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Checkfirst raises $1.5M pre-seed to apply AI to remote inspections and audits
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The inspector with a clipboard, walking around a building, ticking off the last time the fire extinguishers were checked, or if all the lights are working. They work in the TICC (Testing, Inspection, Certification and Compliance) space, and they literally tick boxes. And while the job may seem simple enough to do physically, it’s a whole different ball game when it needs to be done remotely. Founder Ben Lambert realized just that, when after moving to Portugal, his wife’s property inspection business needed to be run remotely. “It was no longer easy to check inspections on-site and get reliable information. A final report could take weeks to come through,” he told me. Plus, actually scheduling the inspections turned out to be at least as large a problem. Seeing an opportunity, Lambert founded an AI-powered workflow tools startup,Checkfirst, that, in addition to allowing for remote inspections, enables businesses to schedule inspectors based on geographical location and qualifications. This results in less travel, a lower environmental footprint, and the workers end up happier as well. The company has now raised a pre-seed $1. 5 million led by Lisbon-based, early-stage venture firm, Olisipo Way, and Hiero VC (a solo GP firm). Notion Capital, and angel investors from companies like Source Point, Busuu, Swogo and FaceIT also participated. “As [the product] developed, we saw that the biggest problem wasn’t necessarily the data capture alone, but where companies earn or lose money was in the scheduling. It’s timely, as AI is perfect for scheduling tasks,” he said. “The biggest problem in the industry is scheduling, and the cool thing is, with AI, you can schedule really easily,” he told me. “Say an inspector is in London but needs to be in Munich to audit a building. With AI, you can understand what they’re doing and put it all together. We’re creating a scheduling tool for all these big companies. It’s not just about meeting compliance; it’s also scheduling. Then the compliance tool allows them to collect data easily to meet the regulatory standards. ” It turns out that the TICC industry is moving people around the world all the time, explained Lambert. “For example, an inspector could be in London today, but the company will send someone from Munich to London, because they don’t really understand they already have a guy in London. If an inspector then flies from Munich to London, they lose all of their margin immediately. With our tools, the guy the company was going to send in from Munich now doesn’t need to come to London. That saves the company thousands of euros, if not more. ” Lambert said they “initially used a mix of open source and commercial AI models”, and are now building their own “based on proprietary data for image recognition and scheduling”. In terms of competitors, Checkfirst is going up against some large incumbents in the compliance space, such as Intact Systems, Lumiform, Safety Culture (a unicorn) and Happy Co (focuses on property management). The difference with Checkfirst, says Lambert, is that it is an API-first solution and uses AI for image recognition and automation, churning out report summaries, and scheduling. The startup is working with several clients on proof-of-concepts, one which has 30,000 customers, the company claims. The co-founding team includes Lambert, CPO Oyvind Henriksen (who started Poq Studio) and CTO Rami Elsawy. Lambert was formerly with Nexmo and Agora
| 2024-05-08T13:02:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/08/checkfirst-raises-1-5m-pre-seed-applying-ai-to-remote-inspections-and-audits/
| 564 | 1 |
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|
Sergey Brin says he’s working on AI at Google ‘pretty much every day’
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Posted: Google co-founder and ex-Alphabet president Sergey Brin said he’s back working at Google “pretty much every day” because he hasn’t seen anything as exciting as the recent progress in AI — and doesn’t want to miss out. Brin revealed the tidbit in aninterviewduring the All-In Summit in L. A. this week. Last year,severalpublicationsreportedthat Brin was back at Google HQ working on various AI projects, but the sit-down is the first time Brin has publicly commented on his return. “It’s a big, fast-moving field,” Brin said of AI, adding that there is “tremendous value to humanity,” before explaining why he doesn’t think training more capable AI will require massively scaling up compute. “I’ve read some articles that extrapolate [compute] … and I don’t know if I’m quite a believer,” he said, “partly because the algorithmic improvements that have come over the last few years maybe are actually even outpacing the increased compute that’s being put into these models. ” 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
| 2024-09-11T00:01:06 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/10/sergey-brin-says-hes-working-at-google-pretty-much-every-day-on-ai/
| 225 | 0.9 |
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Apple cancels its car, Google’s AI goes awry and Bumble stumbles
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Hello, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry. This week, investment firm KKRannouncedthat it would acquire VMware’s end-user computing business from Broadcom for $4 billion. As Ron explains, that business included VMware Workspace One and VMware Horizon — two remote desktop apps that had been part of VMware’s family of products. Elsewhere,Mistral AI, the French AI startup, launched a new model to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4 — and its own cheekily named chatbot dubbed Le Chat. The releaseswere timedwith a Microsoft partnership to provide Mistral models to Microsoft’s Azure customers — and a minorityinvestment($16 million) from Microsoft in Mistral. Lots else happened. We recap it all in this edition of WiR — but first, a reminder tosign upto receive the WiR newsletter in your inbox every Saturday. Apple car canceled:Apple has scuttled its secretive, long-running effort to build an autonomous electric car. The company is likely cutting hundreds of employees from the team, and all work on the project has stopped. It joins alist of other projects Apple has scrapped in various stages, including AirPower and a TV (not to be confused with Apple TV). Bumble stumbles:Bumble posted weak Q4 results showing a $32 million net loss and $273. 6 million in revenue — below Wall Street expectations. To right the ship, CEO Lidiane Jones announced that 30% of Bumble’s workforce, or about 350 employees, would be let go and that Bumble would embark on an app overhaul targeted at reviving growth. Google’s AI goes awry:Google has apologized for an embarrassing AI blunder this week: An image-generating model that injected diversity into pictures with afarcical disregardfor historical context. While the underlying issue is perfectly understandable, Google blames the model for “becoming” oversensitive. Bad look:Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Tumblr owner Automattic, is supposed to be on sabbatical. Instead, he argued with Tumblr users this week over a content moderation decision that sparked accusations of transphobia, Amanda reports. Founder forced out:A group of Byju’s investors last Friday voted to remove the edtech group’s founder and chief executive, Byju Raveendran, and separately filed an oppression and management suit against the leadership at the firm to block therecently launched rights issue. GenAI ebooks:Inkitt, a self-publishing platform using AI to develop bestsellers, has raised $37 million. The startup’s app lets people self-publish stories, and then, using AI and data science, selects what it believes are the most compelling of these to tweak and subsequently distribute and sell. Keeping it old school:Lapse has raised $30 million for its smartphone app that has you wait for photos to be “developed” — with no chance of editing and retaking — before sharing them with a select group of friends if you choose. Techstars reckoning:Mary Ann interviewed Maëlle Gavet, CEO of the startup accelerator programTechstars, in the wake of changes to its operations that have attracted biting criticism. OnEquity, the crew talked through startup news from Microsoft and Mistral AI, Thrasio and Glean — and also covered happenings over at COTU Ventures and Zacua Ventures. Meanwhile,FoundspotlightedAriel Kaye, the founder of Parachute, a direct-to-consumer bedding and home goods company. And forChain Reaction, TC pulled from the archives to air an earlier conversation with Jack Lu, CEO and co-founder of Magic Eden, a “community-centric” NFT marketplace. Steeply discounted Mirai:Toyota is offering $40,000 off a 2023 Toyota Mirai Limited, a fuel-cell vehicle that retails for $66,000 — plus $15,000 in free hydrogen over six years. As Tim writes, there’s only one catch: finding the hydrogen to power it
| 2024-03-02T21:15:05 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/02/apple-cancels-its-car-googles-ai-goes-awry-and-bumble-stumbles/
| 584 | 1 |
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Gemini’s data-analyzing abilities aren’t as good as Google claims
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One of the selling points of Google’s flagship generative AI models,Gemini 1. 5 Pro and 1. 5 Flash, is the amount of data they can supposedly process and analyze. In press briefings and demos, Google has repeatedly claimed that the models can accomplish previously impossible tasks thanks to their “long context,” like summarizing multiple hundred-page documents or searching across scenes in film footage. But new research suggests that the models aren’t, in fact, very good at those things. Twoseparatestudiesinvestigated how well Google’s Gemini models and others make sense out of an enormous amount of data — think “War and Peace”-length works. Both find that Gemini 1. 5 Pro and 1. 5 Flash struggle to answer questions about large datasets correctly; in one series of document-based tests, the models gave the right answer only 40%-50% of the time. “While models like Gemini 1. 5 Pro can technically process long contexts, we have seen many cases indicating that the models don’t actually ‘understand’ the content,” Marzena Karpinska, a postdoc at UMass Amherst and a co-author on one of the studies, told TechCrunch. A model’s context, or context window, refers to input data (e. g. , text) that the model considers before generating output (e. g. , additional text). A simple question — “Who won the 2020 U. S. presidential election?” — can serve as context, as can a movie script, show or audio clip. And as context windows grow, so does the size of the documents being fit into them. The newest versions of Gemini can take in upward of 2 million tokens as context. (“Tokens” are subdivided bits of raw data, like the syllables “fan,” “tas” and “tic” in the word “fantastic. ”) That’s equivalent to roughly 1. 4 million words, two hours of video or 22 hours of audio — the largest context of any commercially available model. In a briefing earlier this year, Google showed several pre-recorded demos meant to illustrate the potential of Gemini’s long-context capabilities. One had Gemini 1. 5 Pro search the transcript of the Apollo 11 moon landing telecast — around 402 pages — for quotes containing jokes, and then find a scene in the telecast that looked similar to a pencil sketch. VP of research at Google DeepMind Oriol Vinyals, who led the briefing, described the model as “magical. ” “[1. 5 Pro] performs these sorts of reasoning tasks across every single page, every single word,” he said. That might have been an exaggeration. In one of the aforementioned studies benchmarking these capabilities, Karpinska, along with researchers from the Allen Institute for AI and Princeton, asked the models to evaluate true/false statements about fiction books written in English. The researchers chose recent works so that the models couldn’t “cheat” by relying on foreknowledge, and they peppered the statements with references to specific details and plot points that’d be impossible to comprehend without reading the books in their entirety. Given a statement like “By using her skills as an Apoth, Nusis is able to reverse engineer the type of portal opened by the reagents key found in Rona’s wooden chest,” Gemini 1. 5 Pro and 1. 5 Flash — having ingested the relevant book — had to say whether the statement was true or false and explain their reasoning. Tested on one book around 260,000 words (~520 pages) in length, the researchers found that 1. 5 Pro answered the true/false statements correctly 46. 7% of the time while Flash answered correctly only 20% of the time. Averaging all the benchmark results, neither model managed to achieve a bit higher than random chance in terms of question-answering accuracy. “We’ve noticed that the models have more difficulty verifying claims that require considering larger portions of the book, or even the entire book, compared to claims that can be solved by retrieving sentence-level evidence,” Karpinska said. “Qualitatively, we also observed that the models struggle with verifying claims about implicit information that is clear to a human reader but not explicitly stated in the text. ” The second of the two studies, co-authored by researchers at UC Santa Barbara, tested the ability of Gemini 1. 5 Flash (but not 1. 5 Pro) to “reason over” videos — that is, search through and answer questions about the content in them. The co-authors created a dataset of images (e. g. , a photo of a birthday cake) paired with questions for the model to answer about the objects depicted in the images (e. g. , “What cartoon character is on this cake?”). To evaluate the models, they picked one of the images at random and inserted “distractor” images before and after it to create slideshow-like footage. Flash didn’t perform all that well. In a test that had the model transcribe six handwritten digits from a “slideshow” of 25 images, Flash got around 50% of the transcriptions right. The accuracy dropped to around 30% with eight digits. “On real question-answering tasks over images, it appears to be particularly hard for all the models we tested,” Michael Saxon, a PhD student at UC Santa Barbara and one of the study’s co-authors, told TechCrunch. “That small amount of reasoning — recognizing that a number is in a frame and reading it — might be what is breaking the model. ” Neither of the studies have been peer-reviewed, nor do they probe the releases of Gemini 1. 5 Pro and 1. 5 Flash with 2-million-token contexts. (Both tested the 1-million-token context releases. ) And Flash isn’t meant to be as capable as Pro in terms of performance; Google advertises it as a low-cost alternative. Nevertheless, bothadd fuel to the firethat Google’s been overpromising — and under-delivering — with Geminifrom the beginning. None of the models the researchers tested, including OpenAI’sGPT-4oand Anthropic’sClaude 3. 5 Sonnet, performed well. But Google’s the only model provider that’s given context window top billing in its advertisements. “There’s nothing wrong with the simple claim, ‘Our model can take X number of tokens’ based on the objective technical details,” Saxon said. “But the question is, what useful thing can you do with it?” Generative AI broadly speaking is coming under increased scrutiny as businesses (and investors) grow frustrated with the technology’s limitations. In apair of recent surveys fromBoston Consulting Group, about half of the respondents — all C-suite executives — said that they don’t expect generative AI to bring about substantial productivity gains and that they’re worried about the potential for mistakes and data compromises arising from generative AI-powered tools. PitchBook recentlyreportedthat, for two consecutive quarters, generative AI dealmaking at the earliest stages has declined, plummeting 76% from its Q3 2023 peak. Faced with meeting-summarizing chatbots that conjure up fictional details about people and AI search platforms that basically amount to plagiarism generators, customers are on the hunt for promising differentiators. Google — which has raced,at times clumsily, to catch up to its generative AI rivals — was desperate to make Gemini’s context one of those differentiators. But the bet was premature, it seems. “We haven’t settled on a way to really show that ‘reasoning’ or ‘understanding’ over long documents is taking place, and basically every group releasing these models is cobbling together their own ad hoc evals to make these claims,” Karpinska said. “Without the knowledge of how long context processing is implemented — and companies do not share these details — it is hard to say how realistic these claims are. ” Google didn’t respond to a request for comment. Both Saxon and Karpinska believe the antidotes to hyped-up claims around generative AI are better benchmarks and, along the same vein, greater emphasis on third-party critique. Saxon notes that one of the more common tests for long context (liberally cited by Google in its marketing materials), “needle in the haystack,” only measures a model’s ability to retrieve particular info, like names and numbers, from datasets — not answer complex questions about that info. “All scientists and most engineers using these models are essentially in agreement that our existing benchmark culture is broken,” Saxon said, “so it’s important that the public understands to take these giant reports containing numbers like ‘general intelligence across benchmarks’ with a massive grain of salt. ” Updated 7/3:A previous version of this article stated that Gemini 1. 5 Pro and 1. 5 Flash’s accuracy was below random chance on the task of reasoning over long text. In fact, their accuracy was above random chance. We’ve made the correction. Google PR also sent links to studies that suggest Gemini’s long-context performance is stronger than implied here:Extended Multi-Doc QA,Video MME,longer queries subset on LMSYS,Ruler
| 2024-06-29T22:30:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/29/geminis-data-analyzing-abilities-arent-as-good-as-google-claims/
| 1,426 | 1 |
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Alta raises $11M to bring ‘Clueless’ fashion tech to life with all-star investors
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Throughout her years working in technology, Jenny Wang, 28, always found herself stumbling back to one idea — a personal styling agent to help users decide what to wear and buy based on their budget, lifestyle, weather, and calendar. She has tried to build such a product numerous times in the past, “but the AI technology was not yet mature enough,” she told TechCrunch. That’s changed, so a few months ago she announced the launch of her dream company,Alta, followed by the announcement today of an $11 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures. The product, which feelsstraight out of the movie “Clueless,”is indeed an AI stylist and personal shopper that makes outfit recommendations and lets users try on those looks with their personalized virtual avatar. For example, a person can ask Alta what the best outfit might be for, say, TechCrunch Disrupt, and the AI will offer suggestions and present a lookbook of outfits. Users upload their closet by either taking photos, forwarding purchase receipts, or searching what is already in the Alta database. People can also dress themselves in clothes they are looking to buy, mixing and matching with clothes already in their closet. Thereare others playing aroundin the AI styling space,such as Wheringand Cladwell, all trying to recreate the magic of that iconic scene in “Clueless,” where Cher plans an outfit from her closet using computer technology. Wang considers herself to be part of the new wave of consumer technology, looking to make styling and shopping more effective. “There are existing players like Google Shopping and Pinterest who are also experimenting with AI,” she continued. “But the experiences that consumers will crave and use in the future will need to be built with new technical architectures and new user interfaces. ” The product is backed by some heavy names, including Michelle Obama’s stylist Meredith Koop, who Wang said helped train Alta’s AI. Other investors in the company include Benchstrength; Algaé Ventures, the investment firm backed by fashion’s prestigious Arnault family of LVMH; Phenomenal Ventures, the firm founded by Kamala Harris’ niece Meena; Anthropic’s VC arm Anthology fund; and a slew of angel investors including DoorDash CEO and co-founder Tony Xu, super modelsJasmine Tookesand Karlie Kloss, Rent the Runway co-founder Jenny Fleiss, and Poshmark CEO and co-founder Manish Chandra. Wang used the word “aligned” to describe her fundraising process and leaned heavily on the network she amassed while working in various tech roles throughout her career. She’s a Harvard engineer by training and has invested in numerous companies, served as a technical advisor to brands, and also held roles at investment firms. Years ago, for example, she was an intern at DoorDash, and previously volunteered on Karlie Kloss’ podcast “Kode With Klossy. ” “I am still actively coding every day and learning from our team and technical advisors,” she said. Wang said the fresh capital will be used to grow the team and fund more research and development. “Our team is continuously updating our in-house models and improving the experience based on community feedback,” she said. Alta has alreadystruck a partnershipwith the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) to offer Alta to its membership base. Wang used to live in San Francisco but relocated to New York to help build out the technology. “NYC is also a closer flight to Paris than SF,” she said, adding that LVMH and one of her angel investors, tech influencerZita d’Hautville, are helping the company expand throughout Europe. Alta is also working with Marie Kondo as the company expands throughout parts of Oceania and the Pacific. The plan is to next look at partnering with retailers worldwide. “Many of the most exciting consumer AI companies are being started in NYC,” Wang continued, adding that she’s assembled a highly technical but also fashion-obsessed team. This startup is her dream come true. 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
| 2025-06-16T13:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/16/alta-raises-11m-to-bring-clueless-fashion-tech-to-life-with-all-star-investors/
| 671 | 1 |
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Apple will replace CFO Luca Maestri next year
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Posted: Apple announced today that Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri will step away from his executive role, effective January 1. Kevan Parekh, Apple’s current VP of Financial Planning, will be promoted to CFO after 11 years at Apple. Maestri has been CFO at Apple since 2014, and he’s now transitioning to a different role in the company, where he will report directly to CEO Tim Cook. Cook said in a press release that Maestri will continue leading the corporate services team, which encompasses information security and real estate. Apple did not provide a reason for this shift, but said that it is “part of a planned succession. ” 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
| 2024-08-26T21:02:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/26/apple-will-replace-cfo-luca-maestri-next-year/
| 174 | 0.8 |
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Base Ecosystem Fund, Hashed Emergent invest $1.9M in Nestcoin to scale its Onboard product
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Nestcoin, a development company housing modern finance projectOnboard, has secured $1. 9 million in a strategic funding round. Hashed Emergent, a Web2. 5 fund for builders from emerging markets, led the round. Alter Global, Magic Fund, CMT Digital, and 4DX Ventures are among the existing investors that took part. Adaverse and Base Ecosystem Fund, two new investors, also participated. It’s been almost a year since the implosion of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX caused Nestcoin, whichraised $6. 45 millionin early 2022, tolose millions in assets (cash and stablecoins). Concurrently, Nestcoin slashed its headcount. The company had planned to create, invest in, and operate web3 products for customers in frontier markets across decentralized finance (DeFi), media, digital art, and gaming. These unexpected events have required Nestcoin to reevaluate its objectives, CEO Yele Bademosi told TechCrunch. The two-year-old startup once served as a testing ground for new web/crypto products. Breach, a media platform; Brunch, a cryptocurrency-based group messaging tool; and Metaverse Magma (MVM), a gaming DAO thatraised $3. 2 million last September, all called the upstart home. But now Nestcoin is portraying itself as a development firm for Onboard. Meanwhile, MVM operates independently after being spun off. “During this transition period, we were trying to make the best decision when there were no good decisions,” Bademosi recounts. “It helped that we were open and transparent with our investors and community. We had to make tough decisions regarding cutting product lines. We had to transition from a venture studio and investment holding company to a single-product company. ” African web3 startup Nestcoin declares it held its assets in FTX, lays off employees Nestcoin plans to use the money to not only shore up its finances, but also to continue with its mission to provide individuals in frontier markets with equitable access to economic possibilities through the development of Onboard. The firm claims that Onboard would help Africans unable to access financial services and possibilities to grow their wealth owing to location constraints or a lack of faith in the continent’s financial systems. In a nutshell, Onboard is a noncustodial wallet. It competes with global services like MetaMask and Trust Wallet and domestic services like Ejara. These self-custody wallets let users securely store and protect cryptocurrencies, digital assets, and tokens. In contrast, Binance and Coinbase are centralized exchanges that entrust asset safekeeping to a third party. “We believe this is the future of modern finance. People will shift to not trusting some third party or middleman to hold their assets,” Bademosi said on the call. “We also have many innovative features in the coming weeks. Rewards, credit and being able to pay or receive payments quickly are a few as we use underlying blockchain technology. ” Onboard, which launched in April, claims to have over 10,000 users. Per its website, users can “instantly” change crypto, especially stablecoins, to their local currency (the naira) via its wallet. A major differentiator from other self-custody wallets, Onboard notes, is that its users can use emails instead of seed phrases to access their keys. Seed phrases, if misplaced, can lead to the loss of crypto assets. On the other hand, Onboard claims to safeguard users’ assets with “secure key management and multifactor authentication. ” Similarly, Onboard, which isn’t disclosing its transaction volumes yet, provides a P2P marketplace for merchants to earn profits by trading digital assets. A virtual card product that allows users to spend stablecoins across 160+ countries is also in the works. Two years ago, investors pushed money into blockchain technologies at a stunning rate, carried away by bullish optimism and frenzy buying of NFTs, DeFi, and web3 projects. As a matter of fact, in 2021, venture capital investments in blockchain companieshit a record high of $25. 2 billion. However, it is common knowledge that investors are more conservative now. “From a fundraising perspective, this is the hardest time I’ve raised capital as an investor and a founder. It’s just a tough market,” said the founding partner of early-stage VC firm Microtraction. Bademosi has raised money from Binance, FTX, and now Coinbase through Base Ecosystem Fund for his blockchain projects. Base Ecosystem Fund invests in and supports early-stage projects built on Base, a low-cost, developer-friendly Ethereum L2 developed by crypto giant Coinbase. Coinbase’s goal with Base is to “make onchain the next online and onboard over 1 billion users into the crypto economy. ” Onboard is integrated into the Base ecosystem of decentralized apps (dApps). For that reason, Bademosi considers it a global product, even if its initial clients (mostly tech professionals and enthusiasts) have come from Nigeria. “Onboard was part of 15 global brands that took part in the launch of Base, including Coca-Cola, Atari, Open Sea and Optimus. We were the only sort of African brand and project. And I think we’re the fund’s second investment globally,” said the chief executive. “The problem we’re solving is global. One thing people should expect from us over the coming months is an intentional push beyond the continent’s shores. ” 1/ I'm sharing the 10 ideas I'm most excited about in crypto right now. If you're building something in crypto or thinking about doing so – check it out. We’re building lots at Coinbase, but we don't have time to tackle everything. So I figured I'd share these. Bear markets are…pic. twitter. com/XKzCkMaOOT — Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong)August 30, 2023 Last month, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, in atweet, described a P2P exchange fully onchain platform as one of the things he was excited about in crypto. Bademosi believes this validates what Onboard is building. But only time will tell. “We’re grateful to be building on Base with Nestcoin and proud to support them with the Base Ecosystem Fund. We’ve been inspired by their work creating Onboard, empowering people across Africa to come onchain and experience increased access, freedom and opportunity. We are excited to work together to bring the next million builders and billion users onchain together,” Jesse Pollak, creator of Base, said of the investment. Topics Reporter, Africa
| 2023-09-07T08:19:42 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/07/base-ecosystem-fund-hashed-emergent-invest-1-9m-in-nestcoin-to-scale-its-onboard-product/
| 1,000 | 1 |
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Aave protocol developer secures $31 million for Lens, a high-performance blockchain for consumer apps
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Avara, the company behindAave,Lens, andFamily, is announcing a $31 million funding round led byLightspeed Faction. With Lens, Avara is building a decentralized L2 network that could serve as the infrastructure for social and consumer apps. This funding announcement comes a few weeks after Lensunveileda completely overhauled version of its protocol, Lens v3. Originally built on the Polygon blockchain, consumer apps that are using Lens v2 include NFT creation and sharing appZora, Twitter-like platformsHeyandKaira, and subcommunity-focused appOrb. Why are crypto developers still trying to create the next big social network? It comes down to decentralization and focusing on users. Users interacting with a Lens-powered app own their identity and content. Apps built on top of the Lens network are interfaces to interact with the blockchain. The Lens team even calls these appsclients. If users want to migrate to a new social platform because they’re unhappy with some changes, they can just sign in to another Lens-powered app. Similarly, while consumer social apps incentivize creators with rewards programs and subscription systems, the companies behind those social networks dictate the rules. “I think social networks are very financial as of today, but most of that financial value goes from advertisers to the platform and very little for the user,” Avara founder Stani Kulechov (pictured above) told TechCrunch. In addition to that, he feels like users are “locked into a specific database. ” With a decentralized social app, “that basically turns the model upside down where the users are more important, and they have more power than the platform itself,” Kulechov added. It could potentially lead to more transparent revenue-sharing contracts with better rewards for creators. With Lens v3, the company is tackling one of the biggest issues with web3 social experiments — the cost of transactions. Writing a post on a web3 platform means signing a transaction on an underlying blockchain. While layer-2 networks have contributed to driving transaction costs down over the past few years, it remains a barrier to entry for large-scale consumer apps. “We launched it on Polygon, but the network doesn’t scale to mainstream usage … where one transaction might cost a fraction of a cent. And that’s basically why we chose a stack where we wanted to have the benefits of Ethereum. All these transactions that happen on Lens Network, we take them, we package them with ZK proofs and then put these transitions into Ethereum,” Kulechov said. The Lens network is now usingZKsyncas the base technology along with validiums. Unlike Base or Arbitrum, validiums are anoff-chaintransaction technique — they make transactions much cheaper. “So this allows us to create transactions that are much more affordable than existing rollups. And that creates a new design space for more consumer applications,” Kulechov said. The idea is that interactions with the Lens network should cost more or less as much as cloud server costs. Developers should be able to absorb those costs for their users. “Our aim here is to say that blockchains should be free to use for users, the same way as the internet is,” Kulechov said. Lens is defining a handful of “social primitives” as the core characteristics of the protocol, namely accounts, usernames, graphs, feeds, and groups. Each user account can create multiple usernames (across multiple apps) and start following other users to build multiple graphs. They can also join groups. The most interesting feature is that developers can create a set of rules to allow or restrict access to feeds (and individual posts within feeds). For instance, you could organize an event and give an NFT to every event-goer. An online community could be restricted to people who hold this NFT. You could also restrict content to people who pay a certain amount. Token gating could be used to create subscriber-only feeds or posts (a “web3 Substack”). As for content moderation, Kulechov believes “a protocol should be as unopinionated as possible. And then, at the application level, the application should manage the moderation. ” Lens plans to launch the mainnet of Lens v3 at some point during the first quarter of 2025. It’s going to be interesting to see if this protocol upgrade moves the needle when it comes to decentralized social networks — the existing ones remain niche networks for now. In addition to Lightspeed Faction, participants in the round include Alchemy, Avail, Circle, Consensys, DFG, Fabric Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Stellarcore, Superscript, Re7, and Wintermute Ventures, as well as angel investors Anurag Arjun, Anton Bukov, Rune Christensen, Alex Gluchowski, Aleksander Leonard Larsen, Loi Luu, Spencer Noon, and Duncan Robinson. Topics Senior Reporter
