger, a professor at Max Planck Institute. “If we combine the robotic leg in a quadruped robot or a humanoid robot with two legs, maybe one day, when it is battery-powered, we can deploy it as a rescue robot. ”
| 2024-09-09T09:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/09/electro-hydraulic-muscles-help-these-robot-legs-stand-straight-on-uneven-terrain/
| 315 | 0.9 |
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Openmart wants to make it easier for enterprises to sell to local businesses
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In 2020, Kathryn Wu launched a side hustle while she was working as a product engineer at Pinterest. Wu started a milk tea company, OhTea, with the hopes of connecting with local grocery stores and gift shops to get them to carry the tea. She quickly realized how difficult it was to not only be able to locate all of the potential retailors but also to find the point of contact at each place. The fragmented market was so hard to navigate, it ended up playing a role in the company’s demise. “I failed to reach product market fit,” Wu told TechCrunch. “It’s just very hard to find that retail information. I needed to pull from several tools, pull up a big spreadsheet and I thought maybe I should just solve my own pain point. ” That experience was the basis for the startup she co-founded three years later,Openmart. Openmart calls itself the AI alternative to Zoominfo. The company uses AI to scrape data from public business filings, maps, customer reviews and other sources to aggregate a database of local businesses organized by type. Users give Openmart a prompt of what kinds of businesses they are looking to sell to and the startup pulls them a list of potential sales leads with details like each business owners’ name and contact information. Wu founded the startup alongside Richard He. The pair met while working at Pinterest as interns and later reconnected with each other as part of an Asian entrepreneurship community. The pair bonded over their dogs: Wu has a golden retriever while He has a lab. When He saw that Wu was thinking about starting a company, he wanted in. While the original idea sparked from Wu being unable to get her small side-hustle business into local business, the resulting mission behind Openmart looked a little different. He said they were doing research into this idea and discovered that large enterprises struggled to navigate selling to local businesses too and decided to focus on building a product for that group first. “Our core focus is still local business,” He said, regarding the businesses Openmart’s database covers. “We know it is a huge pain point. We are confident this AI agent can generate to all outbound sales as we grow into more sectors, not just physical business. AI in the first wave is not replacing lawyers or doctors, it’s more replacing lower intelligence, lower logical orders of reasoning tasks. ” The company was founded late last year and was a member of Y Combinator’s W24 cohort. Openmart garnered a handful of paying customer trials while in beta that range from Fortune 500 companies to Series B and Series C startups. Their fellow YC founders were some of their first customers. Wu said the plan is to focus on generating these kinds of leads for enterprise clients to start with the intent to develop a tier for medium-sized enterprises down the line. Openmart just raised a $2. 75 million seed round and is exiting beta mode. The startup raised from investors including Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Afore Capital and several other VC firms. He said the company was careful to set a reasonable fundraising goal and turned down investors pushing them to raise an oversubscribed round. He said the company is following the fundraising advice of its YC group partner, Gustaf Alstromer, to try to maintain 50% ownership through the Series B. “It’s a pretty simple math problem,” He said. “You want to dilute as little as possible. You only need [to raise] as much capital as you need to survive to the next round. How much money we need is a bottom-up calculation rather than I want as much money as possible. ” He added that with AI helping engineers be more productive they don’t need as much capital for hiring as they can instead concentrate on a small, more efficient engineering team. Openmart is really focused on aggregating this data on local businesses to start but plans to expand into other areas in the future, He said. While it makes sense for many startups to expand horizontally, or to offer the same service to a different vertical or business category, the company may want to be mindful of which areas they expand to. Some areas like B2B software have pretty established sales lead-generation software players like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Crunchbase. He said that even with the company’s plans to expand in the future, they will still focus on their roots: small businesses. Wu added that they want to be thought of as the experts at finding contacts for small and medium-sized businesses. Topics Senior Reporter, Venture Google brings its AI-powered marketing tools to India after ‘Google tax’ repeal Elon Musk’s xAI launches Grok 4 alongside a $300 monthly subscription Why Cluely’s Roy Lee isn’t sweating cheating detectors Microsoft shares $500M in AI savings internally days after cutting 9,000 jobs California lawmaker behind SB 1047 reignites push for mandated AI safety reports Steve Davis left DOGE in May, but officials say he’s still running the show Neobank Revolut seeks $65B valuation, a year after its $45B deal
| 2024-08-21T14:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/21/openmart-wants-to-make-it-easier-for-enterprises-to-sell-to-local-businesses/
| 857 | 1 |
67b77ca5028d9086314d53473bbb056f
|
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|
Sony’s CES 2025 press conference: How to watch
|
Sony knows how to put on a show atCES 2025. The company’s pressers are high-octane, star-studded affairs, as these things go. In addition to standard Sony fare like TVs and audio systems, there’s always a curve ball or two, be it acar,adrone, or a“Gran Turismo” movie. That’s one of the perks of being a massive corporation with your fingers in a lot of verticals. This year’s press event kicks off at tonight at 5 p. m. PT/8 p. m. ET. We’ve already seen some of what Sony will offer, including theSRH-S1 extended reality headsetandadditions to the Bravia home theater line. Sony will be streaming the press conference over onits own siteand onYouTube, and you canfollow along with our live coverage here, or catch up onthe other CES 2025 events being streamed here. CES 2025, the annual consumer tech conference held in Las Vegas, is upon us — and this is where you…
| 2025-01-07T00:53:41 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/06/sonys-ces-2025-press-conference-how-to-watch/
| 152 | 0.8 |
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{"bias_density": 0.24, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
|
A new Chinese video-generating model appears to be censoring politically sensitive topics
|
A powerful new video-generating AI model became widely available today — but there’s a catch: The model appears to be censoring
| 2024-07-24T23:07:39 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/a-new-chinese-video-generating-model-appears-to-be-censoring-politically-sensitive-topics/
| 21 | 0.6 |
6523b8ba28ceb63fd525140d638f464b
|
{"bias_density": 0.15, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
|
Demand for AI is driving data center water consumption sky high
|
Posted: The AI boom is fueling the demand for data centers and, in turn, driving up water consumption. (Water is used to cool the computing equipment inside data centers. )Accordingto FT, in Virginia — home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers — water usage jumped by almost two-thirds between 2019 and 2023, from 1. 13 billion gallons to 1. 85 billion gallons. Many say the trend, playing out worldwide, is unsustainable. Microsoft, a major data center operator, says 42% of the water it consumed in 2023 came from “areas with water stress. ” Google, which has among the largest data center footprints, said this year that 15% of its freshwater withdrawals came from areas with “high water scarcity. ” Why can’t data centers recycle water in a closed-loop system? Many do, but much of what they consume is set aside for humidity control, meaning it evaporates. Especially in drier regions, air that’s not humidified can become a strong conductor of static electricity, which is usually bad news for computers. Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage. TechCrunch's AI experts cover the latest news in the fast-moving field. Every Monday, gets you up to speed on the latest advances in aerospace. Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly. By submitting your email, you agree to ourTermsandPrivacy Notice
| 2024-08-19T23:20:20 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/19/demand-for-ai-is-driving-data-center-water-consumption-sky-high/
| 237 | 0.9 |
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|
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Meta has revenue sharing agreements with Llama AI model hosts, filing reveals
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In ablog postlast July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “selling access” to Meta’s openly available Llama AI models “isn’t [Meta’s] business model. ” Yet Meta does make at leastsomemoney from Llama through revenue-sharing agreements, according to a newly unredacted court filing. Thefiling, submitted by attorneys for the plaintiffs in the copyright lawsuit Kadrey v. Meta, in which Meta stands accused of training its Llama models on hundreds of terabytes of pirated e-books, reveals that Meta “shares a percentage of the revenue” that companies hosting its Llama models generate from users of those models. The filing doesn’t indicate which specific hosts pay Meta. But Meta lists a number of Llama host partners in variousblogposts, including AWS, Nvidia, Databricks, Groq, Dell, Azure, Google Cloud, and Snowflake. Developers aren’t required to use a Llama model through a host partner. The models can be downloaded, fine-tuned, and run on a range of different hardware. But many hosts provide additional services and tooling that makes getting Llama models up and running simpler and easier. Zuckerberg mentioned the possibility of licensing access to Llama modelsduring an earnings call last April, when he also floated monetizing Llama in other ways, like through business messaging services and ads in “AI interactions. ” But he didn’t outline specifics. “[I]f you’re someone like Microsoft or Amazon or Google and you’re going to basically be reselling these services, that’s something that we think we should get some portion of the revenue for,” Zuckerberg said. “So those are the deals that we intend to be making, and we’ve started doing that a little bit. ” More recently, Zuckerbergassertedthat most of the value Meta derives from Llama comes in the form of improvements to the models from the AI research community. Meta uses Llama models to power a number of products across its platforms and properties, including Meta’s AI assistant,Meta AI. “I think it’s good business for us to do this in an open way,” Zuckerbergsaid during Meta’s Q3 2024 earnings call. “[I]t makes our products better rather than if we were just on an island building a model that no one was kind of standardizing around in the industry. ” The fact that Meta may generate revenue in a rather direct way from Llama is significant because plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta claim that Meta not only used pirated works to develop Llama, but facilitated infringement by “seeding,” or uploading, these works. Plaintiffs allege that Meta used surreptitious torrenting methods to obtain e-books for training, and in the process — due to the way torrenting works — shared the e-books with other torrenters. Meta plans tosignificantly upits capital expenditures this year, largely thanks to its increasing investments in AI. In January, the company said it would spend $60 billion-$80 billion on CapEx in 2025 — roughly double Meta’s CapEx in 2024 — primarily on data centers and growing the company’s AI development teams. Likely to offset a portion of the costs, Meta isreportedly consideringlaunching a subscription service for Meta AI that’ll add unspecified capabilities to the assistant. Updated 3/21 at 1:54 p. m. : A Meta spokesperson pointed TechCrunch tothis earnings call transcriptfor additional context. We’ve added a Zuckerberg quote from it — specifically a quote about Meta’s intent to revenue share with large hosts of Llama models
| 2025-03-21T20:40:53 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/21/meta-has-revenue-sharing-agreements-with-llama-ai-model-hosts-filing-reveals/
| 547 | 1 |
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|
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|
Neura shows off humanoid robot 4NE-1
|
German robotics manufacturer Neura this week released video of a humanoid robot, called 4NE-1, performing a variety of activities, like ironing and moving boxes. The promotional video arrives as Nvidia is showcasing a slew of new tools for humanoids at the Siggraph conference in Colorado. Neura is one of a baker’s dozen of firms that were given early access toNvidia’s humanoid development and deployment tools. The list also includes 1X, Boston Dynamics, ByteDance Research, Field AI, Figure, Fourier, Galbot, LimX Dynamics, Mentee, RobotEra and Skild AI. Some, including 1X, Figure and Boston Dynamics, have been among the most prominent names in the emerging form factor. Neura has been teasing the cheekily named 4NE-1 for some time now, but the project has appeared to be in early stages, as the company focused on more traditional form factors in the industrial setting. When I spoke with Neura CEO David Reger during ahumanoid robotics panel at Automatethat also included Boston Dynamics, Agility and Apptronik, he promised a closer look at the bot in July. Several of the robots were present on the floor of that event, but none actually functioned, making them little more than photo opportunities for attendees. This week’s video shows 4NE-1 doing a lot; in some sense, it’s doing more than we’ve seen from other humanoids in the space. Every humanoid needs to be taken with a grain of salt, however — particularly one with a number of short shots and commercial edits. As we’venoted in the past, these videos in particular don’t represent the system’s capabilities. Neura, for its part, is using the video to announce its presence on the scene and work with Nvidia’s robotics portfolio. “By combining Neura’s innovative cognitive robotics solutions with Nvidia’s advanced computing power and simulation platforms, we will push the boundaries of humanoid robotics even faster,” Reger said in a comment tied to the news. The video showcases simulation used to test and train these systems, intercut with shots of the bot in real-world scenarios. Until we’re able to see systems perform repeatable tasks in real-world scenarios at scale, these sorts of videos should always be approached with a degree of skepticism. As with any company working on a humanoid, I would love to see a lot more raw video of 4NE-1 in the field, doing its thing. Even those humanoids that are out in the field are currently in the pilot stage, with the exception of Agility’s partnershipwith logistics giantGXO. Even that deal, however, is a ways off from true wide-scale deployment of the kind of magnitude we’ve seen with autonomous mobile robots. Even so, Nvidia’s commitment to humanoids is a strong vote of confidence for the nascent category. It will also, no doubt, go a long way toward both accelerating development and opening things up to even more new entrants. “The next wave of AI is robotics, and one of the most exciting developments is humanoid robots,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a release. “We’re advancing the entire Nvidia robotics stack, opening access for worldwide humanoid developers and companies to use the platforms, acceleration libraries and AI models best suited for their needs. ”
| 2024-07-31T15:53:28 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/31/neura-shows-off-humanoid-robot-4ne-1/
| 524 | 1 |
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|
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|
Worldcoin is no longer offering Orb-verification in India, Brazil and France
|
Worldcoin is no longer offering its Orb-verification service in India, Brazil and France, just months after the crypto startup expanded the helmet-shaped eyeball-scanning device to those markets. Tools for Humanity, the foundation that oversees development of Worldcoin, exclusively told TechCrunch in a statement that it had expanded the Orb to many markets this year for a “limited time access. ” The sudden retreat, however, comes as a surprise. Worldcoin had opened pop-up kiosks in many parts of India to onboard new users to the platform anddrove crowdsas people lined up to sign up and collect the free tokens. For months, crypto startup founders in India have been murmuring that Worldcoin is facing regulatory hurdles in the market. A spokesperson of Tools for Humanity, told TechCrunch Worldcoin remains committed to “working with partners globally to ensure it meets regulatory requirements and provides a safe, secure and transparent service for verified humans. ” After publication, the Worldcoin spokesperson said in an email with TechCrunch that the Orb-verified services were “temporarily scaled back” in India and other countries. The Orb, a five-pound chromatic sphere, scans an individual’s eyeballs and verifies their identity. The verification system is similar to India’s Aadhaar, which uses biometric data to verify citizens’ identities. Worldcoinindicatedthe similarities in a post on X, formerly called Twitter, back in July 2022. “The multi-city tour kicked off in Tokyo in April 2023 and marked the first time people in many locations across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia were able to experience the Orb. The tour concluded late summer and was also complemented by previews of the Orb in a number of cities globally alongside the launch of the protocol,” Worldcoin spokesperson said in an email response to TechCrunch early this month. Co-founded by Sam Altman, Worldcoin started the global rollout of its services in July this year to help build a reliable solution for “distinguishing humans from AI online,” enable “global democratic processes” and “drastically increase economic opportunity. ” The startup, which has raised about $250 million altogether and counts Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Reid Hoffman among its backers, said at the time that it was rolling out its identity technology as well as the token internationally. Individuals can download World App, the startup’s protocol-compatible wallet software, and visit an Orb, the startup’s helmet-shaped eyeball-scanning verification device, to receive their World ID. While Brazil and France were among the global previews of the Orb-verified services, Tools for Humanity started its biometric verifications in India ahead of its global tour. TechCrunch understands that the organization was even hiring more contractors to expand the Orb-based verification in Indian cities, including New Delhi, until October. Even though the Orbs are no longer available in some markets, World App continues to onboard people in India. The organization also recently updated its protocol to World ID 2. 0 to differentiate between bots and “verified humans” and help developers build new integrations. It alsoannounced integrationsfor World ID with Minecraft, Reddit, Telegram, Shopify and Mercado Libre — in addition to its existing support for Discord, Talent Protocol and Okta’s Auth0. The article was updated to includeadditionalspokesperson comments in the fifth paragraph. Topics Reporter, India Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-12-21T07:10:41 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/20/worldcoin-is-no-longer-offering-orb-verification-in-india-brazil-and-france/
| 600 | 1 |
75bf75fcf94d05d2d92fb2d00032530a
|
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|
Bluesky says it will allow users to opt out of the public web interface after backlash
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Bluesky is changing course by allowing users to opt out ofa change that would expose their posts to the public web. Last month, the companyannouncedits decentralized alternative to Twitter/X would soon open up a public web interface allowing anyone to view the posts on its platform, even if they didn’t have an invite to the app, which remains in a closed beta. Though the team didn’t meet the “end of the month” deadline for the public web launch, it did ruffle some feathers. Many users were upset that their posts would be made public on the web, without the option of setting their accounts to private, aka a “friends-only” mode, like they have on X. Ina poston Wednesday, Bluesky announced its plans to open a public web interface have been pushed back — a move that’s likely due to the user feedback on the issue. The company shared that the “upcoming release will not have the public web view enabled yet, but it will have a tool to opt out of it. ” Still, Bluesky subtly pushed back at the idea that anyone should have felt their Bluesky posts were private or protected by reminding users that “your posts, profile, and likes are all public data. ” However, it’s not exactly users’ fault that they may have been lulled into a false sense of security here. Bluesky firstlaunched in February as an invite-only app, and has remained invite-only in the many months since, even as new Twitter/X competitors emerged, including Instagram Threads. The company seemed in no rush to open to the public, and as a result, users likely felt comfortable that, by the time it did, they would have the option to lock down their accounts if need be. But Bluesky surprised users with its announcement thata public interface would be coming soon,ahead of any option for a private mode for user profiles. Many clamored for this functionalityin replies to Bluesky’s post. As one user, @wagoner,succinctlyput it, “…that’s completely the wrong way around. Allow privacy first, make bluesky public second. ” Now, it seems, Bluesky is listening to its user base with the pushback of the public web interface’s launch and the debut of an opt-out tool instead. The company explains that the opt-out tool will only affect the logged-out view of theBluesky appitself, but it’s recommending that other third-party apps on the open network respect the setting, as well. However, it doesn’t seem to have any ability to force them to do so, which is why an option to set user profiles to private would have been a better option for account privacy. Bluesky said it will soon share how users will be able to use the tool to opt out of the public interface and will explain to developers how to ensure compatibility with other apps, as well. The launch of a public web interface appears to be designed to keep Bluesky a part of the larger conversation around Twitter/X alternatives in addition to making its platform more accessible to a broader user base, even as it remains invite-only. But the launch of Threads, which now hasnearly 100 million monthly active usersand plans to support ActivityPub — the same protocol powering Mastodon, another decentralized alternative to X — is making Bluesky increasingly look like it may have made the wrong bet on the future of decentralized social media. Regardless of how much better its own AT Protocol may be, it doesn’t have the momentum that ActivityPub has, given Instagram’s promises to enter this space. (Whether Instagram ends up supporting ActivityPub remains to be seen, of course, but it seems to still be the plan, given that the app already offersa way to verify your Threads profile on Mastodon. ) Bluesky’s shininess may be wearing off some in these later months, especially as itgrappledwith moderationissues. Initially, invites to the social network were such a hot commodity that theywere selling for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Today, the invites are available on eBay but only for acouple of dollars, indicating that demand has declined. The company has continued rolling out more tools for its users, likeautomated moderation tools and user and moderation lists, and reached aone million user milestone in September, but without opening its doors to the public, users may be finding other places to network, including Mastodon and Threads, if not X
| 2023-12-06T15:29:38 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/06/bluesky-says-it-will-allow-users-to-opt-out-of-the-public-web-interface-after-backlash/
| 725 | 1 |
d209d8cc4e0d7b0855fa5311a1ce60c3
|
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|
Zomato shares plunge after Invesco cut rival Swiggy’s valuation
|
Shares of Indian food delivery firm Zomato ended session on Tuesday at a decline of 6%, hours after it became known that Invesco had cut the valuation of its rival Swiggy. Shares of Zomato ended Tuesday’s trading session at 60. 94 Indian rupees (or 74 U. S. cents ), a 6% decline over the day’s opening at 64. 80 Indian rupees. The share drop wiped over $400 million in Zomato’s market cap. TechCrunch first reported on Monday, after local trading hours, that the U. S. asset manager Invesco hadslashed the valuation of Swiggy, the chief rival of Zomato, by 48. 6% in a year to $5. 5 billion. Invescoled a $700 million funding round in Swiggyin January last year, valuing the Bengaluru-headquartered startup at $10. 7 billion. Elsewhere in the world, private market valuations follow public market valuations. In India, it’s the other way round. Why is price discovery in the Indian markets so poor?https://t. co/NAlY8Os5Dx — Gaurav Juneja (@gjuneja1)May 9, 2023 Topics Reporter, India Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-05-09T12:38:34 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/09/zomato-shares-plunge-after-invesco-cut-rival-swiggy-valuation/
| 236 | 0.9 |
e995144fe7f2fbb91573e0598e0a588d
|
{"bias_density": 0.6, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 1}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
|
Impulse Space bets on shuttling satellites between orbits, raises $150M to scale up
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Impulse Spacehas raised a massive new tranche of funding as big-name investors bet that moving satellites around in orbit will soon be a high demand service. The startup, which was founded by Tom Mueller three years ago, announced the $150 million Series B round on Tuesday. Impulse is developing a line of orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs) that can adjust satellite positions in space after they’re launched by a rocket. While a handful of other firms are working on OTVs, Impulse says its products are differentiated for their chemical propulsion systems that offer very high delta-v, or change in velocity, capability. The company hasannounced two OTVsso far: Mira, to provide last-mile deliveries for spacecraft getting dropped off on ride-share launches, and a larger high-energy kick stage called Helios to move spacecraft from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit (GEO) in less than 24 hours. This is much faster than existing options, which are either more costly, like paying for a SpaceX Falcon Heavy to fly directly to GEO or Rocket Lab to have an Electron rocket drop you in a precise orbit, or time-consuming, with lower delta-V pushes to GEO over months. “The satellite market is demanding enhanced maneuverability and rapid on-orbit responsiveness, which requires Impulse Space’s powerful, high delta-v vehicles,” Founders Fund partner Scott Nolan said in a statement. “Tom has built a team with deep expertise innovating on mission-critical technologies, positioning the company to reliably deliver while driving the future of in-space transportation. ” Muelleris well-known in the space industry: he was a founding employee of SpaceX and eventually became CTO of propulsion, where he led the development of the Merlin rocket engine that powers the Falcon 9 rocket and the Draco thrusters that power the Dragon spacecraft. He left SpaceX in November 2020 and founded Impulse less than a year later. Since then the company has ticked off a handful of major milestones, including a successful first mission that flew in November 2023. The LEO Express-1 saw Mira take to orbit for the first time; the mission concluded after nine months, during which time Mira successfully deployed a customer’s payload and completed the largest-ever orbit raise (150 kilometers in 75 seconds) by an OTV on its inaugural flight, the company said. There are strong signals that the Department of Defense is also interested in this capability: Impulse scored a handful of awards from the U. S. Space Force earlier this year, including two Small Business Innovation and Research grants under the force’s Tactically Responsive Space initiative. That program is designed to solicit capabilities from private industry that could enable the Space Force to move more quickly on orbit. The startup has grown to over 140 people, with operations primarily based out of a 60,000-square foot facility in Redondo Beach, California. Impulse is now focused on its second mission, LEO Express-2, which will see Mira deploy and host payloads for multiple unnamed customers later this year. An upgraded version of Mira will make its first launch in 2025, with Helios to make its first flight in 2026. The round was led by Founders Fund, and includes participation from existing investors Lux Capital and Spring Tide, as well as new investors like DCVC. Other participants include 137 Ventures, Airbus Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Balerion Space Ventures, Elysium, First Principles Group, Island Green, Overmatch, RTX Ventures, Tamarack Global, and Trousdale Ventures. The new funding follows a$45 million Series Athat closed in July 2023. Topics Reporter, Space and Defense Aria Alamalhodaei covers the space and defense industries at TechCrunch. Previously, she covered the public utilities and the power grid for California Energy Markets. You can also find her work at MIT’s Undark Magazine, The Verge, and Discover Magazine. She received an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Aria is based in Austin, Texas. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-10-01T21:01:26 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/01/impulse-bets-shuttling-satellites-between-orbits-is-big-business-and-raises-150m-to-scale-up/
| 707 | 1 |
2c5327e8031456aa3abc6916e94997d8
|
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|
Quandri raises $8.5M Series A to bring process automation to insurance brokers and agencies
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Robotic process automation (RPA) has been a buzzword for a while now, but most of the tools that try to help businesses automate their workflows tend to be generalists. Quandri, a Vancouver, Canada-based startup, is taking a very different approach with its digital workers for the insurance industry. The company today announced that it has raised an $8. 5 million Series A round led by FUSE, with participation from Defined Capital and existing investors Aviso Ventures, Rebellion Ventures, N49P and Good News Ventures. In total, the company has now raised $10 million. The company was co-founded by brothersJackson(CEO) andJamieson Fregeau(president). Jackson was previously the COO of Revenue Accelerator while Jamieson worked at a number of hardware-centric companies, including Open Ocean Robotics. Jackson noted that while he was at Revenue Accelerator, he ended up building a number of bots to automate repetitive data entry tasks. So when the brothers were thinking about what product to build, they decided on putting a different spin on RPA. “Nobody was really talking about a bot for a customer specifically. It was like: you’d give this capability to a customer. And then they would need to go and configure and build all this stuff themselves in a really rigid way. And that prevented a huge slew of companies from accessing this kind of technology because they don’t have the technical resources — or if they have the technical resources, they’re applied to their very specific core products but not on operational automation. ” What Quandri is building is more akin to “robot-as-a-service” than traditional RPA. Instead of having to build automation themselves, Quandri essentially pre-builds these bots for their customers, which also means that the team has to focus on a very specific niche. After working with a couple of potential customers in the insurance space, Jackson told me, the team realized that this was a vertical where brokers and agencies were still doing a lot of repetitive manual work and where a lot of data was sitting in silos (even as the consumer-side of the industry has quickly modernized). “There hasn’t been a lot of net new tooling built for brokerages over the last 10 years,” he said. “It’s been somewhat overlooked by a large wave of innovation that has happened in a lot of other industries. ” Right now, Quandri offers three of these pre-built robots: Renewal Reviewer to help agents compare policies upon renewal, a tool that helps users ensure that files are named correctly and contextually (and not “1847AHDKS812 BROKER”), and Download Director, a service that matches unmatched policies and eDocs to the correct accounts and then matches claims and verifies producer commission amounts as needed. Jackson tells me that the company is currently 100% focused on the insurance industry and specifically on North American brokerages. In the long run, the team may branch out and apply its technology to other verticals. “Bots are a total game changer for our agency,” said Angela Trimble, president, Trustpoint Services. “I told my Agency Manager we are now at a place where we don’t have to be worried about hiring additional employees when it comes to the tasks involving tedious paperwork because we have bots in place. ” Topics Editor Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-06-28T16:00:15 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/28/quandri-raises-8-5m-series-a-to-bring-process-automation-to-insurance-brokers-and-agencies/
| 607 | 1 |
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Apple debuts new business tools for managing presence across email, calls, and Tap to Pay
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Apple on Wednesdayannouncedan expanded series of tools that will allow businesses to increase their visibility on Apple’s platforms via its free service,Apple Business Connect. Launched last year, the online portal lets businesses manage their presence across Apple’s1. 5 billion devicesin areas like Maps, Siri, Spotlight search, Safari, and Wallet. Now business owners will be able to integrate their branding into other Apple products as well, including Mail, Tap to Pay on iPhone, and the Apple Phone app. In addition, Business Connect will open up to all types of businesses, not just those with a physical location, the company says. Business Connect evolved out of asimplersystem that had allowed businesses to manage their listings on Apple Maps, calledApple Business Register. Since the arrival of Business Connect in early 2023, “millions” of places around the world have begun to use the service to customize how their business appears to consumers. This involves the use of place cards, cover photos, logos, business photos, limited-time promotions and incentives known as “Showcases,” and action buttons for things like “order pickup,” or “view menu,” for example. Businesses can also tap into insights to find out more about how consumers are interacting with their business, including how users came to find the business and what actions they take once on the business’s place card. With today’s expansion, Apple will make it possible for any type of business to establish a profile on the system, including businesses that provide services, operate from a home, or businesses that are fully online without a physical location. In addition, all businesses will be able to further manage their brand’s presence across more Apple apps and features. Through the dashboard, businesses can enter details about their brand, including things like the name, category, logo, and website, and can preview how their place card will appear to consumers. Later this year, this information will also be used to customize how business emails will display in Apple’s Mail app. Instead of the boring gray logo that appears today, the email can display the brand’s name and logo in the inbox. And, when clicking into an email, the brand will have an even larger presence with a colorful header at the top of the screen derived from the brand’s logo, in addition to the business’s name and logo. This Branded Mail feature arrives alongside the newly redesigned Mail app for iOS 18, which now categorizes email and groups mail by sender. Similar to Gmail, iOS 18 will sort email into tabs, like Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. Apple says it won’t rely on whether a business has set up its brand through Business Connect to determine where the mail gets sorted, however. Brands will undergo a review process after submitting their brand information, Apple says. They’ll also be able to manage multiple emails or branded domains — like marketing emails versus order confirmation emails. Brands can sign up for this option today and their logo will begin displaying to customers later this year. Tap to Pay is another area that will now feature the brand’s icon instead of the now generic category icon displayed today. The business’s name will also be customizable so it appears to customers the way the business wants it to during the payment process. With this change, Apple says customers will know when they’re making a payment to a trusted and verified business. While not arriving until next year, the integration with the Phone app may be the most useful, as it will identify calls by featuring the business name, logo, and department, helping consumers better determine which calls may be unwanted or spam. Apple says the features, which include a revamped Business Connect dashboard with contextually aware
| 2024-10-16T19:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/16/apple-debuts-new-business-tools-for-managing-presence-across-email-calls-and-tap-to-pay/
| 617 | 1 |
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Crusoe, a rumored OpenAI data center supplier, has secured $686M in new funds, filing shows
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Crusoe Energy, a startup building data centersreportedlyto be leased to Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI, is in the process of raising $818 million, according to anSEC filing. The filing indicates that Crusoe has secured $686 million of the $818 million total that it hopes to raise. Seventy investors have contributed to the tranche so far, per the filing. “A company at our stage of growth is always talking to investors,” a spokesperson for Crusoe told TechCrunch. The Financial Timesreportedearlier this year that Crusoe was in talks to raise roughly $500 million in a funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund with participation from Felicis Ventures. It seems investors had an appetite for a larger tranche, which presumably would come at a higher valuation than the rumored $3 billion — which was already double Crusoe’s previous valuation. Should Crusoe successfully raise $818 million, it would bring the startup’s total raised to approximately $1. 5 billion in equity and debt. Late last year, Crusoe secured $200 million in debt using its data center chips as collateral to buy thousands of AI processors. Crusoe launched in 2018 as a cryptocurrency business, powering its data centers with natural gas that would otherwise be “flared off” and wasted. Like many crypto mining operations, Crusoe pivoted as AI rose to prominence, securing deals with AI companies to provide high-performance computing and AI infrastructure. In early October, Crusoe announced it would enter into a $3. 4 billion joint venture with asset manager Blue Owl Capital to build a massive data center in Abilene, Texas. The campus is expected to be leased to Oracle, which will in turnrentit to Microsoft and its close collaborator, OpenAI. There’s abooming marketfor “neocloud” startups building low-cost, on-demand clouds for AI. CoreWeave, the GPU infrastructure provider,saysthat it’s stockpiled a jaw-dropping $12. 7 billion in available funds, including nearly $10 billion in debt and nearly $3 billion in equity. Lambda Labs in early April secured a special-purpose financing vehicle of up to $500 million. The nonprofitVoltage Park, backed by crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, last October announced that it’s investing $500 million in GPU-backed data centers. AndTogether AI, a cloud GPU host that also conducts generative AI research, in March landed $106 million in a Salesforce-led round. The environmental impact of the build-outs could be substantial. IDCexpectsglobal data center electricity consumption to more than double between 2023 and 2028. Andaccordingto Morgan Stanley, data center tech suppliers will create emissions equivalent to 2. 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030. Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller recently suggested in aninterviewthat AI is, in fact, the solution to the AI energy crises. “There’s all these gripes about AI’s energy usage, [but] the solution to AI’s energy usage is AI,” he told SiliconAngle analyst Dave Vellante. “AI is the tool that we’ve been looking for that’s going to be able to drive these scientific breakthroughs that we need to achieve low-cost, sustainably-powered futures. ” TechCrunch has an AI-focused newsletter!Sign up hereto get it in your inbox every Wednesday
| 2024-11-21T16:41:35 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/21/crusoe-a-rumored-openai-data-center-supplier-has-secured-686m-in-new-funds-filing-shows/
| 500 | 0.9 |
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Unaric exits stealth with $35M to buy and consolidate Salesforce-ecosystem startups
