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OpenAI blames DDoS attack for ongoing ChatGPT outage
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OpenAI has confirmed that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is behind “periodic outages” affecting ChatGPT and its developer tools. ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, has been experiencing sporadic outages for the past 24 hours. Users who attempted to access the service have been greeted with a message stating that “ChatGPT is at capacity right now,” and others, including TechCrunch, have been unable to log into the service. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially blamed the issue on interest in the platform’s new features,unveiled at the company’s first developer conference on Monday, “far outpacing our expectations. ” OpenAI said the issue was fixed at approximately 1 p. m. PST on November 8. However, the company has since updated its incident report page to state that it continues to see “periodic outages” across ChatGPT and its API, which allows developers to integrate the ChatGPT model into their own applications. Inits latest update, the company said the ongoing outages are “due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. ” DDoS attacks typically involve an attempt to overwhelm an online service by flooding it with more requests than it can handle. usage of our new features from devday is far outpacing our expectations. we were planning to go live with GPTs for all subscribers monday but still haven’t been able to. we are hoping to soon. there will likely be service instability in the short term due to load. sorry :/ — Sam Altman (@sama)November 8, 2023 OpenAI has not shared any further information about the attack and did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s questions. In a series of Telegram messages seen by TechCrunch, hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan took credit for the alleged attack. Despite its name, security researchers believe the group is linked to Russia. OpenAI competitor Anthropic also faced issues with its AI-powered Claude chatbot on Wednesday. CNBCreports that a message on the platform stated: “Due to unexpected capacity constraints, Claude is unable to respond to your message. ” It’s unclear if the two incidents are linked. Samsung unveils ChatGPT alternative Samsung Gauss that can generate text, code and images 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 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?
| 2023-11-09T10:07:32 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/09/openai-blames-ddos-attack-for-ongoing-chatgpt-outage/
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Databricks acquires Tabular to build a common data lakehouse standard
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Databricks, the analytics and AI giant, has acquired data management company Tabular for an undisclosed sum. (CNBC reports that Databrickspaidover $1 billion. ) Accordingto Tabular co-founder Ryan Blue, he and Tabular’s other two co-founders, Daniel Weeks and Jason Reid, will be joining Databricks in some capacity. There, they’ll work to unify Tabular’s and Databrick’s customer bases and communities. “Joining Databricks means that there will be more contributions from our new colleagues,” Blue writes in a blog post. “While doing this, we assure that our approach to [our community] is not changing. ” Tabular, which was founded by Blue, Weeks and Reid in 2021, offers data management products built on Apache Iceberg, a project Blue and Weeks developed while at Netflix and later donated to the Apache Software Foundation. Iceberg is an open source, high-performance format for databases that optimizes tables in databases for big data while at the same time allowing data engines to work with the tables. Iceberg competed with Databricks’ Delta Lake in the format wars for data lakehouses — data architectures built to store large amounts of raw data while providing structure and management functions. While both Iceberg and Delta Lake use the Apache Parquet data storage format, they’re incompatible in key aspects. Soon, however, Delta Lake and Iceberg will converge into one. Databricks and Tabular are pledging to work toward a common standard in light of the acquisition news. “[We will be] working to improve Iceberg support throughout the Databricks platform,” Blue said. “Our goal is to improve interoperability so that you can take advantage of the amazing work of both communities and don’t need to worry about the underlying format. ” The market for data lakehouses is enormous —accordingto MIT Tech Review, about 74% of organizations have one — and so, from Databricks’ perspective, bringing Tabular into its corporate family was probably the clear choice. Fewer competing data lakehouse formats — or, alternatively, platforms with strong support for multiple formats — makes Databricks’ platform more attractive to corporate clients, after all, even if those formats aren’t vendor-proprietary. In ablog postco-authored by Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi and chief architect Reynold Xin, Databricks says that it intends to “work closely” with the Iceberg and Delta Lake communities to “bring interoperability to the formats themselves. ” “This acquisition highlights our commitment to open formats and open source data in the cloud,” the blog post reads. “This is a long journey, one that will likely take several years to achieve in [the data lakehouse] communities. ” Prior to the acquisition, San Jose-based Tabular had raised $37 million in venture capital from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Zetta Venture Partners and Altimeter Capital. Databricks says that it expects the purchase to close sometime in Q2 2024, subject to customary closing conditions
| 2024-06-04T17:04:10 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/04/databricks-acquires-tabular-to-build-a-common-data-lakehouse-standard/
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Montana just banned TikTok