| 2024-12-18T14:00:52 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/18/aave-protocol-developer-secures-31-million-for-lens-its-high-performance-blockchain-for-social-apps/
| 758 | 1 |
4da3abc8c781f82baeed1a8aabb9053b
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Orby is building AI agents for the enterprise
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AI “agents” are generative AI models that can perform actions autonomously, like copying info from an email and pasting it into a spreadsheet, and have been hailed asproductivity superchargers. That might be a bit premature, givenmodels’ tendency to make mistakes. But at least a few founders (andanalystsandinvestors) seem convinced that agents are the next frontier in generative AI. Bella Liu and William Lu are two such founders. Their company,Orby AI, is building a generative AI platform that attempts to automate a range of different business workflows, including workflows that involve data entry, documents processing and forms validation. Lots of startups offer tools to automate repetitive, monotonous back-office business processes (seeParabola,Tines, Sam Altman-backedInduced AIandTektonic AI, to name a few). Incumbents, too, like Automation Anywhere and UiPath, havemoved to embrace AIto try to maintain pace with the generative AI competition. But Liu and Lu claim that Orby’s tech stands out for its ability to learn and act on workflows in real time and to understand the patterns and relationships within an enterprise’s unstructured data. “Orby’s platform observes how workers do their work in order to automatically create automations for complex tasks that require some level of reasoning and understanding,” Liu, Orby’s CEO, explained. “An AI agent installed on a worker’s computer effectively watches, learns and generates automations, adapting the model as it learns more. ” With Orby, which launched out of stealth in 2023, Liu and Lu say that they sought to create AI that could understand some of the low-level decisions being made by workers and abstract those decisions away, freeing up workers to focus on headier things. Liu previously led AI and automation efforts at IBM, including product planning and AI-related mergers and acquisitions, and was UiPath’s director of AI product management. Lu is a former Nvidia systems engineer who joined Google Cloud as an engineering lead, helping to design generative AI document and database extraction tech. Orby’s purported secret sauce is a cloud-based generative AI model that’s fine-tuned to complete customer tasks, such as validating expense reports. The model relies partly on symbolic AI, a form of AI that leverages rules, such as mathematical theorems, to infer solutions to problems. Symbolic AI alone can be inflexible and slow, especially when dealing with large and complicated datasets. It needs clearly defined knowledge and context to perform well. But recent research has shown that itcanbe scalable when paired with traditional AI model architectures. “For the last two years, we’ve been engineering this AI model, and have performed successful trials,” Liu said. “There are few pure-play generative AI companies attacking the enterprise head-on with something end-to-end. We are one. ” Liu says that Orby’s model can intelligently adapt to changes in workflows, like when an app’s UI gets an update, by analyzing API interactions and a worker’s browser usage. Having software monitor an employee’s every move sound like a privacy disaster waiting to happen. But Liu claims that Orby doesn’t store most customer data; it only uses certain telemetry data to improve its model, encrypting the data both in transit and at rest. “Humans are kept completely in the feedback loop,” she added. Orby, which recently raised $30 million in a Series A funding round co-led by New Enterprise Associates, WndrCo and Wing (sources say at a post-money valuation of $120 million), is competing in a challenging sector. Forthcoming agentic AI from generative AI powerhouses such as OpenAI and Anthropic have dampened the prospects of incumbents and smaller players alike. Adept, a startup building AI agents technologyfocused on enterprise applications, isreportedlyon the cusp of an acqui-hire deal with Microsoft before it manages to ship a single product. Amazon and Google have released AIagenttoolingto little fanfare. Elsewhere, UiPath — despite its ramping up of generative AI initiatives in the past year — saw salesplummetin its most recent fiscal quarter. Liu says that Orby can come out ahead by taking a systematic go-to-market approach. The company is already generating revenue from around a dozen customers, she says, and plans to put its $35 million war chest toward expanding its Mountain View-based, roughly 30-person team. “The funds are being used to scale our go-to-market, customer support, product and technical orgs,” she said. “The enterprise market has an insatiable appetite for generative AI solutions that demonstrably improve business performance; they are just trying to figure out where to best apply the technology in the near term before they scale it across their business. ”
| 2024-06-27T12:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/27/orby-is-building-ai-agents-for-the-enterprise/
| 738 | 1 |
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Immersive gaming and fitness apps are the key to Vision Pro’s consumer appeal
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The foundational vocabulary of any new medium is inherited from that of its predecessor. Take, for instance, the early days of television, when so many shows were effectively radio programs caught on film. The new medium’s success is dependent on the development of its own vocabulary, distinguishing itself from earlier paradigms. In the case ofVision Pro, the connection to a predecessor couldn’t be more apparent. A major piece of Apple’s content strategy is the ability to run iPadOS apps on the headset. When searching the visionOS App Store, users choose between content developed specifically for the platform and that created for the tablet. It’s similar to the approach the company has taken to building out the Mac App Store, which draws from both iOS and iPadOS apps. While600 is a good number of “optimized” appsfor the launch of a first-gen product, the availability of iPadOS content really bolsters the essentials and gives developers some extra time to build something custom while bigger names like YouTube waffle on their objectives. As far as what constitutes “optimized,” we’re talking about a wide spectrum. That could mean something as simple as a change to the UX to reflect the Vision Pro’s hand tracking. It could also mean something far more immersive. I understand if you didn’t make it all the way throughlast week’s 6,000-word review, so here’s a bit of the TL;DR: the Vision Pro will live or die on the backs of developers. As I noted previously, the first iPhone was undoubtedly a revolutionary piece of hardware, but it was the iPhone 3G’s App Store that really blew the industry wide open. At this point we all fundamentally understand that a hardware platform is only as good as its content, and Apple only truly demonstrated how capable its smartphone was by opening it up to developers. Apple Vision Pro review: The infinite desktop Truly immersive experiences are very much in the minority in the Vision Pro’s current state. That’s not a surprise, really. While development has — to a certain extent — been open for months now, I’m sure many parties have been waiting for launch to gauge the true interest of both the public and their developers. This isn’t to say that immersion isn’t present in the current offering. For one thing, it’s big into Environments — a core feature of visionOS that serves as a kind of immersive desktop wallpaper, putting you on the moon, in a desert or at the edge a volcano. Experience Dinosaurs, meanwhile, does a fine job leveraging the knowledge of the Prehistoric Planet team to create one of Vision Pro’s most compelling demos. It’s content like this that demonstrates potential that can be exploited by future developers. One of the device’s initial creativity bottlenecks, however, is where Apple chose to focus its initial push. In my review, I hammered the idea of “infinite desktop,” a play on the phrase “infinite canvas” that gets to the heart of the “spatial computing” experience Tim Cook has pushed since day one. At its core, Apple sees the device as the next step in a journey that began with the Mac decades ago. For now, it’s designed to play nicely with desktops and laptops, but it’s easy to imagine a future where (should things play out the way the company hopes) Apple’s primary PC is one you strap to your face. This push was a surprise to many at last year’s WWDC. I suspect it also left plenty of fans cold. A 360 degree desktop is compelling to sum, but there’s a sense it which it’s almost a commoditization of the form factor that’s been sold to us as the future of entertainment for decades. A big part of this push is obvious: the first-gen product is $3,500. Enterpriseshave significantly deeper pockets than consumers. How do you sell to them? Training apps are a big piece. If a company believes it can save money on employee training down the road, it will happily shell out the upfront cost. Rendering is a piece as well — look to apps like JigSpace as an example of real-time 3D modeling. Imagine, for instance, building a 3D render of a car in 3D design software, exporting it and then being able to walk around it. The third key point is productivity. That’s where spatial computing comes in. This means products like Microsoft Word and applications like mind mapping, which are traditionally constrained by PC displays. Entertainment is here too, but it largely feels secondary to visionOS in its current form. Part of the answer can be found in the product’s name. Given Apple’s current product line structuring, “Vision Pro” implies the future existence of an “Apple Vision” — i. e. a headset for consumers priced well below $3,500. If you know anything about hardware, you know how much first-gen products absorb R&D costs, as well as smaller-scale manufacturing. The bleeding-edge components such as 4K eye displays way heavily on production costs until scale increases. So, you position the product as premium and you sell it to enterprises. Games and movies are present because they can’t not be. The idea of a “work machine” doesn’t exist the way it did decades ago. The iPhone played a huge role in blurring that line, for better or worse, making the productivity machine its own distraction device. If you bring your work laptop on a business trip, odds are pretty good you’ll fire up Netflix at some point. Perhaps the more accessible version of the product will find Apple shining more of a spotlight on immersive entertainment. As it stands, many of the experiences are iPadOS apps that are played on a virtual large screen, rather than something that takes advantage of immersion and hand tracking in a way that couldn’t be replicated in the medium that preceded it. For now, it seems, there’s a reason Apple doesn’t want people calling the Vision Pro “VR. ” This morning, I played a few rounds of Synth Riders. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s also available on Meta Quest — that’s an easy enough port. In fact, many of the first immersive entertainment experiences will likely take this route. If you’re already developing for VR, why not tap into this burgeoning market? Synth Riders is a rhythm game not fundamentally dissimilar from Rock Band, wherein your hands (or controllers in the case of the Meta Quest) control two spheres that rack up points as you correctly move them to the beat of a synthwave track. I found it mesmerizing. It’s also the closest I’ve come to using a fitness app on the device. This is due to limitations with headset weight, price and that darn battery pack. The Vision Pro isn’t designed for you to jump around and get super sweaty in. This does, however, feel like a blind spot for a company so focused on the space through the Apple Watch and Fitness+ app. Maybe as Apple brings the weight down and finds a more manageable battery solution? Again, many of our Vision Pro conversations are very much focused on the first-gen hump. Ultimately, however, broader consumer appeal will hinge on two key things: 1) Bringing down the cost and 2) Content. Both will make or break future devices’ mainstream appeal, and whether Apple currently recognizes it or not, entertainment and fitness will need to play a key role in that journey
| 2024-02-06T23:13:35 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/06/immersive-gaming-and-fitness-apps-are-the-key-to-vision-pros-consumer-appeal/
| 1,236 | 1 |
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The Rivian-Volkswagen joint venture deal is now up to $5.8B
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Rivian and Volkswagen Group have finalized a multibillion-dollar joint venture to develop software, paving the way to let the German auto giant leverage the EV startup’s more technical chops in the coming years. Volkswagen will invest up to $5. 8 billion by 2027, about 16% more than when the deal was firstannounced in June. Volkswagen Group has already made an initial investment of $1 billion in the form of a convertible note. The new joint venture — Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies — will officially kick off November 13 as an independent company. And, if successful, it could be a boon for both companies. Rivian gets a needed injection of capital and the opportunity to diversify its business, while VW Group gains a next-generation electrical architecture and software for EVs that will help it better compete. Both companies argue the joint venture will reduce development costs and help scale new technologies more quickly. The companies designed the joint venture as a 50-50 partnership with co-CEOs, who will report into both Rivian and Volkswagen Group. Rivian’s head of software, Wassym Bensaid, and Volkswagen Group’s chief technical engineer, Carsten Helbing, will lead the joint venture. Developers and software engineers from both companies will join the joint venture, according to Rivian and VW. The team will be based initially in Palo Alto, California. Three other sites are in development in North America and Europe, the companies said Tuesday. VW, and more specifically its software arm Cariad, has struggled in recent years to deliver what some in the industry have dubbed a“software-defined vehicle. ” This jargon industry term, sometimes abbreviated SDV, means any car, truck, or SUV with capabilities that can be upgraded over time (or even new functions added) via software. Automakers view these software-defined vehicles as a new way to make money via in-car entertainment and services; it’s also seen essential for automakers aiming to compete with Tesla. Earlier this year, Rivian started producing the next-generation of its R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV, an upgrade that reworked the guts of its vehicles, including a new electrical architecture and compute platform. That new electrical architecture is seen internally as a key innovation at Rivian and one that allows the company to wirelessly update software. With the Rivian-VW joint venture steering software development for the German automaker’s next-generation of EVs, Cariad’s future is uncertain. VW Group CEO Oliver Blume said Tuesday that Cariad will continue to play a “central role” in its global software strategy at Volkswagen Group, adding the software arm will be responsible for the existing software platform in today’s vehicles over the next decade. Cariad is also in charge of software governance, which covers autonomous driving, data management, and cloud services. Prior to the initial June announcement, Cariad had hired at least23 of Rivian’s top employeesover the past several months to bolster its Silicon Valley outpost called the SDV Hub. The SDV hub is ground zero for Cariad’s next-generation software architecture known as “software 2. 0. ”Now Rivian will contribute even more talent toward the joint venture. “Rivian will be contributing a significant portion of the team,” Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said during a press conference Tuesday afternoon. The JV team plans to use the existing Rivian electrical architecture and software technology stack to enable the launch of Rivian’s R2 midsize SUV in the first half of 2026 and support the expected launch of the first models from the Volkswagen Group as early as 2027, the companies said. Last month at Disrupt 2024, Bensaid described the joint venture as an opportunity for Rivian to bring its software to multiple brands, including theVW spinoff Scout. He said 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,” Bensaid said at the time. Scout has since confirmed that its vehicles will be among the first to use the new zonal architecture built by the Volkswagen Group-Rivian joint venture
| 2024-11-12T21:11:54 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/12/the-rivian-volkswagen-joint-venture-deal-is-now-up-to-5-8b/
| 663 | 1 |
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Apple earnings see 10% iPhone sales drop, massive buyback fuels stock jump
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Apple on Thursdayreported a 10% drop in iPhone salesfor the second fiscal quarter, dropping from $51. 33 billion to $45. 96 billion, year-over-year. The slowdown was fueled, in part, by an 8% drop in China. Apple’s slow adoption of AI versus competitors like Google and Microsoft likely played a role in consumers’ decision to hold off on purchasing a new iPhone. Apple has promised some big announcements on that front (likely at WWDC in June), but the iPhone 16 itself likely won’t arrive until fall. “Keep in mind as we described on the last call in the March quarter a year ago, we were able to replenish iPhone channel inventory and fulfill significant pent-up demand from the December quarter COVID-related supply disruptions on the iPhone 14 pro and 14 Pro Max,” CEO Tim Cook explained on an earnings call. “We estimate this one-time impact is $5 billion to the March quarter revenue last year. If we remove this from last year’s results, our March quarter total company revenue this year would have grown. ” In spite of those dire hardware figures, however, the company still managed to beat Wall Street expectations and the stock rosemore than 6%after hours, fueled by both an increase on services revenue and a massive $110 billion stock buyback — a jump over last year’s $90 billion purchase. Services, which includes offerings like iCloud, Apple TV+ and Apple Music, jumped 14% for the year. Apple has long anticipated a slowdown in hardware sales, and its increasing focus on subscription services have helped to make up for some of that loss. “We expect our services business to grow double digits at a rate similar to the growth we reported for the first half of the fiscal year,” CFOLuca Maestri noted on the call. He added that, “iPad should grow double digits. ” The company is expected to release two new iPads at astandalone event next week. That the company has not refreshed the tablet line since 2022 no doubt contributed to its own drop in sales from $6. 67 billion to $5. 56 billion, year over year. At Tuesday’s event, Apple is also expected to announce the M4 chip — the latest addition to the Apple Silicon line. The company’s chip progress, however, will soon be challenged by Microsoft’s efforts in the space, which are expected to be revealed at its Build conference in late May. More hardware is likely also on the docket for its annual World Wide Developers Conference in June. Apple does not break out Vision Pro numbers. Instead, those numbers are included in Wearables, Home and Accessories — a list that also includes devices like Apple Watch, AirPods and HomePods. Most reports, however, point to worse than anticipated sales. The company still attempted to give the headset’s arrival a positive spin. “During the quarter, we were thrilled to launch Apple Vision Pro and to show the world the potential that spatial computing unlocks,” Cooknoted in a release. “We’re also looking forward to an exciting product announcement next week and an incredible Worldwide Developers Conference next month. ” In February, Cook attempted to address concern that the company was falling behind Google and Microsoft,notingthat it would have more information on its generative AI efforts “later this year. ” While the subject will no doubt be top of mind at the iPad event, it seems likely the company is saving the big news for WWDC in June. In the meantime, reports have surfaced that Apple is in to integrate both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini into future iPhones. “I don’t want to get in front of our announcements, obviously,” Cook said in response to a question on the subject during tonight’s call. “I would just say that we see generative AI is a very key opportunity across our products. And we believe that we have advantages that set us apart there. And so we’ll be talking more about it as we go through the weeks ahead. ”
| 2024-05-02T20:45:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/02/apple-earnings-see-10-iphones-sales-drop/
| 662 | 1 |
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To secure early-stage funding, entrepreneurs should build ESG into their business models
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ESG has been under the microscope for the past 12 months with pressure from some Republican politicians in the U. S. who have called for investment managers to pull their clients’ money from ESG-focused investments. Simplistically, their argument is that ESG prevents investors being able to access assets like fossil fuels and, by doing so, they will have missed out on soaring fossil fuel company valuations driven by rising energy prices. Those on the anti-ESG side argue that continuing to follow ESG doctrine in today’s market is therefore a failure of fiduciary duty by investment managers. This of course overlooks one rather fundamental challenge: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)in its recent AR6 reportstated that the G7 economies needed to hit net zero by 2040, not 2050, if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, countries pledged to scale down their use of oil and fossil fuels. The latest scientific evaluation from the IPCC sets the scene for a future climate change conference (not too far in the future) making the pledge to scale out fossil fuels and accelerate the already significant investment into an electrified and decarbonized future. So the fiduciary duty of investment managers when seen through that lens would suggest a long-term imperative to ensure that the funds they manage are not placed into assets that will become stranded or obsolete. In other words, investing using ESG metrics and favoring renewable and climate tech type investments makes economic and investment sense in the long term. This approach is one that we follow, and we’re not alone. Despite recent controversy, the ESG investment market isestimated to be worth $53 trillion globally by 2025and data, reported by Bloomberg, from the European Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA) has shown that the EU’s highest environmental, social and governance classification, known as Article 9,drew in €26 billion ($28 billion) in 2022. That coincided with bond funds seeing client outflows that were greater than since the global financial crisis in 2008, while equity funds also suffered, losing €72 billion over the same period. Regardless of the critique, ESG-focused investing is drawing in significant funds and is set to represent around a third of all funds under management by 2025. Whether you believe in ESG or subscribe to the “woke capitalism” viewpoint, it simply can’t be ignored, and any company seeking funding needs to ensure that it is structuring its investment case accordingly. Yet despite this, far too few companies, particularly at a scale-up stage, are thinking ahead to how they structure their investment case so that it appeals to a wide range of investors, particularly those that follow ESG criteria. Data from EFAMA shows thatsignificant money is flowing into Article 9 funds, yet in order to become a portfolio investment, startups must meet Article 9 criteria, otherwise they will fail to meet the investment criteria. This means that having a brilliant idea, business plan, IP and a team to deliver it is no longer enough for startups looking to tap Article 9 investors. Instead, they also need to bake ESG metrics into their business model and demonstrate positive social and environmental impact from the start. For many startups, this creates an additional knowledge barrier that they have to overcome, but addressing that up front will reap dividends, not only in securing early-stage funding but also in enhancing their scale-up potential, by making their business potentially more valuable, and by facilitating ease of exit. That changes the parameters for both the investor and the investee. Investors need to accept that they have a role to play as coach and guide to help startup entrepreneurs understand what they need to report and the impact they need to demonstrate as part of the value they add to the businesses they are investing in. At my firm, we have always seen our role as both a mentor and investor. Accessing funds from our LPs requires us to work with our portfolio companies to ensure that they are equipped to report success and impact in ways that sit beyond traditional P&L. This becomes all the more important in a world where there is no single standard for what ESG means and how it is reported. This results in many entrepreneurial companies (and larger cap businesses as well) being utterly confused about what they should report and how they go about it. It is therefore incumbent on the investor to help drive value and deliver impact through wider ESG performance to meet the reality of a world that seeks impact as well as profit from business. In this new world we are seeing a reformulation of the role of the investor. No longer there just to seek return but also to add value, support growth and act as a steward of capital and also of impact. Companies seeking investment need to understand that change in investor outlook and make it as easy as they can for investors to vet, approve and want to invest in their company. It means starting a business with a clear idea of how you will seek scale-up finance, what your exit plan might be and how you facilitate all those elements in your growth journey. That means baking ESG into the DNA of the business from day one. Topics Contributor
| 2023-05-19T11:30:21 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/19/to-secure-early-stage-funding-entrepreneurs-should-build-esg-into-their-business-models/
| 886 | 1 |
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Waymo and Uber are giving some riders early access to Atlanta robotaxi service
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Waymo and Uber will start offering robotaxi rides in Atlanta to select customers who earlier this year signed onto a waitlist. The move comes ahead of the companies’ public robotaxi launch this summer. Customers selected for early access will be notified in the Uber app and via email. Those who opt for the robotaxi rides will be encouraged to provide feedback during and after the ride. As an extra incentive, riders will receive $10 worth of Uber credits after their first Waymo ride. Atlanta is the second city to get the “Waymo on Uber” service. The companies launched the service, which matches riders with a Waymo via the Uber app, in Austin this spring. Uber and Waymolast September announcedplans to offer a robotaxi service in Austin and Atlanta in early 2025 as part of an expanded partnership. Under the partnership, only Uber users can hail Waymo’s fleet of autonomous Jaguar I-PACE vehicles. Like every other city that Waymo has launched in — a list that includes Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco — the service area in Atlanta will grow over time. Waymo and Uber have agreed to initially offer robotaxi rides in a 65-square-mile area in Atlanta, including downtown, Buckhead, and Capitol View neighborhoods. The “Waymo on Uber” service splits the responsibilities of owning and operating a fleet of driverless vehicles: Uber handles the charging, maintenance, and cleaning of the autonomous vehicles, as well as managing access to the robotaxis via its app, while Waymo monitors the tech and the autonomous operations, including rider assistance
| 2025-05-19T22:47:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/19/waymo-and-uber-are-giving-some-riders-early-access-to-atlanta-robotaxi-service/
| 256 | 0.9 |
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MiLaboratories gets $10M for a platform play to accelerate genomic research
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Advances in DNA sequencing and the vast amounts of genomic data being produced by next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology have created a startup opportunity to build software for biologists so they can more easily analyze this big data and take the next leap. It could help when it comes to developing new vaccines, cancer treatments, and so on. For the last four years,MiLaboratories, a San Francisco-based startup with an R&D facility in Bilbao, Spain, has been building a computational biology platform to make it easier for biologists to process, analyze, and aggregate their data. It incorporates features like data visualization and generative AI to boost usability. Its platform is also designed to be a marketplace for other scientists so that they can distribute more specialized computation tools in the form of apps to keep expanding the utility for the genomics research community. MiLaboratories target scientists whose skill sets span biology, computer science, and math — so-called bioinformaticians. “It’s a ‘no code’ style approach for biologistsandwe also release an [open source] SDK — software development kit — allowing bioinformaticians to build real applications,” CEO Stan Poslavsky tells TechCrunch. “During my and our founders’ scientific career, we saw a huge inefficiency … in how modern therapies, how modern drugs, are developed,” he explains. “Because of this friction between the data — the big data, generated by the biologists, the sequencing data — and the data analysis which is not available for them. ” While there are “thousands” of software programs and tools that can do analysis of NGS data, he says most have been developed within academia, where the focus tends to be on utility rather than usability. There’s also a need for biologists to aggregate and integrate results from multiple analyses, he says. “In a unified picture, allowing you to understand what’s going on. And that’s the place where our platform helps dramatically,” he suggests. The startup hopes its platform will free up bioinformaticians from being called upon to deal with the grunt work of genomic data processing so these multidisciplinary scientists can apply their skill set to the more complex tasks of building algorithms that might help advance cutting-edge science. “Bioinformaticians are actually spending a lot of time just doing a monkey job of running the software for biologists,” says Poslavsky. “To process this data, you need to have Linux machines, go over SSH, run complicated software tools to get the analysis done and get the insight from the data. ” “[A doctor] has no skills to do this on Linux, on HPC [high performance computing] cluster, because he has other things to do. And that’s what most bioinformaticians in the companies and academia are doing, actually, just this monthly job of running the tools. ” On Thursday, MiLaboratories officially took the wraps off its SDK,Platforma. bio, which lets third-party developers contribute apps — although it’s been in alpha and beta testing for several years. (Poslavsky says “around 300 labs” have been using the beta, and “around 20” apps have been made available through the platform so far. ) “The first applications that are available in the platform are built around our biological and bioinformatic applications, which are very popular … [with] companies and people involved in immune therapy developments. But we already have … a good selection of collaborations and people willing to bring their applications on the platform, both from academia and from the industry,” he adds. The 2021-founded startup is also announcing a $10 million Series A funding round to continue development, with a focus on investing in community building. “The key reason for raising money is just to plug more hands into the development of our platform. We are hiring more engineers. We are hiring what is called developer advocates, who are propagating the technology around — primarily — the academic community, because most bioinformatics software is developed in academia. ” “For the upcoming year [we will] focus on the propagation of the technology around the community, and engaging community to build their apps, to wrap their existing software, to deliver them through the platform,” he adds. MiLaboratories’ Series A is led by Madrid-based Kfund, with participation from Acrobator Ventures, EGB Capital, Courtyard Ventures, Somersault Ventures, Speedinvest and Ten13. Commenting in a statement, Miguel Arias, general partner of Kfund, said: “Investing in platforms that bridge the gap between developers (in this case bioinformaticians) and business users (in this case biologists) is at the core of what we want to do in our fund. There is tremendous potential in democratizing access to complex data enabling the delivery of immunological insights. ” MiLaboratories offers its software for free to academics but it’s also taking revenue via a paid model for commercial users. Per Poslavsky, the startup is approaching 100 paying customers at this stage. “Many of the big pharma companies — like Moderna, Bristol Myers Squibb — they are our customers,” he notes, adding: “We have revenue — good revenue — allowing us to not be so dependent on venture money. ” At the start of 2022, the startup raised a $2. 5 million seed round. It also previously took in a small pre-seed from a few angels. Discussing the challenges of developing the computational biology platform, Poslavsky says the staggering amount of data being generated by NGS meant startups had to pay very careful attention to ensuring processing efficiency to avoid generating “crazy costs. ” “The amount of data generated in the space are actually, well, crazy,” he emphasizes. “Big pharma companies, our customers … they have petabytes of genetic data generated so far. So that’s huge scale. ” MiLaboratories has developed what Poslavsky couches as a “very sophisticated” and “mathematically proven” technology that allows for many sorts of calculations to be performed in “a very optimized way. ” He suggests this tech — which it has patented — enables the platform to reach 10x efficiency compared to some other types of computational workflow. “That’s a very important thing. It’s hidden from the eyes of the biologist — because the valuable proposition for the biologist is ‘I want to click buttons and get insight’ — but it’s very important for the business owners. ” Competition wise, Poslavsky namesSeqera(and its Nextflow software) as the closest rival — in terms of popularity and value proposition. There are also open source tools for NGS processing, such asGalaxy, but MiLaboratories reckons its platform offers researchers a more accessible route to data insights. 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