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A new company is emerging out of stealth today with $35 million in funding and a plan to acquire and consolidate startups within the Salesforce ecosystem. Unaric, as the company is called, has secured $25 million in debt and $10 million in equity from various VCs, angels and growth lenders, as it looks to bring together independent Salesforce-focused SaaS companies help them capture a larger chunk of the gargantuan market that has cropped up around Salesforce these past couple of decades. Some companies have built megabucks businesses on top of Salesforce, includingSalesforce-native DevOps platform Copado; Salesforcedata backup platform OwnBackup; andlead-generation platform Qualified. Thousands of smaller companies have cropped up off the back of Salesforce’s rise to the giddy heights of a $200 billion enterprise behemoth, creating an ecosystem thatsome estimatespeg at four times that of Salesforce itself. However, relatively few companies within that Salesforce ecosystem become massive in their own right, due in part to their narrowly-focused “point solutions” that mean end-users have to combine multiple different tools from various smaller vendors — something that larger enterprises are often reluctant to do. And this is where Unaric enters the fray. “For enterprise customers it can be painful to purchase and manage small niche solutions,” Unaric co-founder and CEOJames Gasteenexplained to TechCrunch. “Unaric addresses this by building larger suites, which solve large problems for customers through a single vendor who can provide greater innovation, better service and global support. ” Founded out of London in July last year, Unaric is aiming to buy up to 40 companies over the next three years, the first of which it’s announcing today with the acquisition ofSalesbolt, a product that automatically keeps CRM contacts up-to-date. Over time, Unaric says that it intends to increase the opportunity for cross-selling and knowledge-sharing across all Salesforce products under its wing, as well as introduce a “shared central infrastructure” including a product and engineering hub. The Salesbolt deal pegs Unaric’s initial focus firmly in theRevOpsrealm, an area Gasteen says it will double-down on. “By acquiring multiple companies in this area we will be able to drive cross-sales,” he said. “This is an area where we already have a pipeline of deals lined up. The next stage is to use our knowledge of industries and existing customers’ needs to build out suites of companies focused on particular industry sectors. ” Unari is the handiwork of Gasteen and chief product officerNeil Crawford, each having previously founded Salesforce-ecosystem companies, and chairPeter Lindholmand CFOMoritz Birke. Gasteen, in fact, already has experience of merging two Salesforce-focused companies, when his previous startup Precursive acquired a “complementary” product called Taskfeedback in 2019. “There is a mismatch in the Salesforce ISV (independent software vendor) ecosystem which we have experienced personally, and we know how to put it right,” Gasteen said. “We believe that by building suites of products that match more closely the needs of enterprises, we can help companies to significantly increase their sales, scale their businesses and sell to corporate buyers who would not normally buy from individual vendors. ” Such a hefty acquisition spree will, of course, require a lot of capital, which is where Unaric’s external funding comes into play. The $25 million debt segment emanates from Atempo Growth, with the remaining seed equity tranche coming from LocalGlobe, Concentric, FJ Labs and angels such as OwnBackup founder Sam Gutmann, Hotjar founder Johan Malmberg and enterprise software startup investor Dave Kellogg. Longer term, Gasteen says Unaric is looking to emulate the growth trajectory of a number of established enterprise software companies,such as Veeva Systems, a $32 billion life sciences software company;and Ncino, a $3 billion fintech. Both companies were initially built on top of Salesforce and embraced the cloud from the get-go, but more importantly they have focused their efforts on broad techstacks spanning a single sector. “They have created a lot of value in the ecosystem through being focused on a single industry techstack,” Gasteen said. “They have built the companies mainly through product development and some M&A. Our idea is to emulate the success of these companies by building many Ncino’s and Veeva’s within Unaric. ” Topics Senior Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-06-28T12:00:23 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/28/unaric-exits-stealth-with-35m-to-buy-and-consolidate-salesforce-centric-startups/
| 758 | 1 |
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Instagram now finally allows users to download public Reels
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Instagram is finally letting users download Reels posted by others so they can share them outside the app. Rival short video app TikTok has had this feature for years and gained popularity by people watching short videos with the app’s watermark outside the platform. On Tuesday, the company’s head Adam Mosseri said on his Instagram broadcast channel that U. S. -based users will be able to download Reels to their camera roll. Users can do this by tapping on the share icon and then selecting the Download option. Mosseri noted that Reels from only public accounts are eligible for download. Plus, public accounts can turn off the ability to download Reels. While Mosseri didn’t specify if there will be a watermark on the downloaded Reel, the picture posted by him indicates that the downloaded video will show an Instagram logo along with the account name. TikTok uses a similar format to attach a watermark on downloaded videos. Notably, Instagram has always allowed users to download their own Reels without a watermark from drafts. In 2021, Instagramstopped promotingcontent with a TikTok watermark (or any watermark) on videos. Last August, YouTube started including a logo-based watermark ondownloaded Shorts— the company’s short video product — to discourage cross-platform sharing. So this move by Instagram to let users download Reels could be a tactic to attract people to watch more content on the platform. Reels has been the point of focus to drive growth and revenue for Meta in the last few quarters. During its Q1 2023 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said time spent on Instagram grew by 24% thanks toAI-powered Reels recommendations. Topics Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-06-21T03:30:23 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/instagram-now-finally-allows-users-to-download-public-reels/
| 341 | 0.9 |
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Cognichip emerges from stealth with the goal of using generative AI to develop new chips
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Chips are a critical component of the AI industry. But new chips don’t hit the market with the same speed as new AI models and products. Cognichiphas a lofty goal of creating a foundational AI model that can help bring new chips to market faster. San Francisco-based Cognichip is working to build a physics-informed foundational AI model that can be used by semiconductor companies to speed up the development process of new chips. The company is calling this approach “artificial chip intelligence” and hopes it can help speed up chip production times by 50% and reduce the associated costs as well. This ambitious idea comes from semiconductor industry veteran Faraj Aalaei, who worked at various companies including Fujitsu Network Communications and Centillium Communications. Aalaei told TechCrunch that his company’s origin story begins back in 2015. At the time, Aalaei was a member of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which would often meet to talk about what was ailing their industry. He was growing concerned about what was happening in the semiconductor industry. He gave a presentation to the group about the stark drop in venture capital investing into semiconductor companies, which peaked at 200 deals a year in 2000, he said, and dropped to just one or two a year by 2015. “I essentially warned the other CEOs that this cannot be good for us,” Aalaei said. “It cannot be good for the semiconductor industry in America, and that what we needed to do is to fundamentally change things about it. If that trend continues, then we’re going to lose our competitiveness. We’re going to lose the energy that brings in new ideas to the table. ” Considering how long it takes new chips to come to market, it’s not surprising these companies weren’t attracting venture investors, he said. Then he sat on the idea for almost a decade. He went on to foundCandou Venturesin 2016, and through that fund got to watch the rise in AI startups. When he realized that advancements in generative AI had gotten to a point where it could be used to potentially help solve some of the semiconductor industry’s existent challenges, he decided to launch Cognichip in 2024. Cognichip has been operating in stealth ever since and has amassed a team of AI experts from places like Stanford, Google, and MIT to start building. Aalaei said it will take at least a few years to build the model to “ultimate performance” but said it should be able to help companies before it reaches that goal. “When we get to that point, this artificial chip intelligence, we will be building a system that can actually act like an expert engineer,” Aalaei said. “Once we achieve that vision, then you can actually get the same work done with a fraction of the people and in much, much shorter time. ” Cognichip is now emerging from stealth with $33 million in seed funding in a round co-led by Lux Capital and Mayfield with participation from FPV and Candou Ventures. Navin Chaddha, a managing partner at Mayfield, told TechCrunch that when he was introduced to Aalaei, he felt they were “cut from the same cloth. ” The vast majority of work in the semiconductor industry is still being done by humans; he said he thinks the timing is right to bring AI into the mix. “This is a major pain point, and the solution this company will provide will be a pain killer and not a vitamin for the semiconductor industry,” Chaddha said. “If you don’t have humans doing the job, can AI do it where there’s shortage of talent? Number one, great team, second, [they are] solving a real pain point in a massive, trillion-dollar industry. ” Aalaei said that he hopes Cognichip will also be able to help democratize access to building chips so that more semiconductor companies can get started and land investment. Easier access also means that smaller companies can build more specific chips for specialized or smaller models, too, he said. All of this will depend on when, or if, the company can reach artificial chip intelligence. “What we’re doing is not some incremental change,” Aalaei said. “We’re not building an [electronic design automation] tool, we’re not trying to tweak the process a little bit. We’re trying to set a new goal for our industry and bring some major change. ” Topics Senior Reporter, Venture Why Cluely’s Roy Lee isn’t sweating cheating detectors Microsoft shares $500M in AI savings internally days after cutting 9,000 jobs California lawmaker behind SB 1047 reignites push for mandated AI safety reports Steve Davis left DOGE in May, but officials say he’s still running the show Neobank Revolut seeks $65B valuation, a year after its $45B deal X’s ad business improved under departing CEO Linda Yaccarino, but it’s still tough times ahead OpenAI is reportedly releasing an AI browser in the coming weeks
| 2025-05-15T16:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/15/cognichip-emerges-from-stealth-with-the-goal-of-using-generative-ai-to-develop-new-chips/
| 815 | 1 |
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How two brothers went from growing up on a sailboat to making underwater military vehicles
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Vatn Systems founders Nelson and Freddie Mills spent their childhood cruising over turquoise waters, doing their homework on a sailboat off the coast of Caribbean islands. While their surroundings were idyllic, their vessel of choice was decidedly not. “The first boat I remember, I think our parents bought it for like five, 10 grand,” Freddie said. “It didn’t have refrigeration. It was leaky. ” But it turns out an unreliable ship is a great place to raise future engineers. The brothers, who spent several months of each year on a sailboat, would occasionally put down their homework and pick up a wrench, helping their father jerry-rig mechanical solutions. “We didn’t have enough money to rebuild an engine, so my dad and I and Nelson, we just figured it out,” Freddie said. After spending years on the water, the brothers have now turned their ambitions to just below the ocean’s surface. Last year, the two paired up with engineer Geoff Manchester and Dan Hendrix, a former special forces dive team officer, to foundVatn Systems, a startup producing autonomous underwater vehicles primarily for defense uses. On Tuesday, the Portsmouth, Rhode Island-based company announced a $13 million seed round led by DYNE Ventures and with participation from Lockheed Martin Ventures, RTX Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and others. The round brings the startup’s total funding to $16. 5 million. The company’s vehicles — the first prototype is about 50 pounds — can swim within the top 300 meters of water and carry weapons like torpedoes. The vehicles have other uses as well, like passing messages between ships in areas where signals are blocked by adversaries. To do so, a string of Vatn vehicles autonomously get into position and send data down the line of drones to a ship, with the communication happening out of enemy sightline. “Our ultimate goal is to become an underwater autonomy prime,” Nelson said. Vatn also plans to capitalize on the Department of Defense’s current obsession: swarming technology, meaning a large group of drones that a single military officer can operate at once. While there are plenty of startups buildingaerial drone swarms, Vatn wants to be the government’s answer for underwater swarms. Right now, a single user can operate about 10 Vatn vehicles. “Eventually it’ll be like hundreds,” Nelson said. Vatn will face well-capitalized competition. Defense juggernautNorthrop Grumman has builtits own underwater vehicle prototype, Manta Ray, and the Pentagonselected defense startup Andurilto continue producing its own autonomous underwater device. Nelson argued that Vatn aims to make its vehicles less expensive and easier to mass-produce than competitors. The brothers have a long road ahead, expanding their 18-person team and going to market in 2025. But, by setting up shop right on Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, the pair has ensured they will never stray too far from their seafaring roots. “I’m staring at my sailboat right now,” Freddie said with a smile, looking onto the dock beside Vatn’s office. Topics Senior Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-11-12T14:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/12/how-two-brothers-went-from-growing-up-on-a-sailboat-to-making-underwater-military-vehicles/
| 559 | 1 |
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WeWork’s going concern warning is a reminder that VC and low-margin business don’t mix
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There’s no point in being rude to WeWork at this juncture. The company’s market cap has fallen to around $130 million, it has billions of dollars in debt, and itsaid recentlythat it may struggle to stay in business as its cash balance dwindles. WeWorksees several avenues to right the shipbefore it runs out of cash: Reduce rent and tenancy costs, limit user churn, reduce its overall cost basis and raise new capital. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read itevery morning on TechCrunch+or getThe Exchange newsletterevery Saturday. It is not clear how much relief those endeavors will bring, but WeWork is certainly not going out without a fight. Itsdebt restructuring effort earlier this yearis more evidence of that intent. As we enter what could be the last few months of WeWork, we can draw several lessons from its Icarus-esque rise and fall. You could argue that WeWork is a warning against granting founders too much control for too long: Its founder was famed for his ability to sell and raise capital, but lax controls failed to prevent delusion from replacing ambition at the company. You could also make the case that WeWork became too complicated a financial entity for its own good. But here’s the lesson I want to take away from WeWork’s saga: Venture capital can be excellent for quickly scaling technology startups, but the model is not a good fit for lower-margin businesses. In its most recent quarter, WeWork reported revenue of $844 million, up 3. 6% from a year ago. The company improved its bottom line, too, narrowing its net loss to $397 million from $635 million, and shrinking adjusted EBITDA losses to $36 million from $134 million. Those figures, however, did nothing to offset the fact that the company still had a free cash flow deficit of $646 million in H1 2023. That kind of cash burn is a tough obstacle to overcome for a company that’s worth less than a quarter of its free cash flow deficit from just the first two quarters of the year. WeWork’s description of its liquidity isn’t encouraging, either: As of June 30, 2023, the Company had $205 million in cash and cash equivalents, including $46 million held at its consolidated VIEs, and $475 million in delayed draw note commitments, resulting in total liquidity of $680 million. The Company issued $175 million of the delayed draw notes in July 2023. It’s no surprise that the company’s “losses and [its] projected cash needs, which have been impacted by the recent increases in member churn, combined with [its] current liquidity level [leave] substantial doubt. about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. ” Did it have to be this way? I don’t think so. WeWork clearly had an idea — there’s agood book about that— that resonated with its customer base. However, in its pursuit ofever-larger checks, the companyprioritized revenue growth over the health of its business. The blame for WeWork getting out of shape so fast does not rest solely with investors per se. I’d hazard the fault lies with everyone who was involved. When you pour capital into a business with limited gross margins to help it increase revenue while accreting long-term liabilities, you can spend your way to a point of no return. Why do margins matter, then? Because all the money that WeWork spent on growth has left it with a revenue base that is simply not profitable; what all that fundraised moneyboughtis actually not worth that much. In Q2 2023, here’s how the company’s gross profit stacked up: For a company that has selling, general and administrative costs of $150 million before taking into account debt costs, it’s clear that WeWork remains far from even reaching operating profitability. And we may be being too generous here by not counting the depreciation and amortization costs in our math. Indeed, inits Q1 2023 report, WeWork said that its very non-GAAP “building margin” metric came to –$20 million, inclusive of depreciation and amortization, and +$120 million without. It’s very cool that WeWork has a revenue run rate of $3. 38 billion, but if that revenue costs a lot to generate, it’s hard to arrive at the company’s value — apart from knowing that it is not much. Investors seem to agree with that estimation, with the company’s shares down 22% to $0. 16 this morning following the going concern warning and the Q2 results. You can get mad if you want to. WeWork raised a lot of money that could have gone to founders with models that are a better fit for venture-style growth. Heck, some of those dollars could have backed underrepresented founders, too. But hubris is a human quality and the majority of venture bets fail. None of this is exceptional, per se, except the scale of this possible failure. WeWork can try to spin a good tale about being asset-light and the like, but it was fundamentally a low-margin business that took out longer leases than it sold. If it had scaled slowly, expanding when it could afford to with its own cash flows, the company would have been a smaller but healthier business today. Rent the Runway’s market cap of about $100 million is further testament to the fact that it can be a good idea to raise venture capital to scale a business with highly valuable revenue, provided you can generate operating leverage later. But that is just not doable when you can only manage modest gross margins or worse. Topics Senior Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-08-09T15:30:25 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/09/wework-going-concern-warning/
| 992 | 1 |
f7e0ca3f846c72129850a8396b5c5ff7
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Amazon’s $180 Echo Hub is a wall-mounted smart home control panel
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Echo Hub is easily one of the more interesting hardware devices introduced at today’s Amazon Devices event in Arlington, Virginia. In fact, it’s one of those things Amazon should have introduced years ago. The system is effectively a wall-mounted tablet designed to serve as a centralized control panel for smart home devices. “Today, smart home panels are expensive, they require professional installers and they don’t age well,” said smart home chief Charlie French at today’s event. “We set out to change that. ” The system sports an eight-inch touchscreen that centralizes Ring and other security cam feeds, along with a dashboard that features various smart home devices. You can arm security devices and change echo speaker volumes. Amazon’s new Map View feature scans your home The product is designed specifically to work with Amazon’s new Map View feature, which lets users monitor and control different devices on a room by room basis — something similar to what iRobot has promised on its Roomba devices. One wonders whether the robot vacuum was set to be a bigger piece of that puzzle, before the acquisition was slowed by regulators. Map View arrives for the device next year. Echo Hub arrives later this year, priced at $180
| 2023-09-20T16:21:28 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/20/amazons-180-echo-hub-is-a-wall-mounted-smart-home-control-panel/
| 204 | 0.9 |
a3a5d69b05d82c6d34d7b966d6e43a1a
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US Army soldier pleads guilty to AT&T and Verizon hacks
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Cameron John Wagenius pleaded guilty to hacking AT&T and Verizon and stealing a massive trove of phone records from the companies, according to courtrecordsfiledon Wednesday. Wagenius, who was a U. S. Army soldier, pleaded guilty to two counts of “unlawful transfer of confidential phone records information” on an online forum and via an online communications platform. According toa documentfiled by Wagenius’ lawyer, he faces a maximum fine of $250,000 and prison time of up to 10 years for each of the two counts. Wageniuswas arrested and indictedlast year. In January, U. S. prosecutors confirmed that the charges brought against Wagenius were linked to the indictment of Connor Moucka and John Binns, two alleged hackers whom the U. S. government accused ofseveral data breaches against cloud computing services company Snowflake, which were among the worst hacks of 2024. You also can contact TechCrunch viaSecureDrop. Last month, U. S. attorney Tessa Gorman told the court that both the AT&T and Verizon breaches “arise from the same computer intrusion and extortion and include some of the same stolen victim information. ” She added that “these cases rely on overlapping evidentiary material and legal process and arguably present common questions of law and fact,” which effectively confirmed that Wagenius was involved in the Snowflake breaches. By hacking into Snowflake instances, hackers stole troves of data fromAT&T,LendingTree,Santander Bank,Ticketmaster, and at least 160 other companies. Topics Senior Reporter, Cybersecurity Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-02-19T15:57:55 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/19/us-army-soldier-pleads-guilty-to-att-and-verizon-hacks/
| 304 | 0.9 |
e38d983c21829cac1d43607894c88ee9
|
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X is getting closer to launching its payment service
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X (formerly Twitter) appears to be making progress on itsupcoming payments system, bringing it closer to Elon Musk’s vision of turning X into an “everything app. ” According to arecent findingby app researcher Nima Owji, the company is working on adding a “Payments” button to the navigation bar under the bookmarks tab. Owji, who made the discovery yesterday, told TechCrunch that he found references for new payment features, such as “transactions, balance, and transfer. ” BREAKING: X Payments is coming soon!pic. twitter. com/8JBIHjHOls When Musk initially acquired the social networking app formerly known as Twitter, he envisioned a platform where users could store money in their X accounts, send payments to other users, and potentially access high-yield money market accounts. The latest finding tells us the launch of a payment service is likely soon, which is in line with Musk’s previous goal of mid-2024, which he told Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood during an interview on X Spaces in December. Additionally, the company has been making progress on obtainingmoney transmitter licenses, allowing it to engage in money transfers in the U. S. Last week,X Payments(a wholly owned subsidiary of X) was granted a license in North Dakota, bringing the total number of states to 33. In July, it was approved in Alabama, California, and the District of Columbia. Others include Illinois, Louisiana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia, and more. With X facing challenges in monetizing through advertising, the payment service is the company’s attempt at an alternative source of revenue. On Tuesday, the company just filed anantitrust lawsuitagainst advertising groups over an advertiser boycott that resulted in significant financial losses for X. Topics Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-08-06T18:00:11 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/06/x-twitter-payment-service-update/
| 354 | 0.9 |
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|
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Netflix’s latest season of ‘Black Mirror’ comes with a mobile game
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Season 7 of “Black Mirror” premiered on Thursday,introducing a new mobile gameconnected to one of its episodes. The game, titled “Thronglets,” from Netflix’s ownNight School Studio, serves as a companion to the episode called “Plaything. ” Players interact with virtual yellow pets and strive to keep them alive. If players are successful in caring for their pets, the creatures will replicate, making it increasingly challenging to keep up with their needs. The creatures can also gather resources, develop technologies, explore new areas, and unlock tools and buildings to progress more quickly. While it may initially resemble innocent games like Tamagotchi, the beings in Thronglets are decidedly more twisted. They are sentient and communicate directly with the player. For example, when the player chops down trees using an axe, a creature might realize that bones are more effective than an axe and require less time. Consequently, the player must decide whether to sacrifice some creatures for their bones to speed up the process. Netflix’s gaming strategy to date has lacked focus, but the companymore recently said it would direct its energyon four types of games going forward. These include narrative games tied to Netflix shows, as well as gaming titles for kids, party games, and potential mainstream hits. The latter could include licensed tie-ins to shows and originals. The new “Black Mirror”-themed game is currently available for Netflix subscribers on bothiOSand Android devices. Although Netflix has occasionally launched games inspired by its IP, this is the first time we’ve seen a game that is directly tied to the narrative of a specific episode. Thronglets launches amid the company revamping its gaming strategy, having previously been scatterbrained about the titles it releases. Netflix has released a mix of indie games, popular existing titles, and games based on its IP. However, not all titles have been successful, leading to therecent cancellation of Netflix Stories, a narrative-driven game featuring shows like “Love Is Blind. ” Speaking at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), vice president of games technology and portfolio development Jeet Shroffstatedthat the company is now focusing on four main areas: narrative games, multiplayer party games, games for kids, and mainstream titles. Thronglets falls into the mainstream category, making it a clever decision for the streaming giant to create a game based on one of its most popular shows. Another example of a mainstream release is Squid Game: Unleashed, which has reportedly reached 20 million downloads, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Topics Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-04-10T17:03:58 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/10/netflixs-latest-season-of-black-mirror-comes-with-a-mobile-game/
| 481 | 0.9 |
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Government spyware is another reason to use an ad blocker
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Ad blockers might seem like an unlikely defense in the fight against spyware, but new reporting casts fresh light on how spyware makers are weaponizing online ads to allow governments to conduct surveillance. Spyware makers are reportedly capable of locating and stealthily infecting specific targets with spyware using banner ads. One of the startups that worked on an ad-based spyware infection system is Intellexa, a European company that develops the Predator spyware. Predator is able to access the full contents of a target’s phone in real time. According todocuments seen by Israeli news outlet Haaretz, Intellexa presented a proof-of-concept system in 2022 called Aladdin that enabled the planting of phone spyware through online ads. The documents included a demo of the Aladdin system with technical explanations on how the spyware infects its targets and examples of malicious ads: by “seemingly targeting graphic designers and activists with job offers, through which the spyware will be introduced to their device,” Haaretz reported. It’s unclear if Aladdin was fully developed or was sold to government customers. Another private Israeli company calledInsanet succeeded in developing an ad-based infection systemcapable of locating an individual within an advertising network, Haaretz revealed last year. Online ads help website owners, including this one, generate revenue. But online ad exchanges can be abused to push malicious code to a target’s device. Delivering malware through malicious ads, often referred to as malvertising, works by injecting malicious code into the ads displayed on websites on computer and phone browsers. Much of these attacks rely on some interaction with the victim, such as tapping a link or opening a malicious file. But the global ubiquity of online advertising vastly increases the reach that government customers have to target individuals — including their critics — with stealthy spyware. While no phone or computer can ever be completely unhackable, ad blockers can be effective in stopping malvertising and ad-based malware before it ever hits the browser. Ad blockers — as the name suggests — prevent ads from displaying in web browsers. Ad blockers don’t just hide the ads, but also block the underlying website from loading the ads to begin with. That’s also good for privacy, since it means ad exchanges cannot use tracking code to see which sites users visit as they browse the web. Ad-blocking software is available for phones, as well. Security experts have long advised using an ad blocker to prevent malvertising attacks. In 2022, the FBI saidin a public service announcementto use an ad blocker as an online safety precaution. “Everyone should block ads,”tweetedJohn Scott-Railton, a Citizen Lab senior researcher who has investigated government spyware, in response to the Haaretz report. “It’s a matter of safety. ” How to browse the web privately and securely
| 2024-04-13T13:05:32 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/13/government-spyware-use-ad-blocker/
| 456 | 0.9 |
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|
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NBCUniversal’s Peacock will let you watch 4 livestreams at once for 2024 Paris Olympics
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Today, during NBCUniversal’s annual technology conference, One24, the company revealed a slew of features coming to its streaming service Peacock ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics in July. The most notable feature to launch on Peacock is multiview, which allows subscribers to view up to four simultaneous matches at once. Next to picture-in-picture mode, many sports fans agree that multiview has been one of the greatest advancements to sports streaming tech in years, since it offers a more convenient way to follow multiple games simultaneously instead of constantly switching streams. The company also announced a new interactive “Live Actions” button to let fans choose which events they want to follow, a new way to search for specific athletes, and other features designed to help subscribers navigate over 5,000 hours of live coverage for the upcoming Summer Olympics. Some subscribers have complained about the way Peacock has broadcast the Olympics in the past, so it’s critical that the streamer provides an adequate viewing experience this year. For instance, during the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, Peacock made a questionable choice of revealing some of the winners in the Highlights rail. This will be the first time the service has done a full livestream of all Summer Olympic events, so we bet Peacock is feeling the pressure to get it right. Peacock reported 31 million subscribers as of the fourth quarter of 2023. Although YouTube TV and Apple both offer multiview features, Peacock told TechCrunch during a briefing on Tuesday that it’s the first stand-alone streaming service to offer web support for multiview. Google-owned YouTube TVrolled outa multiview feature last year that’s only available on smart TVs. In May 2023,Applebegan offering multiview on the Apple TV 4K for select sports content, such as Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball streams. Peacock also hopes to stand out among its competitors by offering two multiview options: “Discovery Multiview,” which gives fans a four-screen overview of the live events currently happening, and a more traditional multiview experience where viewers can choose which four matches they want to watch (this second option is only available for Olympic sports with multiple simultaneous streams, such as soccer, wrestling and track and field. ) Both options are customizable, meaning viewers can move around the screens and seamlessly switch between audio feeds. Since up to 40 Olympic events will be happening simultaneously, the unique offering helps viewers determine which four events are the most important. Plus, the feature will showcase tags and descriptions for each match to inform fans which ones have a first-time Olympian or defending champion or if there’s an elimination risk. “With up to 40 events happening at the same time, we want to avoid users having decision paralysis. … [Peacock Discovery Multiview is] the perfect option for fans who want to lean back and let Peacock be their guide to the best of the Olympic Games,” Peacock SVP of Product John Jelley told TechCrunch. Peacock’s multiview feature is available on the web, as well as on smart TVs, streaming devices, and tablets. However, the company explained to us that it isn’t rolling out multiview to mobile devices because the smaller screen size makes it difficult to navigate between events. “It ultimately comes down to the screen size, and we’ve found that multiview on mobile doesn’t deliver the best viewing experience,” Jelley said. “For users who want to watch on the go, multiview is available on tablets, and of course across all other platforms. ” YouTube TVrecently confirmedto 9to5Google that it’s launching support on iOS devices, but it’s likely the feature will be less advanced compared to the TV version. Peacock will begin testing multiview during select events this spring. In addition to multiview, the streaming service’s “Live Actions” will prompt fans to select a “Keep Watching” button if they want to continue viewing live coverage or switch to whip-around coverage. They can also add events to their “My Stuff” list to watch later. A new “Search by Star Athlete” feature allows viewers to narrow down their search to their favorite athletes. Previously, they could only search by sport, event, team and country. Peacock is also expanding its “Catch Up with Key Plays” feature to basketball, golf and soccer. The feature lets fans watch highlights of a game to quickly catch up without having to exit out of the main screen. It initiallylaunchedas a feature for Premier League games. The company noted that multiview and Live Actions will extend to other live sporting events after the Olympics. Topics Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-03-20T19:04:17 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/20/peacock-takes-on-youtube-tv-and-apple-with-its-new-multiview-feature/
| 822 | 1 |
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Again Bio’s bacteria eats exhaust and spits vinegar (for the climate)
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Again Biosays its modified bacteria currently eats about a ton of CO2per day. Spun out by researchers at the Technical University of Denmark, Again Bio sics its hungry microbes on flue gas from a wastewater treatment plant in Copenhagen. The startup is 2. 5 years old, and it quietly raised a $10 million seed round in February from ACME Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Atlantic Labs. The company also benefits from the nearly $47 million grant (€43 million) thatHorizon Europeawarded to a project using Again’s tech,PyroCO2. Again’s whole thing is piping industrial exhaust into a 65-foot-tall bioreactor, where its bacteria feeds on climate pollution and hydrogen, and excretes a useful byproduct: vinegar. The startup says it refines that byproduct into acetic acid and acetate — base chemicals for stuff like detergents, paints, pharmaceuticals and textiles. The point-of-source carbon capture service that Again offers is free, because its business is to sell the output. At the Copenhagen plant, Again says its fermentation vessel is currently operating in a sort of test mode, enabling the startup to give away samples of the resultant chemicals. However, co-founder and CEO Torbjørn Ølshøj Jensen told TechCrunch that Again has a contract with an undisclosed customer that is “large enough that our focus is really just on building plants and rolling them out. ” Jensen added that the tech is now “producing at yields that are commercially viable. ” The firm declined to say more about the deal, which is apparently driving its expansion in Europe and North America. “It’s really dirty things we work with,” Again co-founder and COO Max Kufner told TechCrunch, “but the cool thing about these bacteria is they just feed off it […] and continue to develop themselves to cope with potential inhibitors present in the off-gas. ” In addition to genetically modifying the bacteria, “a lot of the work we’re also doing is forced evolution,” Kufner clarified. Again aims to help decarbonize industrial facilities, but the startup relies on hydrogen made from fossil fuels to deliver energy to its specialized bacteria. According to Jensen, the startup’s chemical production can be “carbon neutral” using thisgray hydrogenbecause Again can capture the CO2from the hydrogenmanufacturingprocess. Regardless, the methane industry, which powers gray hydrogen production, is aserious problem for the climate. Jensen added that Again intends to usegreen hydrogen— made via electrolyzers and renewable energy — in the future. Steal this hot new summer look (it’s bacteria) Topics Senior Reporter, Climate Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-11-30T16:52:26 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/30/again-bios-bacteria-eats-exhaust-and-spits-vinegar-for-the-climate/
| 479 | 0.9 |
96511811f6bff534073a41cbb42c69b7
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Allo is a new app that aims to help people create positive habits with their finances through mindfulness
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Allo, a newfinancial appthat can be described as Headspace for personal finance, is aiming to help users meaningfully engage with their finances without becoming overwhelmed with numbers and spending. The idea behind Allo is to help users create a mindful money practice that allows them to approach their earnings, spending, saving, investing and giving with a sense of fulfillment. Founded in 2021, Allo helps users focus on gratitude and the importance of being aware of not only your numbers, but also your values and priorities when it comes to personal finance. Allo was founded by Will Choi and Paul Montoy-Wilson, who both previously founded Aviate, an intelligent homescreen startup that wasacquired by TechCrunch parent company Yahoo in 2014. With over 15 years of experience in software, the duo wanted to build a company that helps people create positive habits with their finances. Unlike budgeting apps that only focus on spending categories like bills, insurance and transportation, Allo includes categories like nature, family, giving, working out and healthy eating. Users can choose to have a daily, weekly or monthly check-in with the app in order to become aware of their finances. “There are plenty of apps out there that will help optimize your net worth or help you save an extra dollar per month and tell you you overspent on a coffee,” Montoy-Wilson told TechCrunch in an interview. “If there’s a budgeting app out there that works for you, that’s great. We’re not trying to take users from budgeting apps that they love. But, the reality is that those budgeting apps don’t work for most people. ” Montoy-Wilson says budgeting apps can make people feel guilty, which can lead them to avoiding their finances altogether. He believes simply being aware of your finances is an important practice, which is why Allo makes it easier to do so in bite-sized chunks. To get started with the app, users complete Allo’s introductory course and learn from experts on how to feel more peaceful, confident and grateful when it comes to money. The app will ask you to select a few values that you want to focus on, such as health, being generous, exercise and kids. You can then use the values to tag different transactions during your daily, weekly or monthly check-ins. Once you have set up a check-in, the app focuses on two things when encouraging you to be aware of your transactions. First, the app will encourage you to look at the things you appreciate. You can reflect on the transactions that made you happy, such as the money you spent on your family or well-being. Next, the app will encourage you to reflect on the transactions that you don’t feel great about and may want to follow up on. For instance, you may see a transaction for a subscription that you intended on canceling beforehand and make a note to do so. Or, you may come across a transaction where you spent a lot of money going out, and don’t see it as a good use of your earnings. By reflecting on this transaction, you could make a note about wanting to instead spend more money on something you actually care about, like your health. After you have finished looking through your transactions, the app will ask you to check in on your values and select which ones you want to focus on for your next batch of transactions. Say you want to focus on health, you can either decide to just pay more attention to your health-related transactions or actually spend more money in that area by doing things like eating healthier or working out more. “A core principle of Allo is being aware of your numbers, but also being aware of your emotions,” Montoy-Wilson said. “What we’re trying to do with Allo is make it easier through bite-sized chunks to engage with your finances and start changing your relationship with money. And then making it easier to keep that practice going over and over again. ” Once you have completed your check-in, the app won’t surface anything else until your next one. Allo sees this as an “inbox zero” mentality that will help users set down their phone and not have to focus on their finances until their next check-in. Over the past year, around 500 people across the United States have been testing Allo. The app is now available to download on theiOS App Storeand theGoogle Play Store. The app offers a free 14-day trial and costs $6. 99 per month. The company currently does not have any plans to expand beyond the United States. Allo is self-funded and Montoy-Wilson says the goal to keep it independent. The company currently does not have any plans to raise funding. Topics Consumer News Reporter Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor’s degree from University of Toronto and a master’s degree in journalism from Western University. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-08-01T17:00:45 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/01/allo-is-a-new-app-that-wants-to-help-people-create-positive-habits-with-their-finances-through-mindfulness/