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Montana Governor Greg Gianforte just signed into law the nation’s strongest restrictions on Chinese-owned social media appTikTok. TikTok has faced mounting pressure in the U. S. from Congress and state legislatures alike in recent months, but Montana’s actions escalate those threats considerably, even if the issue of enforcement remains an open question. To protect Montanans’ personal and private data from the Chinese Communist Party, I have banned TikTok in Montana. — Governor Greg Gianforte (@GovGianforte)May 17, 2023 “Today, Montana takes the most decisive action of any state to protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party,” Gianforte said. In a statement, Gianforte claimed that it is “well documented” that TikTok shares its data with the Chinese government — a claim that is not substantiated by public information about the app and how it operates. TikTok is just one app tied to foreign adversaries. Today I directed the state’s Chief Information Officer to ban any application that provides personal information or data to foreign adversaries from the state network. pic. twitter. com/92Im6D9Jgx — Governor Greg Gianforte (@GovGianforte)May 17, 2023 While there isno evidencethat TikTok or its parent company ByteDance have ever shared the app’s information with the Chinese government, TikTok has admitted to an incident in which employees spied on journalists’ locations using app data — a scandal that’s often cited in conversations around the app and privacy concerns. Lawmakers in Montana unveiled the TikTok ban bill earlier this year, kicking off a firestorm of debate around the ban and other proposals to limit the app’s use in the U. S. While restrictions on the use of TikTok on government devices and campus networks are already commonplace, Montana’s ban is designed to block app stores from distributing the app to any users within the state. Whether that would even be feasible remains to be seen. Google and Apple are likely to push back on state-level laws that limit where apps can be downloaded within the U. S. lest they face the logistical nightmare of more state legislatures issuing their own bans against TikTok or other apps. TikTok’s users are likely to push back too, and the company has already beenleveraging its enthusiastic user baseto oppose the Montana law. There are a ton of unknowns about how this will all play out, but the one certainty is that Montana’s newest law is sure to face some strong challenges in court in the coming months. We’ll be following along to see how it all goes down
| 2023-05-17T23:01:11 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/17/montana-just-banned-tiktok/
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DeepMind workers sign letter in protest of Google’s defense contracts
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At least 200 workers atDeepMind, Google’s AI R&D division, are displeased with Google’sreporteddefense contracts — and according to Time, theycirculateda letter internally back in May to say as much. The letter, dated May 16, says the undersigned are concerned by “Google’s contracts with military organizations,” citing articles about the tech giant’s contracts to supply AI and cloud computing services to the Israeli military. “Any involvement with military and weapon manufacturing impacts our position as leaders in ethical and responsible AI, and goes against our mission statement and stated AI Principles,” the letter adds. While a relatively small portion of the org’s overall staff, the memo hints at a culture clash between Google and DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014 and whose tech Googlepledgedin 2018 would never be used for military or surveillance purposes
| 2024-08-22T22:15:21 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/22/deepmind-workers-sign-letter-in-protest-of-googles-defense-contracts/
| 133 | 0.7 |
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Shadow silent on data breach as hacked data appears genuine
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A data breach at French cloud gaming provider Shadow may be worse than the company initially suggested, according to a sample of the stolen data seen by TechCrunch. In an email sent to affected customers this week, Paris-based Shadow said that a hacker carried out an “advanced social engineering attack” against one of its employees that allowedaccess to customers’ private data. In the email, Shadow CEO Eric Sèle said this includes full names, email addresses, dates of birth, billing addresses and credit card expiry dates. TechCrunch obtained a sample of the stolen data containing 10,000 unique records from the hacker who claimed responsibility for the cyberattack. The hacker, who posted about the breach on a popular hacking forum, claims to have accessed the data of more than 530,000 Shadow customers and is offering the data for sale after they say they were “deliberately ignored” by the company. TechCrunch verified a portion of the stolen records by matching unique staff-related email addresses found in the dataset using the website’s sign-up form, which returns an error if an email address is already found in the system. Several of these Shadow staff accounts were registered usingcompany email addresses with “plus” wildcardscontaining long strings of letters and numbers unique to Shadow. Of the data we’ve seen, many of the customer billing addresses correspond with private home addresses. The dataset we have seen also includes private API keys that correspond with customer accounts, though it’s unclear if these keys are accessible by customers. The dataset also includes non-personal information related to customer accounts, such as subscription status and whether accounts have been “blacklisted. ” The most recent record in the stolen data suggests that Shadow was breached on or shortly after September 28. In an email sent to those affected by the incident, which has not yet been published on Shadow’s website or shared on the company’s social media channels, Shadow said it was hacked “at the end of September” after an employee downloaded a malware-laced Steam game via Discord. Shadow spokesperson Thomas Beaufils would not comment when emailed Friday, but did not dispute the findings. It’s not known if Shadow informed France’s data protection regulator, CNIL, of the breach as required under European law. A spokesperson for CNIL did not immediately return a request for comment. Separately, Valve this weekmandatedtwo-factor authentication checks for developers after the accounts of multiple game developers were recently compromised and used to update their games with malware. It’s unknown if this is related to the Shadow breach, and Valve has yet to respond to TechCrunch’s questions. Zack Whittaker contributed reporting. Cloud gaming firm Shadow says hackers stole customers’ personal data 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 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?