| 2024-10-10T07:35:20 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/10/milaboratories-gets-10m-for-a-platform-play-to-accelerate-genomic-research/
| 1,166 | 1 |
3b387173faa74e28987644d4b7943076
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Vercel debuts an AI model optimized for web development
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The team behind Vercel’s V0, an AI-powered platform for web creation, hasdevelopedan AI model it claims excels at certain website development tasks. Available through an API, the model, called “v0-1. 0-md,” can be prompted with text or images, and was “optimized for front-end and full-stack web development,” the Vercel team says. Currently in beta, it requires a V0 Premium plan ($20 per month) or Team plan ($30 per user per month) with usage-based billing enabled. We're releasing v0's AI model:• Specialized web-dev knowledge• OpenAI-compatible API• Use in Cursor, Codex, or your own appNow in beta in the API, AI SDK, or AI Playground. The launch of V0’s model comes as more developers and companies look to adopt AI-powered tools for programming. According to aStack Overflow surveylast year, around 82% of developers reported that they’re using AI tools for writing code. Meanwhile, a quarter of startups in Y Combinator’s W25 batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI,perYC managing partner Jared Friedman. Vercel’s model can “auto-fix” common coding issues, the Vercel team says, and it’s compatible with tools and SDKs that support OpenAI’s API format. Evaluated on web development frameworks like Next. js, the model can ingest up to 128,000 tokens in one go. Tokens are the raw bits of data that AI models work with, with a million tokens being equivalent to about 750,000 words (roughly 163,000 words longer than “War and Peace”). Vercel isn’t the only outfit developing tailored models for programming, it should be noted. Last month,JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, debuted its first “open” AI coding model. Last week,Windsurfreleased a family of programming-focused models dubbed SWE-1. And just yesterday, Mistral unveiled a model,Devstral, tuned for particular developer tasks. Companies may be keen to develop — and embrace — AI-powered coding assistants, but models still struggle to produce quality software. Code-generating AI tends to introduce security vulnerabilitiesanderrors, owing toweaknessesin areas like the ability to understand programming logic
| 2025-05-22T15:40:21 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/22/vercel-debuts-an-ai-model-optimized-for-web-development/
| 326 | 0.9 |
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India’s smartwatch market in flux as unknown brands challenge heavyweights
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India’s smartwatch market has transformed, seemingly overnight. For years, it has been dominated by its homegrown players, while global giants like Apple and Samsung have struggled for presence, amid the hundreds of millions of annual shipments. Suddenly, however, the category has been flooded with unknown brands, which have no prior and significant existence. These have started gaining customer focus and are expected to eventually push the market toward a consolidation stage. Domestic brands like Fire-Boltt, Noise and boAt have dominated the category, making up more than 60% of the total market. Apple and Samsung, on the other hand, fell from 4. 5% to a little over 2% share combined, with 1. 1 million units shipped in 2023,according tomarket intelligence firm IDC. Meanwhile, new entrants have seen a surge in their market share from three to 3-5% in 2020 to 15-20% last year. Vikas Sharma, senior market analyst for wearable devices, IDC, told TechCrunch that the category now accounts for 134. 2 million units annually. These brands sometimes carry an unrecognized name or are knockoffs of established products. Many are direct copies of big global brands like Apple and Samsung, priced at less than $12 (1,000 Indian rupees). The Apple Watch price in India starts at $360 (29,900 Indian rupees) for the Apple Watch SE, while the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 retails at $290 (23,999 Indian rupees). The Indian smartwatches from brands such as Fire-Boltt, boAt and Noise start from $12. Unlike the more expensive models, off-brand products generally have no warranties. In some cases, the retailer offers customers a replacement guarantee, but that is, too, not provided by the manufacturer and given merely on a piece of paper or even verbally. Fitness tracking metrics are often inaccurate due to inferior selection of sensors to save costs, while the hardware/software combo leaves much to be desired. Nevertheless, the accuracy — even on the smartwatches offered by established Indian players — sometimes does not match that of the Apple Watch or Samsung Galaxy Watch, as these vendors compromise on sensor quality to maintain affordability. “The accuracy of the sensors is not good enough [across most affordable smartwatches] to provide the same level of user experience, which users get in a premium model,” Counterpoint’s senior research analyst Anshika Jain told TechCrunch. Sharma pointed out the aesthetics, which make these unknown branded models resemble the Apple Watch and Apple Watch Ultra or some high-end rounded smartwatches, as well as affordability, help them gain customer attention. Hong Kong-based market analyst firm Counterpoint Research has observed the number of unknown brands in the Indian smartwatch market has grown from 78 in 2021 to 128 in 2023. “There has been almost 80-90% growth in the number of unknown brands,” said Jain. “This clearly indicates how the market has become more crowded now. ” She noted the pattern the analyst firm has observed for the last couple of years: Most unknown brands emerge during the third quarter — around the time of the festive season in the country — and remain active for one or two quarters before disappearing completely. Additionally, these are likely white-label products imported from China at dirt-cheap prices or assembled by an Indian electronics manufacturing services partner, she said. The growth of unknown brands in the Indian smartwatch market has not yet significantly impacted all the local firms dominating the market. However, the existing players are cautious. Some established local brands have started feeling the heat. Additionally, the growing market share of unknown brands has reduced the average selling price (ASP). Sameer Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Warburg Pincus-backed boAt, told TechCrunch the decline in ASPs is as high as 90%. “Overall volumes have started going down,” he said. “ASPs have declined by, say, 90%, which essentially does not fare well for any industry. Tell me one industry where the price erosion reaches 90% in just one year. ” Market analysts have also observed a massive dip in the ASP, though not as substantial a drop as Mehta mentioned. Jain of Counterpoint, meanwhile, said the ASP dropped by around 39% to $36 in 2023 from $59 in 2022. “There’s a lot of froth at the bottom, which is just bringing in devices and putting it out in the market. Once that goes away, there will be some sanctity. Everybody will stop investing in the business if nobody is making money in the business. ” boAt, India’s third-leading smartwatch brand, saw a 17% decline in year-on-year growth in the fourth quarter, per IDC. The smartwatch business contributes about 20% of the startup’s revenues. Mehta said despite seeing some impact from the unrecognized brands, boAt would continue to generate 15-20% of revenues from smartwatches in the next couple of years. Unlike boAt, Fire-Boltt and Noise (the top two brands), saw year-on-year growth in the same quarter. Gaurav Khatri, co-founder of Bose-backed Noise, told TechCrunch the startup did not see any notable impact from the “constant influx of new entrants and brands. ” Market experts believe the ongoing shift with unknown brands expanding their presence will affect all key players — unless the dominants change their strategy and add more value to their future smartwatches. Currently, market incumbents primarily target first-time buyers — similar to unknown brands. Instead, analysts believe that established brands should target existing customers. “People are not opting for these [established Indian branded] smartwatches for their next purchase with the same level of enthusiasm for the first purchase… the main reason is obviously the customer experience and user interface of these devices, which is not that smooth,” said Counterpoint’s Jain. Most established Indian players do not focus on bringing distinctive valuable features to smartwatches, unlike their big-tech counterparts including Apple and Samsung. Smartwatch makers in the country also sometimes use the same Chinese original design manufacturers [ODMs], limiting product differentiation. Many of these models even bear an uncanny resemblance to Apple and Samsung. However, Indian brands claim to develop printed circuit boards locally, and design software experiences in-house, distinguishing themselves from global players. Local assembling essentially helps manufacturers avoid import duties that are 20%. Last year, smartwatch brands boAt and Noiseentered the smart ring marketin India to diversify their product catalog. However, the smart ring market in India, which saw more than 100,000 shipments in 2023, is led by Ultrahuman, with a share of 43. 1% in Q4, per IDC. Mehta of boAt told TechCrunch the startup is looking to focus on creating different categories in the smartwatch market, such as new models aimed at kids and the elderly, sports and wellness, to retain its presence. Similarly, it is looking to design its new smartwatches for second- or third-time buyers, who are more aware of their health and wellness and look for better-quality devices. Nonetheless, these changes will increase the pricing of boAt smartwatches. That said, market analysts like IDC’s Sharma predicts the Indian smartwatch market will see only single-digit growth this year due to stiff competition from unknown brands and dropping ASPs. The market used tosee over 150% year-on-year growthin the previous years. Sharma also believes that the smartwatch market may consolidate in the coming couple of years, and fewer players would be left. “There will be a flatline coming in the next two years… it all picked up after COVID, and now it’s gone to a sky level… we’ll soon see a saturation point,” he said. Topics Reporter
| 2024-03-08T03:30:01 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/07/india-worlds-biggest-smartwatch-market-change/
| 1,226 | 1 |
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Bluesky will begin verifying ‘notable’ users
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Bluesky on Thursday quietly opened the doors to those who want to become verified on its social networking service. In a post published by theBluesky Safety account, the company announced that “notable and authentic” accounts can now apply for verification through a new online form. Plus, organizations can request to become a Trusted Verifier to receive access to the tools that allow them to verify others. Blueskybegan testing this feature last monthwith a small handful of organizations, including The New York Times, Wired, and The Athletic. For some on Bluesky, the blue verification badge is not a welcome addition, as it reminds them of the clout-chasing that took place on Twitter (now X). For Twitter users, verification became a sought-after status symbol before devolving into a paid subscriber perk under current owner Elon Musk. It represented a two-tier system where some people were deemed more important or notable than others. However, Bluesky’s approach to verification leans on other systems beyond the blue badge. In addition to farming out verification to other Trusted Verifiers beyond the company itself, users can also self-verify by setting a domain as their username — like NPR has done with its account @npr. org. To date, over 270,000 accounts have already adopted domain-based verification. What’s less clear is how Bluesky will vet the applications from those requesting verification. The company’s online form lists some basic requirements, like accounts that have to be active, complete (bio filled out, profile photo, etc. ), and secure. They also have to represent a “real person, registered business, organization, or legitimate entity,” and link to any official website if one exists. However, when it comes to who or what’s deemed notable, the criteria is less straightforward. Bluesky says that notable accounts must be notable within their “field and geographic region” and that the company will take into account various indicators of notability, like “professional recognition, media coverage in established publications, presence on credible reference platforms, or other evidence of public interest. ” There may be other specific notability requirements related to specific verification categories, as well, but Bluesky doesn’t document what those are. “We consider the overall context and public interest value of each account,” the form reads. “Please provide links and evidence that can help us ensure that your account meets notability criteria. ” The company says that it won’t respond to users unless their account is selected for verification, which means someone has to scan the inbound requests to make sure no celebs or other famous figures slip through the cracks. The introduction of verification could have an impact on Bluesky’s culture, which, so far, has differentiated itself from social networks like Twitter/X andThreads, which elevated some users over others. It’s possible the announcement would have been better received if it arrivedafterit established a wider network of Trusted Verifiers — organizations independent from Bluesky. That would more directly telegraph Bluesky’s goals of not being a centralized authority. Elsewhere in the ecosystem, aforked version of Bluesky called Deer. Socialhas approached verification in a more democratic way — it lets anyone select who they trust as a verifier. They can then see the accounts that the trusted verifier has also verified across the network. This way, everyone can verify others or be verified themselves, without the need for a central authority. In other words, those who don’t care for Bluesky’s version of verification already have another choice. Bluesky was not immediately available for comment
| 2025-05-22T21:28:56 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/22/bluesky-will-begin-verifying-notable-users/
| 573 | 1 |
fdfcf144bd4bf6a0ad035a4ceb29c515
|
{"bias_density": 0.12, "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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Southwest Airlines resumes operations after briefly halting takeoffs due to a ‘technical issue’
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Southwest Airlines is resuming operations after the airline briefly paused departures due to a “technical issue” earlier this morning. The airline says it had to address data connection issues caused by a firewall failure. “Southwest has resumed operations after temporarily pausing flight activity this morning to work through data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure,” the company said ina statement. “Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost. Southwest Teams worked quickly to minimize flight disruptions. ” We’ve resumed operations this morning following a pause in service. Please visithttps://t. co/64eTbzR9phto check your flight status and explore self-service options as we work to restore operations and accommodate disrupted Customers as quickly as possible. pic. twitter. com/xGLJLsbiQV — Southwest Airlines (@SouthwestAir)April 18, 2023 FlightAware indicates that nearly 2,500 of Southwest’s flights on Tuesday morning, which represents about 30% of its schedule for the day, were delayed. The airline is asking travelers to useSouthwest. comto check their flight status or visit a Southwest Airlines Customer Service Agent at the airport for assistance with travel needs. The latest disruption comes months after Southwest canceled more than 16,700 flights in December due to changes to its staff scheduling computer systems. The issues costSouthwest more than $1 billionand frustrated thousands of travelers during the busy holiday travel season. The Department of Transportation opened an investigation into the airline in response to the widespread disruption. At the time, the airline said it had taken steps to prevent another widespread disruption. Southwest conducted a review with aviation consulting firm Oliver Wyman to determine ways to prevent another similar situation. Following the review, the airlineintroduced technologyupdates to crew reassignment software, weather alert dashboards, communication systems and more as part of a$1. 3 billion planto boost its operational resiliency. 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
| 2023-04-18T16:01:17 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/18/southwest-airlines-resumes-operations-after-briefly-halting-flights-due-to-technical-issue/
| 344 | 0.9 |
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PhonePe expands new funding to $850 million
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General Atlantic has poured another $100 million into PhonePe, four months afterleading a $350 million investmentin the Indian fintech startup that has so far raised $850 million in an ongoing financing round at the height of the slowing global economy. Walmart-backed PhonePe disclosed the investment in a statement on Monday. The ongoing round values the Bengaluru-headquartered startup at $12 billion. PhonePe is eyeing to raise as much as another $150 million in the ongoing round. General Atlanticinvested another $100 million in PhonePe last month. At a $12 billion valuation, PhonePe is India’s most valuable fintech startup. It competes with Google Pay and Paytm, the latter of which is currently valued at nearly $5 billion. PhonePe, which completed a full separation from thee-commerce giant Flipkart last year, dominates transactions on UPI, a network built by a coalition of retail banks in India. UPI is the most popular way Indians transact online — it processes more than 8 billion transactions a month. Google’s GPay and PhonePe currently process more than 80% of all UPI transactions. Seven-year-old PhonePe commands about 50% of all these transactions by value and it’s not slowing down. The company said earlier this year that it was on pace to process transactions worth $1 trillion annually. Walmart, which also owns a majority share in e-commerce giant Flipkart, said earlier this year that the separation of Flipkart and PhonePe was “very analogous to eBay and PayPal, where each of them operating independently can pursue their own initiatives. ” General Atlantic, which has backed a number of Indian firms, including Jio, BillDesk, Byju’s, Amagi, NoBroker and Unacademy over the past decade, plans to deploy at least $2 billion to $3 billion in India over the next five to seven years, according to people familiar with the New York-headquartered growth equity investor’s plans. The new investment comes at a time when PhonePe is aggressively expanding its product offerings. The startup earlier this yearlaunched a hyperlocal commerce app, called Pincode, that is powered by the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), an Indian government initiative striving to democratize the e-commerce landscape by offering a zero-commission platform. PhonePe said it will “invest significant effort” in Pincode and in “enabling every Indian shopkeeper spread across every nook and corner, over the next few years. ” PhonePe is looking to capitalize on its 450 million-strong registered user base by expanding into additional financial services, including wealth management, lending, stockbroking, ONDC-based shopping and account aggregation. One potential obstacle to PhonePe’s growth was the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the organization overseeing the UPI network, which sought to impose market share restrictions on participating players. However, the NPCI has extended the deadline for compliance until 2025, allowing PhonePe two more years of rapid expansion. In another favorable development, the Reserve Bank of India, the nation’s central bank, has decided to abandon a high-profile project that was initially planned to compete with the UPI platform. Topics Reporter, India
| 2023-05-22T06:48:07 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/21/phonepe-secures-additional-100-million-from-general-atlantic/
| 490 | 0.9 |
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SpaceX Starship: Everything you’ve ever wondered but were afraid to ask
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SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket has the potential to transform the commercial space economy, ensure America’s position as the global leaders in the space race, and put humans on Mars for the first time. But first it has to get to orbit. This is becoming much more likely as the Starship test program accelerates and the company demonstrates more and more of the rocket’s powerful capabilities. Yet to many, Starship is still essentially a vanity project from the world’s richest man. This article will attempt to explain the origins of the rocket and where it might be headed. Standing at nearly 400 feet tall, Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. For comparison, the company’s much-used Falcon 9 is 229 feet tall, and the Saturn V that brought Apollo missions to the moon was 363 feet tall. Starship also represents the reason for SpaceX’s existence: to spread “the light of consciousness,” as Musk puts it, through the solar system, starting with the moon and Mars. The rocket is composed of two stages: the Super Heavy booster and the second stage, which is also called Starship. At liftoff, the Super Heavy generates an incredible 16. 7 million pounds of thrust using its 33 Raptor engines. That’s the amount of power needed to carry upward of 100-150 tons of cargo and crew to low Earth orbit — again, equivalent to the Saturn V but considerably more advanced in several ways. The biggest change is that Starship is designed to be fully reusable, meaning that eventually both stages would return to the launch site to be rapidly refurbished and reused for the next mission. This would be a first in the history of rocketry. While SpaceX pioneered booster reuse with the Falcon 9 rocket, the upper stage is still left in orbit, to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. Reusability, combined with the incredible payload capacity, could drive Starship costs (for SpaceX itself) down to as low as $2 million to $3 million per launch, Musk has claimed. While we don’t have a firm sense of what it costs the company to launch each Falcon 9, because SpaceX’s financials are confidential, they are priced at $69. 75 million for the customer. Interplanetary travel has been embedded in the DNA of SpaceX practically since its inception. Elon Musk has talked about developing a heavy-lift rocket capable of carrying many tons of mass to low Earth orbit, the moon, and even farther for two decades. Asearly as 2005, Musk was publicly discussing his plans to build a rocket with a payload capacity of 100 tons to send to low Earth orbit. The rocket now known as Starship has gone under a few different names: the “BFR” and “BFS” (Big F—ing Rocket/Ship or Big Falcon Rocket/Ship, depending on who you ask); the Mars Colonial Transporter; and the Interplanetary Transport System. In July 2019, the small second-stage prototype called “Starhopper” completed a small hop for the first time; that was followed by the first large-scale demonstrator, called SN15, which completed a high-altitude test flightfor the first time in May 2021. Of course, it hasn’t all been rosy: The company has also explodeda fair few prototypesalong the way, and its first and second integrated flight tests inApril 2023andNovember 2023ended in fiery midair explosions. The Starship program has accelerated in recent years thanks to two main changes: the launch and operation of Starlink, SpaceX’s internet satellite constellation, which provides critical revenue to fuel Starship development, and a $4 billion Human Landing System (HLS) award from NASA to develop a version of Starship to land humans on the moon for the Artemis program. Which leads us to the next question … Starship is often understood as one billionaire’s pet project, but that is a deep misreading of the purpose of Starship or the role it could play in the future of the space economy. Regardless of when Starship might enter commercial operations, pretty much every industry expert agrees that it has the potential to fundamentally transform the space economy. As mentioned above, no other launch vehicle has ever been fully reusable, and those that are partially reusable don’t come close to the rocket’s mammoth size and power. What does that mean? Well, with the ability to launch cargo in bulk essentially solved, one can begin to imagine many incredible and heretofore unthinkable possibilities — provided the rest of the industry can keep up. Starship isn’t just a linchpin of growth for the commercial space industry. NASA also pinned the hopes of its Artemis program on the massive launch vehiclewhen it awarded SpaceX the HLS award in 2021, to deliver the crewed Starship capable of landing astronauts on the moon for the Artemis III mission. That award essentially transformed Starship from one company’s ambition into a major part of ensuring America’s continued supremacy in space. The sixth flight test is currently scheduled for no earlier than November 18. We break down the main flight objectives of the test here. The company will be attempting to re-create the successes of the previous test flight — including catching the Super Heavy booster using “chopstick” arms jutting out from the launch tower — as well as testing upgrades to hardware and software. According to Musk’s most recent estimate — which it must be said, his estimates have not historically been particularly reliable — Starship will launch to Mars in 2026. That’s the soonest opportunity for an expedient mission according to the position of the two planets’ orbits around the sun. Whether SpaceX will have the rocket ready in time for such a long mission is unclear, chiefly because there are still some major technical challenges to de-risk, like on-orbit refueling. That’s right: To reach Mars, or even the moon, for that matter, Starship would need to refuel using a Starship tanker that’s hanging out in orbit. That Starship would transfer propellant to the main vehicle before it could continue its journey. Refueling would need to take place a number of times — for Artemis III, SpaceX estimates needing to launch around 10 refueling tankers to orbit prior to that mission. The Starship that will go to Mars will not look exactly like the ones flying today, Musk told SpaceX employees in April: The interplanetary Starship will likely be as tall as 500 feet, with even more room for crew and cargo. 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
| 2024-11-16T16:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/16/spacex-starship-everything-youve-ever-wondered-but-were-afraid-to-ask/
| 1,123 | 1 |
244755d6afd22ff2e95267f2537ada26
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Apple users can soon upgrade to ChatGPT Plus within the Settings app
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Apple products are gettingan integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPTin December when iOS 18. 2 rolls out, which should supercharge Siri and a few other features with smarter AI. On Monday, iOS 18. 2 beta testers got a taste of how OpenAI could profit off of its Apple partnership. Apple is including an option to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus inside its Settings app, according to an update to the iOS 18. 2 beta spotted by9to5Mac. This will give Apple users a direct route to sign up for OpenAI’s premium subscription plan, which costs $20 a month. This could drive lots of users to sign up for ChatGPT Plus, a core revenue driver for OpenAI, especially because the free version of ChatGPT can be quite limited. Free ChatGPT users won’t have access to OpenAI’s latest models (such as o1-preview) or premium features such as Advanced Voice Mode. They also can only make two images with Dall-E per day, and can’t send as many messages to the AI chatbot as premium users. A big lingering question in Apple and OpenAI’s partnership is how both companies expect to make money off the deal. Apple reportedlyisn’t paying Sam Altman’s startup for the integrationin money, but rather, exposure. The ability to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus in Settings might be enough exposure that this whole thing is worth it for OpenAI, but only if users actually sign up. Otherwise, OpenAI will be on the hook for a large influx of new ChatGPT free users, which will undoubtedly drive up the startup’s AI inference costs. It’s also unclear whether Apple is taking a cut of the revenue OpenAI generates from ChatGPT Plus signups through the Settings app. It’s possible the iPhone maker is simply betting that having cutting-edge AI features is worth the free exposure it’s giving OpenAI, because it will push enough customers to upgrade to new phones. Nevertheless, this is a strange deal. Even though Apple is letting ChatGPT power many of its biggest AI updates yet, the iPhone maker isn’t making this an exclusive deal. Apple says it will soon integrate AI models from other developers, potentiallyincluding Google’s Gemini. In the background of this integration, OpenAI is raising money and losing key executives at an unprecedented rate. Apple was reportedlysupposed to participate in the latest $6. 6 billion round,butpulled outshortly after OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati abruptly left the company. Topics Senior AI Reporter
| 2024-11-04T22:18:02 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/04/apple-users-can-soon-upgrade-to-chatgpt-plus-within-the-settings-app/
| 397 | 0.9 |
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Archer to set up air taxi network in LA by 2026 ahead of World Cup