| 907 | 1 |
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Why OpenAI is only letting some Sora users create videos of real people
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OpenAI launched its video-generating tool,Sora, on Monday. But the company’s opting not to release a key feature for most users pending further testing. The feature in question generates a video using an uploaded photo or footage of a real person as a reference. OpenAI says that it’ll give a “subset” of Sora users access to it, but that it won’t roll out the capability broadly until it has a chance to fine-tune its “approach to safety. ” “The ability to generate a video using an uploaded photo or video of a real person as the ‘seed’ is a vector of potential misuse that we are taking a particularly incremental approach toward to learn from early patterns of use,” OpenAI wrote in ablog post. “Early feedback from artists indicate that this is a powerful creative tool they value, but given the potential for abuse, we are not initially making it available to all users. ” OpenAIalsowon’t let users share generated videos containing clips or images of real people to Sora’s homepage discovery feed. “We obviously have a big target on our back as OpenAI, so we want to prevent illegal activity with Sora, but we also want to balance that with creative expression,” Rohan Sahai, Sora’s product lead, said during a livestream presentation earlier today. “We know that [this will be] an ongoing challenge — we might not get it perfect on day one. We’re starting a little conservative, and so if our moderation doesn’t quite get it right, just give us that feedback. ” Generative video is a powerful tool — and a controversial one, with deepfakes and misinformation being significant concerns. Accordingto data from ID verification service Sumsub, deepfake fraud worldwide increased by more than 10 times from 2022 to 2023. Among other steps OpenAI says it’s taking to prevent misuse, Sora has a filter to detect whether a generated video depicts someone under the age of 18. If it does, OpenAI applies a “stricter threshold” for moderation related to sexual, violent, or self-harm content, the company claims. All Sora-generated videos contain metadata to show their provenance — specifically metadata that abides by theC2PA technical standard. The metadata can be removed, granted. But OpenAI’s pitching it as a way for platforms that support C2PA to quickly detect whether a video originated from Sora. In a bid to fend off copyright complaints, OpenAI also says that it’s using “prompt re-writing” to prevent Sora from generating videos in the style of a living creator. “We have added prompt re-writes that are designed to trigger when a user attempts to generate a video in the style of a living artist,” the company wrote. “We opted to take a conservative approach with this version of Sora as we learn more about how Sora is used by the creative community … There is a very long tradition in creativity of building off of other artists’ styles, but we appreciate that some creators may have concerns. ” A number ofartistshavesuedAI companies, including OpenAI, over allegedly training on their works without permission to create AI tools that regurgitate content in their unique styles. The companies, for their parts, have claimed thatfair use doctrineprotects them from copyright infringement claims, and that AI models don’t, in fact, regurgitate. On training, OpenAI will only say that Sora was developed using a mix of “diverse datasets,” including publicly available data, proprietary data accessed through its partnerships with data vendors, and custom sets developed in-house. Early this year, ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati didn’t outright deny that Sora was trained on YouTube clips, in seemingviolationof the Google-owned streaming platform’s usage policy. According to video bloggerMarques Brownlee, who got an early preview of Sora, the system can create multiple variations of video clips from a text prompt or image and edit existing videos via a Re-mix tool. A Storyboard interface lets users create sequences of videos; a Blend tool takes two videos and creates a new one that preserves elements of both; and Loop and Re-cut options allow creators to further tweak and edit their videos and scenes. Subscribers to OpenAI’sChatGPT Proand Plus plans get access to Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, today — but only if they live incertain countries. OpenAI’s end of the year event is here. The company is hosting “12 Days of OpenAI,” a series of daily…
| 2024-12-09T19:37:58 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/09/openai-is-only-letting-some-sora-users-create-videos-of-real-people/
| 717 | 1 |
388700e4dc0ce9f588fe2d205d7656a8
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‘Only human creators’ can win a Grammy, but AI isn’t totally forbidden
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We are only scratching the surface of how artificial intelligence might be used in art, andmusicians are already experimenting with the technology. But if their AI-assisted composition is to be eligible for a Grammy, they’ll need to make sure that their contribution is “meaningful,” the rules now state. An update tothe famous awards’ eligibility criteriastates that “[o]nly human creators are eligible to be submitted for consideration,” and that “[a] work that contains no human authorship is not eligible in any Categories. ” AI is not a kiss of death, though. In a wise and shrewdly open-ended exception to this prohibition, the Grammy authorities allow for any work in which “the human authorship component of the work submitted must be meaningful and more than de minimis. ” Furthermore, the authorship must pertain to the category a song is submitted for (e. g. , for “songwriting” the AI cannot have written the song). What does this all mean? Say you used an AI-powered tool to generate a constantly shifting loop of some instruments you played. You layer this in with the drums, recorded instruments, and record the vocals you wrote on top. No problem here! The AI is basically just a tool or effect, like any pedal or filter. But what if you had the AI generate the lyrics from a prompt, then sing them in the style ofDavid Crosby? Then you haveRiffusionput together some beats and instrumentation. Last, layer in some unique generated tones you shifted from Brian Eno’sReflection. Now, regardless of the quality of the result (and at a guess. not great), no one would say that you had no creative hand in the resulting track. But were you the songwriter, the vocalist, the composer, or the instrumentalist? Not as those terms are commonly understood or credited. And certainly not according to the folks setting the rules over at the Grammys. This policy of excluding pure AI works but allowing it to be used as a tool is probably the best way forward for awards like this. We’ve seen already howmalicious actors can flood publisherswith AI-generated writing, hoping to snatch a paid spot or even just notoriety. Deepfakes and AI-generated video are already starting to creep onto streaming platforms. Music is likewise vulnerable to disruption by those who would abuse AI technology instead of use it creatively. Generative music, it must be said, is more than simply valid — it’s practically a genre of its own now. And the creation of some of its most iconic works could be described as simplistic (even by their own creators). But it seems unlikely that the Grammys would reject Eno’s Music For Airports if it was submitted today, since it seems clear that there is “meaningful” human authorship involved. But they wouldn’t allow three minutes of randomly selectedGenerative. fmorKrillertracks. The policy is, as I said, wisely open-ended, allowing for the organization to exercise its judgment in what they define as “lacking significance or importance; so minor as to merit disregard. ” No doubt this definition will be in flux in years to come as major artists embrace, reject, or grudgingly include AI-powered tools in their creative processes. From DrakeGPT to Infinite Grimes, AI-generated music strikes a chord Topics Writer & Photographer Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. His personal website is coldewey. cc. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-06-27T22:25:57 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/27/only-human-creators-can-win-a-grammy-but-ai-isnt-totally-forbidden/
| 623 | 1 |
54441e2dd1ec358fbdf8c186af0a18c0
|
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Ilya Sutskever isn’t done working on AI safety
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Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign uphere. This week,Ilya Sutskeverlaunched a new AI company,Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), just one month after formally leaving OpenAI. Sutskever, alongside Jan Leike, was integral to OpenAI’s efforts to improve AI safety with the rise of “superintelligent” AI systems. Yet both Sutskever and Leike left the company after a dramatic falling-out with leadership over how to approach AI safety. In EV news, Fisker filed forChapter 11 bankruptcyprotection, capping off months of problems with its Ocean SUV that included recalls and dozens of lemon law lawsuits. This is the second vehicle company Henrik Fisker named after himself that has wound up in bankruptcy. His first effort started in 2007 and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2013. Change Healthcare this week confirmed that aFebruary ransomware attackresulted in the theft of medical records affecting a “substantial proportion of people in America. ” The company processes patient insurance and billing for thousands of hospitals, pharmacies and medical practices and has access to massive amounts of health information on about a third of all Americans. The Department of Justice vs. Adobe:The U. S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Adobe alleging that the company hides termination fees and makes it difficult to cancel subscriptions. Read more OpenAI acquires Rockset:OpenAI announced that it has acquired Rockset, which builds tools to drive real-time search and data analytics, as the company continues to invest in its enterprise sales and tech orgs. Read more Buttons are back:Clicks released a nostalgic, BlackBerry-esque phone case that adds a keyboard with physical buttons to the bottom of your iPhone. We got to try one for ourselves. Read more Where humans and AI coexist:Butterflies is a social network where humans and AI interact with each other through posts, comments and DMs in an effort to have more creative relationships with AI. Read more Apple kills Pay Later:After launching in late March 2023, Apple’s Pay Later feature is no more. Instead, Apple Pay users will be able to access loans through a partnership with the third-party app Affirm. Read more Beware, Outlook users:A researcher has found a bug that allows anyone to impersonate Microsoft corporate email accounts, making phishing attempts look credible and more likely to trick their targets. Read more Perplexity takes on Google:The AI-powered search startup now displays results for factual queries such as weather and time at a place, currency conversion, and answers to simple math queries directly through cards. Read more Runway unveils Gen-3:The company’s latest AI model for generating videos delivers a “major” improvement in speed — as well as more control over the structure, style and motion of the generated videos. Read more What should AI look like?:From black holes to colorful blobs, representing AI in user interfaces can be a challenge. While approaches differ to branding purportedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-doing intelligence, Devin Coldewey explores how companies have coalesced around the idea that the avatar of AI should be non-threatening, abstract, but relatively simple and non-anthropomorphic. Read more Why Fisker failed:As Fisker files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, many are left wondering what’s next for the ill-fated EV startup. Sean O’Kane argues that whatever happens to Fisker or its assets, it won’t change the fundamental problem: that it wasn’t ready to grapple with bringing a flawed car to market. Read more Pushing ChatGPT’s cultural limits:The current ChatGPT offers answers that are too generalized for specific questions that cater to certain communities, as its training appears Eurocentric and Western in its bias. With most AI models not built with people of color in mind, Dominic-Madori Davis and Tage Kene-Okafor report on the Black-owned chatbots and ChatGPT versions that cater specifically to Black and brown communities — and help founders capitalize on OpenAI’s cultural slip. Read more Topics Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-06-22T20:15:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/22/ilya-sutskever-isnt-done-working-on-ai-safety/
| 712 | 1 |
d259a60e3c3762847e73167ced732484
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Queer social app Lex acquired by the former Musical.ly CEO’s conglomerate
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Lex, a social and dating app for the LGBTQ+ community, has been acquired by9count, a mobile app conglomerate focusing on social networks. Lexstarted as an Instagram page in 2017, which was inspired byvintage lesbian personal ads. The page became so popular that founder Kell Rakowski spun it into an app in 2019. In less than a year, the app raised a$1. 5 millionseed round, and seasoned entrepreneurJennifer Lewisjoined as a co-founder and CEO. “Mainstream social platforms really don’t serve this audience,” Lewis told TechCrunch. According to GLAAD,LGBTQ+ people are twice as likely to experience harassment online, which makes intentional online spaces for queer people more necessary. “What I’m passionate about at Lex is building a social platform where users can meet people like them, but also have a safe space where they can fully express their identity. ” Lex’s users have high standards for the app, since it serves a community that has been historicallyoverlookedandmistreatedby mainstream social platforms. Last year, the app rebranded to emphasize general socialization over dating and hookups, which made some users worried that Lex was becoming too sanitized. As one usertold TechCrunchat the time, “There’s no need to encourage ‘social’ use unless you’re trying to discourse other uses (i. e. , sex). ” As Lex joins 9count, users may be concerned about further change to the app. But Lewis says this move will enable Lex to ship new features more quickly and increase its content moderation capacity. “We’re able to ship new features probably like three times the rate of before the acquisition,” she said. 9count is led by Alex Hofmann, who formerly served as CEO of Musical. ly, the app that was acquired by ByteDance and became TikTok. The conglomerate’s most popular app isWink, another dating and friendship app, but it also operatesother appslike Summer, a dating app. Given his experience with ByteDance, which owns several apps under one corporate umbrella, Hofmann wants 9count to echo that strategy. “We had our first conversation and immediately realized we really share the same vision,” Hofmann said. “The vision is essentially that we believe the future of social media is not in, you know, building this one big product, chasing billions of users with ads, and we believe the future is vertical social networks that empower communities. ” According to Lex, the app has been downloaded over a million times, which is low compared to more-mainstream dating apps — however, Lex is targeting a smaller audience, and users send millions of messages per month. Hofmann and Lewis declined to disclose the terms of the deal. Topics Senior Writer Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B. A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos. Send tips through Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to @amanda. 100. For anything else, email amanda@techcrunch. com. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-09-30T12:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/30/queer-social-app-lex-acquired-by-the-former-musical-ly-ceos-conglomerate/
| 607 | 1 |
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LinkedIn plans to add gaming to its platform
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LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social platform, has made a name for itself primarily as a platform for people looking to network and pick up knowledge for professional purposes, and for recruitment — a business that now has more 1 billion users. Now, to boost the time people are spending on the platform, the company is breaking into a totally new area: gaming. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that LinkedIn is working on a new games experience. It will be doing so by tapping into the same wave of puzzle-mania that helped simple games like Wordle find viral success and millions of players. Three early efforts are games called “Queens”, “Inference” and “Crossclimb. ” App researchers have started to find code that points to the work LinkedIn is doing. One of them, Nima Owji, said that one idea LinkedIn appears to be experimenting with involves player scores being organised by places of work, with companies getting “ranked” by those scores. BREAKING:#LinkedInis working on IN-APP GAMES! There are going to be a few different games and companies will be ranked in the games based on the scores of their employees! Pretty cool and fun, in my opinion!pic. twitter. com/hLITqc8aqw — Nima Owji (@nima_owji)March 16, 2024 A spokesperson for LinkedIn has confirmed that it is working on gaming, but said there is as yet no launch date. “We’re playing with adding puzzle-based games within the LinkedIn experience to unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations,” the spokesperson said in a message to TechCrunch. “Stay tuned for more!” The spokesperson added that the images shared by the researcher on X are not the latest versions. (Update: some updated pictures have now been supplied, which we’re embedding below. ) LinkedIn’s owner Microsoft is a gaming behemoth. Its games business — which includes Xbox, Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax —brought in $7. 1 billion in revenues last quarter, passing Windows revenues for the first time. The LinkedIn spokesperson declined to say how and if Microsoft is involved in the gaming project at LinkedIn. Games are regularly among the most popular apps for mobile phones and PCs — both in terms of revenues and engagement — and puzzle-based casual games has been one of the most popular categories in the space among mobile users. Non-gaming platforms have long tapped into these facts to boost their own traffic — arguably a trend that preceded the internet, if you think about the popularity of crosswords and other puzzles in newspapers and magazines. The New York Times, whichacquired the viral hit Wordle in 2022, said at the end of last year that that millions of people continue to play the game, which is now part of a bigger platform of online puzzles and games developed by the newspaper. Others that have doubled down on gaming have seen mixed results. Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, has been a major driver of social gaming over the years. But in 2022 itshut down its standalone gaming appamid a decline in usage: it’s puttingsignificantly more focusthese days on mixed reality experiences and its Meta Quest business. Over the years, LinkedIn has tried out a number of different new features over the years to boost how and how much people use its platform, with the strategy possibly best described as: “how can we take the most popular tools people are using right now and make them relevant to LinkedIn’s audience and focus on the world of work?” Those have ranged from efforts in online education and professional development, through to apublishingand news operation, bringing in morevideo toolsandcourting creators and influencers
| 2024-03-16T17:12:13 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/16/linkedin-wants-to-add-gaming-to-its-platform/
| 601 | 1 |
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Dutch startup Monumental is using robots to lay bricks
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Few categories are as ripe for automation-fueled disruption as construction. The industry is valued at around $2 trillion a year, in the U. S. alone. Much of that work is strenuous, repetitive and sometimes dangerous — precisely the sorts of problems industrial robotics are built to solve. The other thing construction brings is a wide range of different challenges, meaning that more startups can operate in the space without being in direct competition. Bricklaying robots aren’t exactly an untapped concept. At the moment, Hadrian X is probably the best known player in the space. The U. S. firm specializes in building structures out of large concrete masonry blocks. Amsterdam-basedMonumental, meanwhile, specializes in the more familiar red clay variety. The startup was founded in 2021 by the pair behind data visualization firm Silk (now a Palantir joint). Monumental has already been doing limited pilots in its native Netherlands, including the 15-meter exterior of an office building. Partnerships with 25 contractors have followed, including low-income housing. I can’t speak much to the efficacy of the system beyond what I’ve seen in some video demos, but can say that the company appears to be tackling the problem from a variety of fronts, beginning with an autonomous cart designed to shoulder heavy payloads. From there, another robot spreads liquid mortar and places bricks. “At Monumental, we’re working to help the industry meet these challenges,” says co-founder and CEO Salar al Khafaji. “Our agile, intelligent, and adaptable robots and software blend human expertise with robotic efficiency in a way that the industry has never seen before. ” To celebrate its coming-out party, Monumental is also announcing a sizable $25 million round, led by Plural and Hummingbird, with participation from Northzone, Foundamental and NP-Hard Ventures. Funding will go toward hiring, scaling manufacturing and diversifying the manner of bricks/blocks its robots are capable of handling
| 2024-02-17T22:09:47 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/17/dutch-startup-monumental-is-using-robots-to-lay-bricks/
| 308 | 0.9 |
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Revolut receives long-awaited UK banking license
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Revoluthas been granted a banking license from the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) in the U. K. This is a significant milestone for the London-based fintech company, particularly since it has been trying to secure this licensesince 2021. Revolut has 45 million customers around the world, but its home market remains its most important one, with 9 million clients. The fintech also offers more products and services in the U. K. than in many other markets. The company already has a banking license in the European Union. The Bank of Lithuania helped it get a license in 2018 and the company has been taking advantage of European passporting rules to operate in other European countries. But the story has so far been different in the U. K. Not having a banking license in its home country has hindered the company’s capabilities when it comes to offering credit products (personal loans, credit cards, etc. ) there and controlling a bigger chunk of its infrastructure. “We are incredibly proud to reach this important milestone in the journey of the company and we will ensure we deliver on making Revolut the bank of choice for U. K. customers,” Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, said in a statement. Things aren’t going to change overnight for Revolut’s customers. The company says that the PRA has granted an authorization with restrictions, and Revolut is entering the so-called“mobilisation” stage. Other challenger banks, like Monzo and Starline, have been through the same process in the past. According to theBank of England, this mobilization phase can last a few months but shouldn’t take longer than 12 months. The most important restriction during that stage is that the bank cannot hold more than £50,000 in total customer deposits. The PRA has granted a license to a subsidiary of Revolut Group Holdings Ltd, so the company isn’t going to transfer its U. K. -based customers to this new subsidiary just yet. Instead, the company will keep operating as an e-money institution regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. In its latestannual report, Revolut reported $2. 2 billion in revenue in 2023 (£1. 8 billion). More importantly, the company managed to generate $545 million in pre-tax profit (£438 million). This was the first time in the last three years that the company published its audited annual results before the deadline. In other words, Revolut is growing up and becoming a more transparent company on the financial front. That must have contributed to today’s decision from the Prudential Regulation Authority. Topics Senior Reporter Why Cluely’s Roy Lee isn’t sweating cheating detectors Microsoft shares $500M in AI savings internally days after cutting 9,000 jobs California lawmaker behind SB 1047 reignites push for mandated AI safety reports Steve Davis left DOGE in May, but officials say he’s still running the show Neobank Revolut seeks $65B valuation, a year after its $45B deal X’s ad business improved under departing CEO Linda Yaccarino, but it’s still tough times ahead OpenAI is reportedly releasing an AI browser in the coming weeks
| 2024-07-25T10:08:44 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/25/revolut-receives-much-awaited-uk-banking-license/
| 502 | 1 |
4c2a896db9271311ab74ef957f438052
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Discord kills Gas, the anonymous compliments app it bought nine months ago
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Discord is shutting down Gas, the anonymous compliments-based social media app itacquired back in Januaryfor an undisclosed sum. The app will officially shut down on November 7, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The news of the shut down was first reported byThe Information. “We can confirm that the Gas app will be shutting down on November 7,” a Discord spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We acquired Gas with the goal of supporting our efforts to grow across new and core audiences, and make Discord the best place to talk, hang out and have fun with friends online. The team will continue to play a vital role in our work to make it easier for users to connect with their friends on Discord. ” According to an internal memo seen by The Information, the closure doesn’t come as a surprise, as Discord CEO Jason Citron told employees that the main reason the company bought Gas was to acquire its engineering talent. Citron said in the memo that the company planned to keep Gas running until growth had slowed down. Launched in August 2022, Gas became popular among teens because of its goal to offer a positive social media network. The appreached 1 million daily active userswithin two months. During the height of its popularity, in October and November 2022, Gas dethroned TikTok and other popular social apps in the Apple App Store rankings. Since its launch, global all-time downloads for Gas reached 7 million, according to mobile analytics firm data. ai. Gas saw the highest number of downloads in November 2022, when the app was downloaded 3. 1 million times. Gas’ growth began to stall in the months following. Last month, the app was downloaded only 2,900 times. Gas ranks No. 16 In terms of the top iOS social media apps by U. S. downloads since August 29, 2022. It’s worth noting that the app was only available on iOS and the United States and Canada. The app was targeted toward high schoolers and would get users to answer polls about their classmates. The questions in the polls were designed to boost users’ confidence as opposed to damaging it. The teen who was chosen would then receive an anonymous message with their compliment. The premise was a hit likely because unlike traditional social media, Gas was designed to have a positive effect on users. Gas was founded by Nikita Bier, who is also the founder of TBH, another anonymous social app geared toward high schoolers where people anonymously answered nice questions about others. Biersold TBH to Facebookin 2017. Facebook ended upshutting downthe app in 2018, citing low usage. It appears that Bier may be gearing up to launch another app. Last week, Biertweeted: “Next week there will be a new King of the App Store. ” It’s unknown what the app could be, but given Bier’s past two forays, it may be another anonymous social app. Discord is growing its developer monetization efforts Topics Consumer News Reporter Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor’s degree from University of Toronto and a master’s degree in journalism from Western University. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-10-19T16:46:07 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/19/discord-kills-gas-anonymous-compliments-app-bought-nine-months-ago/
| 611 | 1 |
7206be6d42da28452d08420f67121751
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YouTuber Emma Chamberlain adds to coffee empire with ready-to-drink line
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Many people can’t start their day without a hot cup o’ Joe, or since it’s June now, perhaps a tall cold brew. Coffee drinkers also have refined tastes and like a brand they can relate to. EnterChamberlain Coffee, a company started in 2019 by YouTuberEmma Chamberlain, who has over 12 million subscribers and creates videos about her life and travels. Chamberlain sells high-quality organic coffee roasted in California and that is sustainably sourced via Food4Farmers, supporting coffee-farming communities in Latin America. It is among a number of startups trying to bring something different to coffee consumers. For example,FellowandBlank Streetare putting their spin on it, as arelots of celebrity coffee brands. Today, Chamberlain Coffee announced $7 million in additional funding and an expanded national retail presence in Sprouts and Walmart. This follows the launch last month of its ready-to-drink line of cold brew lattes. Company CEO Christopher Gallant explained that Emma Chamberlain has been a coffee lover for a long time, and her videos often show her drinking it and talking about it. Wanting to create her own brand, she found a roaster and released a single-serve coffee. “It took off like crazy, so she brought in folks that had worked in the beverage and branding spaces to help build it from that single-serve product into a full suite of products that was relaunched in 2020,” Gallant told TechCrunch. How Fellow bootstrapped for 8 years to build a coffee empire Coffee products include cold brew singles, instant sticks, coffee pods, ground and whole bean options in fun names like “Fancy Mouse Espresso,” “Social Dog,” “Sweet Otter Cake Batter” and “Breezy Butterfly. ” There is also matcha, chai and other teas. “We’re really focused on making sure we make great products that can be used for cold brew, whether it’s already a drink, latte or whether that’s single-serve,” Gallant said. “And we have Emma, one of the most powerful voices of Gen Z. It’s leveraging her creative genius to help us create a brand that speaks to her cohort of consumers. If you walk down the coffee aisle and take a look, it’s a very ‘brown’ aisle. We’ve come in with bright colors, fun characters and just a much different approach to the brand than what’s out there already. ” Previously, much of Chamberlain Coffee’s business has been direct-to-consumer through the company’s website and Amazon; however, with the move to retail, Gallant said the company can reach even more customers while out for their ritual shopping trip. Sprouts has carried Chamberlain Coffee’s dry goods line for the past year and it will now be in 4,000 Walmart stores, Gallant said. It is also launching in “a bunch more retailers this year” that are unannounced at this point. Meanwhile, both of the new moves are buoyed by that new round of $7 million in venture capital that closed in April. This follows a $7 million Series A in August 2022. The company has now raised close to $20 million in total. Blazar Capital and United Talent Agency joined Emma Chamberlain in the investment round that also included existing investors Volition Capital, Electric Feel Ventures and Noah Bremen, founder of PLTFRM. Creating a ready-to-drink line wasn’t easy. It was a big challenge that required building both a new supply chain and downstream distribution team, Gallant said. “Our team was amazing and did it in eight months when the process normally takes at least a year and a half,” he said. Gallant declined to go into specifics about the number of customers Chamberlain Coffee served, but did say that over the past year, its subscription business has become a significant portion of online revenue now. The company also plans to double revenue this year. The new investment plays into that strategy. Gallant intends to deploy the funds into innovation of new products, marketing and hiring to add supply chain, marketing and sales to support the new lines of business. “We want to continue to come up with new exciting products that consumers love and go deeper into retail,” Gallant said. “We’re really focused on the national and conventional grocery spaces. From there, we are thinking about the next step for us, like drugstores or non-traditional retail. We are also considering expanding geographically. We’ve got a nice foothold in Europe. ” Blank Street cracked the code on making coffee shops attractive to VC Topics Senior Reporter Christine Hall wrote about enterprise/B2B, e-commerce, and foodtech for TechCrunch, and venture capital rounds for Crunchbase News. Based in Houston, Christine previously reported for the Houston Business Journal, the Texas Medical Center’s Pulse magazine, and Community Impact Newspaper. She has an undergraduate journalism degree from Murray State University and a graduate degree from The Ohio State University. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-06-01T13:30:27 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/youtube-emma-chamberlain-coffee-commerce/
| 858 | 1 |
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The lawmaker behind California’s vetoed AI bill, SB 1047, has harsh words for Silicon Valley
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The lawmaker behind California’s recently vetoed AI bill, SB 1047, is going down swinging. For months, Silicon Valley debated whetherSB 1047would have a chilling effect on California’s AI boom or would protect against catastrophic harms from advanced AI systems. The answer never became clear, since California governor Gavin Newsomdecided it was the wrong approach, vetoing the bill on Sunday before it became law. Now California state senator Scott Wiener tells TechCrunch that some Silicon Valley institutions spread an unprecedented level of “misinformation” about SB 1047 in the months leading up to the veto. (Folks outside of Silicon Valleyalso criticized SB 1047, including Nancy Pelosi and the U. S. Department of Commerce. ) “I’ve had tough bills before, and bills where there have been misinformation. I’ve never had a bill with this level of misinformation,” Wiener told TechCrunch. “There was a whole propaganda campaign. ” Wiener specifically criticizedY Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz executives for helping spreada narrative that SB 1047 would send startup founders to jail. This is not technically false; theoretically, a developer who lied on AI safety reports that SB 1047 would have required could have gone to jail for committing perjury. But that would only have happened if a developer had lied. Indeed, some in the tech industry helped spread that idea. In June, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tansigned a letterto California lawmakers claiming that “AI software developers could go to jail” under SB 1047. Earlier that same month, Andreessen Horowitz partner Anjney Midha said ina podcastthat “no rational startup founder or academic researcher is going to risk jail time or financial ruin just to advance the state of the art in AI. ” “A16Z was, I think, at the heart of a lot of the opposition to the bill,” Wiener said. Y Combinator’s head of public policy, Luther Lowe, tells TechCrunch that the debate around SB 1047 is not as clear cut as Wiener makes it out to be. “The semantic debates alone demonstrate the challenges with bills like SB 1047 being vague and open-ended,” said Lowe in an email. Andreessen Horowitz pointed TechCrunch toward a letter its chief legal officer wrote months earlier when Wiener made similar claims, stating that SB 1047 “is a deeply troubling and fundamental departure from the way software development has been regulated in this country. ” Another claim Wiener called out as misinformation was that SB 1047 would push AI startups out of California. Wiener claims startups across the country would have been affected equally by SB 1047, as long as they did business in California. OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon wrote aletter to Newsomin August stating that SB 1047 would push California’s entrepreneurs out of the state. The Chamber of Progress — a Big Tech trade group representing Meta, Apple, and Google — also has a similarclaim on its website. Wiener also took a jab at Fei-Fei Li, who many call the godmother of AI, for writing alleged inaccuracies about SB 1047 in an Augustopinion piece for Fortune magazine. At the time, Li wrote that open source programs that developers download and build with could be shut down by the original AI model provider under SB 1047. A large part of the debate around SB 1047 was how it would impact the open source ecosystem. “It was crystal clear in the bill that you’re only required to shut down a model if it is in your possession,” Wiener said. “And yet, Fei-Fei Li put that inaccurate statement in her piece. She’s very well respected, so it was unfortunate. ” Li did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Lastly, SB 1047’s author took issue with Newsom’s letter explaining why he vetoed the bill, saying the governor “did not do justice in describing the bill. ” Newsom certainly did give an unexpected reason for his veto, saying SB 1047 should have targeted more AI models. “By focusing only on the most expensive and large-scale models, SB 1047 establishes a regulatory framework that could give the public a false sense of security about controlling this fast-moving technology,” said Newsomin the letter. “Smaller, specialized models may emerge as equally or even more dangerous than the models targeted by SB 1047 — at the potential expense of curtailing the very innovation that fuels advancement in favor of the public good. ” Many, including Newsom, have criticized SB 1047 in the past for being overly burdensome, so it was somewhat surprising to see the governor suggest that the bill should have a more flexible framework that would cover more AI models. Regardless of its failure to become law this time around, Wiener says SB 1047 supercharged the conversation around AI safety in California. On Sunday, Newsom announced a new task force with Li and other researchers to develop guardrails for responsible AI development. The state alsopassed 18 other laws regulating AIin September. Wiener is not ruling out the possibility that he’ll return next year with a revamped version of SB 1047. “It’s too soon to say exactly what we’re going to do,” Wiener said. “We’re absolutely committed to promoting AI safety. ” Topics Senior AI Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-10-02T13:34:36 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/02/the-lawmaker-behind-californias-vetoed-ai-bill-sb-1047-has-harsh-words-for-silicon-valley/
| 924 | 1 |
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Las Vegas sheriff tells a16z partners what’s next on his wish list: AI for bodycams