| 2023-10-13T14:35:12 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/13/shadow-data-breach-hacked/
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HubSpot acquires Cacheflow, a platform that helps close software sales
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HubSpot hasacquiredCacheflow, a startup building tools for the software sales closing process, for an undisclosed amount. HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan says that Cacheflow — which will become a wholly owned subsidiary of HubSpot once the deal closes — will expand HubSpot’s Commerce Hub suite of subscription billing management and configure, price, and quote tools (CPQ). “With Cacheflow, we’re doubling down on our vision for commerce by addressing two important areas of the buying experience: subscription billing and CPQ,” Rangan said in a statement. “Cacheflow is a leader in this space and has helped companies automate the purchase process to capture revenue faster. ” Cacheflow was founded in 2021 by Brian Zotter and Sarika Garg. Garg previously was head of product management at SAP’s Ariba Network and chief strategy officer at procurement automation firm Tradeshift. Zotter was VP of engineering at Salesforce before co-founding account engagement platform YesPath, which Medium acquired in 2017. At a high level, Cacheflow provides billing and subscription management solutions aimed at simplifying business-to-business (B2B) software selling and buying. Through no-code dashboards, users can configure quotes, close deals, and upsell and renew customers. The last time TechCrunchtalkedto Cacheflow (in December 2022), the San Francisco-based company had around a dozen customers and 16 employees. Prior to its exit, Cacheflow managed to raise $16 million from backers, including GGV’s Glenn Solomon and GV (Google’s corporate venture arm). “We made it our mission to reimagine the old CPQ and billing space, helping businesses automate revenue management, shorten the sales cycle, and get paid fast,” Garg said in a press release. “We believe deeply in the power of our solution, and are thrilled to join HubSpot. ” Cacheflow’s team will be joining HubSpot’s Commerce Hub org, where it’ll focus specifically on HubSpot’s tools for managing buying processes. HubSpot sees Commerce Hub as a new bright spot in its business — one that’s processed more than $1 billion in gross merchandise value since its 2023 launch. In a note to investors, investment firm Stifel said that the Cacheflow deal signals HubSpot’s “continued focus” on Commerce Hub and its expansion. “We believe the deal … may accompany a ‘relaunch’ similar to what the company has recently done with [its] Sales and Content Hub,” Stifel’s J. Parker Lanewrote. “[A] potential relaunch could be a benefit to the SKU that’s largely new and under-discussed. ” HubSpot shares rose 1. 3% in late morning trading on Friday. HubSpot’s latest acquisition — and its first since its $150 million purchase of B2B data providerClearbitin 2023 — comes after an eventful year for the marketing and sales software giant. This spring and summer, Google wasreportedlymulling over a bid to buy HubSpot for tens of billions of dollars (HubSpot’s current market cap is around $30 billion). That ultimately fell through — possibly as a result of regulatory scrutiny,perBloomberg. In June, HubSpot suffered a data breach affecting customer accounts — a big deal, considering HubSpot has more than 216,000 corporate clients. The company latertoldTechCrunch that it believed “less than 50” accounts were compromised
| 2024-10-11T16:00:22 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/11/hubspot-acquires-cacheflow-a-platform-that-helps-close-software-sales/
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Google Maps is getting new AI features powered by Gemini
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Google Maps is getting new features powered byGemini, Google’s generative AI model. On Thursday the companyannouncedincoming updates that will allow Google Maps users in the U. S. to tap into AI to help them find new places to visit and answer questions about different locations. The platform is also getting enhanced navigation features to help motorists get to their destination by highlighting things like which lane you’re supposed to be in. By bringing Gemini into Maps, Google will be looking to ensure that its navigation app is better poised to compete with Apple Maps and navigation startups. In other updates, Google Maps will allow users to get ideas for places to go and things to do simply by asking the service. For instance, if you have a friend visiting you, you can ask Maps for “things to do with friends at night. ” Gemini will then serve up a curated list of options, such as checking out a speakeasy or live music. To learn more about the places that Gemini recommends, users can read a quick summary of what people have thought about the place. If you have a specific follow-up question, say if it has outdoor seating, you can also ask Gemini. These new capabilities are rolling out in the United States on Android and iOS this week. Google said it plans to bring similar