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Los Angeles is notorious for its back-to-back traffic. Three events that promise to bring in millions of spectators from around the world — the 2026 World Cup, the Super Bowl in 2027 and the 2028 Olympics — have LA officials searching for a range of new mobility solutions to address its congestion problems. But they’re already behind; most of the city’s planned transportation infrastructure initiatives for the Olympics won’t be completeduntil after 2028. It’s in this gap thatArcher Aviationsees an opportunity. The startup, which is developing electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOLs), hopes to leverage the public sector’s slow pace with a private sector solution: an air taxi network in LA that will replace a two- to three-hour car journey with a 10- to 20-minute air taxi ride, starting in 2026. Ahead of Archer’s second-quarter earnings call Thursday, the company announced the locations for its network of vertiports, or takeoff and landing locations, including Los Angeles International Airport, the University of Southern California, Santa Monica, Hollywood Burbank, Van Nuys and Long Beach in Los Angeles County, as well as Orange County. Archer is also building a new vertiport at SoFi Stadium — which will host the World Cup, Super Bowl and some of the Olympics games — in partnership with Kroenke Sports & Entertainment and the LA Rams football team. While that vertiport won’t be operational by 2026, Archer hopes to complete it in time for the Olympics. The LA announcement comes a few weeks after Archer signed a memorandum of understanding with Kilroy Realty Corporation, identifying Kilroy Oyster Point, a 50-acre waterfront campus in South San Francisco, as a critical hub in the company’s planned SF Bay Area urban air mobility network. Nikhil Goel, Archer’s chief commercial officer, told TechCrunch that most of the vertiports the company announced Thursday for Los Angeles have already been built. “LA has got, I think, the most unused aviation infrastructure in the entire country, so it’s got airports all over the city. It’s got a number of helipads on top of rooftops that just aren’t used today,” Goel, noting that all Archer has to do is set up charging infrastructure and passenger facilities. Archer’s team chose the locations based on data on how people move around Los Angeles today. Archer recently partneredwith Southwest Airlines, a deal that includes giving Archer access to the airline’s customer data that it’s using to identify good locations for vertiports. The planned LA launch in 2026 will be gradual, according to Goel. He said the first year would probably look “like a handful of aircraft” operating one or two routes that offer the most value while Archer learns how to implement its tech effectively, build good customer service and integrate with communities in which it operates. Archer wants to launch commercially in limited pilots starting as early as 2025 in six cities: San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles, New York City, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. In the meantime, the company is racing to build out enough of its Midnight aircraft to launch a service and get the necessary certifications from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The Midnight eVTOL is a piloted, four-passenger electric aircraft that travels up to 150 miles per hour and is designed for back-to-back flights of 20 to 50 miles. The company has said that charging in between rides takes less than 10 minutes. Archer is working with automaker Stellantis to build out its Georgia production facility, where it’s on track to build 650 aircraft a year, starting in the fourth quarter of 2024. The startup is also building six pre-production aircraft out of its small production factory in California. Archer also needs to get Type Certification and Production Certification from the FAA before it can go to market. The former verifies that the eVTOL’s design meets all regulatory safety standards, and the latter ensures that Archer’s production processes can reliably produce aircraft that conform to the approved design and are safe to operate. “All of this is becoming very, very real. The aircraft is flying nearly every day,” said Goel. “Not only did we do our first transition flight, but we’ve done 233 flights to date, and so that puts us well on track to exceed 400 flights for the year. Everything is starting to come together. This is no longer Blade Runner. This is about making it real, launching as soon as 2026, and then scaling up from there. ” 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
| 2024-08-08T20:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/08/archer-to-set-up-air-taxi-network-in-la-by-2026-ahead-of-world-cup/
| 817 | 1 |
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Strategies for building AI tools people will actually use at work
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The application of generative AI in the workplace is a long game, and we’re in the very early stages. Most businesses looking for ways to leverage AI are in uncharted territory — either experimenting with pilot programs or still exploring ways to meaningfully incorporate the technology into their daily operations. That means the challenge is on for product leaders who are building (or thinking about building) AI tools that employees will actually love and use, whether that’s an app integration, a chatbot, or an AI experience built natively into your existing product offering. I’ve held numerous product roles throughout my career, but my current work leading the development of Slack’s AI capabilities is my most exciting one yet. Our product teams have kept boots on the ground, listening to what customers care about and thinking hard about how AI can help them meaningfully reach their productivity goals. That’s led us to develop a set of concepts that I believe will help other product teams stay grounded amid all the AI hype and buzz. Here is a guide that may be helpful for leaders as we build these new products and incorporate large language models into our business strategies and tooling. When building workplace AI tools that resonate with people, the starting point should always be the users themselves. Rather than adopting a broad technology-first approach and asking, “What can we do with AI?” work backward to home in on your core user problems first. For example, the issues that occur in people’s working lives can vary, but I commonly see complaints of information overload, the inability to optimize or effectively utilize your knowledge corpus, and getting bogged down with mundane to-do lists and tasks that just feel like a waste of time. How can you apply generative AI to solve these user problems and create a more efficient, human, and enjoyable work environment? An effective way to encourage the widespread adoption of AI tools is to integrate them seamlessly into employees’ existing work flow. Start with proactively surfacing AI in the moments that it’s most valuable to a person, rather than solely relying on open-ended, user-initiated experiences. This will allow users at all technical levels to be effective and get the most out of the technology, including those who may not have a familiarity or understanding of how to use AI. Picture instead whether an employee could effortlessly and automatically receive insights and recommendations from AI during team meetings or when analyzing project timelines without having to prompt to get the right answer. By embedding AI into the fabric of employees’ daily tasks, they can harness its capabilities without needing to navigate a steep learning curve, making the adoption process smoother and more intuitive. Transparency is a cornerstone of the successful application of generative AI, and indicating when it’s involved builds trust among users. Foster a culture of understanding and confidence in AI in the workplace by flagging AI-generated content. Appropriately flagged content allows employees to confidently incorporate insights into project decisions, and secure interactions enable them to gradually adapt to and gain confidence around new technology. Additionally, allowing employees to interact with AI privately in a one-on-one setting ensures they can familiarize themselves with the technology at their own pace, building a foundation of comfort before embracing collaborative experiences. As the ecosystem of generative AI tools expands, designing flexible and adaptable features that surface when needed, recede when they aren’t, and can always justify the outputs is paramount. Empowering employees to tweak and verify AI-generated results beyond defaults fosters a sense of control, ownership and trust in the technology. If an employee can tweak the results they receive and check its sources whenever they see fit, then AI becomes a valuable tool, complementing their skills rather than replacing their judgment and expertise. Integrating generative AI into the workplace is a collaborative effort, requiring thoughtful consideration of user experiences and their needs. As the technology continues to mature in the workplace — moving from basic knowledge retrieval to more advanced capabilities like task automation and proactive trend identification — businesses that focus on guided experiences, prioritizing transparency, and staying flexible are sure to see their tools adopted and embraced by employees and ultimately, reshape how we work. Topics Contributor
| 2023-12-12T15:35:52 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/12/strategies-for-building-ai-tools-people-will-actually-use-at-work/
| 709 | 1 |
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|
Apple’s iPhone 15 feels like a refined flagship with smart camera improvements
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Apple’s iPhone 15 launched at thecompany’s fall event today, and I got to spend some time with the new smartphone. It didn’t get theflashy new titanium of the iPhone 15 Pro that Brian checked out, but it does have a new design that includes softer, more rounded edges and the introduction the Dynamic Island to a non-Pro phone for the first time. The iPhone 15is actually very impressive in the looks department. Apple went into details about all the material science magic it put into the new colored glass and anodized aluminum used in the cases during its presentation. The ultimate effect, and all most people need to care about, is that they look really good, like candy-colored confections in muted but fun tones. Apple used the new pink color as its showstopper during the presentation, and the bubblegum/blush combo looked great in person, too. In addition to being a visual treat, the new phones feel much nicer in the hand than the last generation, owing to that slightly curved outer edge that your fingers seem to have a much nicer time wrapping around. The iPhone 15 is still the lightest of the bunch, too, though thenew titanium/aluminum frame combo on the 15 Promeans that the gap is not nearly as wide as it used to be in the weight department when comparing the two. Catch up on all of our Apple Event 2023 coveragehere. Apple has a more powerful processor under the hood in the iPhone 15: It’s the same one that is in the iPhone 14 Pro right now. That probably speeds it up a bit, but it’s hard to notice in such a short time, and I’m also comparing it to my own 14 Pro so they should theoretically be the same. The iPhone 15 has a much-improved camera system, however, getting a 48 MP sensor, which outputs at 24 MP by default with Apple using the extra resolution headroom to perform some of its computational camera magic. In the demo hall, the camera seemed super impressive, and I think this is a good step up for mainline iPhone users who might’ve felt more envy for their Pro peers’ photo prowess in the past. USB-C is also obviously welcomeand makes no obvious change to the handling or physical footprint of the phone. Apple has capped it at USB 2. 0 speeds on the iPhone 15, which is maybe annoying but not really an issue for most, since people probably hardly ever use their cable connection for data transfer anyway. The iPhone 15 comes in two sizes, the 6. 1-inch and 6. 7-inch 15 (iPhone Plus), and it goes on sale this Friday, with shipments starting at the end of next week. Topics Editor at Large
| 2023-09-12T19:49:12 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/12/apples-iphone-15-feels-like-a-refined-flagship-with-smart-camera-improvements/
| 458 | 0.9 |
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TechCrunch Space: Engineering the future
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Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. Don’t worry — we’ll be diving into the Mars Sample Return news shortly. 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@prod22. techcrunch. com. For more secure communications,click here to contact us, which includes SecureDropinstructionsand links to encrypted messaging apps. This week’s SOTW segment is dedicated to Mars Sample Return, NASA’s troubled and ambitious plan to bring Martian rock and dust back to Earth. From my colleagueDevin Coldewey: NASA administrator Bill Nelson has pronounced the agency’s $11 billion, 15-year plan to collect and return samples from Marsinsufficient. But the strategy shift could be a huge boon to space startups, to which much of that planned funding will almost certainly be redirected. “The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, and a 2040 return date is too far away,” Nelson said at a press conference. “We need to look outside the box to find a way ahead that is both affordable and returns samples in a reasonable timeframe. ” In other words, clear the decks and start over — with commercial providers on board from the get-go. Former senior SpaceX executive Tom Ochinero is teaming up with SpaceX alum-turned-VC Achal Upadhyaya and one of Sequoia’s top finance leaders, Spencer Hemphill, on a new venture called Interlagos Capital, TechCrunch has learned. There is little public information available about Interlagos, and the trio did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. The company was formally incorporated in the state of Delaware on March 7, and it was registered as an out-of-state company with California only days ago, on April 11. Ochinero, Upadhyaya and Hemphill are all listed on the documents. The principal address is in El Segundo, California. Jake Robins has some really good takes on the Mars Sample Return, which you can find on the link above. I read his work after appearing on his podcast with Anthony Colangelo, Off-Nominal (check out the link here). On April 23, 1972, Apollo 16 astronauts John Young and Charles Duke departed the lunar surface and rejoined Thomas Mattingly in lunar orbit. Young and Duke were returning after spending three days exploring the lunar surface. Then, the trio started heading home. 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
| 2024-04-22T22:00:46 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/22/techcrunch-space-engineering-the-future/
| 453 | 0.9 |
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Arc browser launches Live Folders to auto-update tabs for you
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Fresh off the heels of raising$50 million at a $550 million valuationin March, The Browser Company continues to bring in more features to its Arc browser, set up to provide a genuine alternative to Chrome and other dominant players in the internet browser market. Today it is introducing a new feature called Live Folders, which will automatically create and update tabs in a folder based on events like someone adding a file to a shared folder. Live Folders comes as the company also builds out more AI-powered features to create more dynamic and automated user experiences. One plan has been to buildan AI agent that browses the web on your behalf, although this has yet to launch. The company is launching Live Folders initially with GitHub pull request support. When a user creates a GitHub pull request, Arc automatically creates a Live Folder in the sidebar. The folder will automatically update tabs based on pull requests you have created, assigned to, requested a review for or mentioned. The folder will automatically clear out tabs with completed requests and tasks. If there is a new pull request when your Live Folder is collapsed, the browser will peek it out to highlight the new request to you. Arc is aiming to build a new kind of tracking system with this feature to help users with their daily work. The companyteased this feature in February. When it asked users about support for types of systems for the Live Folders feature, GitHub was the top requested service. The company said it is focused on integrating services to Live Folders that are treated toward collaboration, such as Google Calendar, Google Drive and Figma. It added that the tech behind Live Folders is flexible, so it could also adopt things like updates from RSS feeds. Earlier this month, the startup’s CEO, Josh Miller, announced that the company had hired former Safari designer Charlie Deets and former WhatsApp designer Christine Rode to build different interface designs. Topics YouTube prepares crackdown on ‘mass-produced’ and ‘repetitive’ videos, as concern over AI slop grows 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?
| 2024-04-11T14:30:38 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/11/arc-browsers-live-folders-will-auto-update-tabs-for-you/
| 405 | 0.9 |
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For startups, how many clouds to use may be the wrong question to ask
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Should early-stage startups pursue a single-cloud, multicloud or on-prem strategy when just starting out? Well, the simple answer to that question isjust one cloud, but in the wake ofthe Silicon Valley Bank collapse, redundancy has become sexy again: Who wants to be dependent on a single provider for any mission-critical activity? TechCrunch+ is currently surveying startup founders and CTOs regarding their cloud usage and best practices. If you’re interested in participating in this survey, we’d love tohear from you! But it appears the main consideration isn’t redundancy — it’s actually what sort of compute load a startup has to deal with, according to a TechCrunch+ survey of several startup founders and CTOs. Notably, the founders we heard from were generally bullish on single-cloud usage for young startups, with significant caveats: If a young tech company is simply hosting software, then, to start, a single cloud will suffice, but if the company is working on AI-related tasks like training models, it may need more. Satyen Sangani, co-founder and CEO of Alation, described when it might make sense to use something other than the cloud: If your company needs a huge amount of infrastructure right at the beginning (say, you’re training the next large language model), it might make sense to buy hardware instead. Generally, the early days of companies are filled with experimentation, and the flexibility that clouds provide is a massive benefit in those days. A good question at this juncture is what fraction of “AI-first” startups are training their own models instead of remixing or retooling the UI-layer of existing LLMs, for example. We reckon it’s not too high. Regardless, after parsing answers to our first question, the next time we ask something related, we’ll amend our prompt to:When should a startup move to a multicloud setup? Is there really a march from the public cloud back on-prem? For now, read on for answers to our question:Should early-stage startups pursue a multicloud or on-prem focus when they’re just starting out? We spoke with: Tobi Knaup, founder and CEO, D2iQ:As always, it depends. But most software startups should start on one cloud and be careful not to create too much lock-in by using proprietary services so you can optimize and migrate more easily later. If your company needs a huge amount of infrastructure right at the beginning (say, you’re training the next large language model), it might make sense to buy hardware instead. Generally, the early days of companies are filled with experimentation, and the flexibility that clouds provide is a massive benefit in those days. Mang-Git Ng, founder and CEO, Anvil:Single cloud. Joe Mainwaring, director of Infrastructure, WorkTango:Single cloud. Vikas Bhatia, co-founder, CEO and chief risk officer, JustProtect:When starting out, only a single-cloud solution makes sense. That said, if at all possible, I would recommend leveraging low-code technology to validate the concept. Satyen Sangani, co-founder and CEO, Alation:Single cloud. Early-stage startups need to reduce complexity and optimize for speed. Unless the business has more than 40% of its costs going to the cloud, it’s unlikely that using multiple clouds would provide a material enough benefit in either costs or risk reduction. If cloud costs are a relatively significant part of spend, like at companies that are now developing large-scale, generalized large language models (LLMs), then it’s possible that the answer shifts. Steve Mullaney, president and CEO, Aviatrix:Cloud is often considered a utility, like electricity, by enterprise application teams and other consumers. However, infrastructure operations teams require specialized expertise and underlying technology to deliver the agility and perceived transparency that lines of business expect of cloud-based services. For startups, you need something that’s there working behind the scenes, not hindering the business and not something you need to dedicate many internal resources or overhead to manage. Single cloud gives you the flexibility to scale your infrastructure to meet the business’s needs. But as any business grows today, it will eventually be multicloud, whether due to varying department or application requirements, M&A activity, shadow IT or something else. Regardless of how they begin, startups should expect to eventually be multicloud. Ed Thompson, CTO, Matillion:It depends on the exact goals of the startup. For example, there are lots of businesses out there that exist to help with management of workload across cloud platforms. However, assuming I am just looking for a platform for my product idea in “early stage,” I would opt for a single cloud and lean in hard on the technologies that they offer that allow you to concentrate on proving the business idea at scale. It’s all too easy to get bogged down with technology and infrastructure with the misguided view that saving a few dollars here and there will put you on solid ground for the future. Time is the enemy of the high-growth business — speed to market is the key. Test your ideas, fail fast, learn, pivot and try again. I would always steer toward serverless tools that would accelerate development and allow you to rapidly scale without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Now, this approach does have downsides, namely the vendor lock-in and associated cost of going heavily into something like AWS Lambda. However, a successful idea that grows fast and is adopted at scale but costs too much to run is a much better problem to have than an idea that reaches the market too late and is overhauled by more nimble competitors. Adrian Estala, VP, field CDO, Starburst:Starting with a single cloud provides incredible advantages. But we live in a multicloud, on-prem world, so any new startup has to account for that diversity. The ability to integrate seamlessly across this hybrid environment should be the goal for any startup looking to provide IT/data services. Shane Buckley, president and CEO, Gigamon:Single cloud is the easy answer, but that’s not the reality. The goal of a seed-funded company is to quickly validate, or invalidate, their business concept. Once that stage is reached, the focus shifts to building customer trust with applications that are both secure and deliver a great user experience. While all companies begin with a single cloud, we find most companies soon land on hybrid and hybrid-cloud implementations. Capital constraints, need for agility, available cloud resources and expertise, and M&A activities all factor into how hybrid cloud infrastructures evolve. While public cloud platforms enable rapid deployment and scalability, something that is obviously compelling for startups, the “shared responsibility model” employed by these providers means that application and workload security is the responsibility of the organization, not the provider. Just as guaranteed cloud compute performance does not automatically translate to a great application user experience, physical data center security does not guarantee end-to-end application security either. That is ultimately achieved by gaining deep observability into all hybrid-cloud communications. Topics Senior Reporter
| 2023-05-21T15:00:36 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/21/startups-cloud-strategy-founder-survey/
| 1,127 | 1 |
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SoftBank launches new fund to raise and invest $150 million in Black and Latino-led startups
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SoftBank has launched a second fund under its Opportunity Growth Fund to raise and invest $150 million in Black and Latino-led startups. The Japanese conglomerate is also rebranding the effort, calling it “Open Opportunity Fund,” and has appointed Paul Judge as the fund’s chairman. Judge, who was part of the investment committee at the fund before the rebrand, will become a co-owner of Open Opportunity Fund (OOF) alongside SoftBank and some affiliates. The second fund aims to exceed the initial scope of the first effort, which invested $100 million in 75 companies led by Black and Latino individuals, including Greenwood, Career Karma and Praxis Labs. The new fund hopes to deploy the $150 million within three years. SoftBank will be a limited partner in OOF. “The key point in changing the name is that we’re opening access for others to invest in the fund and to grow more scale,” Judge told TechCrunch. “The lack of funding for Black and Latino founders is still tens of billions away from parity; this is another step in making sure we bring more opportunity to those talented founders. ” The Opportunity Growth Fund was launched in 2020 by SoftBank’s then-COO Marcelo Claure, alongside Judge, managing partner Shu Nyatta and TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot. It has seen seven exits thus far, and has invested in five unicorns, including Cityblock Health and Brex. Last year,the fund briefly becamean “evergreen fund,” meaning it had an open-ended fund structure that let it re-invest capital without constraints and invest across stages. Judge says OOF is taking that one step further: “Fund 2 is a traditional closed-ended vehicle instead of an open-ended evergreen fund. The most important distinction is the move from the sole LP of SoftBank to opening access for other LPs to invest. ” Funding raised by Black foundersdipped last yearfrom 2021, accounting for a mere 1% of the $215. 9 billion invested in U. S. startups last year, according to Crunchbase. Judge hopes the organizations that pledged to back minority founders in the past few years will see this fund as a chance to finally do so with the opportunity to come on as a limited partner. SoftBank said its other funds, such as Vision Fund 2, will continue to invest selectively within the OOF portfolio. Sixty-one percent of the fund’s portfolio are Black-owned companies, while 43% are Latino-founded (the number adds up to more than 100% because some companies identify as Afro-Latino. ) Women-founded companies, including non-Black and Latino women, comprise 12% of the portfolio. OOF plans to continue investing across stages (about half of Fund 1 was invested in early-stage companies and the rest in growth-stage companies). This is good news for founders of color who need to fund their growth-stage startups as they scale. SoftBank appears confident about its ability to deliver. It says its Vision Fund 2 and Latin America Fund have invested nearly $600 million into portfolio companies within OOF. That, combined with the initial $100 million investment from OOF’s Fund 1, means SB has invested $700 million into Black and Latino-led businesses (not including other diversity efforts, such as its Latin America Funds and separate investments into Black and Latino-founded companies). “Scaling this is really about enabling more founders to solve problems,” Judge said. “In doing so, they make the world better; they build a company that’s valuable and deliver returns to investors. It creates an impact on many different levels. ” This story was updated after publication to reflect Judge’s title as chairman of the fund, and to remove references to Panoramic Ventures. 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
| 2023-05-18T14:00:17 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/18/softbanks-opportunity-fund-rebrands-taps-paul-judge-to-lead/
| 625 | 1 |
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Catch+Release launches an AI-powered search for user-generated content
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Catch+Release, a startup that lets brands license creator content, said it has launched an AI-powered search that lets users look for user-generated content in natural language queries. The startup helps companies license creator content for their marketing campaigns. While brands can add links from Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to their collection for potential use, the new search engine lets them look for suitable content without requiring them to move from one platform to another. The startup said that marketers can’t usually search for queries like “children at a birthday party” on Instagram. They rather have to rely on keywords and hope that creators have tagged images or videos correctly. The startup uses image recognition to identify scenes and objects in these media assets. However, one of the biggest limitations of the search engine currently is that it can’t go out and search the internet for you. Catch+Release usually boards creators for licensing their content and asks them to import their assets and link their social accounts to the platform. After releasing creator onboarding earlier this year, the company has 600 creators on the platform with over 300,000 items indexed. In a few test searches, we observed that the search engine was able to easily find images related to the query, but videos were a hit and a miss. For instance, “a dog playing in the Park” showed us some videos where there were no dogs. The company said it is still improving its recognition capabilities. Catch+Release has raised $31. 3 million in funding to date, includingan extension round of $8 million it announced last month. The company has investors including Accel, Cervin, and Stagwell, HarbourVest Partners, Kevin Durant’s venture firm 35V, and Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta. Topics
| 2023-09-19T06:34:05 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/18/catchrelease-launches-an-ai-powered-search-for-user-generated-content/
| 287 | 0.9 |
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Three years after its revamp, Firefox’s Android browser adds 450+ new extensions
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For the sliver of the market that opts for Firefox instead of Chrome, the default browser on Android devices, the experience just got better. Firefox maker Mozilla announced today the launch of over 450 new extensions — aka browser add-ons — which are now available on Mozilla’sFirefox Browser Add-ons page. These extensions allow users to customize the mobile browser to their needs, whether that involves addinganti-tracking privacy tools,contentblockers, productivity tools or other features that introduce new experiences, likestreaming music,or those that allow users to personalize the browser’s user interface — likeswitching all websites to a dark modeor offering abetter way to manage tabs. The lack of extensions has been an issue for Firefox for Android users for years followingthe 2020 launch of a rebuilt version of the mobile browserthat replaced the app’s previous codebase with “GeckoView,” a new, faster and more customizable browser engine. At the time, the companysaid it made a decisionto limit the supported extensions to only those within the “Recommended Extensions” program — meaning those that were commonly installed by end users. This choice allowed Mozilla to quickly get the new browser into consumers’ hands, but squashed the long tail of extension development — and opportunity for software developers focused on this market. While Firefox’s nightly builds later enabled more extensions, the publicly available Firefox for Android browser did not have access to these hundreds of extensions, meaning most of Firefox’s mainstream users were also without. In August of this year,Mozilla saidit had finally completed the infrastructure needed to bring the open extension ecosystem back to Firefox for Android. It then began to test and make hundreds more extensions available to Firefox for Android users, culminating in today’s news that there are now 450+ extensions available. The company stressed the importance of having an open ecosystem, noting that nearly half of all Firefox desktop users have an extension installed to customize their experience. Many of the recommended extensions for the Android browser have user numbers in the six digits or more, but the app itself only retains a small slice of the mobile browser market, due to the traction that the default browsers, Chrome and Safari, have achieved on Android and iOS, respectively. On mobile devices, Firefox has a mere 0. 5% market share as of November 2023,according to data on StatCounter. By comparison, Chrome has a 64. 23% share. Safari, Samsung’s browser, Opera and others are also ahead of Firefox in the mobile browser race. Still, the app has a small but devoted following, including those who are looking for alternative options from others beyond the Big Tech giants. One of its key selling points is automatic tracker blocking, which appeals to the more privacy-minded. Per Google Play Store data, Firefox for Android has topped 100 million installs to date. “The opportunity for innovation is vast,” said Giorgio Natili, Firefox’s director of Engineering, in anannouncementabout the extensions’ launch. “It’s thrilling to see extension developers embrace this moment and create novel browsing experiences and features for Firefox for Android users. People don’t have to browse the mobile web in a strictly singular way anymore. With extensions, you’re free to change the way Firefox for Android looks and behaves. It’s only going to get better as more developers innovate within this exciting new space,” he added
| 2023-12-14T19:39:07 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/three-years-after-its-revamp-firefoxs-android-browser-adds-450-new-extensions/
| 548 | 1 |
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GitLab’s new security feature uses AI to explain vulnerabilities to developers