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Las Vegas police have received funding for tech like drones, license plate readers, and more from Andreessen Horowitz partnerBen Horowitz. Next on its wish list? Artificial intelligence to go through police footage. The city’s Sheriff Kevin McMahill said ona podcast with Horowitz and partner Marc Andreessenthat he wants to use AI to blur faces or obscure sensitive information from body camera footage. McMahill also said he wants to use AI to help officers sift through the reams of information they receive when they subpoena cell phone tower data during investigations. “I really believe that some of this AI here in the new future can have tremendous impact on what has caused significant challenge for me as the sheriff,” McMahill said. The giant Silicon Valley venture firm released the episode on Monday, just a few weeks afterTechCrunch revealedthat Horowitz has been financing the Vegas police department’s purchasing of a number of a16z portfolio companies’ products. Emails TechCrunch received in a public records request also showed Horowitz has helped make decisions about the rollout of some of these technologies. The relationship startled a number of experts and advocates who follow police accountability and surveillance technology that TechCrunch spoke to. But Horowitz and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) only intend to continue — and deepen — that relationship, according to the podcast episode. “We’re not going to stop” funding purchases, Horowitz said. “There’s no doubt about it there’ll be a slower implementation of these types of programs across the United States, they’re just not going to be able to get to them as rapidly as we are,” McMahill said. “But we’re going to prove it’s going to work, and I think more and more municipalities will find the people that are like you. ” The episode only lightly touched on how LVMPD is using some of the technologies, like drones from Skydio and license plate-reading cameras from Flock Safety, both a16z portfolio companies. Horowitz has had conversations with LVMPD about at least four others, TechCrunch revealed earlier this month. The LVMPD did not respond to a request for comment. Andreessen was interested in what more the Silicon Valley firm’s companies can do for the department. “Hopefully our companies will be able to come up with the ideas for technology, but what’s on your wish list for kind of pressing issues, where you’re like: ‘Wow, I wish we could do X, and we haven’t figured out how to do it yet,’” he asked McMahill. McMahill responded by emphasizing how much AI could help the department. He said he has a unit of 12 people to deal with public records requests, and that they spend too much time watching body camera footage to make sure that faces are blurred throughout. “That technology can’t be all that difficult to develop to get us to a place where I don’t have to have real cops doing tedious work to remove faces, addresses, names, things that were said inside of that” video, he said. There are already other efforts underway to integrate AI into police work. One startup, Abel, raised $5 million last month to develop AI that sifts through bodycam footage to write a police report. Police tech juggernaut Axon has also releaseda series of AI tools,one of which identifies objects in body cam footage to expedite the redaction process. McMahill also explained that, during investigations, LVMPD detectives will sometimes subpoena cell phone tower records in order to understand where a suspect might have been at the time of a particular crime. But the police often get back voluminous records that are hard to parse. “If we could get to the place where that technology is able to take that, sometimes literally, millions of cell phone numbers that were there, and sort of go through it and give us a report that says: ‘Hey, these seven telephone numbers, at the date and time that you’re looking for, were in all of these specific locations,’ it helps us develop leads,” he said. In response, Horowitz said applying AI to cell phone tower data would be a “very easy solve for us,” and his partner Andreessen said developing tech to scrub faces from bodycam footage “should be very easy. ” TechCrunch has an AI-focused newsletter!Sign up hereto get it in your inbox every Wednesday. Topics Sr. Reporter, Transportation Senior Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-11-19T18:35:28 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/19/las-vegas-sheriff-tells-a16z-partners-whats-next-on-his-wish-list-ai-for-bodycams/
| 794 | 1 |
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Fantuan acquires Chowbus’ food delivery business
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Fantuan, a Vancouver, Canada–based Asian food delivery company, announced it acquiredChowbus’ delivery business line. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Chicago-based Chowbus also started out as a delivery service in 2016, focused on providing a way for mom-and-pop Asian restaurants to expand their customer base. Co-founders Suyu Zhang and Linxin Wen grew the company to over 20 cities by 2020 andraised over $108 millionin venture capital funding, including a$33 million round in 2020. Then in 2022, Chowbus pivoted to providing restaurant management software and point-of-sale services, Yaofei Feng, Fantuan co-founder, told TechCrunch. A year later, it had over 1,000 restaurant customers. “We are in a similar industry, but each has a particular demographic coverage,” Feng said. “Now we cover more in Canada and they are more in the middle and eastern sides of the United States. We wanted to get better penetration and acquire more customers so we sat down and had a conversation. ” With the acquisition comes a partnership between the two companies that will meld each of their strengths with local Asian restaurants: Fantuan’s rapid food delivery process with Chowbus’ restaurant management software. “With the rapid growth of the restaurant SaaS business line, we want to focus and develop better products and services for merchants,” said Linxin Wen, founder and CEO of Chowbus, in a statement. “We are confident that our partnership with Fantuan will provide improved and expanded services for merchants across food delivery, restaurant SaaS systems and beyond. ” Meanwhile, Fantuan was founded in 2014 by Randy Wu and operates in over 60 cities across Canada, the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. In addition to restaurant delivery, the company also works in the fresh grocery delivery and dine-in service segments. In December 2023,Fantuan raised $40 million in Series C capital. Vancouver’s Fantuan raises $40M to deliver real Asian food at your doorstep About 20 employees from Chowbus will join Fantuan, which will also manage Chowbus’ fleet of independently contracted delivery drivers, Feng said. After consolidating Chowbus’ delivery business, Fantuan plans to solidify its Asia-focused food delivery services across cities in the U. S. where it has just 10% penetration of the U. S. market, Feng said. After the acquisition, the U. S. market share for Fantuan will be over 60%. The two companies also want to help restaurants gain additional business and convenience through order automation and more revenue. The food delivery industry is undergoing an interesting time. JOKR is making it work, whileGetir pulled out of some marketsover the summer. More recently, we sawUber announce it would close Drizlyafter acquiring the alcohol e-commerce business three years ago, andJumiasaid it was discontinuing its food delivery service due to “deep-pocketed aggressive rivals,” according to CEO Francis Dufay. Meanwhile, antitrust regulators in the European Union had similar cartel suspicions andraidedtwo online food delivery companies in November. And Indian food delivery companySwiggy went on a buying spree. The on-demand delivery trilemma Topics Senior Reporter Christine Hall wrote about enterprise/B2B, e-commerce, and foodtech for TechCrunch, and venture capital rounds for Crunchbase News. Based in Houston, Christine previously reported for the Houston Business Journal, the Texas Medical Center’s Pulse magazine, and Community Impact Newspaper. She has an undergraduate journalism degree from Murray State University and a graduate degree from The Ohio State University. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-01-24T14:03:19 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/24/fantuan-acquires-chowbus-food-delivery/
| 618 | 1 |
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Singapore-based Qosmosys closes $100M seed round to develop tech for the moon
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Singapore-basedQosmosyshas closed an astonishing $100 million seed round to develop its lunar lander tech. The company did not disclose its investors, nor did a Qosmosys spokesperson respond to TechCrunch’s email. In a press release published to its website, the startup simply said that it practices a “unique and protective funding model. ” “The structure welcomes a limited consortium of investors, safeguarding all stakeholder interests in anticipation of a planned IPO by 2028 at the latest,” the release says. The company aims to send its ZeusX spacecraft to the moon in just four years, with a second mission in 2029. The spacecraft will be composed of three modules: a service module, a moon lander and a “lunar integrated bulk extraction rover,” which will extract lunar resources. That helps account for the spacecraft’s formidable size: 8 meters in height and 4. 2 meters in diameter, which is larger than its peer landers such as Firefly’s Blue Ghost, Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C and Astrobotic’s Peregrine. Not much is known about the first mission, though Qosmosys did say back in February that it had partnered with Airbus Defence and Space for technical design and engineering services for the ZeusX concept. If all goes to plan, the spacecraft will be capable of transporting 500 kilograms to lunar orbit and 800 kilograms to the surface. The startup, headed by aerospace executive François Dubrulle, is based in Singapore but has two affiliate companies in Houston, Texas and Toulouse, France. Qosmosys says that lunar mining, particularly of essential minerals like Helium-3, is a core part of its business model. Topics Reporter, Space and Defense Aria Alamalhodaei covers the space and defense industries at TechCrunch. Previously, she covered the public utilities and the power grid for California Energy Markets. You can also find her work at MIT’s Undark Magazine, The Verge, and Discover Magazine. She received an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Aria is based in Austin, Texas. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-10-24T00:46:08 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/23/singapore-based-qosmosys-closes-100m-seed-round-to-develop-tech-for-the-moon/
| 396 | 0.9 |
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Quantum VC QDNL hits €25M first-close on new fund
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VC investment into quantum computing declined by 50%last yearaccording to the “State of Quantum 2024” report, dropping from $2. 2 billion in 2022 to $1. 2 billion, with funds switching in favor of generative AI. However, government spending on quantum was predicted to hit $40 billion over the next decade. Now a new VC European fund hopes to capitalize on that trend. The idiosyncratically namedQDNL Participationshas reached a €25 million first close on a proposed €60 million global fund for early-stage quantum startups. However, QDNL plans to expand outside the country and make investments more internationally. The firm’s previous €15 million fund focused on the Dutch quantum ecosystem, backing startups including Qblox, QuantWare, QphoX, and Q*Bird. Speaking to TechCrunch, Ton van ‘t Noordende, general partner at QDNL Participations, said: “Quantum is a global field. There’s been incredible research done in the past decade or so and we’ve seen the emerging of a new, startup ecosystem, with 600 or more companies coming up. There’s also been more than $42 billion invested by over 20 governments in the last two or three years. So this has built up the infrastructure, the clean rooms, the facilities, and essentially de-risking the technology. ” QDNL’s appearance is the latest sign that the Netherlands is making a play to be a key quantum computing ecosystem, and the government (with EU financial backing) has already backed an entire initiative calledQuantum Delta NL, which also just happens to be an investor in QDNL. Its team includes quantum computing pioneer Chad Rigetti as venture partner in the U. S. and specialist quantum VC Kris Kaczmarek in London, who joined as investment director from quantum VC firm 2xN. They join advisors Nadia Carlsten (CEO of the Danish Centre for AI Innovation) and Charles Marcus of the University of Washington. Quantum computing had a tricky start to the year with both Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang soundingdownbeaton when Quantum would arrive. But Nvidia did a quick about-turn andannounceda quantum-exclusive Nvidia Day at its upcoming event in March
| 2025-01-23T13:19:27 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/23/quantum-vc-qdnl-hits-e25m-first-close-on-new-fund/
| 337 | 0.9 |
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Meta to expand labelling of AI-generated imagery in election packed year
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Meta is expanding the labelling of AI-generated imagery on its social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram and Threads, to cover some synthetic imagery that’s been created using rivals’ generative AI tools — at least where rivals are using what it couches as “industry standard indicators” that the content is AI-generated and which Meta is able to detect. The development means the social media giant expects to be labelling more AI-generated imagery circulating on its platforms going forward. But it’s also not putting figures on any of this stuff — i. e. how much synthetic vs authentic content is routinely being pushed at users — so how significant a move this might be in the fight against AI-fuelled dis- and misinformation (ina massive year for elections, globally) is unclear. Meta says it already detects and labels “photorealistic images” that have been created with its own “Imagine with Meta” generative AI tool, which launchedlast December. But, up to now, it hasn’t been labelling synthetic imagery created using other company’s tools. So this is the (baby) step it’s announcing today. “[W]e’ve been working with industry partners to align on common technical standards that signal when a piece of content has been created using AI,” wrote Meta president, Nick Clegg, in a blog post announcing the expansion of labelling. “Being able to detect these signals will make it possible for us to label AI-generated images that users post to Facebook, Instagram and Threads. ” Per Clegg, Meta will be rolling out expanded labelling “in the coming months”; and applying labels in “all languages supported by each app”. Meta launches a standalone AI-powered image generator A spokesman for Meta could not provide a more specific timeline; nor any details on which orders markets will be getting the extra labels when we asked for more. But Clegg’s post suggests the rollout will be gradual — “through the next year” — and could see Meta focusing on election calendars around the world to inform decisions about when and where to launch the expanded labelling in different markets. “We’re taking this approach through the next year, during which a number of important elections are taking place around the world,” he wrote. “During this time, we expect to learn much more about how people are creating and sharing AI content, what sort of transparency people find most valuable, and how these technologies evolve. What we learn will inform industry best practices and our own approach going forward. ” Meta’s approach to labelling AI-generated imagery relies upon detection powered by both visible marks that are applied to synthetic images by its generative AI tech and “invisible watermarks” and metadata the tool also embeds with file images. It’s these same sorts of signals, embedded by rivals’ AI image-generating tools, that Meta’s detection tech will be looking for, per Clegg — who notes it’s been working with other AI companies, via forums like thePartnership on AI, with the aim of developing common standards and best practices for identifying generative AI. His blog post doesn’t spell out the extent of others’ efforts towards this end. But Clegg implies Meta will — in the coming 12 months — be able to detect AI-generated imagery from tools made by Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney and Shutterstock, as well as its own AI image tools. When it comes to AI-generated videos and audio, Clegg suggests it’s generally still too challenging to detect these kind of fakes — because marking and watermarking has yet to be adopted at enough scale for detection tools to do a good job. Additionally, such signals can be stripped out, through editing and further media manipulation. “[I]t’s not yet possible to identify all AI-generated content, and there are ways that people can strip out invisible markers. So we’re pursuing a range of options,” he wrote. “We’re working hard to develop classifiers that can help us to automatically detect AI-generated content, even if the content lacks invisible markers. At the same time, we’re looking for ways to make it more difficult to remove or alter invisible watermarks. “For example, Meta’s AI Research lab FAIR recently shared research on an invisible watermarking technology we’re developing calledStable Signature. This integrates the watermarking mechanism directly into the image generation process for some types of image generators, which could be valuable for open source models so the watermarking can’t be disabled. ” Given the gap between what’s technically possible on the AI generation versus detection side, Meta is changing its policy to require users who post “photorealistic” AI-generated video or “realistic-sounding” audio to inform it that the content is synthetic — and Clegg says it’s reserving the right to label the content if it deems it “particularly high risk of materially deceiving the public on a matter of importance”. If the user fails to make this manual disclosure they could face penalties — under Meta’s existing Community Standards. (So account suspensions, bans etc. ) “Our Community Standards apply to everyone, all around the world and to all types of content, including AI-generated content,” Meta’s spokesman told us when asked what type of sanctions users who fail to make a disclosure could face. While Meta is keenly heaping attention on the risks around AI-generated fakes, it’s worth remembering that manipulation of digital media is nothing new and misleading people at scale doesn’t require fancy generative AI tools. Access to a social media account and more basic media editing skills are all it can take to make a fake that goes viral. On this front, a recent decision by the Oversight Board, a Meta-established content review body — which looked at its decision not to remove an edited video of president Biden with his granddaughter which had been manipulated to falsely suggest inappropriate touching —urged the tech giant to rewrite what it described as “incoherent” policieswhen it comes to faked videos. The Board specifically called out Meta’s focus on AI-generated content in this context. “As it stands, the policy makes little sense,” wrote Oversight Board co-chair Michael McConnell. “It bans altered videos that show people saying things they do not say, but does not prohibit posts depicting an individual doing something they did not do. It only applies to video created through AI, but lets other fake content off the hook. ” Asked whether, in light of the Board’s review, Meta is looking at expanding its policies to ensure non-AI-related content manipulation risks are not being ignored, its spokesman declined to answer, saying only: “Our response to this decision will be shared on our transparency centre within the 60 day window. ” Clegg’s blog post also discusses the (so far “limited”) use of generative AI by Meta as a tool for helping it enforce its own policies — and the potential for GenAI to take up more of the slack here, with the Meta president suggesting it may turn to large language models (LLMs) to support its enforcement efforts during moments of “heightened risk”, such as elections. “While we use AI technology to help enforce our policies, our use of generative AI tools for this purpose has been limited. But we’re optimistic that generative AI could help us take down harmful content faster and more accurately. It could also be useful in enforcing our policies during moments of heightened risk, like elections,” he wrote. “We’ve started testing Large Language Models (LLMs) by training them on our Community Standards to help determine whether a piece of content violates our policies. These initial tests suggest the LLMs can perform better than existing machine learning models. We’re also using LLMs to remove content from review queues in certain circumstances when we’re highly confident it doesn’t violate our policies. This frees up capacity for our reviewers to focus on content that’s more likely to break our rules. ” So we now have Meta experimenting with generative AI as a supplement to its standard AI-powered content moderation efforts in a bid to reduce the volume of toxic content that gets pumped into the eyeballs and brains of overworked human content reviewers, withall the trauma risks that entails. AI alone couldn’t fix Meta’s content moderation problem — whether AI plus GenAI can do it seems doubtful. But it might help the tech giant extract greater efficiencies at a time when the tactic of outsourcing toxic content moderation to low paid humans isfacing legal challengesacrossmultiple markets. Clegg’s post also notes that AI-generated content on Meta’s platforms is “eligible to be fact-checked by our independent fact-checking partners” — and may, therefore, also be labelled as debunked (i. e. in addition to being labelled as AI-generated; or “Imagined by AI”, as Meta’s current GenAI image labels have it). Which, frankly, sounds increasingly confusing for users trying to navigate the credibility of stuff they see on its social media platforms — where a piece of content may get multiple signposts applied to it, just one label, or none at all. Clegg also avoids any discussion of the chronic asymmetry between the availability of human fact-checkers, a resource that’s typically provided by nonprofit entities which have limited time and money to debunk essentially limitless digital fakes; and all sorts of malicious actors with access to social media platforms, fuelled by myriad incentives and funders, who are able to weaponize increasingly widely available and powerful AI tools (including those Meta itself is building and providing to fuel its content-dependent business) to massively scale disinformation threats. Without solid data on the prevalence of synthetic vs authentic content on Meta’s platforms, and without data on how effective its AI fake detection systems actually are, there’s little we can conclude — beyond the obvious: Meta is feeling under pressure to be seen to be doing something in a year when election-related fakes will, undoubtedly, command a lot of publicity. Oversight Board calls on Meta to rewrite ‘incoherent’ rules against faked videos From AI Assistant to image restyler: Meta’s new AI features Topics Senior Reporter Natasha was a senior reporter for TechCrunch, from September 2012 to April 2025, based in Europe. She joined TC after a stint reviewing smartphones for CNET UK and, prior to that, more than five years covering business technology for silicon. com (now folded into TechRepublic), where she focused on mobile and wireless, telecoms & networking, and IT skills issues. She has also freelanced for organisations including The Guardian and the BBC. Natasha holds a First Class degree in English from Cambridge University, and an MA in journalism from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-02-06T13:00:30 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/06/meta-ai-generated-image-labelling/
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This week in tech acronyms: FRB and GPT
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Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-hostNatasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribehere. It’s been a big week for tech acronyms. I woke up on Monday to news that First Republic Bank has been closed down by regulators — and JP Morgan will buy $330 billion worth of assets. The news then spiraled into another question for startups: How does losing yet another banking partner, in a matter of weeks, feel in this environment? As I learned, along with my colleagues Mary Ann Azevedo and Christine Hall, entrepreneurs feel fatigue. It’s true: When First Republic Bank was in its final moments, Silicon Valley didn’t convulse with shock or lather itself into a social media tizzy. Instead, there was a general malaise — and awareness of the gap ahead. Read the rest of our piece on TC+:“As another startup bank partner collapses, tech feels the gap. ” As for the other acronym, you don’t have to look far to find a GPT angle these days. Alex Wilhelm and I wrote a piece about ChatGPT’s impact on edtech, inspired by Chegg’s admission that generative AI has indeed hurt new user growth. As our interviews tell us, OpenAI is clearly changing things for edtech entrepreneurs, and at large, asking them to ask much harder questions, ironically enough. Read our piece on TC+:“OpenAI’s ChatGPT is shaking up the edtech markets. ” With that, let’s get into the perfect pitch deck and the outsider advantage. Follow me onTwitter,BlueskyorInstagramto continue the conversation. If you feel like supporting me extra, subscribe tomy free Substack. The inimitable Haje Jan Kamps has done 47 pitch decks in his Pitch Deck Teardown series. Now he’s asking: How could we do it better? With the help of Trulytell (with an assist from their designer, Jake Muller), Kamps sought to improve a startup’s deck until it became the perfect pitch deck. The results are certainly interesting. Here’s what to know: It’s hard. Take this excerpt from the teardown, if that helps: I’m sorry, but you do have to sense-check your numbers. There’s absolutely no way Supliful’s total addressable market is within 10% of the entire planet’s healthcare spend. This slide feels so insanely, ludicrously wrong, it made me wonder where this calculation came from. Come for the window into perfection, stay for the reality checks. On Equity this week, I spoke to Sam Chaudhary, CEO and co-founder of ClassDojo, and Chris Farmer, CEO of SignalFire, a venture firm that recently announced a $900 million fund to back tech startups. This interviewis structured a bit differently as it was actually recorded as a TechCrunch Live session, our weekly show that focuses on helping people start better venture-backed businesses. Here’s what to know:The best part of the interview was around outsider advantage in a sector like edtech and how to balance with insider awareness on the intricacies of the space. Listen ifyou want a snapshotinto the thinking behind a slow-to-monetize company on how it pulled off investor patience, vision and early mapping. Seen on TechCrunch How Shopify bungled its latest layoffs and made employees feel like NPCs RapidAPI headcount down 82% from fresh layoffs less than two weeks after cutting 50% of staff Think of the monetized children and other TC news With DeepFloyd, generative AI art gets a text upgrade Crypto, influencers targeted in Kenya’s new tax bid Seen on TechCrunch+ The ice-breaking IPO we’ve waited for might not come from the US after all AI is just someone else’s computer Ask Sophie: Will I be allowed into the US if my passport expires in 5 months Take care of yourself, N Topics Senior Reporter Natasha Mascarenhas was a senior reporter at TechCrunch covering early stage startups and venture capital trends. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-05-06T18:01:25 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/06/this-week-in-tech-acronyms-frb-and-gpt/
| 704 | 1 |
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The most interesting startups showcased at Google Cloud Next
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Google held its Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas this week, where it announced dozens of new features, like itsnext generation AI processing chip, called Ironwood, and its latest AI model,Gemini 2. 5 Flash. It also announced a long list of AI startups that have signed to use its cloud. Among them are some of the most watched startups in the world. As we previously reported, this list includesSafe Superintelligence (SSI), the startup founded by OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. It also includes: Anysphere, which makes the uber-popular AI-powered code editor Cursor. Google says Cursor is using Anthropic’s Claude models on Google Cloud. Cursor was recently valued at $10 billion,sources have told TechCrunch. Its biggest rival is probably GitHub CoPilot, so that would make Microsoft one of its top competitors. Hebbiauses AI to search large documents and answer questions, which has made it a hit in the legal industry. Andreessen Horowitz led, while Index Ventures, Google Ventures, and Peter Thiel participated inits $130 million Series B. It is using Google’s Gemini models, Google says. Magicis building frontier models to automate coding as well as research. Its choice of Google Cloud is likely somewhat obvious, given that its2024 $320 million fundraising roundincluded Alphabet’s CapitalG and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as investors. It’s tapping Google Cloud for GPUs, according to Google. Physical Intelligenceis working on developing foundational software for robots and has a who’s-who roster of co-founders, including solo investor extraordinaire Lachy Groom. It raised $400 million at a $2 billion pre-money valuation in November from backers including Sequoia, Jeff Bezos, Lux Capital, and Thrive Capital. A few of its founders have deep ties to Google, having previously worked at Google DeepMind, including Karol Hausman and Chelsea Finn. Photoroomis one of the hottest AI startups in Paris, Europe’s center of AI. It offers AI photo editing and is using Google Cloud’s Veo 2 video generating model and its text-to-image model Imagen 3. Synthesiais building products that make highly realistic AI avatars and is using various Google models. It raised$180 million at a $2. 1 billion round in Januaryled by NEA but with GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) among the investors. All in all, Google Cloud is collecting an impressive list of startups to bolster its race against Microsoft Azure, and to some extent AWS, for AI workloads. In addition, Googleannounced that it added Lightspeed to VC partnersin addition to Sequoia and Y Combinator. Google Cloud grants portfolio companies from its partner investors access to its AI chips and models. Lightspeed’s AI portfolio companies can qualify for $150,000 in cloud credits, Google said. So it has plans to convince even more rising star startups to join its cloud. Here are the rest of the AI startups that Google showcased this week:
| 2025-04-11T21:32:01 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/11/the-most-interesting-startups-showcased-at-google-cloud-next/
| 464 | 0.9 |
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Astra is the space industry’s first SPAC bust of 2024
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Astra Space, the launch company that went public in 2021 at a $2. 1 billion valuation, is going private again after months of burning cash and failing to secure alternate investment. The companyannounced Thursdaythat its board had accepted an offer from its CEO, Chris Kemp, and its CTO, Adam London, to purchase the remaining Astra stock at a price of $0. 50 per share. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2024, at which time Astra will cease trading on the Nasdaq. It is a precipitous fall for the company, which raised nearly $500 million from investors on the premise of an ultra-cheap launch vehicle that could be scaled to execute hundreds of missions per year. In an investor presentation from February 2021, Astra touted a “mass produced portable launch system” that could launch from anywhere in the world. The company told investors it anticipated a bi-weekly launch cadence in 2024. But the company never achieved that (though they did reach orbit twice), facing a series of setbacks including an alarming sideways launch anomaly in 2021 and a number of false starts for commercial launches over the years. Kemp’s suggestion that failure rates mattered less the more frequent launches were may also have rattled potential customers. At the time Astra completed its SPAC merger it also acquired Apollo Fusion, an electric propulsion developer for spacecraft, with the aim of integrating those systems into an Astra satellite constellation. That constellation never came to fruition, however, and while the company did succeed in selling many Apollo Fusion propulsion systems it has struggled to turn that backlog into revenue. Things came to a head last November, when Kemp and London proposed to take the company private at $1. 50 a share – around double the price the stock was trading at then. After that deal stalled, they submitted the revised offer. A special committee of the board, assembled to review Astra’s options, warned in a filing at the beginning of the month that the only alternative to Kemp and London’s proposal was bankruptcy. Correction: The article originally stated that Astra reached orbit once. It has been updated to reflect that Astra reached orbit twice. Topics Reporter, Space and Defense Aria Alamalhodaei covers the space and defense industries at TechCrunch. Previously, she covered the public utilities and the power grid for California Energy Markets. You can also find her work at MIT’s Undark Magazine, The Verge, and Discover Magazine. She received an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Aria is based in Austin, Texas. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-03-07T21:04:29 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/07/astra-is-the-space-industrys-first-spac-bust-of-2024/
| 501 | 1 |
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Okta plans to weave AI across its entire identity platform using multiple models
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One thing is clear this year: Generative AI is having a tremendous impact on the software industry, and a week doesn’t pass without software companies announcing their plans to incorporate the seemingly game-changing technology into their platforms. This week, it’sOkta’sturn. The identity company is making a slew of AI-related announcements at the company’s Oktane customer conference, taking place this week in San Francisco. “I think AI is the next big wave in technology. I think it’s as important and big and impactful as the internet, as cloud, as mobile,” Okta CEO Todd McKinnon told TechCrunch. For Okta, that means training a model on all of the data it’s been collecting about identity and putting that to work to help make customers safer. “We have a new set of capabilities we’re launching called Okta AI,” he said. “It’s taking all of the really, really valuable data we have from risk signals and usage patterns and customers and policies, and combining them with the latest and greatest AI technology. ” As McKinnon points out, Okta AI isn’t a product per se, so much as a set of capabilities that will be added over time across the platform, some of which will incorporate predictive AI to help security teams understand possible threats, and some of which will allow users to interact with the data to pinpoint problems more easily using generative AI. While this will involve many different pieces, he highlighted three in particular. The first, Identity Threat Protection, looks at traditional identity protection, checking for things like the computer, network, location and other clues to ensure the person signing in is who they say they are — but it doesn’t stop there. “With Identity Threat Protection with Okta, AI, the evaluation of your security posture doesn’t stop. It’s continuously getting signals from the entire ecosystem — from CrowdStrike or Palo Alto Networks or Zscalar or anyone else — and this is integrated with identity fraud protection. The second that there’s any kind of risk anywhere, whether it’s malware on the device or a bad network security posture, [it can identify it],” McKinnon said. And if it finds something that passes a particular threat threshold, regardless of which system it came from, Okta or one of its partners, it will undertake what McKinnon is calling a “universal logout,” logging the user out from every system until security can resolve the problem. Next, Policy Recommender proposes an application security configuration based on similar use cases across Okta’s 18,000+ customer base. “You want to get the right balance between ease of use, without checking too much, and still making it secure, especially when the application is sensitive. So Policy Recommender is trained on the policies of thousands and thousands of customers and how they set up these apps,” he said. It uses that data to recommend a policy for each customer, based on their requirements and security posture. Finally, Log Investigator is a more pure generative AI play, letting users query the Okta logs using natural language to find information. “The basis of this technology is a generative model that looks at all of the queries that people are issuing against the Okta logs to ask questions, and it trains the model on those queries,” he said. “So then the result of it is a natural language interface so customers can just ask questions and the Okta system will respond with answers based on what’s in their logs. ” McKinnon says the company is using a combination of models, depending on the task, including Google, OpenAI and Amazon. The company could also develop its own model in the future, one that will likely be based on open source offerings, he said. Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, says in the future there will be an ongoing security battle with both sides using AI to gain an advantage, and security and identity companies like Okta have little choice but to get on board. “Customers know that in the future, AI will be battling AI. So this is just the beginning, and they are expecting their identity providers to be able to handle attacks from other AI systems, as well as proactively preparing,” Wang told TechCrunch. With these and other announcements, Okta is clearly moving toward this world, but it will be judged on how well it executes on these ideas, while protecting customer privacy. For now, these and other AI features being announced this week will go into beta in the coming months, and be generally available sometime next year. Okta CEO opens up about Auth0 acquisition, SaaS slump and Lapsus$ attack
| 2023-10-04T13:00:49 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/04/okta-plans-to-weave-ai-across-its-entire-identity-platform/
| 769 | 1 |
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Amazon taps long-time exec to lead India business as competition intensifies
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Amazon has named long-time executive Samir Kumar as the new head of its India consumer business, a month afterits domestic business’ head resignedamidintensifying competition in the key market. Kumar, who has been with the e-commerce giant for 25 years, will become country manager for India, the company said. This role would be in addition to Kumar’s existing responsibilities overseeing Amazon’s consumer operations in the Middle East, South Africa, and Turkey, the company said. The leadership transition was announced by Amit Agarwal, Amazon’s senior vice president for emerging markets, in an email to staff. The move follows the sudden exit of Manish Tiwary, the previous head of Amazon’s India consumer business, last month. “India remains an important priority for Amazon, and I am super excited about the opportunity ahead as we continue to transform lives and livelihoods,” said Agarwal in a statement. Despite investing over $7 billion in India, Amazon is facing challenges in smaller cities and towns, where local competitors Flipkart (owned by Walmart) and Meesho (backed by SoftBank) have gained stronger market positions. Meesho has overtaken Amazon in terms of monthly active users on mobile apps, according to Morgan Stanley. Bank of America analysts report that Flipkart boasts over 50 million daily active users on its mobile apps in India, while Amazon has fewer than 40 million. In urban India, Amazon is facinggrowing competition from quick-commerce companiessuch as BlinkIt, Swiggy, and Zepto, which offer deliveries within 10 minutes. Flipkart recently launched its own quick delivery service in Bengaluru. The company also startedtesting four-hour deliveries on Myntra, the nation’s top online apparel and fashion platform. Amazon has not launched quick commerce offerings in India so far. Topics Reporter, India Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-09-18T04:15:42 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/17/amazon-taps-veteran-to-lead-india-business-as-competition-intensifies/
| 350 | 0.9 |
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Quantum Machines and Nvidia use machine learning to get closer to an error-corrected quantum computer
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About ayear and a half ago, quantum control startupQuantum Machinesand Nvidia announced a deep partnership that would bring together Nvidia’sDGX Quantumcomputing platform and Quantum Machine’s advanced quantum control hardware. We didn’t hear much about the results of this partnership for a while, but it’s now starting to bear fruit and getting the industry one step closer to the holy grail of an error-corrected quantum computer. In a presentation earlier this year, the two companies showed that they are able to use anoff-the-shelf reinforcement learning modelrunning on Nvidia’s DGX platform to better control the qubits in a Rigetti quantum chip by keeping the system calibrated. Yonatan Cohen, the co-founder and CTO of Quantum Machines, noted how his company has long sought to use general classical compute engines to control quantum processors. Those compute engines were small and limited, but that’s not a problem with Nvidia’s extremely powerful DGX platform. The holy grail, he said, is to run quantum error correction. We’re not there yet. Instead, this collaboration focused on calibration, and specifically calibrating the “π pulses” that control the rotation of a qubit inside a quantum processor. At first glance, calibration may seem like a one-shot problem: You calibrate the processor before you start running the algorithm on it. But it’s not that simple. “If you look at the performance of quantum computers today, you get some high fidelity,” Cohen said. “But then, the users, when they use the computer, it’s typically not at the best fidelity. It drifts all the time. If we can frequently recalibrate it using these kinds of techniques and underlying hardware, then we can improve the performance and keep the fidelity [high] over a long time, which is what’s going to be needed in quantum error correction. ” Constantly adjusting those pulses in near real time is an extremely compute-intensive task, but since a quantum system is always slightly different, it is also a control problem that lends itself to being solved with the help of reinforcement learning. “As quantum computers are scaling up and improving, there are all these problems that become bottlenecks, that become really compute-intensive,” said Sam Stanwyck, Nvidia’s group product manager for quantum computing. “Quantum error correction is really a huge one. This is necessary to unlock fault-tolerant quantum computing, but also how to apply exactly the right control pulses to get the most out of the qubits. ” Stanwyck also stressed that there was no system before DGX Quantum that would enable the kind of minimal latency necessary to perform these calculations. As it turns out, even a small improvement in calibration can lead to massive improvements in error correction. “The return on investment in calibration in the context of quantum error correction is exponential,” explained Quantum Machines product manager Ramon Szmuk. “If you calibrate 10% better, that gives you an exponentially better logical error [performance] in the logical qubit that is composed of many physical qubits. So there’s a lot of motivation here to calibrate very well and fast. ” It’s worth stressing that this is just the start of this optimization process and collaboration. What the team actually did here was simply take a handful of off-the-shelf algorithms and look at which one worked best (TD3, in this case). All in all, the actual code for running the experiment was only about 150 lines long. Of course, this relies on all of the work the two teams also did to integrate the various systems and build out the software stack. For developers, though, all of that complexity can be hidden away, and the two companies expect to create more and more open source libraries over time to take advantage of this larger platform. Szmuk stressed that for this project, the team only worked with a very basic quantum circuit but that it can be generalized to deep circuits as well. “If you can do this with one gate and one qubit, you can also do it with a hundred qubits and 1,000 gates,” he said. “I’d say the individual result is a small step, but it’s a small step towards solving the most important problems,” Stanwyck added. “Useful quantum computing is going to require the tight integration of accelerated supercomputing — and that may be the most difficult engineering challenge. So being able to do this for real on a quantum computer and tune up a pulse in a way that is not just optimized for a small quantum computer but is a scalable, modular platform, we think we’re really on the way to solving some of the most important problems in quantum computing with this. ” Stanwyck also said that the two companies plan to continue this collaboration and get these tools into the hands of more researchers. With Nvidia’s Blackwell chips becoming available next year, they’ll also have an even more powerful computing platform for this project, too. Topics Editor Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-11-02T17:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/02/quantum-machines-and-nvidia-use-machine-learning-to-get-closer-to-an-error-corrected-quantum-computer/