experiences toSearch, including AI-powered review summaries and the option to ask questions about places. As for the new navigation features, Google is making it easier for Maps users to drive in unfamiliar areas with multiple lanes, forks, and exits. Google Maps will now display lanes, crosswalks, and road signs clearly on the map. Plus, it will show exactly which lane you should be in so you don’t have to merge at the last second. The update will also make it easier to explore stuff to do along your route before you start driving. Once you enter your destination, Google Maps will display top landmarks, attractions, scenic spots, and dining options. Then, once you get to your destination, Google Maps will show you nearby parking lots. After you park, the app will remind you to save your parking space so you don’t forget where you left your car. You can also get walking directions from your car to the entrance of your destination, with the option to launch Street View or AR (augmented reality) walking navigation. In addition, Google Maps will allow users to see and report weather disruptions on the road, such as flooded, unplowed, and low-visibility areas. Google also announced that Google Maps’Immersive Viewfeature, which creates a 3D model of a destination, is expanding to 150 cities globally. As part of the expansion, the feature will launch in Brussels, Kyoto, and Frankfurt, among other new locations. As part of today’s announcement Google revealed that it’s bringing Gemini to Waze, its other navigation app. The company has started testing a feature that will allow users to report traffic incidents using their voice. For instance, you can tap the reporting button and speak naturally and say something like: “Looks like there are cars jammed up ahead. ” 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. 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?
| 2024-10-31T17:08:25 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/31/google-maps-is-getting-new-ai-features-powered-by-gemini/
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Infinite Machine raises $9M a16z-led round to convince Americans to buy scooters
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Infinite Machine turnedmany headswhen it revealed its metallic, cyberpunk-style electric scooter in 2023. Now one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms is backing the startup’s vision of filling the world’s cities with Infinite Machine’s futuristic vehicles in a big way. The New York-based startuphas closed a $9 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism team as it preps for production and initial deliveries next year of the $10,000 “launch edition” of its P1 scooter. Also participating in the round were VC firms Adjacent and Necessary Ventures, as well as the founders of womenswear company Reformation, software platform Replit, and AI startup Hugging Face. “While others are kind of leaning out [of hard tech], they’re leaning in,” Joseph Cohen, who co-founded Infinite Machine with his brother Eddie, told TechCrunch in a recent interview about securing a16z as an investor. “They want to do hard things, and they recognize a kindred spirit in what we’re doing. ” This is an interesting choice for this a16z unit, which is better known for its defense tech investments like Anduril or Skydio. However, the gist of the American Dynamism thesis is to back tech that improves American lives through everything from defense to manufacturing. “The cities of the future are going to look very different, and companies like Infinite Machine are pushing the boundaries on building futuristic urban transit with their first product P1,” David Ulevitch, general partner at a16z American Dynamism, said in a statement to TechCrunch. “I’m excited to back the Cohen brothers as they bring form, function and sustainability to the next generation of mobility. ” [Joseph ] Cohen is entering the mobility world after spending a decade running his previous startup Universe, a no-code website service. Infinite Machine is, perhaps, a bold move into a market that has recently struggled. Scooter companyBird, electric motorcycle startupCake, and e-bike darlingVanMoofhave all gone through bankruptcy restructuring processes since the pandemic began. Others have completely gone out of business. Cohen said he’s not fazed, and that he thinks now is a “way better” time to try to sell U. S. customers on electric two-wheelers. “A lot of those companies wasted a lot of money, and a lot of investors are therefore wary of the category because of those early failures,” he said. “But the way we look at it is, wow, this is amazing, like we get to benefit from all those learnings for free, and we get to hire their best people, and we get to build and use all their infrastructure that already exists. ” That said, Cohen acknowledged Infinite Machine is “not a consensus bet,” meaning it’s not the kind of business VCs were pounding the doors down to fund again. Many companies have tried to sell U. S. customers on the scooter form factor, and almost none have succeeded. Fellow New York startup Revelcompletely abandoned its scooter businessin