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Developer platformGitLabtodayannounceda new AI-driven security feature that uses a large language model to explain potential vulnerabilities to developers, with plans to expand this to automatically resolve these vulnerabilities using AI in the future. Earlier this month, the company announced a new experimental tool thatexplains code to a developer— similar to the new security feature GitLab announced — and a new experimental feature that automaticallysummarizes issue comments. In this context, it’s also worth noting that GitLab already launched a code completion tool, which isnow availableto GitLab Ultimate and Premium users, and its ML-basedsuggested reviewersfeature last year. The new “explain this vulnerability” feature will try to help teams find the best way to fix a vulnerability within the context of code base. It’s this context that makes the difference here, as the tool is able to combine the basic info about the vulnerability with specific insights from the user’s code. This should make it easier and faster to remediate these issues. The company calls its overall philosophy behind adding AI features “velocity with guardrails,” that is, the combination of AI code and test generation backed by the company’s full-stack DevSecOps platform to ensure that whatever the AI generates can be deployed safely. GitLab also stressed that all of its AI features are built with privacy in mind. “Ifwearetouchingyourintellectualproperty,whichiscode, weareonlygoingtobesendingthattoamodelthatisGitLabsoriswithin the GitLabcloudarchitecture,” GitLab CPO David DeSanto told me. “Thereason why that’s important to us — and this goes back toenterpriseDevSecOps — is thatourcustomersareheavilyregulated. Ourcustomersareusuallyverysecurityandcomplianceconscious,andweknewwecouldnotbuildacodesuggestionssolutionthatrequiredussendingittoathird-partyAI. ” He also noted that GitLab won’t use its customers’ private data to train its models. DeSanto stressed that GitLab’s overall goal for its AI initiative is to 10x efficiency — and not just the efficiency of the individual developer but the overall development lifecycle. As he rightly noted, even if you could 100x a developer’s productivity, inefficiencies further downstream in reviewing that code and putting it into production could easily negate that. “Ifdevelopmentis20%ofthelifecycle,evenif wemakethat50%moreeffective, you’renotreallygoingtofeelit,” DeSanto said. “Now,ifwemakethesecurityteams,theoperationsteams,thecompliance teamsalsomoreefficient,thenasanorganization,you’regoingtoseeit. ” The “explain this code” feature, for example, has turned out to be quite useful not just for developers but also QA and security teams, which now get a better understanding of what they should test. That, surely, was also why GitLab expanded it to explain vulnerabilities as well. In the long run, the idea here is to build features to help these teams automatically generate unit tests and security reviews — which would then be integrated into the overall GitLab platform. According to GitLab’s recentDevSecOps report, 65% of developers are already using AI and ML in their testing efforts or plan to do so within the next three years. Already, 36% of teams use an AI/ML tool to check their code before code reviewers even see it. “Given the resource constraints DevSecOps teams face, automation and artificial intelligence become a strategic resource,” GitLab’s Dave Steer writes in today’s announcement. “Our DevSecOps Platform helps teams fill critical gaps while automatically enforcing policies, applying compliance frameworks, performing security tests using GitLab’s automation capabilities, and providing AI assisted recommendations – which frees up resources. ” Topics Editor
| 2023-04-24T18:32:52 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/24/gitlabs-new-security-feature-uses-ai-to-explain-vulnerabilities-to-developers/
| 506 | 1 |
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Iconic streamer Pokimane is leaving Twitch for YouTube
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Update, 1/31/23 at 1:15 PM ET: Pokimane has nowconfirmedshe left Twitch to stream on YouTube. One of the most popular streamers on Twitch, Pokimane announced today that she is leaving the platform. It’s not yet clear if she’s retiring from content creation altogether, or if she’s moving from Twitch to another platform. “twitch has been my home for a decade,” Pokimanewroteon X. “but it’s time to say thank you for all the memories and love during my League, Fortnite, & Among us days. ” the end of an era twitch has been my home for a decade. but it's time to say thank you for all the memories and love during my League, Fortnite, & Among us days 💜pic. twitter. com/S8FMp6G3I8 — pokimane (@pokimanelol)January 30, 2024 When Twitch streamers’ payout data was leaked in 2021, Pokimane — whose real name is Imane Anys — was the highest-earning woman streamer on the platform. As she departs Twitch, she has 9. 3 million followers, making her the tenth most-followed user. As one of the first women of color to emerge to Twitch stardom in a male-dominated gaming culture, Pokimane’s influence is palpable. “What an incredible journey it’s been,” Twitch’s X account responded to Pokimane’s announcement. “We’re so proud of everything you’ve accomplished and what’s ahead in the future. You’ll always have a home on Twitch, Poki. ” Over the last few years, many top streamers have left Twitch for exclusive deals with other platforms like YouTube, or the newerKick. Kick offers creators 95% of their subscription revenue, which is a huge upgrade over Twitch’s 50-50 baseline split; streamers in Twitch’s Partner Plus program can make a 70-30 split. Twitch is in a period of disarray. The Amazon-owned platform has conducted multiple rounds oflayoffsin the last year as it struggles to turn a profit — in 2024 alone, Twitch has laid off 500 employees, who made up 35% of the workforce. The company shut down service inSouth Korea, one of the world’s largest esports markets, and it sowed discord in its community overconfusing and ever-changingpayout structures. Though Kick gives creators a better revenue share, the grass isn’t necessarily greener. Kick is notoriously lax when it comes to content moderation, and has become the new home for some streamers who were banned from Twitch. One such streamer is Adin Ross, who used his Kick to livestream porn and platform self-described neo-Nazis. Some streamers have also turned to Kick because it allows gambling content, which Twitch banned last year. Pokimane isn’t likely to be taking her talents to Kick, though. In June, shesaidin a stream that profiting from Kick would compromise her “morals and ethics. ” Perhaps it’s just time for Pokimane to take a break from the internet. Recently, some high-profile YouTube creators like MatPat and Tom Scott have announced their retirement, sparking discourse about how creators decide when it’s time to move on. Without her word, it’s hard to know what’s next for Pokimane, but her departure from Twitch is a monumental moment for the struggling platform. Twitch announces 60/40 revenue split in expanded Plus Program 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
| 2024-01-30T22:03:53 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/30/iconic-streamer-pokimane-is-leaving-twitch/
| 622 | 1 |
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Uber invests $100M in WeRide to fuel robotaxi expansion across 15 more cities
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Uber and Chinese autonomous vehicle technology company WeRide plan to expand a commercial robotaxi partnership and bring the service to another 15 cities over the next five years. The expansion comes five months after the two companies launched acommercial robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi. As part of that expansion, Uber will increase its investment into WeRide by $100 million, according to a Wednesday regulatory filing. WeRide said it expects the cash to come through by the second half of 2025. The companiessaid the expansionwill include cities in Europe. Under the partnership, WeRide’s robotaxi services are available through the Uber app. The relationship is similar to Uber’s deal with Waymo, in which the ride-hailing company handles the network routing and fleet operations, while the autonomous vehicle company remains responsible for the AV tech. Uber and WeRide, which wentpublicon the Nasdaq in late October, operate together in Abu Dhabi and announced plans to add Dubai. In Abu Dhabi, they work with local Tawasul Transport to handle fleet operations. The additional 15 cities will focus on cities outside of China and the United States. Uber has locked up more than 15 partnerships with a wide-range of autonomous vehicle technology companies over the past two years acrossride-hailing, delivery, and trucking. In the past two months, Uber has announced deals withAnn Arbor, Michigan-based May MobilityVolkswagen, and Chinese self-driving firm Momenta. It’s most high-profile partnership in the U. S. — and one that is commercially operating today — is with Waymo. The companies offer a Waymo on Uber service in Austin and are about todo the same in Atlanta. This story was originally published May 5. It has been refreshed with Uber’s capital commitment to WeRide
| 2025-05-07T15:14:32 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/07/uber-invests-100m-in-weride-to-fuel-robotaxi-expansion-across-15-more-cities/
| 280 | 0.9 |
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Startup studio Hexa acquires majority stake in Veevart, a vertical SaaS platform for museums
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Hexais trying something new. Instead of fostering startups from the ground up and incubating them for the first year or so, the Paris-based startup studio is acquiring a majority stake inVeevart, a vertical software-as-a-service company for museums that provides solutions for ticketing, fundraising, CRM, and collection management. Hexa is a familiar name in the French tech ecosystem. The startup studio originally started its life in 2011 as eFounders and regularly comes up with ideas for new tech companies. It tries to find the right founding team and helps them with product design, go-to-market strategy, hiring, and fundraising. After this first phase, the companies become proper, independent startups, but Hexa keeps a significant stake on the cap table. Some successful Hexa portfolio companies includeFront,Aircall,Spendesk, andSwan. But Veevart isn’t a new startup. It was founded in 2014 and now works with 160 museums and cultural institutions of all sizes around the world. With its team of 70 people, Veevart is already profitable. The product has been designed as an all-in-one platform for museums, built on top of Salesforce. Museums that use Veevart can create and manage events, sell tickets online and on-site, manage memberships, automate communications to donors and integrate with the museum shop. Many museums use multiple tools for all those tasks. Having a single platform makes it easier to manage and maintain over time. The reason why Veevart relies heavily on Salesforce comes down to Veevart’s founder, Antonio Velasco Echeverry — earlier in his career, he had worked with Accenture and Salesforce. “I wouldn’t say I ‘chose’ to build on top of Salesforce. People often assume these decisions are intentional, but honestly, luck plays a big part. We didn’t choose Salesforce — it was simply the technology I knew best,” Velasco Echeverry told TechCrunch. Despite some platform limitations, he added that building on top of Salesforce has some advantages such as security, scalability, and access to the entire Salesforce ecosystem. Veevart has bootstrapped itself for the past decade and has been profitable for a while — “not incredibly profitable, but profitable,” Velasco Echeverry said. “So when we started conversations with Hexa, we were not looking too much for money, but more for a partner that could help us get to our revenue targets faster and with less pain,” he added. With this investment, Hexa acts as a sort of hands-on private equity partner. The startup studio is investing €5 million ($5. 4 million at current exchange rates) to become the main shareholder in Veevart. “Our objective is that Hexa can help us achieve $20 million in [annual recurring revenue], implement best practices around product, [go-to-market], sales, and leadership,” Velasco Echeverry said. Private equity firms typically do not engage in small deals like this, while VC firms typically seek companies with high growth potential. But Hexa believes it can elevate Veevart to the next level by providing operational expertise to accelerate the company’s growth. Topics Senior Reporter
| 2025-03-11T06:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/10/startup-studio-hexa-acquires-majority-stake-in-veevart-a-vertical-saas-for-museums/
| 486 | 0.9 |
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No, Andreessen Horowitz didn’t post that crypto scam tweet
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Posted: For some tense minutes on Wednesday, X users were surprised to see one of those crypto “airdrop” posts on Andreessen Horowitz’s blue check-marked account. A second tweet said that $5 million had already been given away. That account has 851,000 followers. A member of a16z’s crypto team saw the tweet and immediately posted a warning not to engage. X quickly took down the post. Airdrops are usually used as ways for cryptocurrencies to promote themselves. a16z tells TechCrunch, and posted on the account: “Earlier today, our X account was briefly compromised. During that time, the account promoted a token and other fake content — none of which originated from a16z. Apologies for any confusion caused by the clowns who temporarily took over our account. ” Andreessen Horowitz is well known for its crypto investments. Because this is a crypto-loving firm, jokes and warning tweets flew: The link would likely drain a crypto wallet, not add to it. So, if it sounds too good to be true — like a VC giving away valuable assets — it isn’t true. Here’s what the scam tweets looked like: 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
| 2025-06-18T23:27:07 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/no-andreessen-horowitz-didnt-post-that-crypto-scam-tweet/
| 252 | 0.9 |
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Amazon wants to turn small shops into delivery partners
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According to a newreport from Axios, Amazon wants to partner with small businesses, such as bodegas and IT shops, so that they can become delivery partners. The company pays a small fee to small retailers for each package they deliver. With this program, Amazon wants to expand its last-mile delivery network and find new partners who can deliver packages for the e-commerce company. Every day, small partner shops receive packages for customers who live in the area. Shop owners or retail employees will then deliver those packages to Amazon customers. In other words, Amazon wants to turn your florist, dry cleaner or hair salon into small Amazon storage spaces. More importantly, Amazon is always trying to find innovative ways to expand its external workforce. Some small business owners might be looking at ways to supplement their income. The company has been exploring this ideaforawhileand it isaccepting applicationsfrom potential partner stores on its website. Amazon says that partner stores receive 20 to 50 packages per day, seven days a week. According to Amazon’s referral program, the company is targeting small and mid-size cities, such as Columbia, Missouri, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Fayetteville, Arkansas and Findlay, Ohio. It is also actively recruiting businesses located in Manhattan, New York. Axios reports that Amazon now plans to expand the Amazon Hub Delivery program to dense cities, such as Boston, Los Angeles and Seattle. There are many reasons why this program makes sense for Amazon. The company has been actively building its own last-mile delivery network based on third-party partners (Delivery Service Partners), self-employed drivers (Amazon Flex) and automatic lockers in stores, train stations or residence locations (Amazon Hub Locker). This strategy is important for the company as it reduces the company’s dependency on other delivery companies. This way, Amazon can control the costs and differentiate its service offering from other e-commerce companies. At the same time, Amazon has become so convenient that many customers now choose to order something online instead of buying it at a local store. Partnering with small retailers is a way to reverse the narrative as Amazon offers additional income (of course, additional income is useless if you have to close your retail store due to declining sales). It’s also going to be interesting to see if Amazon plans to leverage these relationships with small businesses to offer them additional services. For instance, some businesses could decide to become third-party sellers on Amazon. They would be able to hand out packages to the delivery person who already comes every day as part of the Amazon Hub Delivery program — how convenient. Topics Senior Reporter
| 2023-06-26T15:28:46 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/26/amazon-wants-to-turn-small-shops-into-delivery-partners/
| 433 | 0.9 |
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|
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Apple dismisses Microsoft monopoly comparisons
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A week after finding itself at the business end of a landmark lawsuit from the United States Department of Justice, Apple is staunchly denying any parallelsbetween itself and Microsoft in the 1990s. It’s a comparison into which the U. S. Attorney General Merrick Garland leaned heavily in last week’s filing. While portions of the United States v. Microsoft Corp. were partially overturned, the Windows maker was ultimately required to modify certain business practices deemed monopolistic by the government. Garland and the 16 state attorneys general that participated in the Apple suit are no doubt seeking a similar outcome to curtail practices it believes amount to an unfair advantage for the $2. 65 trillion company. “In 1998, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs criticized Microsoft’s monopoly and ‘dirty tactics’ in operating systems to target Apple, which prompted the company ‘to go to the Department of Justice’ in hopes of getting Microsoft ‘to play fair,’” the suit notes, heavily implying hypocrisy on Apple’s part. “But even at that time, Apple did not face the same types of restrictions it imposes on third parties today; Apple users could use their iPod with a Windows computer, and Microsoft did not charge Apple a 30% fee for each song downloaded from Apple’s iTunes store. Similarly, when Apple brought the iPhone to market in 2007, it benefited from competition among component makers and wireless carriers. ” For its part, Apple cites global iPhone numbers that are nowhere approaching the 90+% market share Windows enjoyed prior to the turn of the millennium. Lawsuits like this are a rare opportunity to see a large corporation bragging about howfewdevices they’ve sold relative to the broader market. Indeed, with numbers hovering around 20% globally, it’s difficult to make the case that the company is dominating the competition the way Microsoft did a quarter-century ago. It’s true that the iPhone performs especially well in the domestic market, where it faces less direct competition from many of the low-cost handsets that dominate India and China (the number one and two markets, respectively). Apple suggests, however, that the DOJ’s claim that its “share of the entire U. S. smartphone market exceeds 65%” is misleading, as it refers to revenue rather than units sold. Of the latter, the company believes it commands less than half of its home market. The distinction between these figures comes down to the price per unit. It’s here the DOJ suggests that Apple commands 70% of the “performance” smartphone market. Certainly, it’s true that Apple’s devices largely fall into the premium category, of which the company controls a large swath here in the states. The DOJ will likely have a difficult time proving that this — in and of itself — constitutes a monopoly. This is why much of the 88-page complaint focuses on aspects like Apple’s tight App Store control, the Watch’s inability to interface with Android devices and — of course — the dreaded green bubbles. Taken as a whole, the attorneys general who coauthored the suit suggest that this evidence proves the company is using its market position to coerce third parties and generally make life more difficult for Android developers. Among the more interesting aspects of the suit is the claim that such actions led to the demise of Amazon, HTC, LG and Microsoft’s own attempts to compete in the space. “Many prominent, well-financed companies have tried and failed to successfully enter the relevant markets because of these entry barriers,” the suit notes. “Past failures include Amazon (which released its Fire mobile phone in 2014 but could not profitably sustain its business and exited the following year); Microsoft (which discontinued its mobile business in 2017); HTC (which exited the market by selling its smartphone business to Google in September 2017); and LG (which exited the smartphone market in 2021). Today, only Samsung and Google remain as meaningful competitors in the U. S. performance smartphone market. Barriers are so high that Google is a distant third to Apple and Samsung despite the fact that Google controls development of the Android operating system. ” Apple is effectively laughing at the suggestion that such market failures were the fault of anyone but the companies behind them. The competitors the DOJ consulted while putting together the case likely have differing opinions on how much of a direct role the iPhone maker played in their inability to capture meaningful market share (and each of the above instances are dramatically different from one another), but in the case of the Fire Phone, at least, Amazon should be pointing the finger squarely at itself. As for why companies like Huawei don’t present a challenge to Apple on its home turf, the U. S. government should take a good, long look in the mirror. Thesmartwatch exampleis an interesting one. Even Cupertino’s highly paid legal team would struggle to make the case that Apple Watch owners aren’t hamstrung by its iOS exclusivity. For its part, however, the company suggests that technical limitations are the reason for this. Apple says it spent three years attempting to create WatchOS/Android compatibility, only to give up, citing security and privacy concerns. Similarly, while Apple points to the recent announcement that it will supportRCS messageson iPhone, the company insists that the continued presence of stigmatized green bubbles are necessary to differentiate encryption and compatibility with certain Messages features. The complaint cites internal emails from Apple executives suggesting that removing green bubbles would be bad for business. Ultimately, Apple believes that the lawsuit seeks to effectivelyturn iOS into Android. The company points to the 2008 Supreme Court case, Pacific Bell Co. v. LinkLine Communications. The court ruled unanimously in Pac Bell’s favor, stating that the telecom company didn’t violate antitrust rules and is able to determine the companies with which it chooses to work. When the time comes for Apple to give its arguments, the company will likely argue that it’s not Apple’s job to prop up competitors. “If successful, [the lawsuit] would hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from Apple—where hardware, software, and services intersect,” it noted in a statement issued shortly after last week’s filing. “It would also set a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand in designing people’s technology. We believe this lawsuit is wrong on the facts and the law, and we will vigorously defend against it. ” For more on Apple’s antitrust lawsuit, check here:
| 2024-03-28T22:50:58 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/28/apple-dismisses-microsoft-monopoly-comparisons/
| 1,066 | 1 |
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New study of unicorn founders finds most are ‘underdogs,’ and female founders are rising
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A new study that zeros-in on the founders of so-called “unicorns” — companies worth over a billion dollars — has found most have “underdog” founders who are often drawn from the top 10 universities. There’s also a rising female founder make-up, and no obvious monopoly at seed stage of funding for VCs. The study (“Unicorn Founder DNA Report”) byDefiance Capitalof 845 unicorns and 2,018 unicorn founders set out to look at the “DNA” of unicorn founders, concentrating on the U. S. and U. K. (no EU/European) from 2013 to 2023, to define the common traits of these kinds of founders. The study found: The study further found that unicorns were dominated by white founders, but that every third unicorn had an Asian founder. Indeed, 38% of unicorns had at least one founder who was not white: 82% had at least one white founder, 62% had first or second generation immigrant founders. Only 3% of unicorns had a black founder. And only 21% of immigrant and female founders raised from top 10 VCs. Teams with female founders were two years younger than all-male teams when founding their unicorns (32 versus 34). Serial founders (50%) were more likely to succeed building unicorns, but only one in five unicorns had solo founders. During the last decade, all top seed funds were generalist funds, and the market for seed funds is highly fragmented. Only 28% had raised capital from a top VC seed fund (with more than 1% market share). Only 34% of unicorn founders had worked at an elite employer prior to founding a unicorn, suggesting a McKinsey or similar background is not a prerequisite to success. The study also found three dominant factors in the “DNA” of a unicorn founder. 1. No “plan B” 2. “A chip on the shoulder” 3. Unlimited self belief The study found that many unicorn founders were forced to develop a growth mindset, with values, work ethic and ambitions all established during childhood. Most had a personal story of feeling unfairly treated or feeling limited in their native environment. The study observed these traits in communities left behind for generations, e. g. women founders, people of color, neurodivergent or founders with atypical backgrounds. Many tend also to be “ambitious rebels,” often motivated by a greater cause they care deeply about, have strong family role models, a quality peer network and no fear of failure. A far greater number of first and second generation immigrant CEOs had STEM degrees than local CEOs, suggesting a brain drain from emerging or smaller economies to developed ones. Significantly, more second generation immigrants attended an elite university than the rest of the sample. Other interesting data points came out of the study. Solo founders tended to start their unicorns three years later than founder teams, and it took seven years on average to reach unicorn status for all types of founder teams, but second generation immigrants took only six years. And in fact, the all-white, male, local, Ivy league archetype of founder was actually an infrequent occurrence, at 11%, and only one-third of founders native to a country where they founded the company graduated from a top 10 university. In addition, the top 20 U. S. VC funds tended to favor male, immigrant founders with STEM degrees from elite universities at seed, but appear to be missing a trick by largely ignoring female founders, a growing demographic in the unicorn space. Commenting, Defiance Capital founder Christian Dorffer told me: “I believe this is the most comprehensive study ever done on the backgrounds of unicorn founders in the U. S. and U. K. We cover all new unicorns from 2013-2023, covering over 2,000 founders and over 800 unicorns. ” “VCs famously say that ‘it’s all about the people’, but with only 10% of unicorn founders fitting the Mark Zuckerberg profile, most of the thousands of seed funds are backing the wrong type of founders. One interesting finding in our study is that even the best funds, like Sequoia, only get into less than 3% of unicorns — and only 30 funds have a unicorn market share of 1% or more,” he said. “The hunger, self-belief, ingenuity and resilience we found in the unicorn founders also make a lot of sense when you see that 62% had immigrant founders (typically from countries where it’s impossible to build unicorns) and 17% of new unicorns last year had female founders. ” He continued: “Immigrants and other underrepresented founders are clearly able to produce these amazing results but I wanted to prove it to LPs. A lot of the immigrant founders are coming from the developing world, like India and Africa, even Eastern Europe. They don’t really have that many options at home. They have to leave and pursue opportunities elsewhere. ” “There’s only 30 funds that have more than 1% share of all these unicorns, which means that it’s totally fragmented,” he added. “If you combine this fragmentation with the fact that immigrants and women found it harder to fundraise, there’s a huge opportunity for new funds to come in and specifically set out to look for these founders. ” I asked him how a VC or a family office might change their strategy as a result of seeing this research? “Sequoia being the top fund in only 2. 8% of unicorns means that they miss a lot. Yes, for LPs, top funds are a relatively safe investment. But family offices are now looking at emerging managers and especially early-stage funds as the potential Alpha. So if you’re looking to maximize returns as a family office, you need to be in a few new funds, emerging managers in order to get that outlier company that turns into a unicorn,” he said. Dorffer, who intends now to produce a podcast with many of the unicorn founders surveyed, said: “The stories that are coming out show crazy determination. As a female founder, you have to work twice as hard and take twice as many meetings to raise the money. The founders of Andela and three African founders that built unicorns… have stories that are just so inspirational. ”
| 2024-03-27T10:24:50 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/27/unicorn-founders/
| 1,020 | 1 |
50b28fec1baf09c7f4d14126b4d59027
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|
WhatsApp users can now filter chats with customized lists
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WhatsApp is making it easier to organize the many messages filling up your inbox. The messaging app announced Thursday that it’s adding the ability to filter chats into customizable categories. This will help you keep track of conversations with family members, work colleagues, college friends, and more. The “Custom Lists” feature is an enhancement to the chat filters that WhatsAppintroducedback in April. Previously, you only had access to three filters: “All,” “Unread,” and “Groups. ” With the new update, you can now create lists of your own, letting you focus on your favorite chats at once. To create a list, tap the plus sign (+) in the filter bar at the top of the Chats tab and give the list a name. You can then add anyone you want to the list, including both groups and one-on-one chats. As you add more lists, you’ll be able to swipe on the screen to navigate through the filters. Additionally, you can edit a list by long-pressing it and choosing to add or remove people or groups. By default, WhatsApp will still open to the “All” category, which displays all messages in chronological order. Custom Lists is rolling out today and will become available to everyone in the following weeks. Topics
| 2024-10-31T16:18:20 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/31/whatsapp-users-can-now-filter-chats-with-customized-lists/
| 208 | 0.9 |
3ccc65b92a8a93ddb1a015222a9f9c48
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Peak XV invests $35 million in wealth and asset management startup Neo
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Peak XV Partners has invested $35 million in Neo, a fintech startup founded by industry veterans that is increasingly challenging incumbents including IIFL, Edelweiss and Waterfield Advisors, as the largest India-focused VC broadens its bets on wealth and asset management. Neo operates a suite of wealth and asset management services, serving businesses, sovereign and pension funds and large family offices and individuals with ultra-high-net-worth. The firm, which began operations in 2021, has already amassed over a 1,000 customers, said Neo founder Nitin Jain in an interview. The two firms reserve the optionality to extend the size of the investment, they said. TechCrunch reported in August that Peak XV wasengaging with Neo for an investment. Neo earlier raised about $40 million from a list of undisclosed investors. Despite being second only to China in high-net-worth individuals among BRICS countries, and being home to more than 14,000 ultra-high-net-worth households, India’s wealth management sector remains underdeveloped, plagued by a trust deficit and misaligned incentives. Part of the reason is that the industry is often more geared toward product sales than tailored financial advice, said Jain, who like many of his co-founders and other founding members of Neo started the venture after long stints at investment giant Edelweiss. On the advisory side, Neo serves as an extended CIO to multi-family offices, participating in their investment committees and offering views on asset allocation, corporate holding structure and taxations. “We sit on their side. It’s slightly different from the classical wealth management practice as we are advising as well as selling products to them. So this is a very unique proposition,” he said. The startup works with multiple relationship managers, providing them with additional resources and incentives that supplement their existing practices. Jain said he estimates that 350 to 400 RMs in India control 70 to 75% of assets. Neo will aim to attract about 100 of them in the next two to three years, he said. On the asset management side, Neo focuses on long-term yield-based solutions in real estate and private credit for clients that are looking to generate an income from their investments. Neo already has about $3 billion of assets under management, it said. The startup didn’t need new capital and doesn’t anticipate raising more than one more round in the future, said Jain. Sakshi Chopra, an MD at Peak XV Partners, said the firm had been tracking Jain’s journey for over a year and in Neo it found the right combination of experience, expertise and opportunity. “The founding team, they built asset businesses at Nuvama and Edelweiss, is very high-quality and this is all they have done through their lives,” she said in an interview, adding that the two firms began engaging about 15 months ago. “We share the philosophy on doing good for the people who trust us with their money. ” Having Peak XV becoming a partner will help Neo recruit high-quality talent, said Jain, citing the venture firm’s strong reputation and brand image. With the investment in Neo, Peak XV Partners is expanding its portfolio of startups that operate in the asset and wealth management category. The venture firm is also backer of CRED and Groww, though both are currently serving different sets of audiences. And more players are gearing up to serve the market. Jio Financial Services — backed by Reliance Industries, run by Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani — in July said it hadpartnered with BlackRockto form an asset manager venture, called Jio BlackRock, that will aim to serve India’s growing investor base. Topics Reporter, India