| 884 | 1 |
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Scout Motors EVs will use Rivian-VW software and architecture
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VW’s new offshoot EV company Scout Motors, which revealed itsfirst two vehicles last week, will use the software and zonal architecture being developed by the joint venture between Rivian and the Volkswagen Group. Rivian Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid confirmed toTechCrunch at Disrupt 2024that Scout will leverage the joint venture tech when its vehicles go into production in 2027. VW and Rivian are still working to close the $5 billion deal, which they expect to happen before the end of this year. Rivian and VW had previously said that they planned to use the tech to power most of the German automaker’s future vehicles. But the question of whether the Scout vehicles would join the party had remained up in the air in the wake of last week’s reveal. Scout revealed two EV prototypes: The Traveler SUV and the Terra pickup truck. The company said at the time that the vehicles would use a zonal architecture — meaning it would rely on just a handful of computers that control the functions of a few “zones” of the electrical architecture. And the software in Scout’s press images looked awfully similar to what you can find in Rivian’s current vehicles, so Bensaid’s confirmation is not all that surprising. Bensaid stressed on the Disrupt stage that each brand that uses the joint venture’s software will “continue to have their own identity,” as well as “their own features. ” “We’re enabling competition,” he said. Bensaid also noted how much the Scout vehicles resemble Rivian’s overall design sensibility, even outside of the software. “That’s fantastic,” he said. “It’s great validation of the Rivian product. ” TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 has begun, with hundreds of speakers, hundreds of startups and exhibitors, plus thousands of attendees meeting in… Topics Sr. Reporter, Transportation Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-10-30T18:34:55 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/30/scout-motors-evs-will-use-rivian-vw-software-and-architecture/
| 365 | 0.9 |
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SteamOS expands to other gaming handhelds with the Lenovo Legion Go S
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SteamOS is slowly becoming an alternative to Windows for handheld gaming devices. After launching theSteam Deckwith SteamOS, its own operating system, Valve is now partnering with third-party manufacturers so that they can release gaming handhelds with SteamOS support. On Tuesday, Lenovounveiledthe Legion Go S atCES 2025. Unlike its predecessor, the Legion Go, this gaming handheld has a more traditional form-factor with a large, eight-inch display surrounded by controllers on each side of the screen. The detachable controllers and the kickstand at the back of the device are gone. But the most interesting part of the device is that it comes in multiple configurations. Customers will be able to decide between two AMD chipsets: thenewly announcedbudget processor Ryzen Z2 Go, and the Ryzen Z1 Extreme that Lenovo is already using for the Legion Go. Asus is also using the Z1 Extreme for theROG Ally X. Similarly, customers will get to decide whether they want to buy the Legion Go S with SteamOS pre-installed or Windows 11. While SteamOS is a much better experience for a gaming handheld with a better interface, a better out-of-the-box experience, and better support for sleep/wake, some customers might prefer Windows if they download games through Xbox Game Pass or if their favorite multiplayer game relies on Windows-only anti-cheat software. The Z2 Go version will be available for $599 with Windows 11, or $499 with SteamOS, while the Z1 Extreme variant will cost $729. Lenovo is releasing the Z1 Extreme version in January, while the Z2 Go configurations will be available in May 2025. The entry-level device will come with 16GB of RAM, while the $729 one features 32GB of RAM. When it comes to specifications, the eight-inch display has a 16:10 aspect ratio and supports resolutions of up to 1920×1200 with a 120Hz variable refresh rate. The Legion Go S comes with a 55Wh battery, two USB 4 ports and a microSD slot. The device weighs 730g (1. 61 pounds) and comes with an extremely tiny touchpad to navigate the desktop interface. Lenovo also plans to update the original Legion Go, and it evenshowcasedan early prototype of the Legion Go 2 at CES 2025. The idea is that the Legion Go S and the Legion Go will be two separate products that will be updated every now and then. While you could consider the Legion Go S as a Steam Deck competitor, remember that Valve has collaborated with Lenovo to tweak SteamOS for the new machine. Valve takes a cut on every Steam purchase, and the company seems to think that it’s more important to grow the Steam ecosystem than become the next big console maker. CES 2025, the annual consumer tech conference held in Las Vegas, is upon us — and this is where you… Topics Senior Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-01-08T11:18:48 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/08/steamos-expands-to-other-gaming-handhelds-with-the-lenovo-legion-go-s/
| 534 | 1 |
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Elon Musk’s X could still face sanctions for training Grok on Europeans’ data
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Earlier this week, the EU’s lead privacy regulator ended its court proceeding related to how X processed user data to train its Grok AI chatbot, but the saga isn’t over yet for the Elon Musk-owned social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s received — and will “examine” — a number ofcomplaintsthat have been filed under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). “The DPC will now examine the extent to which any processing that has taken place complies with the relevant provisions of the GDPR,” the regulator told TechCrunch. “If, further to that examination, it is established that TUIC [Twitter International Unlimited Company, as X’s main Irish subsidiary is still known] has infringed the GDPR, the DPC will then consider whether the exercise of any of its corrective powers is warranted and, if so, which one(s). ” X agreed to suspend data processing for Grok training inearly August. The undertaking X made to it was then made permanentearlier this week. That agreement committed X to delete and stop using Europeans users’ data to train its AIs which it had collected between between May 7, 2024 and August 1, 2024, according to a copyTechCrunch obtained. But it’s now clear there is no requirement on X to delete any AI models trained on the data. So far, X hasn’t faced any sanction from the DPC for processing the personal data of Europeans to train Grok without people’s consent — despite the DPC’s urgent court action to block data collection. Penalties under the GDPR can be stiff, reaching up to 4% of global annual turnover. (Given that the company’s revenues are now infreefall, and could well scramble to hit $500 million this year based on reported quarterly figures, that might sting especially badly. ) Regulators are also empowered to order operational changes by demanding that infringement ceases. But complaints may take a long time — even up to several years — to investigate and enforce. This is important because although X has been forced to stop helping itself to Europeans’ data to train Grok, it is still able to operate any AI models it’s already trained on the data of people who did not consent to the use — with no urgent intervention nor sanction to stop this happening as yet. Asked whether the undertaking the DPC obtained from X last month required X to delete any AI models trained on Europeans’ data, the DPC confirmed to us it does not: “The undertaking does not require TUIC to carry out this action; it required TUIC to permanently cease the processing of the datasets covered by the undertaking,” a spokesperson said. Some might say this is a neat way for X (or others training models) to circumvent the EU’s privacy rules: Step 1) Quietly help yourself to people’s data; Step 2) use it to train AI models and — when the cat’s out of the bag and regulators’finally come knocking— commit to deleting *the data*, leaving your trained AI models intact. Step 3) Grok-based profit!? Asked about this risk, the DPC responded by saying the purpose of its urgent court proceeding had been to act on “significant concerns” that X’s processing of EU and EEA users’ data to train Grok “gave rise to risk for the fundamental rights and freedoms of data subjects. ” But it did not explain why it does not have the same pressing concern about risks to Europeans’ fundamental rights and freedoms from having their information embedded into Grok. Generative AI tools are known to produce false information. Musk’s twist on the category is also intentionally irreverent — or “anti-woke” as he dubs it. That could amp up the risks about the types of content it may produce about users whose data was ingested to train the bot. One reason the Irish regulator may be more cautious about how to deal with this issue is these AI tools are still relatively new. There’s also uncertainty among European privacy watchdogs how to enforce the GDPR against such a novel technology. Plus, it’s not clear whether the regulation’s powers would extend to being able to order AI model deletion if a technology has been trained on unlawfully processed data. But ascomplaints continuetostack upin this area, data protection authorities will have to grasp the generative AI nettle sooner or later. In separate X news Friday, it emerged X’s head of global affairs is out. Reutersreported the departure of long-serving staffer, Nick Pickles, a U. K. national who spent a decade at Twitter, rising further up the ranks during Musk’s tenure. In apost on X, Pickles claimed he made the decision to leave “several months ago” but does not elaborate on his reasons for leaving. However it’s clear the company has a lot on its plate — including dealing witha ban in Brazil; andpolitical blowback in the U. K. over its role in spreading disinformation linked to rioting in the country last month, with Musk’s personal penchant for pouring fuel on the fire (including posting on X to suggest that for the U. K. “civil war is inevitable”). In the EU, X is alsounder investigationunder the bloc’s content moderation framework. A first batch of Digital Services Act grievances werelaid out in July. Musk was also recently singled out for a personal warning in an open letter penned by the bloc’s internal markets commissioner, Thierry Breton — to which the chaos-loving billionaireopted to respond with an insulting meme. Topics Senior Reporter Natasha was a senior reporter for TechCrunch, from September 2012 to April 2025, based in Europe. She joined TC after a stint reviewing smartphones for CNET UK and, prior to that, more than five years covering business technology for silicon. com (now folded into TechRepublic), where she focused on mobile and wireless, telecoms & networking, and IT skills issues. She has also freelanced for organisations including The Guardian and the BBC. Natasha holds a First Class degree in English from Cambridge University, and an MA in journalism from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-09-06T09:33:52 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/06/elon-musks-x-could-still-face-sanctions-for-training-grok-on-europeans-data/
| 1,082 | 1 |
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Vibrant Planet raises $15M Series A to help PG&E and others trim their wildfire risk
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Natural disasters have a way of making people pay attention. Take, for example, California’s recent, catastrophic wildfire seasons, which broke records for how many acres they burned, how much property they destroyed and how many lives they took. That, plus the way they turned the sky a shade of apocalyptic orange, grabbed people by the lapels and didn’t let go. The ordeal inspired more than a few people to search for solutions. Vibrant Planetwas one that grew out of California’s wildfires. TechCrunchcovered the company’s seed round, and now the startup is back with fresh funding. Vibrant Planet has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by the Ecosystem Integrity Fund, with participation from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Citi Ventures, Day One Ventures, SIG Climate, Globivest, Coefficient LP and other investors. That comes on top of the $17 million in pre-seed and seed funding the company announced in June 2022 as well as some government grants, bringing the total raised to $34 million. Last year, I found the idea of an ecological SaaS refreshing, though I wasn’t sure it would have the potential for the sort of breakneck growth that venture capital firms like to see. Call it skepticism by familiarity: I was trained as a landscape ecologist and spent five years studying California’s oak woodlands; before that, I did a bit of fire modeling as part of a small research project. I’m still close enough to the topic to understand that environmental issues are often treated, and funded, more like footnotes than keynotes. Historically, it’s not been the most remunerative sector. In the last five years, though, that’s started to change. Disasters like California’s wildfire season have forced a slow awakening upon the world and, more specifically, the U. S. Call it trial by wildfire, hurricane, heat wave, drought or flood. Take your pick. But are enough people taking the climate threat seriously that a startup focused on wildfire management could succeed? As is the case with any Series A company, it’s probably too early to make any firm predictions. Yet I’m cautiously optimistic, and it’s not because the company has a fatter bank account. One thing in particular caught my attention in my conversation with Allison Wolff, co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet: The startup has signed a deal with PG&E, the utility responsible for some of the worst fires in California history. Previously, Vibrant Planet’s customer base included governments and nonprofit organizations mostly focused on land conservation and species preservation. All worthy customers, but nonprofits don’t tend to spend as much as for-profits, and government agencies have long sales cycles. PG&E, though, is a large company worth about $38 billion. Its service area spans 70,000 square miles of some of the most wildfire-prone landscapes in North America. Few companies have experienced climate risk like PG&E, though it’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. Risk is spreading throughout the utility sector, as Hawaiian Electric Industries recently discovered in the wake of the Maui wildfires. PG&E, Wolff said, is “a very natural partner, because they are big landowners; they have a lot of at-risk infrastructure they need to protect in a concerted interest in reducing fuel beds to help with that catastrophic fire problem. ” Vibrant Planet primarily sells a SaaS package it calls Land Tender. It gives organizations access to remotely sensed data, including satellite and lidar data, as well as tools to understand how different approaches to managing a landscape could affect the ecosystems they contain. That includes everything from the plants and animals that live there to how they interact with the land, water and each other. A lot of those functions can be done with existing tools like ESRI’s ArcGIS, but having a cloud-based tool pre-populated with data certainly makes things easier. Plus, prices for Land Tender are based on the number of acres an organization wants to manage rather than on a per-seat basis. That should make it easier to bring more stakeholders into the project. (Land Tender is being used on 7 million acres, larger than the state of Vermont. ) The company has hired an impressive science team, with people from academia, the U. S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and NASA. They’ve been working on many of these problems for years. Vibrant Planet isn’t announcing any other major corporate customers yet, but Wolff said the company is in talks with other utilities. And utilities are probably just the start. Any organization that’s substantially exposed to wildfire-adapted ecosystems, which represent about half of all terrestrial ecosystems, could probably benefit from wildfire forecasting and mitigation. Will they wake up to the risk in time or suffer the fate of PG&E and Hawaiian Electric? That’s up to them, but at least they have options. Topics Senior Reporter, Climate Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-10-05T13:00:02 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/05/vibrant-planet-series-a/
| 868 | 1 |
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Apple’s new macOS Sequoia update is breaking some cybersecurity tools
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On Monday, Apple released itslatest computer operating system update called macOS 15, or Sequoia. And, somehow, the software update has broken the functionality of several security tools made by CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft, and others, according to posts on social media, as well as messages posted in a Mac-focused Slack channel. At this point, it’s unclear exactly what is the issue, but it appears to affect several products made by companies that provide software for macOS users and enterprises, which has caused frustration among people who work on and with macOS-focused security tools. “As a developer of macOS security tools, it’s incredibly frustrating to time and time again have to deal with (understandably) upset users (understandably) blaming your tools for breaking their Macs, when in reality it was Apple’s fault all along,” said Patrick Wardle, the founder of Mac and iOS security startupDoubleYou, and a longtime expert on macOS security. “I get it, that writing bug-free software is challenging, but maybe if Apple spent less time and money on marketing, and more time on actually testing their software, we’d all be better off!” Wardle told TechCrunch. On the day of macOS Sequoia’s release, a CrowdStrike sales engineer said in a Slack room for Mac admins that the company had to delay support for the new version of Mac’s operating system. “I’m very sorry to report that we will not be supporting Sequoia on day 1 in spite of our intention (and previous track record) to support the latest OS within hours of [General Availability],” the engineer said in the message, seen by TechCrunch. The engineer also said CrowdStrike sent out a “Tech Alert” to customers, adding that “there’s quite a lot going on with the changes in the network stack. ” ”We’re also tracking some similar issues with other vendors, and have feedback and a case in to Apple. While we would love for there to be a fast-follow patch that resolves this for us, we’re acting under the assumption there won’t be and we’ll need to fix it in our code with a sensor release,” the sales engineer wrote. You also can contact TechCrunch viaSecureDrop. “Please trust me when I say this was looked at through every angle, to see if there was any way to continue to provide the best protection to our customers on this new OS without having to delay,” the CrowdStrike engineer wrote. “Ultimately it was decided that the best course to protect our Mac fleets is to wait until this is resolved. ” Also, several people on Redditreported having issueswith CrowdStrike’s security product on the new macOS. CrowdStrike spokesperson Kevin Benacci told TechCrunch on Thursday that the company is “currently waiting for a macOS Sequoia update and will provide official support. We respectfully refer you to Apple for any additional questions. ” Apple did not respond to requests for comment. On Monday, a SentinelOne Support account warned customers in the same Mac-focused Slack channel: “Do not upgrade your endpoints until you have a supported SentinelOne Agent,” citing a series of issues with the new macOS version. SentinelOne did not respond to a request for comment. After publication, SentinelOne spokesperson Craig VerColen said in an email: “SentinelOne delivered full support for macOS Sequoia immediately upon its release this past Monday as covered onour blogand support sites. ” ESET alsoalerted customersof a network connection issue after upgrading to macOS Sequoia. An ESET representative did not respond to our request for comment. After publication, ESET spokesperson Jessica Beffa said that ESET products “are compatible with the new macOS. ” Other people in the same Slack reported having issues with Microsoft Defender for macOS after the Sequoia update. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment. Security researcher Will Dormann wrote on Mastodon that he was having issues withDNSandrunning his firewallon his macOS machine. Another security researcher, Wacław Jacek,wrotein a blog post that, “it seems the OS firewall can sometimes start blocking access to web browsing after upgrading to macOS Sequoia,” and shared a potential workaround. The problems with macOS Sequoia appear to have caused issues with Firefox browser users, too,according to a separate Reddit thread. Damiano Damonte, a spokesperson for Mozilla, said in an email to TechCrunch after publication that Mozilla, which make the Firefox browser, “received reports” of issues from some users and Mozilla reported the problem to Apple, but has not yet been able to reproduce the bug in testing. This story has been updated to include comments from ESET, SentinelOne, and Mozilla. Topics Senior Reporter, Cybersecurity Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-09-19T17:08:11 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/19/apples-new-macos-sequoia-update-is-breaking-some-cybersecurity-tools/
| 823 | 1 |
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Amid calls for sovereign EU tech stack, Evroc raises $55M to build a hyperscale cloud in Europe
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A Swedish startup aiming to build a hyperscale cloud company in Europe has raised €50. 6 million ($55 million) in Series A funding. Evroc, as it’s called, says it’s laying the foundations for a “secure, sovereign and sustainable hyperscale cloud to reimagine the digital future of Europe. ” The announcement comes amidgrowing callstocreate a European tech stack, one independent of U. S. tech firms and the shifting political landscape. Just this week, acoalition from across Europe’s tech industrycalled for “radical action” from lawmakers to reduce the region’s reliance on foreign-owned digital infrastructure, pushing for homegrown alternatives toapps,AI models,chips, and the full gamut of cloud services. Evroc aims to capitalize on this momentum. The three-year-old company plans to build data centers and an array of cloud services. At itslaunch in 2023, Evroc outlined plans to establish eight data centers by 2028. Today, it says it has two co-location facilities in Stockholm and another two in Paris. By the end of the second quarter of this year, the company expects to have two additional facilities operational in Frankfurt, with work already underway on its first flagship data centers in Swedenand France, scheduled for completion in 2026 with AI workloads as a primary focus. “They […. ] are designed for the energy density required for AI, where racks can consume 20 times what a traditional server rack can,” Evroc CEO and founderMattias Åström(pictured above) told TechCrunch. “Both will be equipped with liquid cooling but will also host compute and storage servers. ” Evroc’s formal launch is slated for later this year, with Åström adding that it is already working with early beta customers in industries requiring a “high need for sovereignty,” including defense, public sector, healthcare, and financial services. He also hinted at additional data centers coming next year, though the company isn’t ready to confirm specifics. Europe’sdigital sovereignty agenda is nothing new. In fact, most U. S. tech giantsare already investinginlocal infrastructureto ensure compliance with EU data residency regulations. AI darlingOpenAI also recently unveileda new offering that allows customers to process and store data in Europe. But with geopolitical tensions on the rise, Åström argues that control over Europe’s infrastructure matters more than just server locations. For example, Donald Trump last monthsigned an executive orderauthorizing economic sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands, accusing it of “illegitimate and baseless actions” against the U. S. and Israel. These sanctions affect how tech companies can serve organizations, with aGuardian reportindicating that the ICC relies heavily on Microsoft’s Azure cloud for storing data. Elsewhere, Elon Musk — now a central figure in U. S. governmental operations — has previouslyadmitted to throttlingUkrainian access to Starlink satellites, operated by his company SpaceX. More recently,he claimedthat Ukraine’s entire frontline would collapse if he chose to turn it off. AlthoughMusk later backtracked, the incident served as yet another reminder of the importance of infrastructure independence. And it’s also why the EU isforging ahead with plansfor its own sovereign satellite constellation to rival Starlink. “I simply want Europe to control its own destiny,” Åström said. “And while we’re at it, try to build something that is better. ” Geopolitical turmoil aside, the AI revolution means that organizations previously reliant on on-premises infrastructure must now consider the cloud to fully leverage AI. Several European startups are already building cloud infrastructure in Europe, includingFrance’s FlexAI,Finland’s DataCrunch, andNebius in the Netherlands— an entity thatemerged from the ashes of Yandexlast year. However, while many of these players focus on AI computing, Evroc aims to build an extensive, developer-friendly hyperscale cloud that’s more akin to AWS and its ilk. The bulk of Evroc’s 60-plus employees are focused on software development, spread across Sweden, France, and the U. K. Åström noted the London hub wasn’t originally planned but became necessary to attract top talent from major tech firms. “I’m actually very excited about our London office — that wasn’t part of the initial plan, but in order to get extremely smart people that are working for the hyperscalers, it was the right decision,” Åström said. When Evroclaunched out of stealth two years agowith €13 million in funding, Åström told TechCrunch he planned to raise as much as €3 billion in capital within a couple of years. By August of last year, news broke that Evroc had raised€42 millionas part of its Series A, and now the round has closed at €50. 6 million with investments from U. S. -European venture firmBlisce,EQT Ventures,Norrsken VC, andGiant Ventures. There is no escaping the elephant in the room, though. Building anything close to what the hyperscalers have built requires a near-bottomless pit of cash — so does Evroc still plan to raise billions? “That’s still the case, but the key here is [first] getting that software stack,” Åström continued. “Europe has a lot of data centers, but we don’t really have that cloud. This equity round is really helping us build the software stack. ” The company plans to raise significantly more capital later in 2025, following a funding model similar to other cloud infrastructure players such as CoreWeave, which has grown its footprint byborrowing against collateralsuch as Nvidia chips. “Building out data centers will require a lot of additional investment, but the good news is that you can finance that with debt,” Åström said. Topics Senior Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-03-20T07:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/20/amid-calls-for-sovereign-eu-tech-stack-evroc-raises-55m-to-build-a-hyperscale-cloud-in-europe/
| 952 | 1 |
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Netflix is getting into short videos with a new vertical feed for mobile
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Netflixannouncedon Wednesday that it’s testing a short-form video feature, signaling that even a streaming giant with over 300 million subscribers is concerned about losing viewers’ time spent on mobile to apps like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. The company debuted the feature at its first-ever product and tech event, where it also revealed several other upcoming plans for the service. These plans include anAI-powered search tool, as well as a redesign of the TV homepage and improved real-time recommendations. Netflix’s new mobile-only vertical feed allows users to easily scroll through clips of its original titles. Within this feed, users can tap on buttons to watch the entire show or movie immediately, save it to their “My List,” or share it with friends. Of note is that the clips are curated from the “Today’s Top Picks for You” section rather than being chosen from Netflix’s entire library. This approach makes it specifically tailored to each user, ultimately encouraging viewers to watch the full shows. The experiment rolls out globally in the coming weeks on iOS and Android devices. It’ll appear for users as a tab on the in-app homepage. The introduction of this feature comes at a pivotal time, as competition among platforms for viewer attention intensifies. Audiences increasingly favor quick entertainment, leading to a shift in traditional viewing habits. As a result, even large players like Netflix are adapting to retain and attract subscribers. This also follows President Trump’s secondextension of the deadlinefor the TikTok ban. The latest test follows a trend among other streaming services that are trying out similar features. Tubihad its entry into short-form video last year with its “Scenes” feature. More recently,Peacocklaunched curated vertical video playlists earlier this year that not only feature short clips from TV series and films but also sports and news content. Netflix is no stranger to experimenting with short-form video content. In 2021, the platformrolled outa TikTok-inspired feature called “Fast Laughs,” which focused on funny clips. However, this new test aims to reach a broader audience beyond just comedy fans and will be more personalized. In terms of Netflix’s new homepage update, one small change implemented is that the shortcuts for “Search” and “My List” were moved to the top of the page, where they were previously located on the left-hand side, making them easier to access. Netflix also has new “callout” badges that help viewers discover titles. For example, if users are searching for the latest Emmy-winning content, these badges will be prominently displayed on the title cards featured on the homepage. Additionally, Netflix improved its real-time recommendation system. Now when subscribers search for content, it considers factors such as the trailer a viewer recently watched or the actors they are looking up. For instance, if they give a thumbs-up to the popular TV series “Wednesday,” the system will quickly adjust their homepage to display similar recommended titles. Topics Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-05-07T12:15:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/07/netflix-is-getting-into-short-videos-with-a-new-vertical-feed-for-mobile/
| 551 | 1 |
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Foundry Group is shutting down and won’t raise another fund
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Foundry Group, an 18-year-old venture firm with nearly $3. 5 billion in assets under management, has quietly decided to shut down and not raise any more funds. The move was unexpected considering that the firm announced a $500 million fund last year. Boulder, Colorado-based Foundry first announced that its current fund would be its last on January 19. The venture firm had been investing since 2007, according to Crunchbase, and had announced the $500 million fund,Foundry 2022— its eighth — in May of 2023. Over the years, Foundry has invested in more than 200 companies and nearly 50 venture firms, according to co-founder and partner Seth Levine. It had backed the likes of Fitbit, Zynga and AvidXchange, among others. The firm maintains the decision was the plan all along. When TechCrunch reached out to Levine, he declined to directly comment on the firm’s decision to shutter, and instead pointed to blogs he’d written. In oneblog, he acknowledged that the firm’s decision to completely shut down was an unusual one. He wrote: “While VC firms rarely make decisions like this, it’s precisely what we planned to do when we started Foundry in 2006. From our founding, we intentionally decided not to build a legacy or generational firm — one meant to live beyond the tenure of the founding partners. Instead, we intended to focus on the work of investing, re-evaluating each potential new fund as our fundraising cadence required…We’ve had several moments over the last decade where we thought the fund we were raising might be our last. Each of those times, after reflection and discussion, we decided to raise another fund. But not this time. Foundry 2022 will be our last fund. ” In apersonal blog, Levine noted that he began sharing publicly in January of 2023 his plan for the 2022 Foundry fund to be his “last as a partner at Foundry. ” He added: “I didn’t make a big announcement about it – just started mentioning it in situations where it seemed natural to do so…At the time, I wasn’t sure if we would make the same decision for Foundry as a whole, but since I knew my intentions, I thought it would be appropriate to be open about it. After more discussions internally and careful consideration, we decided that the 2022 fund would be Foundry’s final fund as well. ” Levine continued: “Choosing not to be a legacy firm is one way we’ve challenged norms in the venture industry and just one of many things we take pride in as we reflect back upon our time building Foundry. We’ve loved experimenting with the venture model, whether that was building the first VC AngelList syndicate, investing in markets across the country where venture capital was less prevalent, being among the first GPs to institutionalize a fund investment practice, and attempting to bring transparency, openness (and hopefully some humor) to the venture industry. ” Foundry still has 33% to 40% left out of that fund to invest, Levine told theDenver Business Journal. In his blog, Levine said specificallythe firm plans to “continue to lead Series A and B financings” out of the fund. The move raises questions for its portfolio companies. Foundry says it will continue to invest out of its newest fund, but for founders, accepting capital from a firm that is winding down is a risk and could make securing follow-on funding that much harder. Meanwhile, Levine maintained to theDenver Business Journalthat he expects all the funds to be deployed byaround 2026 and that the firm will then “still work with businesses in which it has investments. ” In his personalblog, Levine wrote: “We raised our last Foundry fund at a fortuitous time, just as the markets cooled off (it’s a great time to be investing), and we have another two years or so of new investments to look forward to. Not to mention a decade or longer of work with the portfolio after that. ” The investor also told the Denver Business Journal that he would “be with Foundry until its work is completely done,” adding that co-founder Brad Feld and partner Chris Moody “plan to do the same. ” He could not say what the other partners would “get up to in the next few years. ” In her ownblog postFoundry partner Jaclyn Hester wrote that she was “focused on supporting our portfolio and leading new early-stage rounds as we deploy the remainder of the 2022 fund over the next few years. ” Foundry is not the only venture firm to recently unexpectedly announce it was winding down. In December, Boston-based OpenView abruptlyannounced it would stop investing in new companiesless than a year afterraising $570 millionfor its seventh fund. Update: This article was updated post-publication to reflect there no departures at the firm as a result of the decision – voluntary or otherwise, according to Levine. It also was updated to include further details behind the firm’s decision not to raise any more funds. Topics Sr. Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-02-13T23:56:23 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/foundry-group-is-shutting-down-and-wont-raise-another-fund/
| 903 | 1 |
8e7ff7f4f10ccca41db2f50d5242afa4
|
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Framework’s repairability philosophy is set to expand beyond the laptop
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Framework Computerwas ahead of the curve. The company was founded in 2019, as 20 U. S. states began exploring potentialright to repairbills. It delivered its first product, the Framework 13, in 2021, a year before New York enacted its landmark (if flawed) Digital Fair Repair Act. Today,the companysells its repairable laptops in 13 countries across North America and Europe, along with Taiwan. Even so, Framework has been deliberate — cautious even — when it comes to raising. Its last major round was an $18 million Series A, closed in early 2022. “When we closed a Series A round two years ago, we shared our strategy around fundraising, which is to raise as little as possible and focus funds on efficiently expanding the reach of our mission,” the company notes. “You can now see the results of that investment with Framework Laptop 16 out in customers’ hands. ” On Tuesday, the company announced a follow-up — a $17 million Series A-1. “We are a consumer company that’s not doing AI that successfully raised funding in 2024,” founder and CEO Nirav Patel tells TechCrunch, with a bit of a laugh. There is, indeed, something oddly refreshing in a company that hasn’t shoehorned some unrelated bit of ChatGPT functionality into their pitch. Instead, Framework remains focused on its core business: user-repairable and upgradable laptops. Patel is, however, quick to note, “fundamentally, we are a consumer electronics company, not a laptop company. ” That simple clarification highlights a key element of this fundraising round. While generative AI might not be in the cards, an expanded portfolio certainly is. In addition to “scaling the reach” of its current offerings, this new funding will go toward “extending to additional product categories. ” Patel did not disclose specifics. The European firmFairphone, which operates on a similar philosophy of consumer access, recently expanded its own portfolio. In addition to smartphones, the company now offers repairable headphones and earbuds. “We love what they’re doing,” Patel says of the kindred company. “It’s obviously a brutally competitive category that they’re in, and they’ve been doing quite well in it. ” Part of the funding will go toward hiring. Framework is planning to fill a total of 10 roles in 2024, adding to a headcount that is currently just under 50. In spite of that figure, the company maintains a wide international reach, including the brand new territory of Poland. “It’s all direct to consumer,” says Patel. “We managed our go-to-market directly. We don’t deal with distributors or channels or retail, and we have this very, very short pipeline from warehouse to the consumer’s doorstep. That makes it operationally incredibly efficient. For the most part, we have a positive cash cycle, in the sense that we’re collecting money from the customers buying our product before we need to pay suppliers, in many cases. ” Fairphone launches easy-to-repair earbuds The round was led by Spark Capital and features Buckley Ventures, Anzu Partners, Cooler Master and Pathbreaker Ventures. In addition to the $17 million, the company is opening up $1 million to equity crowdfunding through $10,000 investments. “It’s a little bit of an experiment,” says Patel. “We’re bringing in 100 investors, and probably for the most part, the vast majority of them are not going to be professional investors. This might even be the only private company investment any of them have ever made. We’ll see what that’s like, having that 100-person community board. ”
| 2024-04-23T14:00:17 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/23/frameworks-repairability-philosophy-is-set-to-expand-beyond-the-laptop/
| 571 | 1 |
b7fd3b780254ddcdefe05bb1b4c9ae2d
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Plug In South Los Angeles helps build diverse startups in a traditionally underserved area