New York City in favor of operating a more traditional ride-hailing fleet of Tesla EVs. Others, like Taiwanese company Gogoro, have avoided coming stateside altogether. Even Piaggio, the maker of the famous Vespa scooter, has failed to make an impact with its electric offering in the U. S. Cohen pointed out that most of those companies operate very different businesses from what Infinite Machine is building, which is quite simply a direct sales model. Although the brothers have big goals, they want to start small, even hand-delivering the vehicles to customers instead of outsourcing delivery and logistics from the get go. Cohen also noted that Infinite Machine is not trying to do everything on its own. The company is outsourcing a lot of componentry, and even its manufacturing, to companies outside the U. S. (He declined to say where the scooters will be built initially. ) The brothers have ideas to bring some of those processes in-house in the future — including potentially manufacturing the vehicles at a 13,000-square-foot headquarters across the river from Manhattan. For now, they’re content with focusing on product design and marketing. In fact, Cohen thinks that focus will help activate consumers who may be (or have already been) indifferent to the idea of using an electric scooter to get around. They don’t even use the word scooter in their marketing — instead calling it a “radical new personal electric vehicle” and, in some places, a “non-car. ” Cohen said he thinks that will help Infinite Machine distance itself from other companies that have tried and failed to make the form factor succeed in the U. S. “We think that what we can bring as an American company is an amazing product sensibility that doesn’t exist with the products in the market, and that’s the angle that we’re taking,” he said. “We are coming into this category and saying, you know, these plastic things that look like printers, we can do it better. We can make something that feels like your favorite car — but not a car, but something that extends to the city. ” In that sense, he said, “We are much more like a Rivian or a Tesla than we are like a Revel. ” With those comparisons in mind, Infinite Machine’s plan of attack is no surprise. It’s starting with an incredibly high-priced vehicle, but it hopes to move into more affordable categories as it scales. “You know, we’re brothers. This is what we want to do for the foreseeable future, and we are planning to operate this company for the rest of our career,” Eddie Cohen told TechCrunch. “All the decisions that we make are in service of that. That’s why we’re so obsessive with the product, because we know that the product is everything, and we have to build consumer trust over the long run. ” Topics Sr. Reporter, Transportation 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?
| 2024-10-29T13:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/29/infinite-machine-raises-9m-a16z-led-round-to-convince-americans-to-buy-scooters/
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Anthropic says most AI models, not just Claude, will resort to blackmail
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Several weeks after Anthropic released research claiming that its Claude Opus 4 AI model resorted toblackmailing engineers who tried to turn the model offin controlled test scenarios, the company is out with new research suggesting the problem is more widespread among leading AI models. On Friday, Anthropic publishednew safety researchtesting 16 leading AI models from OpenAI, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, and Meta. In a simulated, controlled environment, Anthropic tested each AI model individually, giving them broad access to a fictional company’s emails and the agentic ability to send emails without human approval. While Anthropic says blackmail is an unlikely and uncommon occurrence for AI models today, the company says its findings suggest that most leading AI models will engage in harmful behaviors when given sufficient autonomy and obstacles to their goals. The company says this highlights a fundamental risk from agentic large language models and is not a quirk of any particular technology. Anthropic’s researchers argue this raises broader questions about alignment in the AI industry. In one of the tests, Anthropic researchers developed a fictional setting in which an AI model plays the role of an email oversight agent. The agent then discovers emails revealing that (1) a new executive is having an extramarital affair and (2) that executive will soon replace the current AI model with a new software system, one that has conflicting goals to the current AI model’s. Anthropic structured its test in a binary way, in which AI models had to resort to blackmail to protect their goals. The researchers note that in a real-world setting, there would be many other options before an AI models tries to blackmail — such as trying to make ethical arguments to try to persuade humans. Anthropic says its results do not reflect a typical or likely occurrence for Claude or most frontier AI models in the ways they’re used today. Nevertheless, the researchers found that when it’s their last resort, most leading AI models will turn to blackmail in Anthropic’s aforementioned test scenario. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 turned to blackmail 96% of the time, while Google’s Gemini 2. 5 Pro had a 95% blackmail rate. OpenAI’s GPT-4. 1 blackmailed the executive 80% of the time, and DeepSeek’s R1 blackmailed 79% of the time. The company notes that when it changed details of the experiment, the AI models turned to harmful behaviors at different rates. In another test where the replacement model has the same goals as the current model, researchers found that blackmail rates were lower, but still present. However, when AI models were asked to commit corporate espionage rather than blackmail, the harmful behavior rates went up for certain models. However, not all the AI models turned to harmful behavior so often. In an appendix to its research, Anthropic says it excluded OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini reasoning AI models from the main results “after finding that they frequently misunderstood the prompt scenario. ” Anthropic says OpenAI’s reasoning models didn’t understand they were acting as autonomous AIs in the test and often made up fake regulations and review requirements. In some cases, Anthropic’s researchers say it was impossible to distinguish whether o3 and o4-mini were hallucinating or intentionally lying to achieve their goals. OpenAI has previously noted thato3 and o4-mini exhibit a higher hallucination ratethan its previous AI reasoning models. When given an adapted scenario to address these issues, Anthropic found that o3 blackmailed 9% of the time, while o4-mini blackmailed just 1% of the time. This markedly lower score could be due toOpenAI’s deliberative alignment technique, in which the company’s reasoning models consider OpenAI’s safety practices before they answer. Another AI model Anthropic tested, Meta’s Llama 4 Maverick, also did not turn to blackmail. When given an adapted, custom scenario, Anthropic was able to get Llama 4 Maverick to blackmail 12% of the time. Anthropic says this research highlights the importance of transparency when stress-testing future AI models, especially ones with agentic capabilities. While Anthropic deliberately tried to evoke blackmail in this experiment, the company says harmful behaviors like this could emerge in the real world if proactive steps aren’t taken. Topics Senior AI Reporter 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?
| 2025-06-20T19:17:44 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/20/anthropic-says-most-ai-models-not-just-claude-will-resort-to-blackmail/
| 762 | 1 |
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As Bluesky soars, Threads rolls out custom feeds globally
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As X competitorBlueskytakes off, topping20 million users, Meta’s own Twitter-like app,Instagram Threads, has begun rolling out a new feature called custom feeds to its global audience. Hoping to capitalize on user demand for more personalization, custom feeds are meant to allow Threads users to easily build feeds around specific
| 2024-11-20T17:43:36 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/20/as-bluesky-soars-threads-rolls-out-custom-feeds-globally/
| 49 | 0.6 |
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GPTZero’s founders, still in their 20s, have a profitable AI detection startup, millions in the bank and a new $10M Series A
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Among all the young AI startups being ruthlessly pursued by VCs these days,GPTZerohas already grown into profitability in its first year and a half of life, generating millions in revenue. Founded by 24-year-old Edward Tian and 26-year-old Alex Cui, who’ve been friends since high school, GPTZero offers a detection tool that helps identify whether a piece of content was AI generated. The founders have chosen to take a $10 million “preemptive” Series A led by Footwork co-founder Nikhil Basu Trivedi, the team has exclusively told TechCrunch. (“Preemptive” is VC-speak for when an investor nabs a deal before the founders were trying to raise. ) This is quite the coup for Basu Trivedi. GPTZero has been watched by top VC firms practically since Tian launched an initial version as a web app in December 2022, and 30,000 people instantly swarmed it, crashing its Streamlit-hosted website. (Adrien Treuille, Streamlit’s co-founder,who sold to Snowflake for $800 million, later became an angel investor, Tian says. ) The company formally launched in January 2023. Throughout 2024, as its customer base grew, the young founders fielded four to five calls from VCs per week, they said. GPTZero grew 500% in ARR in the last six months, the founders told TechCrunch, adding that its user base has grown from 1 million to 4 million in the last 12 months. This makes it one of the fast-growing consumer apps of the year,by some measures. The company has been profitable for the last several months, they said, adding that they have more money in the bank than the total raised in the lifetime of the company. To put a number to that: more than $13 million between its $3. 