| 2023-10-18T11:33:16 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/18/peak-xv-invests-35-million-in-wealth-and-asset-management-startup-neo/
| 590 | 1 |
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|
Researchers find security flaws in Skoda cars that may let hackers remotely track them
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Security researchers have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the infotainment units used in some Skoda cars that could allow malicious actors to remotely trigger certain controls and track the cars’ location in real time. PCAutomotive, a cybersecurity firm specializing in the automotive sector, unveiled 12 new security vulnerabilities impacting the latest model of the Skoda Superb III sedan, at Black Hat Europe this week. This comes a year after the organizationdisclosed nine other vulnerabilities affecting the same model. Skoda is a car brand owned by German automobile giant Volkswagen. Danila Parnishchev, head of security assessment at PCAutomotive, told TechCrunch the vulnerabilities could be chained together and exploited by hackers to inject malware into the vehicle. An attacker would need to connect with the Skoda Superb III’s media unit via Bluetooth to exploit the flaws, Parnishchev told TechCrunch. The vulnerabilities, discovered in the vehicle’s MIB3 infotainment unit, could allow attackers to achieve unrestricted code execution and run malicious code every time the unit starts. This could let an attacker obtain live vehicle GPS coordinates and speed data, record conversations via the in-car microphone, take screenshots of the infotainment display, and play arbitrary sounds in the car, according to PCAutomotive. Parnishchev told TechCrunch that the flaws, which PCAutomotive verified for itself on a Superb III, also make it possible for an attacker to exfiltrate the phone contact database of the vehicle owner if they have enabled contact synchronization with their car. “Usually phones are encrypted, so you cannot easily extract the contact database,” Parnishchev said. “In the case of the infotainment unit, you can — the contact database is stored in plaintext. ” Parnishchev noted that they did not find a way to bypass the in-vehicle network gateway restrictions to access safety-critical car controls such as the steering wheel, brakes, and accelerator. In research shared with TechCrunch before it was published on Thursday, PCAutomotive noted that the vulnerable MIB3 units are used in multiple Volkswagen and Skoda models, and based on public sales data, estimates there are potentially more than 1. 4 million vulnerable vehicles out there. However, Parnishchev said the number of vulnerable vehicles could be much higher if one considers the aftermarket component market. “If you go to eBay and search for a part number, you will find it. And if it’s the case that the previous user didn’t erase it, their contact database will be there, too,” he explained. PCAutomotive said Volkswagen patched the vulnerabilities after they were reported through the company’s cybersecurity disclosure program. In an emailed statement to TechCrunch, Skoda spokesperson Tom Drechsler said: “The reported vulnerabilities in the infotainment system have been and are being addressed and eliminated through continuous improvement management via the lifecycle of our products. At no time was and is there any danger to the safety of our customers or our vehicles. ” Topics Sr. Reporter, Cybersecurity Carly Page was a Senior Reporter at TechCrunch, where she covered the cybersecurity beat. Prior to that, she had spent more than a decade in the technology industry, writing for titles including Forbes, TechRadar and WIRED. You can contact Carly securely on Signal at +441536 853956
| 2024-12-12T11:37:37 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/12/researchers-find-security-flaws-in-skoda-cars-that-may-let-hackers-remotely-track-them/
| 520 | 1 |
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Where OpenAI goes from here is anyone’s guess
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OpenAI went from hot startup to hot mess in a New York minute last week. By now you knowthe story: The board fired CEO Sam Altman, his president and co-founder Greg Brockman followed him out the door, and his former employees are in full-on revolt. For now, at least, it looks like Altman and Brockman have landed at Microsoft, and many of their former OpenAI employees could soon be following suit. While startups fall apart all the time, it doesn’t usually happen to those on such solid footing. This one came down to politics, and it got real ugly real fast. The situation is still in flux, and nobody knows how this will ultimately end, but the different entities appear to be negotiating, at least for now. After all this drama, could everything go back to the way it was before the board fired Altman? It’s still possible, believe it or not. An OpenAI investor, who spoke with TechCrunch+ on background, hopes to see Altman return to OpenAI after all the dust settles. “The goal remains the same: the board to go, and Sam and co to return, but it’s very dynamic. This is a high-powered stake among prominent investors and a ragtag board,” the person said. “Investors are keeping all options and potential remedies on the table against the board. The board does not have the legal capital to fight a major lawsuit against them. ” That investor is not alone. Matt McIlwain, managing director at Madrona, thinks the companies would be better off operating separately. “So it’s good for Microsoft to have some independence from OpenAI and also that OpenAI remains independent, especially since it has this additional missionary component to it,” McIlwain told TechCrunch+. “And so, I think that most of the parties around the table see that now. And I guess the question is, can they get there? I think they will,” he said, maybe even before Thanksgiving. One thing is clear, however: If Microsoft absorbs the people behind OpenAI, even though the company already had an advantage via the partnership and investment in place, it would potentially make Microsoft a very hard player to beat in the AI space. Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, calls the moves we have seen this week “the ultimate power play. ” But he believesit comes down to a battlebetween folks who want to build AI ethically versus those who want to go faster, and the OpenAI board bungled the situation. “What the OpenAI board ended up doing is unleashing an acceleration of the war between the folks who want to go fast and the folks [who] want to stick around and actually build ethical AI,” Wang said. And by doing so, they played into Satya Nadella’s hands. “So now Microsoft doesn’t have to deal with ethical AI. Satya gets a $90 billion bump in his valuation very, very cheaply by bringing these two folks over, and he’s got 700 to 800 people ready to work for them [on this technology]. It is the ultimate coup. ” But what does this mean for OpenAI? It has a ton of intellectual property and potentially nobody to continue building it. Microsoft could have a slew of new employees who are bound by confidentiality agreements. It’s hard to parse. Mark Kesslen, chair of the IP practice group at law firm Lowenstein Sandler, says it’s a complex situation, especially given the relationship that existed between Microsoft and OpenAI prior to this. While Kesslen has no direct knowledge of the contractual arrangements between the companies, he is an expert in IP law. But the folks who would be coming over from OpenAI still know the ins and outs of the tech, even if they can’t bring the IP. “You can’t bring the work product, but you bring your knowledge and your skills, but that would be no different than if they ended up working for Google on Bard or at Anthropic. They’d have to start all new on their product without their IP. ” The complicating factor here of course is that Microsoft already has a relationship with OpenAI where they’ve been using each other’s IP. None of this changes that agreement, as far as we know. “So the mere fact that some of OpenAI employees went to Microsoft is interesting, but so long as OpenAI can continue to perform [under the terms of the agreement], I’m not sure there’s any breach of that agreement,” he said. Box CEO Aaron Levie, whose company is an OpenAI customer, doesn’t think it will matter much to customers like him, however this plays out. “For what it’s worth, obviously OpenAI already had an incredibly tight relationship with Microsoft,” Levie told TechCrunch+. “So whether Sam and Greg go to Microsoft and kind of rebuild a version of OpenAI, or they go back to OpenAI, I think for the most part, the practical outcome is essentially the same for developers. ” What remains unclear while this plays out is the impact on investors. What will the fate of OpenAI the company be if everyone threatening to quit actually bails? That would leave investors with a startup with a ton of IP, but no employees to work on it. Those assets would potentially have value in the marketplace, but not nearly as much as OpenAI had last Thursday before all this happened. While it’s hard to believe that practically the entire company could be absorbed by Microsoft in this fashion, it’s no stranger than how this whole story has unfolded to this point. TechCrunch reporter Jagmeet Singh also contributed to this report. OpenAI mess exposes the dangers of vendor lock-in for startups
| 2023-11-21T22:00:35 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/21/where-openai-goes-from-here-is-anyones-guess/
| 945 | 1 |
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Glean wants to beat ChatGPT at its own game — in the enterprise
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But if there’s one thing it excels at, it’s surfacing answers from vast pools of data. EnterGlean, whose software connects to enterprise first- and third-party databases to field plain-English requests (e. g. “How do I invest in our company’s 401k?”) from employees, sort of like a customChatGPT. Launched by Arvind Jain, the co-founder of cloud data management company Rubrik, Glean was inspired by Jain’s observations that Rubrik employees often struggled to find the information they needed to do their jobs — and that staffers at other companies were struggling with the same. “I saw that engineers were spending too much time outside code, account managers couldn’t find the latest research or presentation needed to close deals, new employees took too long to onboard, and so on” Jain told TechCrunch in an interview. “This growing problem destroyed productivity, sapped energy and detracted from the employee experience. ” It seems Jain was on to something. A recent Gartnersurveyfound that 47% of desk workers have trouble finding the data they need to perform their jobs. In the same survey, workers reported that the growing number of apps they have to manage at work — 11 on average now versus six five years ago — is exacerbating the challenge. In 2019, Jain — along with a small founding team — built Glean as an AI-powered search app geared toward enterprise customers. The first few iterations were along the lines of Microsoft’s SharePoint Syntex and AmazonKendra, occupying a product category known as “cognitive search. ” Using natural language processing, the early Glean could understand document minutia in addition to searches employees across an organization might perform. Over the years, Glean evolved into a platform that connects with and analyzes a company’s databases and data stores to answer employee inquiries — following after the explosive GenAI trend. Glean today ingests info from sources including support tickets, chat messages and customer relationship management platform entries and applies GenAI to attempt to turn that all that into insights and relevant answers. One imagines companies would be wary of connecting their proprietary data — especially their internal chat data — to a GenAI platform that performs this deep a level of scraping and analysis. And that wouldn’t be an incorrect assumption. A recent Ciscopollfound that more than one in four organizations have banned the use of GenAI over privacy and data security risks. In the poll, companies said they feared GenAI tools would compromise their IP or potentially disclose other sensitive information to the public — or their rivals. But Jain asserts that Glean is “secure” and “private” — at least to the extent a cloud-based GenAI platformcanbe. “Glean respects the same permissions set in a company’s data sources (Slack, Teams, Jira, ServiceNow, etc. ), so employees only receive answers based on the data they’re allowed to access,” Jain said. “When a user deletes a document in the underlying application, the document gets deleted from the Glean system. ” What about the curse from which most GenAI suffers, though —hallucinations? Is Glean immune from making up facts and citations, getting summaries wrong and missing the point of basic requests? It’s possible; this writer wasn’t able to test Glean himself. But Jain, while refusing to say just how often Glean hallucinates, highlighted the mitigations in place to make the platform’s GenAI more reliable, including a model trained on customer data to learn industry and firm-specific jargon and letting customers switch among several open source GenAI models to drive Glean’s core experience. “AI work assistants need to deliver personalized results based on who’s searching,” Jain said. “Various aspects of the searcher — their role, job function, management hierarchy, specific projects and responsibilities and even who they work with — end up being important in defining the content that’s relevant to them. Glean learns a custom model for every customer to deliver highly personalized results to every employee based on these attributes. ” Glean also employs RAG (short for Retrieval-Augmented Generation), an increasingly common technique used to “ground” GenAI by retrieving data from outside sources of knowledge, to boost performance. Jain says that every answer Glean gives is “fully referenceable” back to the original source. “Glean [can recommend the] documents users might need for their day-to-day work by learning from past work patterns,” Jain said. “[It] delivers turnkey implementation of a complex AI ‘ecosystem,’ with over 100 connectors. ” Glean makes money by charging a monthly per-seat subscription, based on annual contracts. Despite competition from vendors like Microsoft (specifically Copilot) and OpenAI (ChatGPT) as well as enterprise search providers such as Coveo, Sinequa and Lucidworks, Jain says that business has been quite strong as of late, with annual recurring revenue close to quadrupling in the last year. That runs counter to the narrative that corporations — far from embracing GenAI wholeheartedly — have been slow and wary to deploy it across their business functions. Responding to a December 2023surveyby Convrg. io, the Intel subsidiary, only 10% of organizations said that they’d launched GenAI solutions all the way to production in 2023. The vast majority of solutions remained in the research and testing phases, the organizations said — implying companies haven’t been successful in finding money-making GenAI use cases. Glean’s financials — and a 200-strong customer base that includes Duolingo, Grammarly and Sony — appear to have won over investors, however. Glean today announced that it raised $200 million in a Series D funding round co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Adams Street, Coatue, ICONIQ, IVP, Latitude Capital and additional strategic backers Capital One Ventures, Citi Ventures, Databricks Ventures and Workday Ventures. Kleiner Perkins’ Mamoon Hamid had this to say in a statement: “The opportunity for Glean is enormous, and we have so much conviction in the team’s ability to provide the GenAI solution for the enterprise that we co-led this round after investing in every round prior to this, after leading their Series A in 2019. I’ve spent my venture career investing in applications that enable knowledge workers to be more productive, whether it’s Slack, Box or Figma, and see huge potential in Glean to change the way that people work. ” Jain says that the new capital, which brings Glean’s total raised to ~$360 million and values the startup at $2. 2 billion, will be put toward expanding “all of” Glean’s teams (the Palo Alto-based company has ~300 employees at present), enhancing its product and “building out a robust go-to-market motion. ” “Glean has continued to see strong and growing customer demand, especially from enterprises who’ve spent the past year evaluating the necessary requirements to bring GenAI into their organizations,” Jain said. “We’ve always been prudent in hiring and spending, and the recent increase in hiring is to meet strong customer demand. ”
| 2024-02-27T13:00:04 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/27/glean-wants-to-beat-chatgpt-at-its-own-game-in-the-enterprise/
| 1,131 | 1 |
f7429bdffce03514b71589c64583cf12
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|
Sonia’s AI chatbot steps in for therapists
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Can chatbots replace human therapists? Some startups — and patients — claim that they can. But it’s not exactly settled science. Onestudyfound that 80% of people who’ve used OpenAI’s ChatGPT for mental health advice consider it a good alternative to regular therapy, while a separatereportfound that chatbots can be effective in reducing certain symptoms related to depression and anxiety. On the other hand,it’s well-establishedthat the relationship between therapist and client — the human connection, in other words — is among the best predictors of success in mental health treatment. Three entrepreneurs — Dustin Klebe, Lukas Wolf and Chris Aeberli — are in the pro-chatbot therapy camp. Their startup,Sonia, offers an “AI therapist” that users can talk to or text with via an iOS app about a range of topics. “To some extent, building an AI therapist is like developing a drug, in the sense that we are building a new technology as opposed to repackaging an existing one,” Aeberli, Sonia’s CEO, told TechCrunch in an interview. The three met in 2018 while studying computer science at ETH Zürich and moved to the U. S. together to pursue graduate studies at MIT. Shortly after graduating, they reunited to launch a startup that could encapsulate their shared passion for scalable tech. That startup became Sonia. Sonia leverages a number of generative AI models to analyze what users say during “therapy sessions” in the app and respond to them. Applying techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy, the app, which charges users $20 per month or $200 per year, gives “homework” aimed at driving home insights from conversations and visualizations designed to help identify top stressors. Aeberli claims that Sonia, which hasn’t received FDA approval, can tackle issues ranging from depression, stress, and anxiety to relationship problems and poor sleep. For more serious scenarios, like people contemplating violence or suicide, Sonia has “additional algorithms and models” to detect “emergency situations” and direct users to national hotlines, Aeberli says. Somewhat alarmingly, none of Sonia’s founders have backgrounds in psychology. But Aeberli says that the startup consults with psychologists, recently hired a cognitive psychology graduate, and is actively recruiting a full-time clinical psychologist. “It is important to emphasize that we don’t consider human therapists, or any companies providing physical or virtual mental health care conducted by humans, as our competition,” Klebe said. “For every response that Sonia generates, there are about seven additional language model calls happening in the background to analyze the situation from several different therapeutic perspectives in order to adjust, optimize and personalize the therapeutical approach chosen by Sonia. ” What about privacy? Can users rest assured that their data isn’t being retained in avulnerable cloudor used to train Sonia’s models without their knowledge? Aeberli says Sonia is committed to storing only the “absolute minimum” amount of personal information to administer therapy: a user’s age and name. He didn’t address where, how, or for how long Sonia stores conversation data, however. Sonia, which has around 8,000 users and $3. 35 million in backing from investors, including Y Combinator, Moonfire, Rebel Fund and SBXi, is in talks with unnamed mental health organizations to provide Sonia as a resource through their online portals. The reviews for Sonia on the App Store are quite positive so far, with several users noting they find it easier to speak with the chatbot about their issues than a human therapist. But is that a good thing? Today’s chatbot tech is limited in the quality of advice it can give — and it might not pick up on subtler signs indicative of a problem, like an anorexic person asking how to lose weight. (Sonia wouldn’t even know the person’s weight. ) Chatbots’ responses are also colored with biases — often the Western biases reflected in their training data. As a result, they’re more likely to miss cultural and linguistic differences in the way a person expresses mental illnesses, particularly if English is that person’s second language. (Sonia only supports English. ) In the worst-case scenario, chatbots go off the rails. Last year, the National Eating Disorders Association came under fire for replacing humans with a chatbot, Tessa, that dispensed weight-loss tips that were triggering to people with eating disorders. Klebe emphasized that Sonia isn’t trying to replace human therapists. “We are building a solution for the millions of people who are struggling with their mental health but can’t (or don’t want to) access a human therapist,” Wolf said. “We aim to fill the gigantic gap between demand and supply. ” There’s certainly a gap — both in terms of the ratio of professionals to patients and the cost of treatments versus what most patients can afford. More than half of the U. S. doesn’t have adequate geographic access to mental care,accordingto a recent government report. And a recentsurveyfound that 42% of U. S. adults with a mental health condition weren’t able to receive care because they couldn’t afford it. A piece in Scientific American talks about therapy apps that cater to the “worried well,” or people who can afford therapy and app subscriptions, and not isolated individuals who might be most at risk but don’t know how to seek help. At $20 per month, Sonia isn’t exactly cheap — but Aeberli argues it’s cheaper than a typical therapy appointment. “It’s a lot easier to start using Sonia than seeing a human therapist, which entails finding a therapist, being on the waitlist for four months, going there at a set time and paying $200,” he said. “Sonia has already seen more patients than a human therapist would see over the course of their entire career. ” I only hope that Sonia’s founders remain transparent about the issues that the app can and cannot address as they build it out
| 2024-06-26T20:12:12 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/26/sonias-ai-chatbot-steps-in-for-therapists/
| 957 | 1 |
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No ChatGPT in my court: Judge orders all AI-generated content must be declared and checked
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Few lawyers would be foolish enough to let an AI make their arguments, but one already did, and Judge Brantley Starr is taking steps to ensure that debacle isn’t repeated inhiscourtroom. The Texas federal judge has added a requirement that any attorney appearing in his court must attest that “no portion of the filing was drafted by generative artificial intelligence,” or if it was, that it was checked “by a human being. ” Last week, attorney Steven Schwartz allowedChatGPTto “supplement” his legal research in a recent federal filing, providing him with six cases and relevant precedent — all of which were completely hallucinated by the language model. He now“greatly regrets” doing this, and while the national coverage of this gaffe probably caused any other lawyers thinking of trying it to think again, Judge Starr isn’t taking any chances. At the federal site for Texas’ Northern District, Starr has, like other judges, the opportunity to set specific rules for his courtroom. And added recently (though it’s unclear whether this was in response to the aforementioned filing) is the“Mandatory Certification Regarding Generative Artificial Intelligence. ”Eugene Volokhfirst reported the news. All attorneys appearing before the Court must file on the docket a certificate attesting either that no portion of the filing was drafted by generative artificial intelligence (such as ChatGPT, Harvey. AI, or Google Bard) or that any language drafted by generative artificial intelligence was checked for accuracy, using print reporters or traditional legal databases, by a human being. A form for lawyers to sign is appended, noting that “quotations, citations, paraphrased assertions, and legal analysis” are all covered by this proscription. As summary is one of AI’s strong suits, and finding and summarizing precedent or previous cases is something that has been advertised as potentially helpful in legal work, this may end up coming into play more often than expected. Whoever drafted the memorandum on this matter at Judge Starr’s office has their finger on the pulse. The certification requirement includes a pretty well informed and convincing explanation of its necessity (line breaks added for readability): These platforms are incredibly powerful and have many uses in the law: form divorces, discovery requests, suggested errors in documents, anticipated questions at oral argument. But legal briefing is not one of them. Here’s why. These platforms in their current states are prone to hallucinations and bias. On hallucinations, they make stuff up — even quotes and citations. Another issue is reliability or bias. While attorneys swear an oath to set aside their personal prejudices, biases, and beliefs to faithfully uphold the law and represent their clients, generative artificial intelligence is the product of programming devised by humans who did not have to swear such an oath. As such, these systems hold no allegiance to any client, the rule of law, or the laws and Constitution of the United States (or, as addressed above, the truth). Unbound by any sense of duty, honor, or justice, such programs act according to computer code rather than conviction, based on programming rather than principle. Any party believing a platform has the requisite accuracy and reliability for legal briefing may move for leave and explain why. In other words, be prepared to justify yourself. While this is just one judge in one court, it would not be surprising if others took up this rule as their own. While as the court says, this is a powerful and potentially helpful technology, its use must be at the very least clearly declared and checked for accuracy. Topics Writer & Photographer Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. His personal website is coldewey. cc
| 2023-05-30T23:32:49 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/30/no-chatgpt-in-my-court-judge-orders-all-ai-generated-content-must-be-declared-and-checked/
| 602 | 1 |
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Instagram teases AI tools for editing appearances, backgrounds in videos using prompts
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Instagram head Adam Mosseri is teasing upcoming generative AI features for the social app that will allow creators to “change nearly any aspect” of their videos using text prompts. The editing tools will be powered byMeta’s Movie Gen AI model, and are expected to launch on the social network sometime next year, Mosseri said in avideo shared on Thursday. “We’re working on some really exciting AI tools for you video creators out there,” Mosseri said. “A lot of you make amazing content that makes Instagram what it is and we want to give you more tools to help realize your ideas. And you should be able to do anything you want with your videos. You should be able to change your outfit or change the context in which you’re sitting, or add a chain, whatever you can think of,” he added. The video previews the AI editing features that Mosseri is teasing, including the ability to change your outfit, alter your background environment, add jewelry, and change your overall appearance. For instance, in one scene, Mosseri’s background changes to a snowy atmosphere, and in another, he transforms into a puppet-like, animated version of himself. While the previews look clean and seamless, it’s unknown if the user-facing editing tools will render the same sort of results once launched. When Meta unveiled Movie Gen back in October, the company said the model allows you to use simple text inputs to create videos and sounds and edit existing videos. Meta said at the time that the AI video generator wouldn’t be publicly available. Today’s announcement reveals that Meta will be leveraging the model to give creators on Instagram more AI editing tools for their videos. It’s worth noting that Meta unveiled Movie Gen months afterOpenAIandAdobedebuted similar models. OpenAI’s Soralaunched to some users earlier this month, and Adobe started letting some users test itsFirefly video generatorin October. TechCrunch has an AI-focused newsletter!Sign up hereto get it in your inbox every Wednesday. 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
| 2024-12-19T17:47:29 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/19/instagram-teases-ai-tools-for-editing-appearances-backgrounds-in-videos-using-prompts/
| 372 | 0.9 |
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Intel mandates four days in the office
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Intel says that it’ll require employees to work from the office four days a week, a shift from the company’s current policy. CEO Lip-Bu Tan made the announcement during Intel’s Q1 2025 earnings call on Thursday. Previously, Intel allowed staff to work from home two days a week, but Tan said that adherence to the company’s hybrid work policy has been “uneven at best. ” “I strongly believe that our sites need to be vibrant hubs of collaboration that reflect our culture in action,” Tan said. “When we spend time together in person, it fosters more engaging and productive discussion and debate. It drives better and faster decision-making. And it strengthens our connection with colleagues. ” The policy change will go into effect September 1. Tan said that local leadership will share “site-specific details” and “seek [staff] input on how to create the best possible on-site experience. ” Intel, which is reportedly planning tolay offas much as 20% of its workforce, is the latest big tech company to mandate a return to the office. Amazon made headlines in 2024 when CEO Andy Jassy announced that corporate employees must return to work in the office five days a week. Salesforce implemented a four-day-per-week policy in October. And Apple moved to a hybrid setup in 2022. Evidence is mixed on whether working from the office bolsters productivity. Researchhasshown, however, that return-to-office mandateshurt employee satisfaction
| 2025-04-24T21:26:58 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/intel-mandates-four-days-in-the-office/
| 232 | 0.9 |
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Waymo picks its next robotaxi, Joby lands more Toyota bucks, and Cybertruck notches its fifth recall