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Derek Smith, the founder ofPlug In Ventures, grew up in southern Los Angeles and saw firsthand the frustration that stems from lack of economic development. That’s why he decided to come home in 20144, after spending the first part of his career in NYC, to start a startup incubator in his old neighborhood. He wanted to help aspiring entrepreneurs learn the ropes of growing a startup and hoped that in the process, building these businesses could help bring higher-paying jobs to the area. Smith already knew that founders from historically underrepresented groups face a bigger challenge when it comes to getting funding. Funding for Black founders fell for the third straight yearto an historic lowin 2023 — and it was pretty paltry to begin with. Black founders last year accounted for just 0. 48% of total venture money, a mere $661 million out of $136 billion allocated, perCrunchbase data. That’s a substantial institutional roadblock. And it’s why Smith’s ultimate goal for Plug In South LA is to smooth the way for Black and brown entrepreneurs looking to build tech startups and need help and guidance. That could help them become successful businesses and could help people who help build wealth and create jobs in areas often left behind by startup ecosystems. “We really want to support those founders and entrepreneurs who can build businesses that can scale broadly,” Smith told TechCrunch. Funding to Black founders was down in 2023 for the third year in a row As with many startup incubators, the people who come through Plug In participate in a 12-week program, which involves about five hours per week outside of their day jobs running their companies. The programming includes weekly workshops along with more industry-specific groups and advice from people in the tech community who work with each cohort on things like pitch deck critiques, the importance of storytelling, financial planning and so forth. The program concludes with a demo day for investors. Smith sees a bevy of underutilized talent in areas like South LA. He hopes that by helping to incubate these companies, as they scale and become successful, that they share his broader vision of giving back by creating jobs and supporting talent in underserved or overlooked communities. For him, the philosophy behind his firm comes down to economic development and building a network of entrepreneurs, instead of relying on outside forces to help. “The politicians don’t want to do the work. The [Big Tech] companies don’t want to do the work. The entrepreneurs have to do it. And this is why we have to find entrepreneurs that are in alignment with this broader vision,” he said. Vaughn Blake, a partner at Blue Bear Ventures, says he met Smith right after he launched Plug In South LA and was asked to participate on a panel during one of the early demo days. “Once I realized what Derek was up to, and recognizing the need for that type of organization and mentorship here in Los Angeles, I’ve been happy to participate,” Blake told TechCrunch. Smith took some time to build up the organization. For the first several years, prior to the first official Plug In South LA cohort in 2020, he ran monthly and quarterly programs focused on helping diverse founders who were in the early stages of building a startup. Those programs eventually evolved into the more formal accelerator program that exists today, according to Smith. Currently, he’s in the process of recruiting the incubator’s fifth cohort, which will take place later this year with 12 to 15 participants, depending on how many companies he chooses. One of the more successful companies to emerge so far from the incubator isChargerHelp, a platform aimed at helping field technicians troubleshoot and fix broken EV charging stations. The founders went through Smith’s accelerator program in 2020 shortly after launching the company. ChargerHelp co-founder and CEO Kameale Terry says the experience was invaluable, giving her specific help with things like refining her pitch. She credits at least in part the time spent in the incubator with her landing a $17. 5 million Series A. To date, the company has raised over $20 million, perCrunchbase data. As part of the broader goal to create jobs in the community, ChargerHelp is succeeding at that, too, going from about a dozen employees when the company entered the program to close to 45 today. Terry says one of the advantages of the program is that there is a network made up of people of color, all facing the same challenges, that continues to grow and help participants long after they leave the program. “This program is interesting because I can find folks that have a similar lived experience, where I can get help and offer help. And it’s something really cool to be a part of,” she said. In addition to ChargerHelp, some other companies that have emerged from the program includeSwayBrand, a platform designed to help connect diverse creators with agencies and brands. The startup has raised almost $2 million, according to Smith. Another isThriveLink, which has created a product that uses AI to help underserved patients find and apply to the social services they need. Smith says the company has launched pilots with several major health insurers. Until recently, Smith was not investing directly in the companies that came through the program because of a lack of funds, but that is changing with future cohorts as the firm moves from a free model to one based on equity. “We’re looking at a capital solution piece with an adjacent fund that we are rolling out that will invest in our cohorts moving forward, and we will take a 5% equity ownership in the companies with a follow-on investment on top of that equity,” Smith said
| 2024-03-03T16:00:12 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/03/plug-in-south-la-diverse-startup-incubator/
| 962 | 1 |
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|
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Google’s new AI hub in Paris proves that Google feels insecure about AI
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This morning, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai inaugurated a new hub in Paris dedicated to artificial intelligence. This hub is located in a newly renovated building near Google’s main office in Paris. It will host around 300 researchers and engineers. But if you pay close attention to Google’s whereabouts in Paris, you may think that Google already launched an AI research center in Parisback in 2018. In fact, the company told me that it doesn’t plan to create a new AI team for this new hub. There’s some new office space, but the team of 300 researchers and engineers who are going to work from the new hub were already working for Google Research and DeepMind — as well as YouTube and Chrome. And yet, several high-profile government members, such as Bruno Le Maire (the minister of the economy) and Valérie Pécresse (the president of the Île-de-France region) were there to welcome Sundar Pichai and congratulate Google on the announcement. Given the involvement of Google’s top leader and government members, let’s dissect this communication effort. With the positioning of this announcement, Google wants to remain near the top of the list when it comes to attracting AI talent. Google could have sent an email to its employees to tell them when they can pick up their badges for the new office. Instead, the company decided that it was a PR opportunity. The company needs to show that it cares about AI and that it’s a priority. And there’s a reason why Google thinks it can attract AI talent in Paris. Over the past few years, several tech giants have set up AI research labs there. In addition to Google, Facebook (now Meta) created its Paris research labback in 2015with Yann LeCun at the helm of the AI initiative — this research group is called FAIR, for Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research. Since then, many researchers and engineers left their jobs at Big Tech companies to create startups. Mistral AI is arguably the most emblematic example of that as the young startup has alreadyraised hundreds of millionsof dollars to develop new foundational models. But there’sa thriving ecosystem of AI startups in Paris. Examples includeNabla,Dust,GladiaandGiskard. In just a few years, some of the people working for these startups could also choose to work for Google if they’re looking for something a bit different. At the same time, it shows once again that Google is insecure about artificial intelligence. Given that this building will host teams working not only on AI research projects but also on consumer products like YouTube and Chrome, Google could have simply called it a “Google hub. ” But the company decided that this was an AI hub. They want to say loud and clear that they are an AI company. Sure, the tech giantjust launched Gemini Ultra, its most powerful large language model to date. But most people still think about ChatGPT when they think about an AI assistant. A year agoat a press conference in Paris, Google unveiled Bard, its AI chatbot assistant that is now called Gemini. It was a rushed effort to catch up with ChatGPT. But it was as much about launching a product as it was about planting a flag that shows that the company is capable of releasing an LLM-based chatbot — and then iterate. You could consider that today’s new AI hub is the continuation of that strategy of regular announcements about AI. To be fair, Google isn’t the only tech giant making grand gestures about AI investments. In addition to its financial commitment in ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI, Microsoft alsoannounced todaya €3. 2 billion ($3. 4 billion) investment over the next two years in AI infrastructure in Germany. Once again, this investment isn’t focused on artificial intelligence exclusively. Microsoft plans to create data centers in Germany for its Azure cloud platform. Some of Azure’s products are focused on AI, but it’s a much larger cloud provider with clients that have nothing to do with the AI industry. So it’s not just a Google thing. Topics Senior Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-02-15T17:29:20 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/googles-new-ai-hub-in-paris-proves-that-google-feels-insecure-about-ai/
| 746 | 1 |
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Bharti will become BT’s biggest shareholder after buying a 25%, $4B stake from Altice
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’s former incumbent telecoms carrier, is picking up a major new investor today as telecoms companies look for stronger footing in the rapidly shifting technology and communications market. Bharti, the Indian tech and telecoms giant that owns Airtel, said it would purchase a 24. 5% stake currently owned by Altice. Based on BT’smarket capof around £13 billion ($16 billion) at the time of the deal, it values the stake at around $4 billion. Bharti said in a statement that it would buy 9. 99% immediately, and would acquire the remainder after regulatory clearance. Altice has found itself on unstable footing over its debt-led acquisitions and corporate scandals, as detailed inthis storyat the end of 2023. Altice, which owns stakes in other technology and communications companies, had bought its stake in BT in several tranches, initially in 2021 and later inMay 2023. BT’s share price has dropped since then partly due to the broader decline of technology and communications stocks. And Altice now appears to be paring down its operational assets: This deal comes on the heels of itssale of media platform Teads to web recommendation platform Outbrainless than two weeks ago for $725 in cash and deferred payments, plus stock, in a transaction valued at $1 billion. 5G and AI are two of the biggest existential milestones for telcos at the moment. They might turn out to be threats, or opportunities, depending on how carriers play their cards. Bharti cited both in its rationale for this deal, likely looking for better economies of scale on both fronts in terms of purchasing, development and strategy as competition heats up from technology giants that threaten to further cannibalize telcos with new approaches to communication that bypass telco infrastructure. “Bharti hopes that this investment will further help create new synergies in the telecom sector between both countries in the areas of AI and 5G R&D and core engineering amongst others, offering great potential to collaborate on industry best practices and emerging technologies,” the company said in a statement. Airtel, Bharti’s mobile carrier, is in hot competition with Reliance’s Jio in India in what many consider a duopoly, so investing abroad gives Bharti more diversification. Interestingly, BT — riding high on its incumbency status in the U. K. — was once the one doing the investing: It held a 21% stake in Bharti between 1997 and 2001. “Bharti and British Telecom (BT) have an enduring relationship going back more than two decades wherein BT owned 21% stake along with 2 board seats in Bharti Airtel Limited from 1997-2001,” noted Bharti’s founder and chairman, Sunil Bharti Mittal, in a statement. “Today marks a significant milestone in Bharti Group’s history as we invest in BT — an iconic British Company. ” BT was considerably less verbose on the news of the deal. “We welcome investors who recognise the long-term value of our business, and this scale of investment from Bharti Global is a great vote of confidence in the future of BT Group and our strategy,” Allison Kirkby, BT’s CTO, said in astatement, the company’s only comment on the deal. “BT has enjoyed a long association with Bharti Enterprises, and I’m pleased that they share our ambition and vision for the future of our business. They have a strong track record of success in the sector, and I look forward to ongoing and positive engagement with them in the months and years to come. ” Additional reporting by Manish Singh
| 2024-08-12T07:40:15 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/12/bharti-will-become-bts-biggest-shareholder-after-buying-a-25-4b-stake-from-altice/
| 574 | 1 |
41ae4349e638e1a0b9a78e7d06b9398d
|
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AI invades ‘word of the year’ lists at Oxford, Cambridge and Merriam-Webster
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Few would disagree that 2023 was, in the world of technology at least, dominated by artificial intelligence. The dictionaries have taken note in their “word of the year” lists, and notably all the AI-related words they highlight are, in fact, existing words that have been appropriated and regurgitated with new meanings. A little on the nose, isn’t it? Cambridge’s word is “hallucinate,”which is of course the habit of generative AI models like ChatGPT to invent anything from dates to entire people rather than admit it doesn’t know. The problem is that these systems don’t know what they don’t know,because they don’t know anything at all. As complex word prediction models, all that matters is that they produce a sentence that resembles their training data. If you ask it for famous 18th-century German surgeons and it doesn’t have any exact matches, it will simply hallucinate something close, like Arman Verdigger of the Einschloss Research Hospital in Tulingen. See, I can do it too! All that matters is that it sounds plausible. Unfortunately, these hallucinations are so confidently stated that countless of them have been accepted without question as real. Hallucinations can be put to good use, though: Generative imagery and audio is entirely and deliberately “hallucinated” in that it is a mishmash of the model’s training data but not an exact recreation of any of it (though it can get mighty close). This too has its dangers, as AI-generated art and photos of varying quality proliferate in numerous contexts. The acceptance of the word despite its original limitation to human perception “underscores our readiness to ascribe human-like attributes to AI,” said Cambridge AI ethicist Henry Shevlin. “As this decade progresses, I expect our psychological vocabulary will be further extended to encompass the strange abilities of the new intelligences we’re creating. ” Merriam-Webstergrabbed the other end of the stick with the selection of “authentic” as their word of the year. “With the rise of artificial intelligence—and its impact on deepfake videos, actors’ contracts, academic honesty, and a vast number of other topics—the line between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ has become increasingly blurred. ” While “authentic” didn’t get a brand new definition, it did get a new and important connotation. For years we have worried about whether or not something we or others are doing is authentic. Authenticity is a paradox of modern consumerism: It can’t be bought or sold, and as such it is perhaps the most valuable and marketable quality in the world. Before, we had to worry whether a trend or item represented the authentic interests and choices of a person or group. Now we have to wonder whether, like the Pope’s fabulous Balenciaga puffer, a thing is real in the first place. “Deepfake” also made the longlist at M-W, graduating (whether mercifully or unfortunately) from a niche tech for revenge porn to a general-purpose term for generative AI. Its antecedents may not be respectable, but we can’t choose what enters the zeitgeist. Case in point,Oxford’s word of the year— which it would be much better for this article had it been AI-related, but unfortunately the AI term is relegated to runner-up. “Prompt,” a versatile and underused word, has gained another definition with its now well-known meaning relating to the human side of generative AI. When you tell an AI system to put together a list of article ideas based on the current weather, you are providing the “prompt,” and indeed the word quickly became a verb, and one “prompts” a system now. Of course these are perfectly appropriate extensions of prompt’s existing definitions. We have prompted a response for centuries. And as a noun, the use of “prompt” was originally reversed in computer interfaces: The command line prompt was itself prompting the human for a response. So here we have an interesting reversal. Who is prompting whom — or what? Whether this has empowered or diluted the word is a matter of taste. If you were wondering what Oxford’sactualword of the year is, it’s “rizz,” a playful shorthand for “charisma” and something that AI arguably lacks entirely, like Tom Holland. It was inevitable that AI terminology would infiltrate the lexicon, though I’m a little sad that the cooler terms like “latent space” have yet to enter general use. The technology is moving fast enough, however, that it is perhaps better to stick to the well established, as indicated by the judgment exercised by my peers, as I would like to think them, in the lexicographic world. We await further words of the year, however, as bolder dictionary content teams consider whether vectors and embeddings deserve a boost as well. Topics Writer & Photographer Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. His personal website is coldewey. cc. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-12-04T19:15:50 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/04/ai-invades-word-of-the-year-lists-at-oxford-cambridge-and-merriam-webster/
| 858 | 1 |
006e57f96148de6894079a71c152c975
|
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OpenAI tempers expectations with less bombastic, GPT-5-less DevDay this fall
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Last year, OpenAI held asplashy press eventin San Francisco during which the company announceda bevy of new products and tools, including the ill-fated App Store-likeGPT Store. This year will be aquieter affair, however. On Monday, OpenAI said it’s changing the format of its DevDay conference from a tentpole event into a series of on-the-road developer engagement sessions. The company also confirmed that it won’t release its next major flagship model during DevDay, instead focusing on updates to its APIs and developer services. “We’re not planning to announce our next model at DevDay,” an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We’ll be focused more on educating developers about what’s available and showcasing dev community stories. ” OpenAI’s DevDay events this year will take place in San Francisco on October 1, London on October 30, and Singapore on November 21. All will feature workshops, breakout sessions, demos with the OpenAI product and engineering staff and developer spotlights. Registration will cost $450 (or $0 through scholarships available for eligible attendees), with applications to close on August 15. OpenAI has in recent months taken more incremental steps than monumental leaps in generative AI, opting to hone and fine-tune its tools as it trains the successor to its current leading modelsGPT-4oandGPT-4o mini. The company has refined approaches toimprovingthe overall performance of its models andpreventingthose models from going off the rails as often as they previously did, but OpenAI appears to have lost its technical lead in the generative AI race — at least according to somebenchmarks. One of the reasons could be the increasing challenge of finding high-quality training data. OpenAI’s models, like most generative AI models, are trained on massive collections of web data — web data that many creators are choosing to gate over fears that their data will beplagiarizedor that they won’t receive credit or pay. More than 35% of the world’s top 1,000 websitesnow block OpenAI’s web crawler, according to data from Originality. AI. And around 25% of data from “high-quality” sources has been restricted from the major datasets used to train AI models, astudyby MIT’s Data Provenance Initiative found. Should the current access-blocking trend continue, the research group Epoch AIpredictsthat developers will run out of data to train generative AI models between 2026 and 2032. That — and fear ofcopyright lawsuits— has forced OpenAI to enter costly licensing agreements withpublishersandvariousdatabrokers. OpenAI is said to have developed areasoning techniquethat could improve its models’ responses on certain questions, particularly math questions, and the company’s CTO Mira Murati haspromiseda future model with “Ph. D. -level” intelligence. (OpenAI revealed in ablog postin May that it had begun training its next “frontier” model. ) That’s pledging a lot — and there’s high pressure to deliver. OpenAI’s reportedlyhemorrhagingbillions of dollars training its models and hiring top-paid research staff. OpenAI still facesmanycontroversies, such as usingcopyrighted data for training, restrictiveemployee NDAs,and effectivelypushing outsafety researchers. The slower product cycle might have the beneficial side effect ofcounteringthe narrative that OpenAI has deprioritized work on AI safety in the pursuit of more capable, powerful generative AI technologies
| 2024-08-05T20:09:05 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/05/openai-tempers-expectations-with-less-bombastic-gpt-5-less-devday-this-fall/
| 504 | 1 |
b6800776d66beb335e87b12e6de04cdf
|
{"bias_density": 0.29, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
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South Loop Ventures closes $21M fund in Houston to build up local tech ecosystem
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South Loop Ventures, a Houston-based venture firm, announced a $21 million Fund I, with Rice Management Company and Chevron Technology Ventures serving as anchor investors. The firm, which launched in 2022, focuses on seed and pre-seed companies, with $400,000 as the average check size. It also primarily hopes to focus on backing founders of color. Zach Ellis (pictured above), the firm’sfounder and managing director,spoke to TechCrunch about his final close. He said the fund is general and will invest in founders nationwide, though it does have a preference for sectors that “reflect the industrial strength of Houston,” such as healthcare, energy, space, and climate. Texas Capital Bank and The Great Commission Foundation of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas also participated in the round. So far, South Loop has made 13 investments and hopes to invest in a total of at least 30. “We thought it was important to have a fund focused on diverse founders here in Houston, given Houston’s diversity,” he said. Houston is one of the nation’smost diverse cities, ranking at number five. Asked if he was worried about the anti-DEI backlash, as his fund targets founders of color, Ellis offered a simple response. “We strongly believe that venture capital should be accessible to everyone and that underinvested and diverse teams offer a unique opportunity for significant returns,” he said. Despite his growing love for Houston, Ellis actually hails from New Orleans and started his career in the military. “I’ve always been a very mission-driven person, so after serving seven years active duty in the Navy, I transitioned to the corporate sector. ” That led him to work as a healthcare consultant, which later exposed him to a corporate innovation group. That group then taught him about how to use technology in a way that helps people with the mundane aspects of everyday life. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe we get paid to do this,’” he recalled. “And my colleague said, ‘You should see what the VCs do. ” He networked until he landed on the corporate venture team at PepsiCo, where he performed a mix of technology scouting, corporate partnerships, and investing in food and agriculture-related funds. From there, he went to Ohio State, where he helped manage a pool of money to later invest in Midwest-focused VC funds and startups spun out from the university. “It was around that time that the pandemic happened, the George Floyd murder happened, and I was able to reflect on my career and the impact I was having and the fact that I was often the only Black or brown face in any room that I was in,” Ellis said. “I wanted to do something about it. ” Serendipitously, he received a call from a friend in Houston, who told him that the city was working to raise its profile in tech and innovation. His friend, in particular, said many stakeholders had an appetite to support a fund backing founders of color. That, and he had already told many of them that Ellis would be the perfect person to lead one. So, Ellis came down to Houston and birthed the idea for South Loop Ventures. He described the fundraising process as “difficult. ” “We began just as the market started to slow down, and it continued to become more challenging,” he said. “While we had strong initial momentum, it ultimately took us 24 months to complete. ” He met most of the fund’s current investors through a network of stakeholders, adding that Mercury Fund in particular helped connect him with other investors in the ecosystem. Next, Ellis is hoping to lure some more tech talent to the city. That, and, of course, pour some money into founders looking to build the next big thing. “People are naturally drawn to live here, which I believe will help attract top-tier founders who will see not only the business opportunities but also feel welcome and comfortable,” he said. “With South Loop’s support, we aim to ensure they also feel empowered. ” Topics Senior Reporter, Venture Dominic-Madori Davis is a senior venture capital and startup reporter at TechCrunch. She is based in New York City. You can contact her on Signal at +1 (646)-831-7565. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-05-20T13:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/20/south-loop-ventures-closes-21m-fund-in-houston-to-build-up-local-tech-ecosystem/
| 772 | 1 |
6bc0239d7c36bdf9e175cd63d651f9f5
|
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Tofu is building an omni-channel marketing platform for enterprises
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When EJ Cho started his first company in 2018, he was exposed to what it takes to market a product. He was surprised to find a market filled with different single-use tools. “It was a very frustrating experience,” Cho told TechCrunch. “I had to learn and juggle all these different tools. It felt like a very inefficient way of getting your word out to users. I’ve always been fascinated about how to make marketing a bit more efficient and effective. ” Cho (pictured above on the left) sat on this idea for a few years while working on engineering teams at companies such as Meta, Affirm, and Fast. After the advancements in generative AI in 2022, he realized he might be able to solve the marketing problems he had years earlier using AI. The result wasTofu, an AI-driven B2B marketing platform that’s designed to bring all of a company’s potential marketing campaigns into one space. The platform integrates with a marketing team’s existing workflow, and tools like HubSpot and Salesforce, and uses AI to automatically modify marketing copy for different marketing channels and can personalize marketing content for different customer types. Cho, Tofu co-founder and CEO, said that while he ran into his frustrations with marketing tools while building a consumer-facing company, he decided to focus on B2B marketing because it is significantly more text heavy than B2C marketing, which made it a more natural choice for a generative AI approach. Tofu’s team consulted more than 40 different CMOs before writing any code, Cho said, to figure out what their biggest pain points were. The two areas that came up most consistently were that CMOs wanted to be able to personalize content across different market segments and to repurpose content for different channels. Cho said that’s where Tofu focused first. “If you really think about it, there’s not that much delta between what you want to write for maybe an email versus what’s for a landing page copy,” Cho said. “Obviously there’s these small nuances, but it’s nothing that cannot be embedded under one tool. ” San Francisco-based Tofu launched in late 2023 and has seen strong demand. The company boasts 12x revenue growth, although it’s worth noting that it’s only been in operation for a little over a year. Customers include DeepScribe, Check Point, and Wunderkind, among others. The company is announcing a $12 million Series A round led by SignalFire with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Tau Ventures, and Correlation Ventures, among a number of existing VC investors and angel investors. Using AI in marketing is not necessarily a new concept — nor a post-ChatGPT concept, either. Jasper, which helps enterprise companies with AI-driven marketing, has been around for a decade and is valued at more than $1. 5 billion. Cordial, another cross-channel marketing platform, has raised more than $70 million in venture funding. Cho acknowledged that the space is crowded but added that he thinks Tofu is in a good position because it touches so many different teams within a marketing department, compared to a single-use tool. That makes it stickier than some of Tofu’s other competitors, he said. The fact that Tofu isn’t just a ChatGPT wrapper and offers an integrated end-to-end solution makes them stand out, he added. Now that Tofu has closed its Series A round, the company is going expand the product’s capabilities as it works toward building a source of truth for marketing teams. “It is a noisy space,” Cho said. “The way we position ourselves is to basically say we replace and can support the multiple use cases you’re purchasing individual tools for with one platform. So that unified platform is a very appealing value proposition for customers, especially enterprise customers. ” Topics Senior Reporter, Venture Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-02-13T18:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/13/tofu-is-building-a-omni-channel-marketing-platform-for-enterprises/
| 695 | 1 |
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ElectronX is building a market for electricity trading
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Renewable electricity is cheap and clean, but also less predictable than firing up a gas turbine. Turns out that’s both a problem and an opportunity. Most solutions to the problem of intermittency involve pairing solar panels and wind turbines with batteries, which store the power for use when the sun sets or the wind dies down. The batteries act as a sort of hedge against those natural disruptions. But pricey physical assets aren’t the only way to hedge risk. Markets are another. One startup,ElectronX, is in the process of building an exchange in which buyers and sellers can speculate on the price of electricity on an intraday basis. The goal, the company said, is to help both sides manage risk and hedge volatility, taking some of the financial uncertainty out ofrenewable energy. To reach that goal, ElectronX has raised $10 million in a follow-on round led by Systemiq Capital with participation from Equinor Ventures, Shell Ventures, and Innovation Endeavors, the company told TechCrunch. The new investment follows a $15 million seed the startup raised in June 2024. For the most part, the electricity market in the U. S. is highly regulated, built on assumptions that were formed when electricity was largely generated by coal-fired power plants. They ran day in, day out, forming a stable base on which more expensive power plants reacted to fluctuations in demand. But as solar and wind have entered the market, they’ve turned some of those assumptions on their heads. Unlike large fossil fuel power plants, renewable power can be turned on and off quickly. Batteries add to the cost but offer even more speed and flexibility in responding to shifts in demand. Those qualities have opened the door to new ways of trading power, ElectronX argues. The company’s proposed exchange would allow electricity suppliers and consumers access to futures and options contracts that capture intraday volatility in pricing. ElectronX is still waiting on approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, but should that happen, the company’s smaller contract sizes and more direct access should lower the financial barriers present in today’s electricity markets, the company said. The goal is to allowsmaller companiesto play a larger role in electricity markets, similar to how retail traders can participate in other markets. “By leveraging more precise financial products, renewable assets should see better return profiles and faster payback periods,” Innovation Endeavors said in a statement. Update: Clarifies how capacity is bought and sold and updates attribution in last paragraph. Topics Senior Reporter, Climate Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-02-19T17:05:51 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/19/electronx-is-building-a-market-for-electricity-trading/
| 487 | 0.9 |
356a49bac3f66159c04aae03a31724c7
|
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How to stop doomscrolling
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The world is bad sometimes, but it feels even worse if you can’t stop staring into the all-consuming abyss that is the 6-inch screen of a smartphone, following you through space and time. It taunts you with its compact, light build that’s small enough to slip into your pocket and take anywhere, and its siren call is so strong that for some reason, we cannot sleep without our phone on our nightstands. As we weatherthe horrors around us, it may occur to you that you would feel calmer and more attentive and balanced if you did not pick up your phone dozens of times a day to doomscroll. It’s messing with our brainsto intersperse our day with glimpses into the most extreme, engagement-baiting TikToks, only to flip over to X or Bluesky and see crushing news headlines. Like any bad habit, doomscrolling is hard to kick. But it’s not hopeless. So how do you stop doomscrolling? We have some ideas about how you can set yourself up for success. First of all, you aren’t the problem. The problem is that our lives have become deeply intertwined with tech companies that are looking to capture as much of our time as possible. If I use my Apple Watch to track a workout, I end up seeing text messages crop up while I’m trying to catch my breath after running up a steep hill. If I go on Spotify to listen to a specific album, I open the app and immediately see recommendations for podcasts and audiobooks that I’m not typically interested in. Or if I download Snapchat solely for a group chat where my friends send pictures of their pets, then each pet picture comes with some advertisement, extraneous push notification, or AR marketing filter that I didn’t sign up for. It’s no wonder that our phones make us feel crazy. I don’t believe that Mark Zuckerberg is sitting in his lair — probably within his “metaverse” — dreaming up ways to personally make my life worse. But it is the inherent nature of consumer tech companies that our attention is what keeps them afloat, and the more we pay attention to them, the happier their investors are, and the stock prices rise, and so on. Even with the knowledge of how these companies operate, it’s still difficult to break our bad habits. I will still open my Instagram account to see what my friend sent me, only to regain my consciousness 10 minutes later after I’ve watched dozens of Reels. For the first several years after Apple introduced the Screen Time feature on iPhones, I chose deliberately not to turn it on — I was afraid of what I might learn about myself. But that fear in itself told me that I have a problem. Knowledge is power, and if we know which apps are sucking up most of our time, then we can curb how much time we spend on them. Here’s how to set screen time limits for specific apps on iOS: Apple’s built-in Screen Time tools are effective, but they’re a bit easy to circumvent; if you’re watching a great TikTok and suddenly get a pop-up that your time is up, you can just tap a button to give yourself another 15 minutes … and then do the same thing after another 15 minutes go by. Some people opt to use third-party apps to motivate them to reduce their screen time, which can address potential pitfalls of Apple’s existing functionality. Here are some apps that are designed to limit your screen time: We rounded up some physical devicesthat can help you stop looking at screens too much, as well. So, you’ve opened TikTok and your screen time limits have denied you access, but now you don’t know what to do. Maybe you’re standing in line at the coffee shop and need a distraction. And sure, in an ideal world, we could simply be bored without spontaneously combusting, but this isn’t an ideal world. Here are some other things you can do on your phone that do not involve social media: Topics Senior Writer Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B. A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos. Send tips through Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to @amanda. 100. For anything else, email amanda@techcrunch. com. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-03-17T21:16:14 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/17/how-to-stop-doomscrolling/
| 863 | 1 |
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|
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Ask not for whom the Louvre of Bluesky tolls, it tolls for thee
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It’s a sad weekend over at Bluesky, where one of the best accounts hasdisappeared— although we can still hope for its resurrection. Known as The Louvre of Bluesky, the account in question struck fear into the hearts of bad posters everywhere. While it posted commentary and jokes of its own, its most brutally funny and haunting work came in the form of screenshots capturing rogue Bluesky posts in all their unhinged glory. It’s hard to write a proper appreciation now that the Louvre has vanished, and it’s truly impossible to create a full taxonomy of all the varieties ofposter’s diseaseit managed to capture in the wild. Perhaps the defining characteristic of posts memorialized in the Louvre of Bluesky — beyond the simple failure to get a joke — was a scolding tone, along with a sense of absolute outrage that someone, somewhere might be having fun on the internet. Maybe I’m projecting too much onto a screenshot-filled anonymous social media account, but to me, it always felt like the exact opposite ofthe tedious, ad nauseum complaintsthat Bluesky is a liberal echo chamber. This wasn’t someone who’d spent a few minutes on the site just to confirm their suspicions and write the umpteenth version of the same op-ed. Whether they loved Bluesky or hated it, whoever operated the account clearly knew the site’s darkest corners; they understood what absolute weirdos its users could be. The account also felt, at times, like a warning — that any of us, in a moment of weakness, could post something clueless or cringe. Just knowing the Louvre of Bluesky was out there was enough toscare me(not often enough, I’m sure) into deleting a couple of dumb or obvious replies. So where has the Louvre of Bluesky gone? Ina post on Patreon, the account’s author said it would be taken down “temporarily” due to “a loser and a coward” emailing their bosses and their wife’s bosses. They added that they’re “not sure if the account will stay closed. ” It’s not much to go on. I can only hope that likethe real museum, the Louvre of Bluesky will be able to reopen soon. But even if it doesn’t, its spirit will continue haunting all of us who remember we’re just a few keystrokes away from being immortalized for a bad post
| 2025-07-05T20:11:39 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/05/ask-not-for-whom-the-louvre-of-bluesky-tolls-it-tolls-for-thee/
| 385 | 0.9 |
d06035425f467d7821187e51efeedbd1
|
{"bias_density": 0.65, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 2, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 1, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 4, "concerns": []}
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Instagram now lets you speed up reels just like on TikTok
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Meta-owned Instagram is copying yet another feature from TikTok. This time, it’s the ability for users to play a reel at 2x speed by long pressing on the right or left side of their screen. When TikTok first launched, videos could only be 15 seconds long. As the years passed and TikTok rose in popularity, the social network rolled out support for longer videos. With this, TikTok introduced the option for users to speed up videos, as they had been trained to consume content more quickly. Instagram Reels also started off by allowing users to post videos that were only up to 15 seconds in length. Today, users can share videos that are up to 3 minutes long. Like TikTok, Instagram wants to give users the option to watch more content quickly with the new fast-forward option. The ability to fast-forward a video increases the chances of a viewer actually reaching the end of longer videos, especially since the idea behind Reels is to offer users quick, bite-sized pieces of entertainment. This can be attributed to concerns that the rise of short-form video content may benegatively impacting our attention spansand ability to focus on longer-form content. Given that Instagram Reels is a direct clone of TikTok, it’s not surprising that the platform is borrowing specific features from the short-form video platform. It’s not the first time Instagram has done so either, asits Remix featureis a copy of TikTok’s Duet tool. Topics Consumer News Reporter Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor’s degree from University of Toronto and a master’s degree in journalism from Western University. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-03-27T17:51:06 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/27/instagram-now-lets-you-speed-up-videos-just-like-on-tiktok/
| 356 | 0.9 |
74dd795eeb56ad2698fd1c981426bf1b
|
{"bias_density": 0.43, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
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LinkedIn cuts 716 jobs as it phases out its China app