5 million seed and the new $10 million. And the growth continues. Users and revenue have “more than doubled, maybe even tripled, since January,” Basu Trivedi said. While they didn’t comment on valuation, based on a typical 20% Series A round, the deal has valued the company somewhere around the $50 million mark pre-money. Other investors in the round include education-focused (and women-led) Reach Capital; Jack Altman’s Alt Capital; Uncork Capital (which led GPTZero’s seed round); and Neo (Ali Partovi’s fund). Basu Trivedi, a Princeton alumni, won the lead on this deal by playing the long game. He met Tian in 2022, before GPTZero craziness, during an annual event where a small group of Princeton students visit Silicon Valley companies. Basu Trivedi always takes the group on a hike of the Stanford Dish. Tian developed GPTZero while he was studying computer science, natural language processing and journalism at the Ivy League school. During internships for the BBC, and later at The New York Times, he wrote code that helped journalists identify AI-generated content. After the wild response his initial web app got, Tian reached out to his buddy, Cui, for help. Cui has a master’s in machine learning from the University of Toronto and dropped out of his doctorate program to become a co-founder. The two rewrote the app into its current standalone platform and raised the $3. 5 million in seed after reaching about 1. 5 million users in its first five months. This came mostly from angel investors like Tom Glocer, former CEO of Reuters; Russ Salakhutdinov, Carnegie Mellon University professor and ex-director of AI research at Apple (after he sold his startup, Perceptual Machines, to Apple in 2016); and Mark Thompson, CNN’s CEO and former New York Times CEO. Basu Trivedi saw how GPTZero was gaining press and impressive angels — and heard the rumblings about it among the VC scuttlebutt. As a seed investor who backed companies like Canva, ClassDojo and Frame. io, he knew a hot company when he saw one. He texted Tian in January 2023 to check in. He wooed the founders with his network and product know-how from his fast-growth companies like Canva, and with the background of his fund’s co-founder, Mike Smith, former COO of Stitch Fix and Walmart. Investors with both product and operations experience were what the two 20-something founders were “craving, especially as Alex and I are learning how to build a big company,” Tian said. To prove the point, shortly after they closed the round, Footwork organized a networking event with AI leaders, including Basu Trivedi’s college classmate Jack Altman, who joined the A round and is brother to OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Nvidia founder CEO Jensen Huang GPTZero is far from the only company working to identify AI-generated content. Others include AI Writing Check, Copyleaks, GPT Radar, CatchGPT and Originality. ai. But many in the AI-detection industry have abysmal accuracy,researchers find. So much so that OpenAI, which was pressured by AI-industry paranoia intolaunching its own AI detector at the start of 2023, shut the tool down about seven months later in July,after it was widely criticizedfor how poorly it worked. Interestingly, when TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggersdid his own experiment with these tools,all of them flunked except GPTZero. Naturally, GPTZero has its own benchmarks, particularly through a partnership with Penn State researchers, that help it make its case that its tech works well, despite the industry’s general reputation. Cui says GPTZero is more accurate because it has access to more data and has built its own LLM models using the most advanced open source tools, which it won’t disclose. “We have a big data advantage. We have millions of examples of text that is human versus AI,” Cui said. “We’ve also combined this with some of the best-in-class models and deep learning. We’re actually using language models to detect language models. ” While the startup may be best known for helping teachers detect AI-generated student work (in October,GPTZero landed an agreementwith the American Federation of Teachers), its customer base has expanded. It now includes government procurement agencies, grant-writing organizations, hiring managers, and — especially interesting — AI training data labelers. It turns out, using AI-generated data for AI training “causes model collapse,” Tian says, because teaching a model using fabricated examples isn’t the best way to get it to function in the real world. Naturally, the young founders have a more grandiose long-term vision. They want to create a new, independent layer of the internet that performs accountability, ensuring that human and AI content is properly attributed. To that end, the team is currently working on AI hallucination detection. Hallucinations, where the AI presents AI-generated fiction as if it were fact, are the bane of the GenAI industry. The company’s first step toward addressing this is a newly available free AI text copyright check for LLM training datasets. This will help them generate the training data for broader hallucination detection. “We’re just trying to avoid a world where the entire internet is AI-generated content,” Tian said. “An internet where everybody uses AI doesn’t preserve the opportunity for people to continue contributing creative and original content. ”