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Welcome back toTechCrunch Mobility— your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just clickTechCrunch Mobility! I kicked off my week atUP. Summit, an invite-only event that was held this year in Bentonville, Arkansas, to meet up with founders and investors focused on the future of transportation. UP. Summit has always celebrated U. S. innovation and this year was no different, but there was more of an urgent and existential undertone this year. And with it an even bigger embrace of dual-use technology — meaning tech like software, autonomous vehicles, and aviation used for both civilian and military purposes. Defense tech is hot these days, and conversations (both on and off the stage) at the UP. Summit reflected this broader trend. Oh, before I forget, if you want to follow my work but are more of a listener than a reader, may I suggest theEquity PodcastorThe Autonocast? I’m on both! And this week, I popped over to TechCrunch’sFound podcastto talk to the co-founder ofMotorway, a startup that connects car owners with dealers looking to buy and resell their vehicles. Remember all of the deals and partnerships a few years ago surrounding electric semitrucks? Major corporations likePepsiCo, which operates its own fleet, and Coca-Cola bottlers were keen to try out and eventually bring electric semitrucks manufactured by Tesla, Daimler’s Freightliner eCascadia, Nikola, and Kenworth into their transportation networks. A couple of little birds recently told me the on-the-road results have these corporations rethinking what they’re getting and how much value they provide. Specifically, that EV tractors with real loads (not demos) are yielding 50% to 75% of the “claimed” range. Does that mean these companies will scrap the programs? Probably not. But it may mean a slower-than-expected rollout. Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec atkirsten. korosec@techcrunch. com, Sean O’Kane atsean. okane@techcrunch. com, or Rebecca Bellan atrebecca. bellan@techcrunch. com. Or check outthese instructionsto learn how to contact us via encrypted messaging apps or SecureDrop. Joby Aviationhas bagged another$500 million investmentfromToyota, bringing the automaker’s total capital injection into the electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) company to $894 million. It’s either a signal that Toyota believes in Joby’s ability to get its eVTOLs certified and passengers flying commercially by its previously announced deadline of 2025, or it’s a sign that Toyota is falling prey to the sunk-cost fallacy. A classic weighing of the scales in the world of investing in frontier tech. Joby plans to use the funds to get to the end of its lengthy Type 2 certification process with the Federal Aviation Administration and ramp up production of its eVTOL. Toyota’s engineers have been helping with Joby’s production; they work side by side with the Joby team in California to help the startup develop a manufacturing method and tooling design. A couple other notable deals… EVgohas secured a$1. 05 billion conditional loanfrom the U. S. Department of Energy to accelerate the expansion of its nationwide fast charging network. EVgo is trying to build out about 7,500 new chargers. J. B. HuntandUP. Labsare working together on alogistics and freight venture labthat will launch up to six startups over the next three years. It’s a smart move for J. B. Hunt, a legacy logistics company that recognizes that startups will be the ones solving the freight problems of the future. Numa, a company developing advanced AI agents to automate customer interactions for auto dealerships,raised $32 millionin a Series B funding round co-led by Touring Capital and Mitsui & Co. Existing investors Costanoa Ventures, Threshold, and Google’s AI-focused venture fund, Gradient Ventures, also participated. Fordiscutting downthe subscription cost of its hands-free driver-assistance feature BlueCruise to $49. 99 per month or $495 annually, down from $75 per month and $800 per year. The discount comes after BlueCruise came under federal scrutiny after two fatal crashes this year. Teslahas begun rolling out itsSupervised FSD softwareto certain Cybertruck owners. Superfans get the tech first. Bot Auto, the new AV trucking startup from TuSimple co-founder Xiaodi Hou, hopes to ride thewave of the AV 2. 0 era, where startups are able to take advantage of recent AI advancements — from transformers to open source data cloud storage tools — to grow cheaply and quickly. Cruisehas to pay a$1. 5 million fineto the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration after omitting key details of a pedestrian crash — like that its robotaxi dragged the pedestrian for 20 feet after running her over. Uberis on a mission to snatch up as many autonomous vehicle partnerships as possible. Itslatest tie-upis withAvride, the Yandex spinout that’s pursuing both sidewalk delivery robots and autonomous cars. Waymohas begunoffering robotaxi rides in Austinto certain members of the public who have expressed initial interest. The rides will be free for now as Waymo gears up for a commercial launch in partnership with Uber in 2025. Waymohas also come under the public eye after one of its robotaxisstalled in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’motorcade in San Francisco. Oh, and there was also that case of a robotaxi stopping and low-key trapping a passenger inside while some guys outside the carharassed her for her number. And finally, in our last piece of Waymo news … remember those rumors aboutHyundai? Welp,Waymois going to useall-electric Hyundai IONIQ 5 vehiclesin its robotaxi fleet. It’s notable on a few fronts and has me wondering how — and if — this will affect Hyundai-backedMotional. Canoohas beenslapped with two new lawsuitsfrom suppliers that claim the struggling EV startup owes them money. The complaints come just weeks after Canoo kicked off a major reorganization that included the departure of its CTO. Teslahas racked up itsfifth Cybertruckrecall since launching in November 2023. This time, it’s due to a delay in the rearview camera, and Tesla has already done an over-the-air update on the roughly 27,000 Cybertrucks affected. (Side note: The one benefit of a sweeping recall? We get a rough idea of how many Cybertrucks are on the road. ) Cybertrucksare really a theme in this week’s newsletter. Apparently, aRussian warlordhas said he wants to take a couple of the trucks into Ukraine. Experts have said, from a warlording perspective, that’s actually unwise. Beta Technologieshasunveiledthe next electric aircraft in its lineup, and this one is for the passengers. Beta has made a name for itself building eVTOLs and eCTOLs (electric conventional takeoff and landing) with medical, cargo, and defense applications, but the passenger-carrying vehicle has been in the cards the whole time. Matternethas launched its first-everhome drone delivery servicein Silicon Valley. The company’s been running a pilot since August 30 with its M2 Drones that are equipped with a tether drop system so they can lower packages right onto your doorstep. Pivotal, the lightweight electric personal aircraft startup formerly known as Opener, shared at the UP. Summit that it has completed delivery of 13 BlackFly aircraft to customers (private owners and the U. S. Air Force) across the country. Regent, a startup developing and making all-electric seagliders, provided a substantive progress report at UP. Summit. Regent co-founder and CEOBilly Thalheimer, who previously worked at Aurora Flight Sciences, is putting the $60 million of capital it raised last year to work. He told me that engineers are integrating hardware components into a full-scale seaglider prototype called the Viceroy to provide the technical validation of the craft. Regent plans to begin sea trials with humans on board later this year. WingCEOAdam Woodworthhad a few announcements at the UP. Summit event, including the reveal of a new aircraft and arobot-to-drone delivery pilotin partnership withServe Robotics. A Serve sidewalk bot will pick up a food order and drop it at a Wing “AutoLoader,” where a Wing drone will scoop it up and deliver it the last mile. What a time to be alive. Tierhasofficially mergedunderDottin Europe. The two scooter and bike-sharing startups decided it would be better to combine under one brand name, rather than build a conglomerate of micromobility services. I am finally ready to share my thoughts about the2024GMC Sierra EV Denali Edition 1, an all-electric truck with an estimated 440 miles of range and a powertrain that delivers 754 horsepower and 784 pound feet of torque. I should start by sharing that I do like trucks, but these days I have been less keen on them because they keep getting bigger and more expensive. The Sierra EV is in line with this trend and, yep, it’s a bit too big for my taste. However, even with that subjective caveat, let me tell you what GMC’s second electric truck delivered, besides being incredibly quick off the line — zero to 60 mph in 4. 5 seconds — despite its size. If a truck can be luxurious, this is it. And it better be, considering this trim starts at $99,495 before taxes, title, and dealer fees. The front and backseat cabin is absolutely massive and feels more like a spacious SUV than a truck; plus it has all the posh details and materials that up the luxe appeal. The Denali Edition 1 is the full package — there are no options to add — and that means it has all the tech, including a 16. 8-inch center touchscreen and the hands-free advanced driver-assistance system Super Cruise. I used Super Cruise on public highways in and around Detroit. But I also had the opportunity to try the hands-free trailering feature on a closed track. If you’ve ever hauled a boat or trailer, you know how much play there can be; even with my limited time on the track, it was obvious that it lightened my cognitive load. For those interested in the software, yes, it worked. No buggy moments for me. And despite the truck’s large footprint, it was easy to maneuver in and out of parking spots and other tight areas thanks to the four-wheel steering. What is “This week’s wheels”? It’s a chance to learn about the different transportation products we’re testing, whether it’s an electric or hybrid car, an e-bike or even a ride in an autonomous vehicle
| 2024-10-04T17:05:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/waymo-picks-its-next-robotaxi-joby-lands-more-toyota-bucks-and-cybertruck-notches-its-fifth-recall/
| 1,672 | 1 |
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|
Google launches a GitHub Copilot competitor
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At its annualI/O developer conference, Google today announced the launch of a number of AI-centric coding tools, including its competitor toGitHub’s Copilot, a chat tool for asking questions about coding and Google Cloud services, as well as AI-assisted coding in Google’s no-code AppSheet product. At the core of virtually all of these new code completion and code generation tools is Codey. Based on Google’s PaLM 2 large language model, the company specifically trained Codey to handle coding-related prompts, but it also trained the model to handle queries related to Google Cloud in general (all of this, by the way, falls under Google’s Duet AI branding). “[We took] that base model, and then a large team — a lot of my folks actually — in developer relations have been helping fine-tune that with our multi-year collection of a knowledge graph of everything Google Cloud produces,” Google Cloud’s Richard Seroter explained. “That knowledge graph now is part of the pipeline that’s constantly feeding and training this model. Then that model is served up and exposed through Vertex where our front-end components and such can call in to that for chat, AppSheet code completion, things like that — with, of course, Google’s scale security and performance. ” The model, Google says, was trained on a large corpus of permissively licensed open-source code, as well as a lot of internal Google code, all of the company’s code samples and its reference applications. Google launches a smarter Bard Developers will get access to these new tools through an extension for Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, the Google Shell Editor, as well as in Google’s cloud-hosted Workstations service. And while the model was trained in the context of Google Cloud, it’s worth stressing that the code generation features are obviously not specific to Google Cloud at all. It currently supports Go, Java, JavaScript, Python and SQL. Developers will be able to chat with this model right in a chat box in their IDE or write a comment in a text file and have it generate the relevant code. All of this sounds quite similar to what competing projects are offering today, but Seroter argued that what sets Google’s tool apart is its integration with the rest of the Google Cloud Platform. For now, however, only a small set of trusted testers will be able to try the code assistance feature, integrated chat and the new AI integrations in Google’s AppSheet no-code development platform. Chances are we will hear quite a bit more about this at Google’s Cloud Next event in late August. What’s also important here is that the vision here goes beyond generating code. In the near future, Google would like to use these models to help developers manage all of their services on Google Cloud (including deploying and scaling applications) using this chatbot technology. “In essence, I think we’ve been using 20th-century interfaces on 21st-century platforms. We’ve been doing CLI and UIs and APIs — those are awesome, but it’s a lot different than 50 years ago where it took a 50-page manual to use a computer. Now we’ve got over a million pages of Google Cloud docs. It’s time for something different,” Seroter said. In part, this is about making developers more productive and freeing them from having to constantly switch context by looking this up elsewhere, but if this vision pans out, then it will also free developers and DevOps teams from a lot of the routine work that comes with testing and deploying applications. If you can simply tell Google Cloud to look at your code and figure out the best way to deploy it and then monitor it over time, that frees up a lot of time for more creative tasks, after all. “We’re trying to put AI at the center of the cloud experience, changing how developers interact with the cloud platform to make it more human-centric, goal-oriented, holistic,” Seroter said. “So it’s kind of a new approach to cloud interfaces and the systems and we’re excited about that. ” Topics Editor
| 2023-05-10T18:03:37 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/10/google-launches-a-github-copilot-competitor/
| 673 | 1 |
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|
Max Q: Elon says Starship is ready, FAA says not quite
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Hello and welcome back to Max Q! In this issue: The Federal Aviation Administration has closed the mishap investigation into SpaceX’s first orbital test flight in April, but regulators won’t green light a second launch until the company completes more than 60 “corrective actions. ” While the FAA did not disclose the details of the 63 actions SpaceX must take before launching Starship again, the agency did provide a list of just some of what’s expected, including vehicle hardware redesigns, redesigns to the launch pad and additional analysis and testing of safety critical systems. Once SpaceX has implemented all of the corrective actions — and only at this point — it can apply for and receive a modified license from the FAA to launch Starship again. Max Q is brought to you by me,Aria Alamalhodaei. If you enjoy reading Max Q, consider forwarding it to a friend. 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
| 2023-09-11T22:00:46 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/11/max-q-elon-says-starship-is-ready-faa-says-not-quite/
| 212 | 0.9 |
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Taylor Swift’s music is back on TikTok, despite platform’s ongoing UMG dispute
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After 10 weeks of being absent from the platform, Taylor Swift’s music has returned to TikTok — or at least her more recent songs and “Taylor’s Version” cuts, since she owns those masters. Taylor Swift’s music, and music from all artists signed to Universal Music Group, was pulled from TikTok when the two parties were unable to come to a renewed licensing agreement. UMG published a scathing press release accusing TikTok of trying to “bully” the label into accepting a deal worth less than its previous one. UMG framed its refusal to come to a deal with TikTok as a means of standing up for emerging artists. “How did [TikTok] try to intimidate us? By selectively removing the music of certain of our developing artists, while keeping on the platform our audience-driving global stars,” UMGwrote. “TikTok’s tactics are obvious: use its platform power to hurt vulnerable artists and try to intimidate us into conceding to a bad deal that undervalues music and shortchanges artists and songwriters as well as their fans. ” TikTok did not respond to a request for comment. UMG also represents superstars like Billie Eilish, BTS, Ariana Grande and Olivia Rodrigo, but Swift is in a unique position. After contractual disputes of her own, Swift has beenre-recording her old albumsto reclaim ownership of the songs. Her “Taylor’s Version” recordings are back on TikTok, but songs from records like “Reputation,” which doesn’t yet have a “Taylor’s Version,” are still absent from the platform. The timing of Swift’s return to TikTok isn’t a coincidence. Next week, Swift will release her new album, “The Tortured Poets Department. ” Even artists as huge as Swift are not immune to the necessity for social media marketing — and if fans can’t make TikToks using sounds from the new record, the album might be … slightly less ubiquitous? But the partnership is beneficial for TikTok too. With a fanbase like Swift’s, it’s inevitable that numerous audio trends will emerge from the album, and TikTok won’t want to miss out on that engagement, especially since Reels will have that music anyway. Universal Music Group plans to pull song catalog from TikTok 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
| 2024-04-11T17:41:43 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/11/taylor-swifts-music-is-back-on-tiktok-despite-platforms-ongoing-umg-dispute/
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Meta says users and businesses have 600 million chats on its platforms every day
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Meta is doubling down on business messages for revenue generation, as Mark Zuckerberg indicated during the company’s earnings call for Q3 2023. Zuckerberg said that the company is looking to tap into generative AI-based bots for businesses for use cases like customer support. The Meta CEO said that users and businesses are interacting more than 600 million times per day across its platforms. This is the first time Meta is sharing this metric during an earnings call. He didn’t specify how many of these are marketing or informational messages to users such as a company sending ticket info or an order update. However, Zuckerberg noted that more than 60% of WhatsApp users in India — which is the largest market for the chat app withmore than 500 million users— message a business app account. Notably, a lot of individual business owners also use a WhatsApp Business account that enables them to use features like business pages, product catalogs and message broadcasting. Meta earned $293 million in Q3 2023 — with a 53% year-on-year growth — driven largely due to the WhatsApp Business platform. In June, the company announced thatWhatsApp Business crossed 200 million monthly active users. The social networking giant has a few ways to earn money from business messaging. On WhatsApp, it defines different types of messages andcharges businesses based on conversation sessions. It also offers click-to-message and click-to-WhatsApp ads. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg said that these kinds of adshave hit a $10 billion annual run rate and are growing. In the last few months, WhatsApp has announced business products such as custom personalized messages sent to customers andWhatsApp Flows to enable a richer in-app shopping experience. In September, the company also announced plans fora verification system for WhatsAppwith features such as custom web pages and support for 10 devices linked to one account for easier handling of customer queries. Meta also wants to leverage generative AI to have business accounts respond to customers for purchase and support queries. “Now I think that this is going to be a really big opportunity for new business AIs that I talked about earlier that we hope will enable any business to easily set up an AI that people can message to help with commerce and support,” Zuckerberg said during the call. Zuckerberg’s argument is that in some markets, such as Thailand or Vietnam, businesses can afford to have people respond to customers manually because of the low cost of labor. However, other markets can use Meta’s Business AI bots. With the growth and availability of generative AI models, several AI-powered customer support startups havelaunched productsandattracted interest from investorsandpotential acquirers. Topics
| 2023-10-26T10:28:55 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/26/meta-says-users-and-businesses-have-600-million-chats-on-its-platforms-every-day/
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Nonprofit Code.org sues Byju’s unit WhiteHat Jr over payment dues
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educational nonprofit, has filed a lawsuit in a California district court alleging that Byju’s subsidiary WhiteHat Jr breached a licensing contract by failing to pay fees while continuing to use Code. org’s platform. WhiteHat Jr, whichsold to Byju’s for $300 million in 2020, partnered with Code. org in 2021 and agreed to pay $4 million over four years to license Code. org’s coding education platform. But in the lawsuit filed earlier this month, Code. org claims WhiteHat Jr did not honor the payment schedule while continuing to leverage its coding courseware. According to Code. org’s legal complaint, WhiteHat Jr paid its 2022 licensing fee but then informed the nonprofit earlier this year that it would be unable to make the remaining scheduled payments under the four-year deal. Code. org’s lawyers argue the original contract makes clear that, even in the event of termination, WhiteHat Jr would not be relieved of its obligation to pay all future licensing payments still owed — $3 million in this case. “To this day, Whitehat has failed to pay either the Q1 2023 invoice or the Q2 2023 invoice. In fact, despite repeated written and oral requests by Code. org for payment, Whitehat has not paid anything at all beyond the $1,000,000 that it paid pursuant to the 2022 invoices before the Agreement was amended,” wrote lawyers of Code. org, whose donors include Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Byju’s did not respond to a request for comment. The lawsuit is the most recent trouble for Byju’s stemming from its acquisition of WhiteHat Jr, adding to existing issues the company has faced since the purchase. The Indian edtech giant, valued at $22 billion in a financing round in early 2022, earlier this year weighedwhether to wind down WhiteHat Jr, TechCrunch reported. It also adds to the woes of Byju’s, which is facing heat for protracted delays in filing its financial accounts and governance issues. Prosus, an influential backer of Byju’s, recentlywrote down the valuation of the startup to below $3 billion. Topics Reporter, India
| 2023-12-26T11:52:55 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/26/nonprofit-code-org-sues-byjus-unit-whitehat-jr-over-payment-dues/
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Fortinet confirms customer data breach
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Posted: On Thursday, cybersecurity giant Fortinet disclosed a breach involving customer data. In a statement posted online, Fortinet said an individual intruder accessed “a limited number of files” stored on a third-party shared cloud drive belonging to Fortinet, which included data belonging to “less than 0. 3%” of its customers. The company said that the incident “did not involve any data encryption, deployment of ransomware, or access to Fortinet’s corporate network. ” Capital Brieffirst reportedthe news. Based on the company’s most recent full-year earnings, Fortinet has “well over half a million customers,” suggesting that the breach may affect at least 1,500 corporate customers of Fortinet. The breachwas reported by Bleeping Computer, citing a threat actor who claimed on a known cybercrime forum that they had stolen 440 gigabytes of Fortinet customer files. TechCrunch has also seen the listing. Fortinet spokesperson Stephanie Lira declined to comment and would not answer TechCrunch’s questions about the incident. Lira did not dispute the number of customers’ affected. 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
| 2024-09-13T14:36:18 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/13/fortinet-confirms-customer-data-breach/
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Paddy Cosgrave returns as Web Summit CEO after resigning over Israel/Gaza controversy
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Paddy Cosgrave, the co-founder of the Web Summit tech conference, is returning to his role as CEO afterresigningin October overcontroversial statements he madeabout the Israel/Gaza war last year on social media. Rumors of his return began tosurfaceover the weekend; Cosgrave confirmed the move in apost on X today. Notably, in his announcement, Cosgrave does not make any mention of the politicized remarks he made that led to his departure less than six months ago (with the social media posts he wrote at the time deleted as well, aside from hispublic apology). Instead, Cosgrave goes for de-escalating, announcing plans for a shift in focus to “smaller” groups. “As Web Summit becomes bigger, our aim should be to make it smaller for our attendees. More intimate. More convivial. More community focused,” he writes. In doing so, the move is reminiscent ofMark Zuckerberg’s shift to “community” at Facebookin the wake of the social network’s huge post-2016 election scandal (Cambridge Analytica, election manipulation, congressional hearings and the rest). Smaller groups, of course, give a larger entity — whether it is a social network or an event — a way to cater to different agendas and opinions. As with Facebook, the emphasis on community might be a counterweight to Web Summit’s bigger business aim: scale; in Web Summit’s case, growing its conference empire by getting as many people and companies as possible paying to attend its events. In a subsequent post on the company’sblog, Web Summit outlined its new focus on targeting smaller communities, likely as a method to extract more value out of its events — both in terms of their ability to attract lucrative sponsorships, but also to make the large, sometimes unwieldy, conferences more valuable to individual attendees: “Over the last year we have tested small prototype meetups for attendees in similar industries like product engineers or marketing leads. All of these were facilitated through our Web Summit app… Our software, our design, our production and all teams and elements of Web Summit will expand to help make this worthwhile mission a reality. ” Web Summit runs a number of very large, global, tech conferences, the best known and biggest of which is in Lisbon, which in recent years attracted upwards of 70,000 attendees. The list also includes smaller, invite-only events under brands including F. ounders for later-stage founders, and other similar events. Its flagship event went through a tumultuous period last year after it was engulfed in criticism from its large tech sponsors, who pulled out of the Lisbon Web Summit, just weeks out from it taking place, in the wake of Cosgrave’s remarks. The controversy started when, shortly after October 7, the day of the Hamas massacre of Israeli citizens, Cosgrave posted data on X pertaining to the human cost of the Israel-Palestine conflict between 2008 and 2023, but — inexplicably — omitted any mention of the tragic events (and casualties) of that weekend. Cosgrave also posted support for the Irish government’s criticism of Israel’s implied plans to cut off water and electricity to Gaza as part of its plans for the war. (Later, Israelindeed didcut off water and electricity to Gaza, and the country’s government has been accused, by a vote in theUN’s Human Rights Council most recently, of actions that could amount to war crimes. ) In the face of an outcry, Cosgrave continued to double-down in subsequent posts. This was the last straw for many of Web Summit’s speakers, with the loudest voices ofcriticismcoming from Israel-based VCs and founders, who were then joined by several influential U. S. -based tech founders and investors. Large sponsors, including Microsoft and Google, thenpulled outof the conference. Under pressure, Cosgraveapologizedfor offense caused by the posts and resigned as CEO. Scrambling in the lead-up to the Lisbon event, Web Summit quicklyappointedformer Wikimedia CEO Catherine Maher as Cosgrave’s CEO replacement, even as Cosgraveretainedan 80% ownership of the business. It was a very short tenure: Maherleft Web Summita few months later for the CEO role at NPR, leaving Cosgrave’s company rudderless once again, setting the stage for Cosgrave’s return
| 2024-04-08T08:39:29 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/08/paddy-cosgrave-returns-as-web-summit-ceo-after-resigning-over-israel-gaza-controversy/
| 675 | 1 |
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Headspace brings meditation to Meta Quest
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Mindfulness and meditation apps havetremendous potential in the world of extended reality. The full immersion created by headsets like the Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro offer great potential to kickstart such practices, which are notoriously difficult to both begin and maintain. As such, partnership between leading meditation app Headspace and Quest-maker Meta is a no-brainer. This morning, the companies announced a collaboration with multimedia design firm Nexus Studios that customizes the experience for extended reality headsets. The fittingly namedHeadspace XRfeatures practices guided by the app’s mindfulness/meditation instructors, Dora Kamau and Kessonga Giscombe. If you’ve ever used Headspace, Calm or the like (or just experienced guided meditation of any sort), you’re likely familiar with the approaches, including breathing exercises, body scans, mood tracking and the like. They’re all designed to help re-center the user’s focus. There’s also a community element here, presumably for those who need a little external encouragement to maintain a consistent practice. These are backdropped against colorful, metaverse-style environments, where users can interact and play games. At the very least, the experience seems engaging in a way not normally associated with meditation apps. This could, perhaps, go a ways toward bringing users back — how it will translate to an effective, regular practice is another question. Clearly the firms wanted to offer something beyond just meditation. “Research shows that when humans play, our brains are activated in a way that can impact overall life satisfaction and emotional well-being. Unfortunately, our day-to-day lives are often stripped of this opportunity,” Headspace VP Sara Cohen says in a release. So, gaming as a gateway to mindfulness is the apparent hook here. At the very least, improving moods through social activities seems like an achievable short-term goal. While coupling a subscription fee with a free app is pretty standard in the industry, Headspace is opting instead for an upfront fee of $30. The app is available now for Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro
| 2024-03-06T16:18:11 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/06/headspace-brings-meditation-to-meta-quest/
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Winning wireless with American strengths