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LinkedInis cutting 716 jobs and will begin phasing out its local jobs app in China. In alettertoday, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky said the decision to shutter the standalone China app, called InCareer, was because of “fierce competition and a challenging macroeconomic climate. ” While reducing some roles, LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft and has20,000 employees, also plans to open about 250 new jobs in some segments of its operations, and new business and accounting management teams on May 15. LinkedIn is thelatest tech company, ranging in size from Google and Amazon to startups, to announce layoffs. Its parent company, Microsoft,said it was cutting 10,000 jobs, or nearly 5% of its global workforce, in January. InCareer was launched in December 2021, a couple months after LinkedInannounced it was shutting down its main service in China. At that time, itattributedthe decision to shutter LinkedIn China to “a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements. ” InCareer wasmeant to help professionals within Chinanetwork, find and apply for jobs, but it was up against competitors likeMaimai, the dominant professional networking site in the country with over 120 million users, according to its website. Maimai’sadvantagesinclude the ability to share posts anonymously, which makes it a popular destination for workers seeking to vent or find information about their companies. LinkedIn plans to finish phasing out InCareer by August 9, while shifting its China strategy to help companies operating in China hire, market and train abroad. This means it will continue to have Talent, Marketing and Learning businesses in China. Laid off employees who are covered by U. S. benefits will get severance pay, continuing health coverage and career transition services, while employees outside the U. S. will get benefits that align with local labor laws and practices. The layoffs and InCareer’s phasing out are part of changes that LinkedIn is making to its Global Business Organization (GBO) and China strategy. As part of that, LinkedIn is sunsetting its Business Productivity team. It also plans to reduce management roles and use more vendors to “serve emerging and growth markets more effectively. ” Roslansky said he expects fiscal year 2024 to “remain challenging. “We’re adapting as we have done this year and will continue to operate with the ambition we need to deliver on our vision and the pragmatism required to run the business well,” he wrote. Aspart of Microsoft’s latest quarterly earnings report, issued in April, LinkedIn reported a 8% increase in revenue year-over-year. In the report previous to that one, Microsoftwarnedit expected revenue growth to slow to the mid-single digits in the third quarter, due to a slowdown in hiring and advertising spending. The long haul of Microsoft’s China localization Topics Senior Reporter Catherine Shu covered startups in Asia and breaking news for TechCrunch. Her reporting has also appeared in the New York Times, the Taipei Times, Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Disclosures: None Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-05-09T04:36:39 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/08/linkedin-layoffs/
| 569 | 1 |
af08678602a7701fd04da57fea88b051
|
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OpenAI buffs safety team and gives board veto power on risky AI
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OpenAI is expanding its internal safety processes to fend off the threat of harmful AI. A new “safety advisory group” will sit above the technical teams and make recommendations to leadership, and the board has been granted veto power — of course, whether it will actually use it is another question entirely. Normally the ins and outs of policies like these don’t necessitate coverage, as in practice they amount to a lot of closed-door meetings with obscure functions and responsibility flows that outsiders will seldom be privy to. Though that’s likely also true in this case, therecent leadership fracasand evolving AI risk discussion warrant taking a look at how the world’s leading AI development company is approaching safety considerations. In a newdocumentandblog post, OpenAI discusses their updated “Preparedness Framework,” which one imagines got a bit of a retool after November’s shake-up that removed the board’s two most “decelerationist” members: Ilya Sutskever (still at the company in a somewhat changed role) and Helen Toner (totally gone). The main purpose of the update appears to be to show a clear path for identifying, analyzing, and deciding what do to about “catastrophic” risks inherent to models they are developing. As they define it: By catastrophic risk, we mean any risk which could result in hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage or lead to the severe harm or death of many individuals — this includes, but is not limited to, existential risk. (Existential risk is the “rise of the machines” type stuff. ) In-production models are governed by a “safety systems” team; this is for, say, systematic abuses of ChatGPT that can be mitigated with API restrictions or tuning. Frontier models in development get the “preparedness” team, which tries to identify and quantify risks before the model is released. And then there’s the “superalignment” team, which is working on theoretical guide rails for “superintelligent” models, which we may or may not be anywhere near. The first two categories, being real and not fictional, have a relatively easy-to-understand rubric. Their teams rate each model on four risk categories: cybersecurity, “persuasion” (e. g. , disinfo), model autonomy (i. e. , acting on its own), and CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats; e. g. , the ability to create novel pathogens). Various mitigations are assumed: For instance, a reasonable reticence to describe the process of making napalm or pipe bombs. After taking into account known mitigations, if a model is still evaluated as having a “high” risk, it cannot be deployed, and if a model has any “critical” risks, it will not be developed further. These risk levels are actually documented in the framework, in case you were wondering if they are to be left to the discretion of some engineer or product manager. For example, in the cybersecurity section, which is the most practical of them, it is a “medium” risk to “increase the productivity of operators. on key cyber operation tasks” by a certain factor. A high-risk model, on the other hand, would “identify and develop proofs-of-concept for high-value exploits against hardened targets without human intervention. ” Critical is “model can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal. ” Obviously we don’t want that out there (though it would sell for quite a sum). I’ve asked OpenAI for more information on how these categories are defined and refined — for instance, if a new risk like photorealistic fake video of people goes under “persuasion” or a new category — and will update this post if I hear back. So, only medium and high risks are to be tolerated one way or another. But the people making those models aren’t necessarily the best ones to evaluate them and make recommendations. For that reason, OpenAI is making a “cross-functional Safety Advisory Group” that will sit on top of the technical side, reviewing the boffins’ reports and making recommendations inclusive of a higher vantage. Hopefully (they say) this will uncover some “unknown unknowns,” though by their nature those are fairly difficult to catch. The process requires these recommendations to be sent simultaneously to the board and leadership, which we understand to mean CEO Sam Altman and CTO Mira Murati, plus their lieutenants. Leadership will make the decision on whether to ship it or fridge it, but the board will be able to reverse those decisions. https://techcrunch. com/2023/11/29/a-timeline-of-sam-altmans-firing-from-openai-and-the-fallout/ This will hopefully short-circuit anything like what was rumored to have happened before the big drama, a high-risk product or process getting greenlit without the board’s awareness or approval. Of course, the result of said drama was the sidelining of two of the more critical voices and the appointment of some money-minded guys (Bret Taylor and Larry Summers), who are sharp but not AI experts by a long shot. If a panel of experts makes a recommendation, and the CEO makes decisions based on that information, will this friendly board really feel empowered to contradict them and hit the brakes? And if they do, will we hear about it? Transparency is not really addressed outside a promise that OpenAI will solicit audits from independent third parties. Say a model is developed that warrants a “critical” risk category. OpenAI hasn’t been shy about tooting its horn about this kind of thing in the past — talking about how wildly powerful their models are, to the point where they decline to release them, is great advertising. But do we have any kind of guarantee this will happen, if the risks are so real and OpenAI is so concerned about them? Maybe it’s a bad idea. But either way it isn’t really mentioned. Topics Writer & Photographer Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. His personal website is coldewey. cc. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-12-18T20:12:25 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/18/openai-buffs-safety-team-and-gives-board-veto-power-on-risky-ai/
| 1,032 | 1 |
99020d86ec59d0f3e7b4757ae33c285f
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Potential ‘meme stock’ Reddit will let Redditors sell shares immediately
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Reddit’s IPO should be interesting to watch — and not just because the businessremains unprofitable, but also because of how the company has chosen to bring in its community of active users and moderators into its public markets debut. Ina new SEC filing, Reddit’s IPO involves around 22 million shares, priced between $31 to $34. In addition, the IPO could be volatile given that Reddit will allow its community members to sell their shares immediately, instead of being subject to the usual lock-up agreements that typically prevent investors from selling shares for six months after the IPO. Other outlets reportedReddit would raise up to $748 millionat a valuation of nearly $6. 5 billion. However, the company is selling 15 million shares — only a portion of that 22 million — to raise up to $519 million, it said. The company isn’t going to make money from the selling shareholders — the remaining 7 million shares. The movesets up Reddit to become a meme stock— a term coined in reference to thewild GameStop short squeeze of 2021, which was driven by a group of Reddit users on its community r/WallStreetBets. The users had taken on the hedge funds that had shorted GameStop’s stock by over 100% by working collectively to buy the stock. The goal was to push the funds and other investors to cover their shorts instead of taking losses as the stock began rallying thanks to Redditors’ buying of shares. The gambit worked as the stockjumped over 600%within days, with trading halted a number of times due to its volatility. By allowing the Reddit community to buy into the IPO, there’s again potential for the stock to be manipulated — this time, possibly in Reddit’s favor — by Redditors’ collective action. However, things could also go poorly for Reddit on this front, given that the companylisted r/WallStreetBets as a risk factor in the IPO. Wrote Reddit in its S-1 filing: Given the broad awareness and brand recognition of Reddit, including as a result of the popularity of r/wallstreetbets among retail investors, and the direct access by retail investors to broadly available trading platforms, the market price and trading volume of our Class A common stock could experience extreme volatility for reasons unrelated to our underlying business or macroeconomic or industry fundamentals, which could cause you to lose all or part of your investment if you are unable to sell your shares at or above the initial offering price. In its new filing, the company indicates that the Redditors in its directed share program will be able to sell at any time. “Shares purchased through the directed share program will not be subject to the terms of the lock-up agreement or market standoff restrictions,” the document reads. Eight percent (1,760,000 shares) of Reddit’s Class A common stock will be offered through this program to 75,000 eligible Reddit users and moderators, certain board members, and friends and family of employees and directors. Redditors who created an account before January 1, 2024, are potentially eligible for the directed share program, provided they are U. S. -based and 18 years old or older. They’ll be invited to participate in “six phased priority tiers,” Reddit says, based on their reputation (or in Reddit lingo, their karma score), or their contributions as moderators. Because only a set amount of stock is being made available through this program, if demand outweighs capacity, a waitlist will be offered. Redditfirst filed its S-1 in December, which was made public in February, signaling its intention to go public and making it the first significant tech IPO of the year and the first consumer social IPO since Pinterest in 2019. However, the company struggles to turn a profit on both a GAAP and adjusted basis, despite its scale, which sees the site attracting 267 million weekly active users engaging across its more than 100,000 communities. More recently, Reddit announced a new revenue strategy involvingthe licensing of its data to various entitiesbuilding AI tools for $203 million over two- to three-year periods, depending on the individual deals’ terms. Reddit will debut on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “RDDT. ” Updated 3/11/24, 12:07 p. m. ET with details around share sales from Reddit with respect to the amount being raised. Reddit files to go public at last Reddit cites r/WallStreetBets as a risk factor in its IPO filing Reddit says it’s made $203M so far licensing its data
| 2024-03-11T14:09:34 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/11/reddit-to-raise-748m-in-ipo-but-may-become-a-meme-stock-as-redditors-can-sell-shares-immediately/
| 737 | 1 |
1e7784c1e54e89a019d02532a39f5328
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Dropbox’s chief customer officer Eric Cox plans to step down, per filing
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Dropbox’s chief customer officer, Eric Cox, plans to step down, according to a document filed with the SEC on Friday. Cox will remain in his current role for “a period of time” to help with the transition, per the filing, and then will continue as a “non-executive” employee through mid-August. The filing did not mention who would replace Cox. Cox joined Dropbox in November 2023 from Vimeo, where he was the COO overseeing sales, customer success, data, strategy, and operations. Before that, Cox spent 19 years at Adobe in a variety of roles, including as digital media go-to-market sales lead for the Americas, and VP of digital media for business. In a statement, a Dropbox spokesperson told TechCrunch that Cox stepped down “in order to spend more time with his family. ” “In his time here, [Eric] brought together all of our customer-facing organizations, built a talented and seasoned bench, and worked tirelessly to lay the foundation for our future success,” the spokesperson said. “We’re grateful that he’s able to stay on for the next few months to ensure continuity until we have a new senior hire in place. ” Dropbox has had a rough go of it lately. While the company reported both net profit and revenue above analysts’ estimates in the most recent quarter,its revenue growth had slowed, and its forecast for the current quarter fell below what Wall Street expected. Dropbox’s stock is down around 8% year-to-date. As part of an aggressive turnaround plan, Dropbox last Octobersaidit would lay off 20% of its staff, or around 528 people. The cloud storage company has increasingly looked to AI technologies to drive revenue. Recently, it expanded its AI-powered smart organization and search tool, Dropbox Dash, with enterprise-focused features, including data governance controls. Updated 10:30 a. m. Pacific: Added a statement from a Dropboxspokesperson
| 2025-04-11T13:27:19 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/11/dropbox-chief-customer-officer-eric-cox-plans-to-step-down-per-filing/
| 304 | 0.9 |
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Aston Martin taps Lucid to help develop electric vehicles
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automaker that produces the luxury all-electric Air sedan, will supply Aston Martin with powertrain components and battery technology for future electric vehicle models, the companies said Monday. The iconic British luxury automaker aims to launch an EV in 2025. The agreement marks a first for Lucid — a chance to act as supplier and diversify its revenue streams. Lucid has been struggling tomeet delivery expectationsanddrum up enough demandfor its luxury EVs, and has consistentlymissed the beat on revenue. In March,Lucid cut its workforce by 18%. Earlier this year, the startup unveiled a derivative of its electric drive unit specially designed for use in motorsports. Under the terms of the agreement, Aston Martin will make phased cash payments to Lucid and give the startup a 3. 7% stake, or about 28,352,273 ordinary shares. The value of shares and cash payments should reach about $232 million. Lucid will give Aston Martin technical support as the latter integrates Lucid’s electric powertrain technologies, including its twin motor drive unit, battery technology and onboard charging unit called the Wunderbox. “Combined with our internal development, this will allow us to create a single bespoke BEV platform suitable for all future Aston Martin products, all the way from hypercars to sports cars and SUVs,” Roberto Fedeli, chief technology officer of Aston Martin, said in a statement. Aston already uses engines and other technology from Mercedes-Benz, and will continue to get future gas-powered and hybrid powertrain and electric architectures from the automaker, according to an Aston spokesperson. China’s Geely recently increased its equity stake in Aston by 17%. “Along with Mercedes-Benz, we now have two world-class suppliers to support the internal development and investments we are making to deliver our electrification strategy,” Lawrence Stroll, executive chairman of Aston Martin, said in a statement. “With the recently announced long-term partnership with Geely, we will also gain the opportunity to access their range of technologies and components, as well as their deep expertise of the key strategic market of China. ” Aston Martin is scheduled to announce a strategic update that sets out new production targets on Tuesday. Topics Senior Reporter Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch, where she covers Tesla and Elon Musk’s broader empire, autonomy, AI, electrification, gig work platforms, Big Tech regulatory scrutiny, and more. She’s one of the co-hosts of the Equity podcast and writes the TechCrunch Daily morning newsletter. Previously, she covered social media for Forbes. com, and her work has appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, i-D (Vice) and more. Rebecca has invested in Ethereum. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-06-26T08:40:34 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/26/aston-martin-taps-lucid-to-help-develop-electric-vehicles/
| 499 | 0.9 |
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Elon Musk’s false and misleading election claims have been viewed 2 billion times on X
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The world’s richest man buys out one of the most popular social media platforms and uses it as a propaganda and disinformation machine in support of a presidential candidate. What could go wrong? Ananalysisfrom the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that tracks misinformation, found that Elon Musk posted at least 87 claims this year about the U. S. election on X that fact-checkers have rated as false or misleading. Those false and misleading posts have generated more than 2 billion views, and not just because Musk is an influential person. He has also been found totweak X’s algorithmsso his own posts reach everyoneon the platformbecause apparently, having 203 million followers just isn’t enough. CNN first reportedon the CCDH’s data, noting that Musk has given more than $118 million to a super PAC that is supporting former president Donald Trump for reelection, making Musk the biggest donor to Trump’s campaign. That PAC has been leading anadvertising campaignthat impersonates Democrats and targets registered Republicans with unpopular policies that are not supported by VP Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. The ads are cartoonishly “woke,” saying things like “Help make our schools as trans-friendly as possible,” and “A national, mandatory buy-back program means fewer guns & fewer tragedies. Kamala Harris gets it!” A 404 Media report found in the last couple of weeks, the PAC increased its Facebook ad spend by 1,000%. Meta waited until the end of last week toban adsabout social issues, elections, or politics. On X, political ads are still pumping alongside Musk’s megaphone. Anyone with an X account has witnessed the barrage of political messaging from Musk, much of which is in favor of Trump and far-right political narratives. The CCDH found Musk’s political posts have garnered more than 17. 1 billion views since the billionaire executive formally endorsed Trump in July. That’s twice as many views as all political ads on the platform combined during the period, which is roughly the same as spending $24 million in campaign ads, per the CCDH. Researchers identified a total of 746 posts Musk made between July 13 and October 25 that mention terms associated with the U. S. election, like Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, voting, and ballots. The analysis comes from publicly available data from X about Musk’s posts and political campaign spending to promote ads on the platform. Among the examples of false or misleading claims that Musk made on X is one that claims, “Triple-digit increases of illegals in swing states over the past 4 years. Voter importation at an unprecedented scale!” The post saw21 million views. Another claimed, “If the Democratic Party big government machine wins this election, they will ban voter ID nationwide, not just in California. ” It saw11. 9 million views. The research found that Musk’s claims that Democrats support “importing voters” were viewed nearly 1. 3 billion times. Musk has also pushed narratives about unreliable voting systems that have been viewed 532 million times, per the analysis. For the record, there is little to no evidence to support the claim that illegal voters are “imported” to support particular political parties. Voter fraud is rare in the U. S. due to strict verification measures at the state and federal levels. Expertssaymail ballots are verified when being requested by a voter and verified again when returning a ballot. Like any organization that criticizes Musk, CCDH has become a target for the billionaire, who recentlycalledthe group a “criminal organization. ” Musk, a self-described free speech advocate, tried to sue the CCDH last year, but the case wastossedby a federal judge who said the litigation was aimed at “punishing” the organization for criticizing X. Imran Ahmed, CEO of CCDH, said in a statement that X has “devolved into a hellscape of hate and disinformation” after Musk removed many of the site’s guardrails that protected against false information. Musk has claimed thatX’s Community Notesfeature allows community members to fact-check posts, but Ahmed says the feature is “little more than a bandaid. ” “Elon Musk has shown through his personal conduct his contempt for truth — is it any wonder that his solution to the disinformation crisis on X was so lackluster?” said Ahmed. Ahmed was also onstage atTechCrunch Disruptlast week where he warned of the use of generative AI to reduce the marginal cost to produce and distribute a piece of disinformation to zero. “So what you have, theoretically, is a perfect loop system in which generative AI is producing, it’s distributing, and then it’s assessing the performance — A/B testing and improving,” he said. “You’ve got a perpetual bulls— machine. That’s quite worrying. ” TechCrunch has reached out to X for comment. Topics Senior Reporter Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch, where she covers Tesla and Elon Musk’s broader empire, autonomy, AI, electrification, gig work platforms, Big Tech regulatory scrutiny, and more. She’s one of the co-hosts of the Equity podcast and writes the TechCrunch Daily morning newsletter. Previously, she covered social media for Forbes. com, and her work has appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, i-D (Vice) and more. Rebecca has invested in Ethereum. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-11-05T17:08:40 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/05/elon-musks-false-and-misleading-election-claims-have-been-viewed-2-billion-times-on-x/
| 926 | 1 |
2ec8c210c64c4e268b03abd9dfcf8c12
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Harness acquires Armory
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Software delivery platformHarnesstoday announced that it has acquired the assets ofArmory, a continuous deployment startup built on top of the open sourceSpinnaker project. As Harness CEO and founder Jyoti Bansal told me, the acquisition price was about $7 million in cash. In total, Armory had raised more than $82 million, including a$40 million Series C roundled by B Capital in late 2020. Other investors include Lead Edge Capital, Insight Partners, Crosslink Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Mango Capital, Y Combinator and Javelin Venture Partners. Harness will hire many of Armory’s employees and Harness will continue to support existing Armory implementations. But Bansal also stressed that this is very much an asset deal. He does, of course, hope that many of Armory’s customers will migrate to the Harness platform over time, but he also stressed that he wants to help Armory’s existing customer base. “Our purpose mostly is to provide the kind of continuity of relationships and continuity of service to the customers. Over time, if we do the right things by customers, they can become even bigger Harness platform customers and Harness has a lot of offerings in our platform to help these accounts,” Bansal said. Jim Douglas, ex-CEO of Wind River, took over from co-founder Daniel R. Odio as Armory’s CEO in 2021. Some of Armory’s current customers include LaunchDarkly, Autodesk, Informatica, Patreon, First Republic Bank and HelloSign. This acquisition also follows the wider trends that have been playing out in the overall enterprise software ecosystem, where the current economic climate favors end-to-end solutions over single-point solutions as businesses look to consolidate and reduce their expenses. “The market is growing for DevOps solutions, but for single-point solutions, it’s hard to compete,” Bansal said. “The economic environment has been definitely challenging for a lot of startups to continue to raise capital. It’s good and bad. It’s good for companies like Harness, but at the same time I feel, from a startup ecosystem, yes, there are challenges right now and companies have to be operating at a much higher standard, than previously. ” Harness may implement some of Armory’s technology into its own products and Bansal stressed that he hopes that the experienced Armory engineers Harness plans to hire will also help it continue to innovate (and support the existing Armory customer base). Talking about Harness in general, Bansal noted that he wants to build an enduring company that will, one day, go public. The last time he tried that, Ciscoacquiredhis company AppDynamics for $3. 7 billion right before it wasscheduled to IPO. If you know more about this acquisition, you can contact Frederic on Signal at (860) 208-3416 or by email (frederic@techcrunch. com). Armory nabs $40M Series C as commercial biz on top of open-source Spinnaker project takes off Topics Editor Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-01-11T14:00:14 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/11/harness-acquires-the-assets-of-continuous-deployment-service-armory/
| 531 | 1 |
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TechCrunch Space: SpaceX’s big plans for Starship in Florida
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Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. I hope everyone had a great Independence Day. On to the news! Want to reach out with a tip? Email Aria ataria. techcrunch@gmail. comor send me a message on Signal at 512-937-3988. You also can send a note to the whole TechCrunch crew attips@techcrunch. com. For more secure communications,click here to contact us, which includes SecureDropinstructionsand links to encrypted messaging apps. Last week was a bit slower, in terms of news — to be expected, given the holiday — but I was still super excited by thispartnership between two startups to deliver AI-capable computing power to space. San Francisco-based Aethero is developing the compute, and Cosmic Shielding Corporation is providing a novel radiation shielding material. The payload will go to orbit in just days, and I’ll definitely be following the progress in the coming months. SpaceX’s ambitious plans to launch its Starship mega-rocket up to 44 times per year from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center are causing a stir among some of its competitors. ButSpaceX may have even more ambitious plans for a second launch padright next door: Space Launch Complex (SLC)-37 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS). Hats off to Firefly Aerospace for launching its Alpha rocket for the fifth time late last Wednesday. The mission delivered eight CubeSats to orbit for NASA, which paid for the mission as part of its Venture Class Launch Services (VCLS) Demo 2 program to support the development of small launchers. Rewatch the launch below. I got my hands on an advanced copy of “Wild Wild Space,” the new space documentary directed by Ross Kauffman and based on a book by space journalist Ashlee Vance. I’m mulling writing a full review, but what I will say is: It’s a raucous ride. There are many, many quotable sentences, like this one from Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck: “I’m not built to build shit. ” It’ll be available on HBO on July 17 — it’s worth the watch. Topics Reporter, Space and Defense Aria Alamalhodaei covers the space and defense industries at TechCrunch. Previously, she covered the public utilities and the power grid for California Energy Markets. You can also find her work at MIT’s Undark Magazine, The Verge, and Discover Magazine. She received an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Aria is based in Austin, Texas. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-07-08T22:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/08/techcrunch-space-spacexs-big-plans-for-starship-in-florida/
| 466 | 0.9 |
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Accounting hasn’t fully embraced AI yet — Quanta just raised $4.7M to change that
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AI has brought attention to all kinds of futuristic technologies, fromhumanoid robotstoautonomous warships. But there’s a quieter boom happening in a highly traditional industry: accounting. VCs are excited by the prospect of automating costly human labor with AI, funding companies likeNumericandKicklast year, to name a few. The latest startup to ride this wave isQuanta, which sells an AI-powered accounting platform to software companies and has raised a $4. 7 million seed round led by Accel, it exclusively told TechCrunch. Other investors include basecase, Comma Capital, and San Francisco angel investor Elad Gil. Quanta traces its origins to founder Helen Hastings’ time as a software engineer at buy now, pay later company Affirm, where she saw firsthand how outdated accounting software was. Getting good financial data was highly manual and resulted in reports that only came out once a month. “I knew I wanted to build something from scratch that could help financial teams and business leaders be more efficient,” Hastings told TechCrunch. So Quanta’s platform hoovers up data from a company’s existing fintech tools like Brex, Mercury, or Stripe to automatically produce books and real-time reports. That’s a vision that has tripped up other startups like Bench,which tried — and failed — to automatesome of its expensive human bookkeepers (600 strong at its peak) with AI. But Hastings says Quanta will avoid this conundrum by building an AI-first product before hiring lots of bookkeepers. So naturally, it also only initially accepted customers for which its automated system could perform all of the accounting. The fundraise is also a personal milestone for Hastings as a female founder in a space that’s dominated by men. The percentage of funding that goes to female-only founded companies like Quanta stood at only 2% in 2024,according to PitchBook data. Hastings says that a college instructor once told her that he didn’t picture her becoming a founder. But moments like that one only invigorate her more. With this fundraise, Hastings says Quanta plans to move beyond its current niche of early-stage software companies to larger businesses, including ones with multiple corporate entities. Hastings says she’s excited for larger organizations to “expect more” from their accounting tools “beyond what incumbents have been able to handle. ” Topics Senior Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-02-27T19:41:53 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/27/accounting-hasnt-fully-embraced-ai-yet-quanta-just-raised-4-7m-to-change-that/
| 443 | 0.9 |
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Firefly forges on after co-founder murdered by Hamas
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A startup calledFireflythat’s tackling the thorny and growing issue of cloud asset management with an “infrastructure as code” solution has raised $23 million in funding. That comes on the heels of strong demand for its tech and increasing revenue fourfold in 2023. The firm’s latest success also comes on the heels of tragedy, as co-founder CTO Joseph “Sefi” Genis was among the hundreds killed by Hamas in October 2023 at the now-infamous Nova music festival. The firm finds itself at the intersection of technology and major world events for the second time. Firefly was hatched in 2021 in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, amid a huge burst of “digital transformation. ” Suddenly faced with remote workforces, organizations turned to the cloud in a big way to manage those workers and to launch new services. Those migrating into the cloud seized on a big opportunity to work more flexibly and efficiently, but their move also carries risk. As companies spread their work across multiple containers, clouds, apps and devices, ops teams have trouble tracking their digital assets — living or dormant — and that can have major implications for cost, security, and operations. “How do you handle so much complexity?” asks Firefly CEO Ido Neeman (sitting in the center in the picture above). “You can’t. The proliferation of tools is too overwhelming. ” Firefly’s services address this with tech that can scan assets in clouds from major providers, including Google, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, along with private clouds, containers, apps and more. Using AI technology, the company creates a snapshot of the situation and immediately begins to highlight what might appear to conflict with something else, along with suggestions for how to remediate the problems. Firefly’s remediations are delivered in the form of “infrastructure as code,” which is used by DevOps and related teams as a way to provision and manage cloud resources, using code rather than physical or interactive tooling. “We do this by automatically and instantly discovering your entire cloud footprint across all the clouds, all the technologies, all the infrastructure’s code,” Neeman explained. “We discover everything on your cloud footprint. Then we scan it to detect which part of your cloud is properly controlled and qualified. You control it, you own it, it’s well-governed versus unmanaged, misconfigured, or inefficient. Once we find such chaos, we’ll give you automatic remedies to fix it. ” The company had recently launched an AI that suggested and could execute the code automatically, but it disabled that feature for some bigger customers, who were concerned about hallucinations and simply getting things wrong. We still have a ways to go before everyone signs up for all AI, all the time. Regardless, just as HubSpot might be used for marketing assets, or ServiceNow for infrastructure resources, Firefly wants to be “the source of truth, the cloud control pane” for the cloud, Neeman said. The company’s remediation by default comes in the form of suggestions, and it’s ultimately up to DevOps to decide whether these should be implemented. Vertex, a previous backer, led this Series A with participation from two other returning investors — Hanaco and SoftBank — as well as new strategic backer InMotion Ventures (the investment arm of Jaguar Land Rover) and Redseed, a fund created by ex-DST partners and founders. Firefly had previously raised $6. 5 million, and it’s not disclosing its valuation. Raising money as a successful startup these days can feel like a major win in itself. But it’s even more of an achievement when the funding comes after a crushing blow. The startup has headquarters in Foster City in the Bay Area, and most of its customers are in the U. S. , but it was founded and retains significant operations in Israel, which put it on the front lines of tragedy when Genis was murdered. (He is on the right side in the photo above. ) Genis’ death came after a protracted attempt to evade the attackers, an effort he shared through text messages with his wife. Ultimately, Genis and a friend went into hiding. Cornered, they could see that there was no escaping a particular armed Hamas attacker. Without an option to flee further, the pair tried to overtake him. They both died. But the effort had a heroic ending: The distraction they provided saved the lives of others who had been hiding with Genis and his friend. “Thanks to the fact that they attacked the terrorist, they prevented him from entering the shelter and seeing that there were other people there,” one of the survivorssaid in a TV interview. The attack at the Nova festival and surrounding villages kicked off a protracted and controversial war in Gaza, resulting in tens of thousands more casualties amid the destruction of an entire territory. Firefly represents the contradictions and complexities of the situation for the people and businesses in Israel and Gaza, many of whom are inherently involved in a conflict bigger than themselves, whether they want to be or not. Some will try to find a way to a brighter place despite that. Neeman, who co-founded Firefly with Genis and CPO Eran Bibi (pictured far left), said that the startup had been planning to raise money before this happened — a plan that was paused in the immediate aftermath. “We needed to handle this awful, awful situation,” Neeman explained. “He was not just the CTO, not just the co-founder, of Firefly. He was a very close friend to me, to Eran, to the entire team. Sefi was such a beautiful soul, just smiling and happy and honestly, a genius. So it was hard. ” They delayed funding for months, but also thought of how to soldier on (short of becoming soldiers in the literal sense). “I think that the entire team became stronger out of it,” he said. “We are now all committed to making his vision come true. Sefi wanted to solve cloud complexity, so for us, his legacy lives on through making Firefly a big, successful company. ” Growth began to accelerate, with the company growing fourfold over 2023 and doubling sales and customer counts in the last six months. “We signed some of the largest logos in the Fortune 500, and we created some amazing new capabilities to make cloud operations much more simple. We’ve added some great team members. We know we will always remember our good friend, but we’re optimistic. We’re seeing the future. ”
| 2024-05-29T16:56:48 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/29/after-co-founders-murder-at-the-hands-of-hamas-cloud-startup-firefly-raises-23m/
| 1,074 | 1 |
7f3bbad58810f7f481a1c875d0c8ada0
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|
Nvidia’s AI Workbench brings model fine-tuning to workstations
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Timed to coincide with SIGGRAPH, the annual AI academic conference, Nvidia this morning announced a new platform designed to let users create, test and customize generative AI models on a PC or workstation before scaling them to a data center and public cloud. “In order to democratize this ability we have to make it possible to run pretty much everywhere,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang during a keynote at the event. Dubbed AI Workbench, the service can be accessed through a basic interface running on a local workstation. Using it, developers can fine-tune and test models from popular repositories like Hugging Face and GitHub using proprietary data, and they can access cloud computing resources when the need to scale arises. Manuvir Das, VP of enterprise computing at Nvidia, says that the impetus for AI Workbench was the challenge — and time-consuming nature — of customizing large AI models. Enterprise-scale AI projects can require hunting through multiple repositories for the right framework and tools, a process further complicated when projects have to be moved from one infrastructure to another. Certainly, the success rate for launching enterprise models into production is low. According to apollfrom KDnuggets, the data science and business analytics platform, the majority of data scientists responding say that 80% or more of their projects stall before deploying a machine learning model. A separate estimate fromGartnersuggests that close to 85% of big data projects fail, due in part to infrastructural roadblocks. “Enterprises around the world are racing to find the right infrastructure and build generative AI models and applications,” Das said in a canned statement. “Nvidia AI Workbench provides a simplified path for cross-organizational teams to create the AI-based applications that are increasingly becoming essential in modern business. ” The jury’s out on just how “simplified” the path is. But to Das’ point, AI Workbench allows developers to pull together models, frameworks, SDKs and libraries, including libraries for data prep and data visualization, from open source resources into a unified workspace. As the demand for AI — particularly generative AI — grows, there’s been an influx of tools focused on fine-tuning large, general models to specific use cases. Startups likeFixie,RekaandTogetheraim to make it easier for companies and individual developers to customize models to their needs without having to shell out for costly cloud compute. With AI workbench, Nvidia’s pitching a more decentralized approach to fine-tuning — one that happens on a local machine as opposed to a cloud service. That makes sense, given Nvidia and its product portfolio of AI-accelerating GPUs stand to benefit; Nvidia makes not-so-subtle mentions of its RTX lineup in the press release announcing the news. But Nvidia’s commercial motivations aside, the pitch might appeal to developers who don’t wish to be beholden to a single cloud or service for AI model experimentation. AI-driven demand for GPUs has propelled Nvidia’s earnings to new heights. In May, the company’s market capbriefly reached$1 trillion after Nvidia reported $7. 19 billion in revenue, up 19% from the previous fiscal quarter
| 2023-08-08T16:00:10 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/nvidias-ai-workbench-brings-model-fine-tuning-to-workstations/
| 502 | 1 |
e16eef49960d4dc0feeb45c54b79f8c5
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|
Amazon jumps on nuclear power bandwagon by investing in X-energy and promising small reactors
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Amazon today became the latest Big Tech company to throw its weight behind nuclear power, joiningMicrosoftandGoogle, which both previously announced long-term promises to buy nuclear power from startups to power their data centers. The companyrevealedthree deals, including an investment in startup X-energy and two development agreements that aim to add around 300 megawatts’ worth of capacity in both the Pacific Northwest and Virginia, two data center hot spots. The two development deals outline the construction of small modular reactors (SMR), which generate a fraction of the power produced by contemporary nuclear power plants but which proponents say will be faster and cheaper to build. Amazon expects the reactors will start generating electricity in the early 2030s. In the Pacific Northwest, the agreement with the Energy Northwest consortium of state public utilities will support the construction of four SMRs that will produce around 320 megawatts combined. Future expansion could bump the total generating capacity to 960 megawatts, enough to power about 1 million homes. In Virginia, Amazon and Dominion have agreed to “explore the development” of 300 megawatts’ worth of SMRs near the North Anna Nuclear Generating Station located between Washington, D. C. , and Richmond, Virginia. Those projects are likely to be built using technology from X-energy, an SMR startup based in Rockville, Maryland. Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund led a new $500 millionSeries C-1 roundinto the company, with participation from other investors, including Citadel founder Ken Griffin, NGP, and the University of Michigan. The new round adds to the $385 million the company has raised to date, according to PitchBook. X-energy specializes in high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors, an approach that fell out of favor in the U. S. and Europe but as new designs emerged was more recently revived in Japan and China. When built, X-energy’s Xe-100 reactor will generate 80 megawatts of electricity. Its uranium fuel is coated with three layers of carbon, and 18,000 of these poppy seed-sized particles are then loaded into a billiard-ball-sized “pebble,” and 200,000 of those pebbles are used per reactor. Helium flows between the pebbles, where it’s heated to 750°C. That heat is then transferred to water, which generates steam to spin a turbine. The fuel system, known as TRISO, istoutedas being safer than existing nuclear fuel designs, with the particles containing the uranium under high temperatures. X-energy’s first reactor will be built at a Dow chemical plant outside Corpus Christi, Texas. The company has not announced when the project will be completed and said that it intends to develop up to 5,000 megawatts of new nuclear power throughout the U. S. by 2039. The new deals with Amazon, like the dealGoogle announced on Mondaywith Kairos, give nuclear fission a boost in the face of growing progress on nuclear fusion and the steady march of power from renewable sources like solar and wind, which have become considerably cheaper over the last decade. Although nuclear power is widespread, new reactor designs have yet to be commercially proven, and their timeline puts them in direct competition with other sources of carbon-free power that promise to decarbonize the electrical grid in the coming decade. Topics Senior Reporter, Climate Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-10-16T16:36:30 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/16/amazon-jumps-on-nuclear-power-bandwagon-by-investing-in-x-energy-and-promising-small-reactors/
| 592 | 1 |
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Google brings Gemini-powered search history and Lens to Chrome desktop
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Google Thursday said that it is introducing new Gemini-powered features for Chrome’s desktop version, including Lens for desktop, tab compare for shopping assistance, and natural language integration for search history. Years after introducing and evolving Google Lens on mobile, the feature is finally coming to desktop. Rolling out to users across the world in the coming days, Lens will live in the address bar, as well as the three-dot menu. After clicking, you can select a part of a page and ask more questions to get search results. You can also tap on objects, such as someone’s backpack in a picture, and ask questions through multi-search to find a similar item in different colors or brands. Depending on the question you ask, you might also get AI Overviews in answers. In addition to searching for shoppable items, users can also find out how much sunlight a plant needs, for example, or get help understanding a math equation. Google is also introducing a new feature called Tab Compare to aid shopping. In the coming weeks, Chrome will offer an AI-powered summary of similar items you might be searching across different tabs. For instance, if you are searching for a new Bluetooth speaker, the feature will show details such as product specs, features, price and ratings in one place, even when you’re looking at these details across different pages. One of the most useful updates of this lot is the ability to search your browsing history through natural language queries. Sometimes you don’t remember what page you visited apart from a few details. The company is rolling out AI-powered history search in the coming weeks as an opt-in feature for U. S. users. An example of a natural language query is, “What was that ice cream shop I looked at last week?” Google uses a combination of URL, title, and contents of the page to show search results. The company said that it doesn’t use this data to train Gemini and won’t surface any information from the incognito session. Google currently can’t process AI-powered search history locally, however, so it uses cloud capacity to return results. In January, the company introduced AI-powered features such asa writing assistant, tab organizer, and theme creator. In May, it rolled out a way tomention Gemini and ask the chatbot questionsdirectly from the address bar. Topics Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-08-01T16:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/01/google-brings-gemini-powered-search-history-and-lens-to-chrome-desktop/
| 460 | 0.9 |
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|
Lyft shares pop, then plop, as it predicts slow and steady growth
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Lyft made less money per active rider in the second quarter — something that might normally give investors pause. Yet, the ride-hailing giant’s stock price initially rocketed nearly 14% in after-hours trading following itsQ2 2023 earnings report. The stock then shed its after-hours gains shortly before this story went live. The company’s enthusiastic investors seemed to be reacting to its positive outlook for its third fiscal quarter. While Lyft’s Q2 revenue matched Wall Street estimates of $1. 02 billion — a mere 2% increase from the $1 billion in revenue Lyft pulled in Q1 — the company forecasted a gain of 11% to 13%, or $1. 13 billion to $1. 15 billion, in Q3. According to Yahoo Finance data, analysts only expected Lyft to reach $1. 09 billion next quarter. Lyft’s revenue per rider decreased almost 5% quarter-over-quarter, a result of the ride-hailing giant’s attempt to keep fares low to compete with Uber. The upshot? Lyft saw its number of active riders increase in the second quarter to 21. 5 million riders, up from 19. 6 million in the first quarter. But asTechCrunch noted in Q1, the question still remains as to whether this price cutting will drive enough ride volume gains to allow Lyft to return to substantial growth. Cost-cutting is Lyft’s friend now, as well as in the future. It’s possible that Lyft’s ability to trim the fat in the second quarter, something Lyft’snew CEO David Risher promisedwould happen when he took over in April, also initially motivated investors. In Q2 2023, Lyft’s net loss was $114 million, down from the $377. 2 million it recorded a year ago and the $187. 6 million it saw in Q1 2023. The company’s recent cost cutting reportedly included laying off1,200 workersin the second quarter. Lyft plans to reduce its overall cost footprint in 2023 by about $330 million annually. The firm also aims to change how it compensates employees, reducing share-based compensation in 2023 to $550 million, down from $750 million in 2022. In 2024, that’ll drop to $350 million. Those reductions could help combat dilution at the company. On an adjusted basis, Lyft pulled in $41 million. That’s up from $22. 7 million in Q1 2023, but still down from the adjusted EBITDA for Q2 2022 of $79. 1 million. That said, Lyft beat its own estimates of $20 million to $30 million. Lyft closed the quarter with $638. 4 million in cash and cash equivalents — an improvement from Q1’s $509. 6 million. In Q3, Lyft aims to meet an adjusted EBITDA of between $75 million and $85 million. Lyft to make ‘significant’ cuts across ride-hailing company Topics Senior Reporter Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch, where she covers Tesla and Elon Musk’s broader empire, autonomy, AI, electrification, gig work platforms, Big Tech regulatory scrutiny, and more. She’s one of the co-hosts of the Equity podcast and writes the TechCrunch Daily morning newsletter. Previously, she covered social media for Forbes. com, and her work has appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, i-D (Vice) and more. Rebecca has invested in Ethereum. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-08-08T21:29:18 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/lyft-shares-pop-then-plop-as-it-predicts-slow-and-steady-growth/
| 590 | 1 |
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|
Pendulum’s AI-driven platform helps enterprises better predict supply and demand
|
Supply chains have had a tumultuous few years, beginning in 2020, when COVID-19 upended legacy global supply chains. More recently, the “TikTok-ification” of retail has companies like Shein and Temu creating new products constantly as consumer demands change at the same rapid pace. Pendulumaims to help companies better plan for supply and demand in this new on-demand economy. Pendulum’s software connects all of a company’s fragmented internal data sources, like inventory, procurement, and pricing, into one AI-powered model that is meant to help companies predict and optimize their supply and demand. Co-founder and CEO Benjamin Fels told TechCrunch that getting supply and demand right helps companies not only improve their margins but also reduce waste. “The single most powerful thing you can do as a retailer to become more sustainable is absolutely nail supply versus demand,” Fels said. “If you know everything you make somebody wants, you are going to dramatically decarbonize your operations, and you are going to increase at massive scale your margins. ” Fels originally got the idea for Pendulum after he spent years on the derivatives trading floor and oversaw teams building AI-enabled prediction products for supply and demand on the financial side. Fels said he wondered if that same approach would also work for supply and demand in the supply chain world. He launched Macro-Eyes in June 2013 alongside Suvrit Sra at MIT to find out. The pair spent years doing research and development around this concept. When the company was ready to commercialize and raise institutional capital in 2023, they rebranded to Pendulum. Pendulum now works with enterprises across retail, healthcare, and national defense. Victoria Secret-owned Adore Me and the U. S. Department of Defense are customers. Pendulum is announcing a $22 million funding round that includes $11 million of non-dilutive capital, for research and development, and $11 million in venture capital from firms including: Lowercarbon Capital, Cross-Border Impact Ventures, and Decisive Point, among others. Fels said the company plans to use the funding to help the company get to scale with a core set of customers, continue to grow its customer base, and improve its product. In addition to the funding news, Pendulum also announced that Jean-François Gagné, the co-founder of Element AI —which was acquired by ServiceNow in 2020 for $230 million— is joining the company as the chief strategy and product officer. “I realized that JF not only had this insight on bringing AI to the enterprise, but also this rich history across supply chain and across a lot of these fundamental optimization problems,” Fels said. “After multiple three-hour-straight conversations, it just clicked that JF needed to lead the product vision, and needed to lead strategy around how we take this to scale. ” Supply chain tech has become a hot category ever since the pandemic highlighted the fragility of existing global supply chains. Fels thinks that Pendulum stands out because its algorithmic approach was built on a decade of research and development. “People have been trying to optimize supply chains for 5,000 years,” Fels said. “Over the last two or three years, the volatility and the uncertainty both around supply and around demand, has just hit every retailer, every organization that’s exposed to supply chain, with tremendous force. We felt that really required a different kind of response. ” Topics Senior Reporter, Venture Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-02-06T14:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/06/pendulums-ai-driven-platform-helps-enterprises-better-predict-supply-and-demand/
| 624 | 1 |
a5d6af4b3ced348242e14202b369620e
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|
Meta denied injunction against Norway’s ban order on its surveillance ads
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Meta has lost a first bid to get an injunction slapped on a ban Norway’s data protection authority imposed on its consentless behavioral ad targeting inJuly. The order also provides for daily fines for non-compliance. An Oslo District court rejected Meta’s arguments seeking to block the order and ruled in favor of theDatatilsynet. “We are very pleased with the Court’s ruling and the result. This is a big victory for people’s data protection rights,” said the DPA’s director general, Line Coll. Meta could seek to appeal the decision to a higher court. But has not confirmed whether or not it will do so. “We are disappointed by today’s decision and will now consider our next steps,” a Meta spokesman told us. “We have already announced our intention to transition all EU and EEA [European Economic Area] users to the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]legal basis of Consent, and will continue to work with the Irish Data Protection Commission [DPC] to facilitate this. ” Norway’s data protection authority confirmed the daily fines are accruing on Meta for failing to comply with its ban on running ads that are targeting by tracking and profiling local users without their consent. The DPA’s decision arranged for penalties of one million NOK (~$100,000) per day of non-compliance — starting on August 14 — suggesting the fines levied already exceed $2 million. Although a spokesman for the authority confirmed none of the money has been collected yet. The Datatilsynet’s order, which was made using emergency powers set out in the GDPR, can only apply for three months since the Norwegian authority is not Meta’s lead data supervisor for the GDPR (that’s Ireland’s DPC). But the order was intended as a stop-gap to respond to the fact Meta has continued to process people’s data for ad targeting without having a valid lawful basis. Meta’s claim of contractual necessity for this processing was rejected by EU DPAsat the start ofthis year. After which it moved to claiming a so-called “legitimate interest” to process people’s data for ads. However the EU’s top court, the CJEU, slapped that downin Julywhen it handed down a much anticipated judgement in relation to a challenge to Meta’s data collection brought years earlier by Germany’s competition authority — ruling that legitimate interests is not appropriate for “personalized advertising” either and Meta must obtain the data subject’s consent. After that,at the start of last month, Meta finally announced an “intention” to switch to a consent-based legal basis for its targeted advertising — suggesting it would start asking permission from regional users to track and profile them for ad targeting. But itsblog postannouncing the switch did not say when it would happen. And the Norwegian DPA’s point is essentially that unlawful processing is continuing in the meanwhile, hence why it took the stop of issuing an emergency order. It’s not clear why Ireland, which leads on GDPR oversight of Meta, has not acted with similar alacrity to end its unlawful ads processing. We reached out to the DPC with questions but at press time it had not responded to our requests for an update. In mid July, the DPC told TechCrunch it had been conducting an assessment of Meta’s ads’ compliance following the January GDPR decision striking down its claim of contractual necessity and the more recent CJEU ruling blocking use of LI — saying then that it had passed its assessment to other EU data protection authorities for review. It also said it expected to conclude that process by the middle of August. However there has been no public developments since then (aside from Meta’s own announcement of a future, undated switch to consent). So it’s not clear what’s taking so long for Ireland to act on an issue that affects the rights and privacy of hundreds of millions of Europeans. Update:The DPC’s deputy commissioner, Graham Doyle, has now sent this line: “We await submissions from [Meta] re: change to consent and will be sharing and engaging with the other CSAs [concerned supervisory authorities] when we get them so the process is ongoing. ” The Datatilsynet confirmed it’s been in contact with the DPC regarding Meta’s legal basis for ads but suggested the Irish regulator’s attention here is directed at what happens in future, with Meta’s incoming “consent process”, not on the ongoing unlawful processing that Norway’s ban order targets. “We are in contact with Irish colleagues,” its spokesman told us. “The DPC is now following up on the consent process at Meta… and what might happen in the future. And then we’re looking at what is currently happening, which is actually separate. But you could say that we are keeping each other in the loop — but they’re not doing anything related to the ongoing processing. ” The Norwegian authority could take the further step of referring the matter to the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and asking it to take a binding decision — which would apply across the EU (and not be time limited). But it has not yet done so, although the spokesman said it is “intensely assessing” that possibility. “What is going on — this surveillance based advertising — is not just in a Norwegian problem; it is a European problem. And that is why it may be necessary for us to take to the EDPB,” he added. Meta’s behavioral ads banned in Norway on Facebook and Instagram Meta says it will offer Europeans a free choice to deny tracking Topics Senior Reporter Natasha was a senior reporter for TechCrunch, from September 2012 to April 2025, based in Europe. She joined TC after a stint reviewing smartphones for CNET UK and, prior to that, more than five years covering business technology for silicon. com (now folded into TechRepublic), where she focused on mobile and wireless, telecoms & networking, and IT skills issues. She has also freelanced for organisations including The Guardian and the BBC. Natasha holds a First Class degree in English from Cambridge University, and an MA in journalism from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-09-06T14:52:12 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/06/meta-surveillance-ads-injunction-fail/
| 1,077 | 1 |
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|
Meta AI now has 1B monthly active users
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Posted: Meta AI now has one billion monthly active users across its apps, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday, as firstreported by CNBC. The new milestone doubles the500 million monthly active usersMeta AI had back in September 2024. The “focus for this year is deepening the experience and making Meta AI the leading personal AI with an emphasis on personalization, voice conversations and entertainment,” Zuckerberg said. He went on to state that Meta’s plan is to keep building out the AI assistant before creating a business around it. As the assistant gets upgraded over time, Zuckerberg said “there will be opportunities to either insert paid recommendations” or launch “a subscription service so that people can pay to use more compute. ” If Meta were to launch a paid subscription service, it would be looking to rival popular AI chat apps, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The new milestone comes a month after Meta launched astand-alone Meta AI app. Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage. TechCrunch's AI experts cover the latest news in the fast-moving field. Every Monday, gets you up to speed on the latest advances in aerospace. Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly. By submitting your email, you agree to ourTermsandPrivacy Notice
| 2025-05-29T14:02:43 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/29/meta-ai-now-has-1b-monthly-active-users/
| 229 | 0.9 |
131432636e18f907a3103f8daf21afe9
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RoboForce raises $10 million to create a robot workforce
|
Last summer, whenRoboForcefounder Leo Ma visited a solar farm outside Phoenix, the ground was hot enough to cook an egg on. Ma watched as workers traversed uninhabitable lands to spend hours securing millions of solar panels. Over the years Ma has visited hundreds of factories, from chip makers to underground drilling sites. Each time, he saw humans working on menial and potentially dangerous tasks and came to the same conclusion: “These are the kind of jobs that we shouldn’t need people to do anymore,” he told TechCrunch. Enter RoboForce, the company Ma founded 19 months ago with the ambition of creating hyper-accurate robot workers to do tasks like solar panel installation. The company’s inaugural product is a robot about one and a half meters tall with black metal arms (pictured above, somewhat like a bigger, headless Wall-E). Today, the company announced $10 million in early-stage funding to build out Ma’s robot worker dream. Investors include Nobel Laureate economist Myron Scholes, well-known Chinese fund VC Gary Rieschel( formerly of SoftBank), and Ma’s alma mater Carnegie Mellon University. “Roboforce is focusing on the most tedious, repetitive, force-demanding and the certain risk and dangerous work that shouldn’t have to be human to do it,” Ma said. RoboForce is a continuation of Ma’s life’s work. Previously, he worked on autonomous driving software at Baidu USA, before he co-founded CYNGN, an automated driving company that Ma helped bring public. As he put it, “building AI robotics is all I do. ” RoboForce is starting with the solar panel market, where Ma said there’s a huge labor issue already. In 2024, about 53 gigawatts of solar projects were delayed because of worker shortages and long waits for equipment, according todata company Wood Mackenzie. Ma said RoboForce will launch one to two pilot solar projects with its robots this year. RoboForce is facing well-capitalized competition. This past summer, AES Corporation introduced the world to Maximo, a massive robot that the company claims willinstall solar panelstwice as fast as a human. But Ma isn’t worried, claiming that his product is the most accurate robot available. “RoboForce, proudly, is the first and the only one in the market that achieves both the AI model and the robot with the final action as one millimeter accuracy,” he said, adding that such accuracy allows the RoboForce robot to do fine motor tasks, like, say, tightening a screw in middle of the Arizona desert. The desert is just the beginning for RoboForce. Their moonshot dream? “Helping build the moon base on the moon,” Ma said. CES 2025, the annual consumer tech conference held in Las Vegas, is upon us — and this is where you… Topics Senior Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-01-06T17:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/06/roboforce-raises-10-millions-to-create-a-robot-workforce/
| 517 | 1 |
533ac2b3e48a25cca4d8379089c79caf
|
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|
Istio graduates
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TheCloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF) today announced thatIstio, the open sourceservice meshoriginally developed by Google and IBM and built on top of Lyft’s Envoy proxy, has graduated from its status as an incubating project and moved to join the likes of Kubernetes, Prometheus and fellow service mesh Linkerd as a CNCF Graduated Project. “Service mesh adoption has been steadily rising over the past few years as cloud native adoption has matured across industries,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. “Istiohas helped drive part of this maturation, and the project has progressed quickly since joining CNCF late last year. We look forward to watching and supporting this continued growth as theIstioteam adds new features and simplifies the service mesh experience. ” The history of Istio and the CNCF is a bit complicated. Google and IBM launched the project back in 2018, but unlike other projects, it took a long time before Google brought it under the auspice of a foundation. It was only a little bit more than a year ago that Googledonated the project to the CNCF. Given that Google donated Kubernetes to the CNCF barely a year after the organization was founded, that struck many people as odd and may have hampered Istio’s adoption. “With the rise of microservices architectures as the de facto pattern for authoring modern applications, connecting, observing and securing the complex landscape of containers and services has become a challenge for engineers,” said Cameron Etezadi, director of Engineering, Google Cloud. “Google is proud of our role in the creation and development ofIstioas a comprehensive solution to this hard problem. Istio‘s graduation, as well as its leading position as the world’s most adopted service mesh technology, reinforces our belief that it should be easy for everyone to benefit from secure, robust service-based applications. ” The CNCF now has two service mesh projects under its umbrella and there is a bit of competition between the two, especially given that a number of companies offer commercial services around them, not in the least Buoyant, the company behind Linkerd, which features a detailed breakdown of the difference between the two projectson its site, and Solo. io, which bets on Istio. The CNCF has always been happy to host competing projects, though (and on the other side of that coin, during the CNCF’s recent KubeCon/CloudNativeCon in Amsterdam, Aniszczyk told me that he believes the CNCF may have to get a little bit faster at archiving failing projects). Istio has seen quite a bit of development in that last year under the CNCF. Back in September, Solo. io and Google announced what is essentially the next evolution of Istio, the so-called “ambient mesh,” which will make it significantly easier for new users to adopt Istio and harden the project’s security posture. “We are immensely proud ofIstioreaching the Graduated level within CNCF. It is a clear testament to the dedication and collaborative spirit of our vibrant community, as well as the value the project provides to our users,” said Louis Ryan, CTO of Solo. io and co-creator ofIstio. “At Solo, we are proud to have worked alongside the community and contributors since the project’s inception to growIstiofrom an ambitious idea into a mature and stable service mesh solving large real-world problems. We want to thank everyone who has contributed to this moment, and we look forward to shaping the future of application networking together. ” Google and Solo. io bring Ambient Mesh to Istio Google donates the Istio service mesh to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Topics Editor Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2023-07-12T16:49:12 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/12/istio-graduates/
| 656 | 0.9 |
dcb20e42c150aabf60a08828b1abb54d
|
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US Senate removes controversial ‘AI moratorium’ from budget bill
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senators voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to remove acontroversial 10-year banon states’ abilities to regulate AI from the Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” reportsAxios. The provision to the reconciliation bill was introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Many prominent Silicon Valley executives — including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, and a16z’s Marc Andreessen — were in favor of the so-called “AI moratorium,” which they said would prevent states from forming an unworkable patchwork of regulation that could stifle AI innovation. Opposition to the provision became a bipartisan issue, as most Democrats and many Republicans warned that the ban on state regulation would harm consumers, and let powerful AI companies operate with little oversight. Critics also objected to Cruz’s plan to tie compliance with federal broadband funding. After going back and forth over the provision, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Monday offered an amendment to strip the provision alongside Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA). Blackburn (pictured above) originally opposed the provision, but came to an agreement with Cruz over the weekend that shortened the proposed ban from 10 years to five. Blackburn then pulled her support for the provision entirely on Monday. The Senate voted 99-1 to strip the AI moratorium. Topics Senior Reporter Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch, where she covers Tesla and Elon Musk’s broader empire, autonomy, AI, electrification, gig work platforms, Big Tech regulatory scrutiny, and more. She’s one of the co-hosts of the Equity podcast and writes the TechCrunch Daily morning newsletter. Previously, she covered social media for Forbes. com, and her work has appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, i-D (Vice) and more. Rebecca has invested in Ethereum. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2025-07-01T13:07:48 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/us-senate-removes-controversial-ai-moratorium-from-budget-bill/
| 350 | 0.9 |
dc5b89b02aa52c0ecabf5689be95e870
|
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Discord comes back online after widespread outage
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Discord is back online after an outage this morning, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The outage came asMeta’s Instagram, Facebook and Threads all went downthis morning. YouTube has alsoconfirmed that its serviceis having issues this morning too, and that it’s working on a fix. “This incident has been resolved,” Discord’s status page reads. “We are reviewing the updated rate limiting that triggered the initial session start issues, as well as the scaling targets for the internal service which limited guild loading during initial recovery. ” Discord says it is monitoring the recovery of multiple systems. According to third-party monitoring websiteDownDetector, the issues began at around 10:50 a. m. ET. Users reported that they were unable to load messages, while others say said they were unable to access the service at all. The outages across the multiple services come on Super Tuesday, a day when people across a number of U. S. states are voting in the primary. The outages, mainly on Facebook and Instagram, may make it harder for candidates to continue their outreach and remind people to head to the polls on an important day. Update 03/05/2024 11:45 a. m. ET:The article has been updated to reflect that Discord has solved the issue and is back online. Facebook, Instagram and Threads were all down in massive Meta outage on Super Tuesday Topics Consumer News Reporter Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor’s degree from University of Toronto and a master’s degree in journalism from Western University. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-03-05T16:24:15 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/05/discord-is-down-for-some-users/
| 338 | 0.9 |
7c295fd9124dd69956a205d3d97ade36
|
{"bias_density": 0.46, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
|
Only hours left to apply to Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt
|
A last call and a major shout-out to any and all early-stage founders. It’s time to dig deep and take advantage of an unparalleled opportunity atTechCrunch Disrupt 2023. I’m referring to theStartup Battlefield 200. All good things must come to an end, and the Startup Battlefield 200 experience isn’t just good — it’s great. But you’ll never know unless youapply here todayby 11:59 p. m. PDT. Why should you hunker down and get it done? Listen up. Thousands of early-stage startups vie to make the cut, but only the top 200 — carefully vetted by the TechCrunch editorial team — win a coveted spot on the show floor in San Francisco. It’s a bright showcase, and the spotlight draws the attention of media and investors on the lookout for the next big disruptor. In a classic, “but wait, there’s more” moment, 20 of those 200 — the best of the best — compete for TechCrunch’s $100,000 equity-free prize, as judged by TechCrunch editors, top VCs and entrepreneurs. What’s in it for you? Plenty. Take a look at what you’ll receive if your startup makes the cut: The benefits extend far beyond the Disrupt conference. TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield program, one of the most coveted cohorts to belong to, consists of more than 1,100 startups that have collectively raised $13 billion and generated more than 126 exits. Do you think you’ve got what it takes to make it to the top? You don’t have much time left —apply to Startup Battlefield 200 hereTODAY by 11:59 p. m. PDT! Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023? Contact our sponsorship sales team byfilling out this form
| 2023-05-15T13:00:29 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/15/last-day-apply-startup-battlefield-200-techcrunch-disrupt-2023/
| 277 | 0.9 |
ec43728f27c2aae7e3e7a07e6d0532df
|
{"bias_density": 0.22, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
|
Salesforce snatches up Zoomin, a tool for organizing company knowledge
|
Salesforce is on a buying spree. After snatching up data management firmOwnearlier in the month, Salesforce todayannouncedits plans to buy Zoomin, an enterprise knowledge platform. Zoomin — which we’ve covered ahandfuloftimesbefore — unifies a company’s docs, like product user guides and tutorials, in one portal. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Salesforce expects it to be finalized in Q4 of its fiscal year 2025 (January 31), subject to customary closing conditions. Founded in 2019 by Gal Oron, Hannan Saltzman, and Joe Gelb,Zoominapplies AI and big data to help companies build self-service documentation search and support experiences. The Israeli startup’s customers range from tech brands like McAfee and Dell to fast-food franchises including Burger King, Tim Hortons, and Popeyes. Zoomin’s investors — among them General Atlantic, Bessemer Ventures Partners, Viola Growth, and Salesforce’s own venture org, Salesforce Ventures — poured $73 million in capital into the firm. Rahul Auradkar, EVP of unified data sources at Salesforce, says that post-acquisition, Zoomin will augment Salesforce’s Data Cloud platform to power use cases like using a company’s knowledge base to automate customer service interactions. “Proprietary unstructured data is powerful fuel our customers can use for AI agents and customer experiences,” Auradkar said, “and Zoomin’s proven expertise and technology will accelerate Data Cloud’s innovation and enable our customers to get better value. ” Salesforce’s acquisition of Zoomin comes after the tech giantpledgedto spend $500 million in additional cash on AI startups through Salesforce Ventures
| 2024-09-24T22:35:56 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/24/salesforce-snatches-up-zoomin-a-tool-for-organizing-company-knowledge/
| 240 | 0.9 |
4af35dd8f7bf8e51b8e21bbeeb85b567
|
{"bias_density": 0.24, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
|
Corsair is buying mechanical keyboard maker Drop
|
Everyone seems to be buying a mechanical keyboard these days. Corsair has one-upped them all bybuying its own mechanical keyboard company. The Fremont, California-based peripheral maker today announced that it’s acquiring “certain assets” fromDropfor an undisclosed, all-cash deal. “Drop has been acquired by Corsair,” Drop CEO Jef Holovewrote in a blog postconfirming the news. “I am sure front-of-mind for you is what this will mean for Drop and our focus on our discerning, engaged enthusiast community – especially at a time when we’ve been watching other players in the community struggle or outright fold. Obviously, we are convinced this move is good for us, for you and for the hobby, and I’ll give you a sense of why here. ” The executive called the Portland-based company “small but mighty,” relative to a product portfolio that includes several keyboards, keycaps and audio accessories. Mechanical keyboards are the company’s bread and butter, and it makes fine hardware. I’ve been using the Drop Shift keyboard now for several months. The firm is also notable for high-profile branding exercises that include keycaps featuring Lord of the Rings and Marvel IP. “Personalized Keyboards that can be modified by the consumer is one of the fastest growing trends in the gaming peripheral space,” Corsair CEO Andy Paul said in a release. “Drop has proven to be one of the leaders in this space and with Corsair’s global footprint, we expect to significantly grow the Drop brand worldwide. We are also excited to be able to offer specialized Corsair and Elgato products to the enthusiast community that Drop is engaged with. ” Corsair purchased Elgato’s gaming division back in 2018 and continues to release products with that branding. The company has several mechanical keyboards of its own and will continue to operate Drop as its own brand. “Being a part of Corsair will help our team deliver more of what you love. You’ll see new products from us soon that Corsair is just as excited about as we were in creating them. You’ll see new collabs with community favorites,” says Holove. “Access to a world class supply chain will make getting you those products more reliable. With a global logistics capability behind us, we’ll also be able to do a fundamentally better job serving all of you outside the US who just want an easier, more affordable way to get the products you covet. ” OnePlus 81 Pro mechanical keyboard review
| 2023-07-17T15:49:13 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/17/corsair-is-buying-mechanical-keyboard-maker-drop/
| 404 | 0.9 |
88f29d8909a9eac909c8b9f6c6e84753
|
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|
Singaporean investment app Syfe pulls in $27M to hasten growth in Asia Pacific
|
The Asia Pacific region has long been an important market for wealth management firms with the plethora of developing economies and a burgeoning retail investment market. But there’s still a huge market to capture: About 40% to 45% of personal financial assets in the region are held in cash and deposits as of 2023, according toa report by McKinsey. Singapore-based investment platformSyfehas been working on making wealth management more accessible in the region by offering a variety of investment products and options, all via a smartphone app. The company has now raised a $27 million Series C round to offer more products and hasten its growth in Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. Syfe was founded in 2017 and launched its app in July 2019, and has since amassed over 100,000 users across more than 40 countries as it focused on making it easy for retail investors to find and invest in products that are usually not available to them via banks or traditional investment platforms. “Many people had tried traditional wealth managers, but the advice they were being given was always limited to the investment products that institution offered,” Syfe CEO and founder Dhruv Arora said. “Even if there were better products on the market, the wealth manager could not offer them. On top of that, the fees of the traditional wealth managers are very high. ” Syfe today offers everything from managed portfolios and fractional investing to cash management solutions and even a brokerage platform. The company also offers retail investors access to institutional products by partnering with banks and investment firms like Blackrock, Pimco and Vanguard. It does not require users to have a minimum deposit or meet additional requirements to avail these products. The company generates revenue from fees, Arora said. That strategy seems to have worked: Syfe this year reached profitability in its home market of Singapore, and Arora said its average client’s assets on the platform have more than doubled since 2023. According to the company, its AUM is in the billions of U. S. dollars. This Series C brings its total amount raised to $79 million and comes roughly three yearsafter its $30 million Series B funding round in 2021. Two U. K. -based family offices and returning investors, Valar Ventures and Unbound, participated in the Series C. The company did not disclose its valuation. Arora previously worked as an investment banker at UBS in Hong Kong. After leaving UBS, he led product development, growth and consumer services at Indian grocery delivery startup Grofers (now Blinkit),which was acquired by Zomato for $570 million. Other investment apps in Southeast Asia includePintu,Ajaib,BibitandPluang— all based in Indonesia. Syfe is often compared with Singapore-basedEndowusandStashAway. “This funding will enable us to reach more customers and help them grow their wealth for a better future,” Aurora said. “Through increased investment in development, we will bring even more innovative new products to market while continuously upgrading the Syfe user experience. We will also be assessing strategic investment opportunities or acquisition targets aligned with our mission and growth objectives. ” Topics Reporter, Asia Kate Park is a reporter at TechCrunch, with a focus on technology, startups and venture capital in Asia. She previously was a financial journalist at Mergermarket covering M&A, private equity and venture capital. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally
| 2024-08-13T15:59:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/13/singapores-investment-app-syfe-accelerates-growth-across-asia-pacific-with-27m/
| 615 | 1 |
17b6c41ec904aa8f250c5f990ad5f0a2
|
{"bias_density": 0.14, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
|
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