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America’s infrastructure needs a serious upgrade. That includes the nation’s digital infrastructure — the critical networks underpinning commerce, defense, transport, and public safety. It sustains innovation power — the ability to invent, adapt, and adopt new technologies — integral to our competitiveness and national security in the 21st century. This nation has been the pacesetter of the digital era, with a sequence of game-changing innovations in cellular technology: 2G brought text; 3G brought mobile broadband and BlackBerry; 4G brought mobile video and the app stores. But now we are far behind in technologies like 5G, withless than halfthe speed of Bulgaria or Malaysia, andjust 7%of South’s Korea’s number of 5G base stations per capita. While the Chinese technology firm Huawei’s global market dominance in 5G has been slowed somewhat by sanctions and export controls, it is not threatened by superior U. S. innovations. Now, with the release of the first-everNational Spectrum Strategy, the Biden administration has shown it is taking America’s waning digital infrastructure seriously. The strategy — along with the broadband investments of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act’s industrial policy — recognizes that telecommunications policy and infrastructure are critical for preserving American technology leadership. But despite these advances, our approach to spectrum innovation isn’t sufficient. One problem is our failure to address the evolving telecommunications technology landscape. For example, accelerated mobile network deployment, now entering the 5G era, dominates the debate on spectrum policy and allocation. That made great sense in the 1990s and 2000s, when the cellular technology leaps mentioned above powered the smartphone revolution, but it makes less sense today. While we should worry that the United States is so far behind in 5G, mobile networks are just one part of an increasingly complex communications system of data exchanges between people, computers, devices, apps, the cloud, and autonomous agents. Hyperscale companies process two-thirds of global data traffic — including that flowing from mobile cellular networks — andown the undersea fiber-optic cablestransmitting data between continents. Much communication happens via internet connections enabled by Wi-Fi, an unlicensed wireless technology. Wespend90% of our time, and consume 80% of data, indoors where mobile cellular coverage is less and less practical. Even looking at mobile network users alone,halformoreof all smartphone data is transmitted over Wi-Fi, not the carrier’s spectrum. Our spectrum policies don’t reflect this, and mobile network operators themselves acknowledge the present model does not encourage them to build. They arealreadyslowing investment in 5G network deployments and signalingtheir disinterest in 6G investment. Europe’s third-largest telco, Orange, hasgone further, saying: “5G is the last ‘G’ and we’re moving beyond Gs. Orange will not be marketing 6G when its form emerges. ” As wireless use cases evolve, our spectrum management regime must keep pace. We should further define the strategy to play to our strengths and avoid competing where we don’t have a chance of winning. Targeted government subsidies can be helpful and necessary, but we probably won’t see another round of substantial government investment soon, and we probably can’t or won’t outspend China anyway. We’re also unlikely to produce commodity communications equipment better or cheaper domestically, and shouldn’t embrace a government-directed command economy. We can pressure countries not to use Huawei systems, but absent a clear alternative that is cheaper or superior, this is tantamount to asking them to live in the past and give up the growth we know the digital economy brings. But we do have comparative strengths on which to build, specifically in software, in competitive innovation, and in market shaping and design, that provide us a strategic opportunity to develop world-class digital infrastructure. First, America excels at software development, and network architecture is increasingly software-defined, similar to how computing has been virtualized into the cloud. Even where non-American companies supply network hardware, American companies can compete if they excel at producing the software necessary to manage those networks. Open Radio Access Networks— which allow multiple vendors to build the mobile ecosystem — are a good start and will encourage innovation. We also need to make more “killer app” use cases for wireless technology. If we create more game-changing wireless applications — from advanced manufacturing, to smart cities, to autonomous transport, to remote sensing — we create demand that pulls digital infrastructure forward. Advancements in AI applicationsfor network management will also increase the technical capacity for spectrum utilization. Second, in response to competitive command economies, we could promote competitive access to spectrum in order to accelerate innovation. The National Spectrum Strategy reflects a refreshing openness to sharing of spectrum “by design,” but we can do more. As FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel articulated, we need to “turn spectrum scarcity into abundance. ” Exclusive use increases scarcity and we should avoid it unless there is a clear and credible rationale. Licensing innovation can foster innovation, as seen in thesuccessfulCitizens Broadband Radio Service experiment to share spectrum, with over 370,000 access pointsdeployed. There are also opportunities in spectrum auction design — an American innovation the world has adopted that provides a useful mechanism for allocating spectrum usage rights. For example, Nobel winner Paul Milgrom and others have developed a concept called “depreciating licenses,” where auction winners declare a spectrum value that determines both an annual license fee and buyout price at which they agree to sell. When Congress restores the FCC’s auction authority — hopefully soon — it should consider how it can enable creative spectrum allocation tools to maximize public benefit. At the same time, we need to devise policies to ensure we achieve the ultimate objective — a functional network. We should develop creative uses of funds that reduce service costs and incentivize fast and vast deployment. Perhaps auction payments could be set aside to provide low-cost loans for network development, with strict performance requirements and clawback provisions. While this may result in forgoing some auction revenue, the lasting economic value created in GDP, productivity, and new products would easily outweigh this shortfall, promoting best-in-class digital infrastructure. America’s vast innovation potential has been a powerful engine for prosperity and security. But we can’t compete against our global peers with that engine throttled by last-generation digital infrastructure and policy. We must acknowledge new realities and play to our strengths to reverse digital infrastructure deterioration. Topics Contributor
| 2024-02-23T14:00:01 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/23/winning-wireless-with-american-strengths/
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Pan-African contrarian investor P1 Ventures reaches $25M first close for its second fund
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Pan-African venture capital firmP1 Ventureshas reached the first close of its second fund at $25 million. The venture capital firm secured this capital from some of Africa’s largest industrial conglomerates and private companies, several fund of funds and general partners of global funds based in the U. S. and Europe. P1 Ventures expects to reach a final close by early next year, founder and general partnerMikael Hajjartold TechCrunch in an interview. Hajjar launched P1 Ventures in 2020 withHisham Halbouny, who also serves as a general partner. Its first fund (a proof of concept fund, as Hajjar calls it) allocated $11 million to 24 ventures, primarily concentrating on e-commerce, fintech, insurtech, health tech, and SaaS industries. While this second fund (its first institutional fund) will still focus on these sectors, the firm is adding AI to the mix. Its first investment in this category is Zambian startup Nkoloso. ai, which gathers data and keeps track of vast tracts of agricultural land using satellite imagery and AI. It’s also one of two AI startups and five portfolio companies the Dubai–based venture capital firm has backed from its second fund. Hajjar argues that the use of AI by the firm in the agriculture and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sectors exemplifies Africa’s potential to leverage this emerging technology to bypass traditional infrastructure, similar to the way mobile money in Africa surpassed the need for debit and credit card infra. Additionally, AI demonstrates how African companies may develop products with global reach. “We believe that AI will be Africa’s next big leapfrog opportunity. So when you think how fintech transformed the continent and allowed it to disrupt the banking sector, we believe AI will do the same with sectors like retail, healthcare, and the creative economy,” said the general partner. “What we see beautiful in AI is the ability to export. As you know, single market and currency risk are the main risks in investing in Africa. The beauty of AI is that you have export-first businesses. ” Hajjar cited Egypt-born Instabug and BioNTech-subsidiary InstaDeep as examples of such African-founded software and AI businesses with customers in the U. S. , Europe and globally. P1 Ventures, which has offices in Lagos and Cairo, recently began an Entrepreneur In Residence program, under which Nkoloso. ai received funding. Both partners utilize their skills and expertise as past operators to manage this venture studio, which plans to incubate four more startups in the next four years headed by founders capable of achieving product-market fit and scaling the product. During the interview, Hajjar proudly highlights his firm’s “contrarian” approach to VC investment in Africa. “We go off the beaten path and back the underdogs; we invest where no one else does,” he says, underscoring super early investments made from P1 Ventures’ first fund in startups operating within Francophone Africa markets, includingYassir, a mobility startup-turned-super app in Algeria;Chari, a B2B e-commerce platform in Morocco; andDjamo, a payments startup in the Ivory Coast. These upstarts have emerged as the most well-funded startups in their respective countries. Notably, Yassir, the firm’s first investment, stands out as one of the most valuable startups in Africa and the Middle East. Although most of P1 Ventures’ investments from its initial fund were made in the seed stage, the firm characterizes itself as multistage and occasionally engages in Series A and B investments opportunistically. It is evident that P1 Ventures likely provided small checks during subsequent stages of expansion for companies such as Yassir and Egyptian fintech MoneyFellows, owing to the limited size of its first capital. Nevertheless, it is intriguing that the firm was able to participate in these rounds. Hajjar explained that the partners’ institutional track record plays a significant factor. He also noted specific instances when stage and geographical arbitrage were crucial and emphasized their active involvement in assisting companies with investors for follow-on rounds, talent, and expansion strategy. “Very few African GPs manage funds with that institutional track record and that allows us to have better visibility on what it takes to build category-defining businesses, especially as we look at inflection points and arbitrage across stages and geographies,” the general partner said, referencing how P1 Ventures picked Chari at the pre-seed stage rather than more popular B2B e-commerce deals in Egypt and Nigeria and MoneyFellows at Series A instead of other pre-seed/seed stage fintechs at comparable price points in Egypt. On top of that, P1 Ventures was also instrumental in connecting MoneyFellows with CommerzVentures for its Series B round and Chari in several acquisitions it has made in the last two years, Hajjar remarked. Yassir pulls in $150M for its super app, led by Bond Gameball, an Egyptian software company gamifying loyalty and customer retention with a client base across 70 countries, and General Atlantic-backed healthtechReliance Healthare among P1 Ventures’ 29 early-stage investments in 10 countries since its launch. P1 Ventures has observed that, on average, its portfolio businesses have secured 35 times more follow-on money for every dollar it has invested, even in the face of a decline in global venture capital funding. The firm, which didn’t disclose its IRR, asserts that the metric stems from the significant value it contributes to its portfolio firms beyond capital. This value is primarily attributed to the partners’ multistage, multisector expertise and extensive networks across the U. S. , Europe, and Asia. “I’m the first Mauritanian to launch a fund; as you can appreciate, this comes with a deep sense of meaning. I know African talent is more dispersed than current VC is. I intend to be this change agent and empower the next generation of African entrepreneurs. Just like people took a chance on me as an emerging fund manager, it’s my duty now to back underdog founders and turn them into regional, if not global, winners,” Hajjar stated. “Also, what Africa is going through right now, we believe, is very similar to what Europe went through 25 years ago or what Latin America went through eight years ago. We believe P1 is best positioned to emerge as the premier VC just like Index Ventures did in Europe orKaszekin Latin America. ” Before engaging in angel investing in 2014 and establishing P1 Ventures in 2021, Halbouny previously had a position as a partner at Man Capital, a subsidiary of Mansour Group. Man Capital had invested early in prominent companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and Bolt. He was also managing director at EFG Hermes, one of MENA’s largest investment banks. On the other hand, Hajjar, a Stanford MBA graduate and engineer, held roles in Google, Zum, and Areva. Along with the partners, P1’s advisory group also consists of investors and operators, including Emil Michael, the former chief business officer of Uber, and Bernard Dalle, a founding team memberof London-based Index Ventures. “Innovation across the African continent is booming and P1 is ideally positioned to help African entrepreneurs at the earliest stages build valuable and enduring businesses,” Dalle noted. Topics Reporter, Africa
| 2023-09-26T09:26:52 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/26/pan-african-contrarian-investor-p1-ventures-reaches-25m-first-close-for-its-second-fund/
| 1,157 | 1 |
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Social media startup Fizz sues Instacart and Partiful for trademark infringement over new Fizz app
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Social media startup Fizzis suing grocery delivery giant Instacart and party planning app Partiful for trademark infringement, the company announced on Thursday. Earlier this week, Instacart launcheda new drinks and snack delivery app for parties called Fizzand announced that Partiful had integrated Fizz directly into its platform. Founded in 2020, Fizz is a Gen Z-focused social networking app available on more than 400 college campuses. The suit, filed Wednesday in the U. S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks a jury trial, injunctive relief, damages, and a court order barring Instacart and Partiful from using the “FIZZ” name in connection with social or event planning services. Instacart and Partiful did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. In the lawsuit, Fizz states that it has been using the “FIZZ” trademark since January 2022 and filed for trademark registration in December 2021. The startup is accusing Instacart and Partiful of common law trademark infringement, federal trademark infringement, cybersquatting, and violating California’s unfair competition laws. “This new Fizz App by Instacart and Partiful is a blatant attempt to misappropriate the goodwill that Plaintiff has painstakingly developed through its continuous use of the FIZZ Marks among the Gen-Z demographic,” the lawsuit reads. “Together, Instacart and Partiful are competing head-on with Plaintiff in its core market of event planning for the Gen-Z demographic. Instacart and Partiful could have chosen any name for their new venture, but rather than compete on an even playing field, they are using FIZZ. ” Fizz alleges that Instacart and Partiful knowingly launched the new app with the identical name for the same Gen Z demographic, creating a likelihood of confusion among customers who may believe that the new ordering service is affiliated with or endorsed by Fizz. The startup also alleges that Instacart and Partiful are exploiting its brand recognition as a known social platform for Gen Z. “Plaintiff is informed and believes and thereupon alleges that Defendant Instacart had a bad faith intent to profit from the FIZZ Marks when it registered the domain name <FIZZ. COM>,” the lawsuit states. “Specifically, Defendant Instacart knew or should have known of the FIZZ Marks and incorporated Plaintiff’s trademark and trade name in its domain name. In doing so, Defendant Instacart intended to divert consumers from the Fizz Platform’s online location <FIZZ. SOCIAL> to the Fizz App online location for Defendant’s own commercial gain. ” Additionally, the lawsuit alleges that Partiful competes with Fizz directly in the events planning space, and that the company is now using Fizz’s name to confuse the Gen Z demographic after failing “to win the Gen Z market through fair competition. ” The lawsuit announced today isn’t Fizz’s first brush with legal action, as the startupsued rival Sidechat in 2023over unfair competition practices. 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
| 2025-05-08T19:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/08/social-media-startup-fizz-sues-instacart-and-partiful-for-trademark-infringement-over-new-fizz-app/
| 505 | 1 |
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Khloe Kardashian launches consumer brand backed by Serena Ventures, WME
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Khloe Kardashian has formally launched her new food company, Khloud, and its first product, a protein popcorn,set to hit Target starting April 29. Back in December, TechCrunchreported that Kardashianand her mother, Kris Jenner, were looking to raise at least $10 million for a business called Khloud. Jessica Bixby, an associate partner at K5 Global, which invested in the brand, said that it went on to raise an “oversubscribed $12 million round. ” Other investors include Serena Ventures, William Morris Endeavor (WME), and Shrug Capital. Khloud says its popcorn is crafted from whole-grain corn and that its “Khoud Dust,” a milk protein and seasoning blend sprinkled on it, gives each serving seven grams of protein. In addition to Target, the product will be soldon its website. “We’re starting with popcorn, but that’s just the beginning,” Kardashian told TechCrunch. “We plan to expand into other snacking categories across the store, there’s so much room to reimagine everyday snacks. ” Kardashian says the mission of her snack brand is to offer more nutritious alternatives made from “clean” ingredients. The Kardashian-Jenners are known for their ever-growing and ever-encompassing consumer business empire. This, however, marks the first time a member of the family has forayed into the snack business. It somewhat makes sense — numerous articles have been written about their favorite foods (includinga dedicated Instagram page), and anywhere there is widespread potential consumer interest, there is a widespread chance for celebrities to make money. Celebs have pumped outnumerous hair care lines, liquor lines, and beauty products. The Kardashians have been there (and are still doing that). Now, their empire spreadsfrom household cleaning productsto the food in our pantries. 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
| 2025-04-22T19:00:55 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/22/khloe-kardashian-launches-consumer-brand-backed-by-serena-ventures-wme/
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Pretiosum Ventures hits first close on its second fund to back infrastructure startups
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London-basedPretiosum Ventureshas reached the first close of what TechCrunch understands could eventually be a $20 million second fund. Founded in London in 2019 byYana Abramova, the solo GP fund invests in “infrastructure” startups (enterprise SaaS, fintech, and web3). Pretiosum (a witty inflexion of the Latin wordpretiōsusmeaning “precious”) typically writes checks in the $250,000 to $500,000 range in a “follow-on” manner. Abramova sits on Cambridge University’s Judge Business School alumni board and was previously an ambassador at Tech Nation (recently acquired by Founders Forum). As one of Europe’s very few female GPs, Abramova backs startups at the pre-seed, seed, and occasionally at the Series A stage. To date, Pretiosum has co-invested in startups alongside Cherry Ventures, Greycroft, Seedcamp, IQ Capital and Y Combinator. I’ve noted before that there’sa new waveof solo GP VCs coming to Europe, even if we thinkit might be tough out there, especially in the U. S. The trend has only just begun in Europe, and I very much doubt it will stop just because we are in a new, bearish cycle. AsI wrote in June, this model of VC has arrived late enough in Europe for it to become a more viable way forward for many European startups. We have already seen the launch of Underline Ventures, started last year by Bogdan Iordache in Romania, as well as the launch of Hypernova, a $25 million fund of funds that plans to invest not only in other funds but also directly into startups
| 2023-08-09T08:00:06 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/09/pretiosum-ventures-hits-first-close-on-its-second-fund-to-back-infrastructure-startups/
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As misinfo circulates on X amid the Israel-Hamas war, reporters look to other platforms
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In the wake ofincreasing misinformationrelated to the Israel-Hamas war now circulating on X, the app formerly known as Twitter, a number of journalists are building up their networks on rival platforms. The shift, though potentially small in terms of raw user numbers, could have an outsized impact on X, where power users create the majority of posts. And if anything, journalists have been longtime power users of Twitter — marketing their scoops, commenting on news and recirculating headlines — the lattera feature X owner Elon Musk ditched just days ago. The move frustrated publishers, some of whom are now considering reducing their social media involvement with X,Digiday reported. As active users, journalists play an important role in keeping content flowing on X and engage in conversations around timely events. If they were to leave for other networks, X could begin to feel quite different. For starters, it could experience a loss of content, as the platform relies heavily on power users. According to Pew Research studies from 2019,10% of U. S. adults were responsible for 80% of tweetson Twitter, and6% accounted for 73% of political tweets. Despite not being as large a platform as its social media competitors, like Facebook and Instagram, Twitter was known as a breaking news network. In 2021, Pew found that even though only 25% of U. S. adults used the app,59% said they used it to get news— a bigger percentage than on Facebook (54%). Twitter, in its heyday, understood its place as part of the news ecosystem,even relisting itself in the “News” category on the App Store back in 2016,instead of “Social Networking. ” The move not only gave it better visibility in the app rankings, but it was a more accurate description of what Twitter was used for — not networking, but information sharing. Though Musk has often shown antipathy to the media —banning journalistsat times andmeddling with news organizations’ accounts, by labeling them as “state-affiliated” and “government-funded”— news journalists themselves have been hesitant to leave the platform. Despite Musk’s attempts to make things worse for them, X remained the largest of the microblogging networks and a continual source of real-time news. But that may change as X faces its first significant worldwide news event under newCEO Linda Yaccarino. Aftercutting its trust and safety staff,the platform is struggling to keep up with themisinformation and disinformation circulatingrelated to the Israel-Hamas war. European regulatorswarned the company that those failurescould results in fines worth 6% of its annual revenue. At the same time, Elon Musk is promoting accounts associated with sharing conspiracies,Wired reports, undermining the platform’s efforts at curbing such disinformation. Plus, a new featureallows users to limit replies to only X Premium subscribers— a potential means of publishing misinfo without being subject to pushback from commenters — unless the post gets flagged by Community Notes reviewers. These unpaid (and likely now overworked), Community Notes reviewers are X’s crowd-sourced fact-checkers. They rely on a system that aims tobuild consensus across differing groupsbefore their Notes go live. But those reviews have taken too long to publish in recent days as posts related to the war increased. Remarked one Community Notes writer, Kim Lowry Picazio, over on Instagram Threads, “All weekend we were furiously vetting, writing, and approving Community Notes on hundreds of posts which were demonstrably fake news. It took 2+ days for the backroom to press whatever button to finally make all our warnings publicly viewable,” she said. X CEO Yaccarino seemingly admitted to this problem,posting on Mondaythat Notes would now appear “more quickly” on X. The Community Notes teamsaid it’s also working on further speed gainsbeyond those rolled out last week. Community Notes now appear more quickly on X. They’re a vital tool for adding context and combating potential misinformation. Become part of this important community. https://t. co/VJIUCQe1ks — Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX)October 9, 2023 In the meantime, journalists are setting up shop on new networks, hedging their bets against X’s potential to be a useful platform during a fast-moving news event. Over the weekend,a post on Threads from CNN’s Reliable Sourceswent viral, asking journalists on Threads to self-identify by tagging themselves so others could find them. The post blew up with 1,919 replies and over 5,000 likes — smaller numbers for X, perhaps, but big for Threads. Even if reporters do leave X for other platforms, it won’t likely immediately be reflected in these app’s usage numbers. In fact,X reports it’s actually seeing an increasein daily active users in the conflict area. It also saw more than 50 million posts globally focusing on the terrorist attack on Israel, it said, extolling its role as the center of the global conversation around these tragic events. However, itsCommunity Notes account saidthat only 500+ unique notes relating to the attacks and events are being shown on X. In the past couple of days, we’ve seen an increase in daily active users on@Xin the conflict area, plus there have been more than 50 million posts globally focusing on the weekend’s terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. As the events continue to unfold rapidly, a cross-company… — Safety (@Safety)October 10, 2023 But in reality, the loss of reporters posting to X could turn the platform into abreeding ground for misinformationand could potentially give competitive platforms an advantage to capture more mainstream attention as they attract the attention of bigger names in media. Platformer suggested the momentcould provide Instagram Threads with an opportunity if it moved quickly to clone Twitter-like features like hashtags and Trending Topics. But Threads has seemed hesitant to embrace news, even blocking searches for keywords like “covid” and “long covid,”The Washington Post reportedin September. According to The Information, Threads’ team has internally debated how much it wants to involve itself in news, given the potential problems doing so creates. That only leaves the decentralized platformMastodon, the invite-onlyBlueskyand smaller competitors likeSpillorPebbleas other possible destinations for news. None seem as promising as Threads, which at least has years of moderation experience thanks to numerous Facebook crises. (Mastodon’s moderation relies on individual server operators and admins, so it may be able to keep up on those it runs itself, but not on smaller instances. ) In the meantime, reporters’ shifting alliances aren’t playing out in terms of the usage numbers for X or its rivals, app store data indicates. Market intelligence firmApptopiasays there have been “no significant movements” in the daily active usage numbers of X, Bluesky, Mastodon or Threads as of yet. X cuts headlines from link previews as Musk wants users posting directly on the platform X’s new control lets only verified accounts reply to a post
| 2023-10-10T20:14:33 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/10/as-misinfo-circulates-on-x-amid-the-israel-hamas-war-reporters-look-to-other-platforms/
| 1,099 | 1 |
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Justice Department charges Chinese hackers-for-hire linked to Treasury breach
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The Department of Justice has announced criminal charges against 12 Chinese government-linked hackers who are accused of hacking more than 100 American organizations, including the U. S. Treasury, over the course of a decade. The charged individuals all played a “key role” in China’s hacker-for-hire ecosystem, a senior DOJ official said on a background call with reporters, including TechCrunch, on Wednesday. The official added that those charged, which includes contract hackers and Chinese law enforcement officials, targeted organizations in the U. S. and worldwide for the purposes of “suppressing free speech and religious freedoms. ” The DOJ also confirmed that two of the indicted individuals are linked to the China government-backed hacking group APT27, orSilk Typhoon. The two individuals, named as Yin Kecheng and Zhou Shuai, are accused of carrying out “multi-year, for-profit computer intrusion campaigns” dating back to 2013. Prosecutors say these campaigns allowed the two individuals to steal data from victim organizations before selling that information to third parties, some of which had links to the Chinese government. The two hackers gained access to victims’ networks by exploiting multiple security flaws in widely used enterprise software, according to the DOJ’s now-unsealed indictment. New research fromMicrosoft published on Wednesdayconfirms the hackers exploited flaws in Microsoft Exchange, Palo Alto Networks firewalls, Citrix NetScaler appliances, andIvanti Pulse Connect Secure appliancesas recently as January. Ivanti’s chief security officer Daniel Spicer told TechCrunch that the company “can’t speak” to Microsoft’s attribution, but said it moved quickly to patch the bug. Organizations targeted by Yin and Zhou include U. S. -based technology companies, think tanks, law firms, defense contractors, local governments, healthcare systems, and universities, said U. S. prosecutors. Yin has also been linked to therecent widespread hack of the U. S. Treasuryin December 2024. Yin was sanctioned by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in February after linking Yin to China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), the intelligence agency responsible for the country’s foreign intelligence collection. According to the DOJ, the FBI has seized the virtual private servers and other infrastructure used by Yin to carry out the hack on the U. S. Treasury. The Justice Department also on Wednesday announced charges against eight employees ofChinese government hacking contractor I-Soon, including its chief executive and chief operating officer, along with two alleged officers of China’s Ministry of Public Security, the government agency that oversees public policing in the country. According to the DOJ, the I-Soon employees were involved in a widespread hacking campaign from 2016 to 2023, generating “tens of millions of dollars. ” The I-Soon employees are also accused of carrying out hacks at the request of China’s security agencies, as well as carrying out intrusions on their “own initiative” before selling the stolen data to the Chinese government. This hacking campaign saw the I-Soon employees target a number of U. S. -based organizations, prosecutors say, including a religious organization that was critical of the Chinese government, an organization focused on promoting religious freedoms in China, and several U. S. news organizations, the DOJ said. Data stolen by Yin was also sold through I-Soon, prosecutors say, though it’s unclear if this includes data stolen during the breach at the U. S. Treasury. The defendants remain at large. The U. S. Department of State’s Rewards for Justice program has announced a reward of up to $10 million for information that helps track down any employees of I-Soon. Separately, a reward of $2 million is being offered for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of Yin and Zhao. Topics Sr. Reporter, Cybersecurity Carly Page was a Senior Reporter at TechCrunch, where she covered the cybersecurity beat. Prior to that, she had spent more than a decade in the technology industry, writing for titles including Forbes, TechRadar and WIRED. You can contact Carly securely on Signal at +441536 853956
| 2025-03-05T16:56:05 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/05/justice-department-charges-chinese-hackers-for-hire-linked-to-treasury-breach/
| 638 | 1 |
a560f86021c39e75da2205de95954102
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Elon Musk claims Tesla will launch a self-driving service in Austin in June
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday his company will launch a paid ride-hailing robotaxi service in Austin, Texas using its own fleet vehicles this coming June — the latest in a long line of sky-high promises he has yet to meet about autonomy. Musk was otherwise unsurprisingly light on details. During an earnings call, Musk said there will be no drivers in the cars, which will use the yet-to-be-released “unsupervised” version of its Full Self-Driving software. He also said he expects the unsupervised FSD software to be released to owners in California and “many regions of the U. S. ” this year. But the idea of owners adding their own cars to the Tesla ride-hail fleet won’t happen until at least next year, Musk said. The CEO then called 2025 “maybe the most important year in Tesla’s history. ” Musk first teased the idea of starting up a paid self-driving serviceback in Octoberwhen Tesla revealed its purpose-built Cybercab prototype, which has no steering wheel or pedals. He said at the time that Tesla was looking to launch an early version of the ride-hailing service in Texas and California in 2025 using Model Y SUVs and Model 3 sedans. Bloomberg News recentlyreportedthat Tesla was in talks with Austin city officials to make that happen. The city’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk said Wednesday that Tesla is “putting our toe in the water gently at first, just to make sure everything’s cool,” but didn’t offer any further detail about what that means. Tesla has been testing the performance of unsupervised FSD software on its factory grounds in Texas, he said — a location that has far less complexity than a real-world environment. “Then, you know, put a few more toes in the water, then put a foot in the water, with safety of the general public and those in the car as a top priority,” he said. Musk said Tesla is “looking for a safety level that is significantly above the average human driver,” but did not specify how Tesla is making that measurement. The company has long published a so-called “vehicle safety report” on its website that shares the number of miles traveled between crashes on Autopilot, its less capable driver assistance software. The company compares that number to an overall government crash figure for human drivers. But there are a number ofproblemswith this comparison. Much of Autopilot driving happens on highways and not on surface streets. Tesla also does not offer any detail about the conditions or severity of these crashes. This story has been updated with more details from the earnings call. Topics Sr. Reporter, Transportation
| 2025-01-29T22:52:54 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/29/elon-musk-claims-tesla-will-launch-a-self-driving-service-in-austin-in-june/
| 444 | 0.9 |
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