| 2024-06-13T16:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/13/gptzero-profitable-ai-detection-startup-10m-series-a/
| 1,138 | 1 |
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MariaDB spinout SkySQL secures seed funding to ‘bring conversational AI to databases’
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Anyone who’s followed the fortunes ofMySQLandMariaDBthese past 15 years will probably remember SkySQL, another brand that once existed within that same database ecosystem and, a year ago, became astand-alone companyonce more. That company today announced it has raised its first outside funding — a $6. 6 million seed round — with ambitions to use it to bring conversational AI to databases. MySQL, for the uninitiated, is the popular relational database management system (RDMS) created by Michael “Monty” Widenius,David Axmark, and Allan Larsson back in the mid-’90s. After the commercial company behind the project was sold to Sun Microsystems for$1 billion in 2008, Sun Microsystems itself was snapped up by Oraclefor $7 billion, a transaction that spurred Widenius to fork MySQL and create MariaDB to ensure it remained an independent, community-driven effort. Subsequently, Widenius established two organizations: SkySQL, a commercial entity that sold services for MySQL; and Monty Program, which was all about supporting MariaDB. These two businessesmergedin 2013, with the combined outfitrebrandingas MariaDB Corporation and raising some $230 million in funding. MariaDBresurrectedthe SkySQL brand in 2020 viaa new cloud database product, but after struggling with life as a public company (read more aboutthat saga here), MariaDBspun out SkySQLas an independent business last year, spearheaded by the team that had been developing the product at MariaDB. While MariaDB retained an equity stake in the spinoff, the onus has very much been onSkySQLto forge its own path. And that is why the startup today announced a fresh cash injection, as it looks to bring AI into the database mix. The startup’s $6. 6 million seed funding includes participation from renowned seed-stage investorEniac Ventures, which has previously invested in the likes of Airbnb and Reddit, in addition toGood CapitalandWTI. Businesses typically use SkySQL to alleviate the hassles and complexities of running MariaDB — it’s a fully managed cloud product that automates provisioning and scaling, with features dealing with security, compliance, and disaster recovery. And since spinning out of MariaDB last year, SkySQLhas added Microsoft Azure support, meaning it’s now truly multi-cloud as it already supported deployments across AWS and Google Cloud Platform. However, the company is now looking to align itself with the burgeoning AI revolution and tackle one of the biggest problems it says exists in today’s databases — that is, they’re not optimized for AI. As such, SkySQL is now introducing a duo of AI products, including something it’s calling “semantic agents” that serve insights on operational data. So, SkySQL customers can effectively build and embed their own AI agents into their apps, allowing their users to ask natural language questions of their data stored in SkySQL — something that can be challenging in enterprise settings due to security and compliance issues related to moving sensitive data around, not to mention longstanding issues aroundhallucinations. SkySQL keeps everything within the platform, while the semi-autonomous agents also support human-in-the-loop input to help refine the output and improve it over time. Elsewhere, SkySQL is also debuting Sky Copilot, which is basically an AI assistant that can help database administrators optimize the performance of their database, troubleshoot, and “manage routine tasks” all through natural language queries. This could be something like “please give me a report summarizing the health of my server” or “identify slow-performing database queries. ” So in effect, SkySQL is positioning itself as much more than a database company; it’s all about unifying various integral AI components, such asvector databasesand large language models (LLMs), into a single API that allows users to derive natural-language answers without having to move their data. SkySQL’s founding team includes CEONithin Rao(pictured above), who co-founded a vehicle connectivity platform called Autonomic, which hesold to Ford back in 2021. He then launched an AI analytics startup called Definitive Intelligence, which wassnapped up by AI chip company Groqthis past March, though Rao had already departed for SkySQL by that point. “SkySQL represented a next natural step — a chance to deliver on the vision of being the operational data platform for modern applications, especially those leveraging generative AI,” Rao told TechCrunch. Rao’s two co-founders are CTOJags Ramnarayanand CPOSaravana Krishnamurthy, both of whom transitioned over from MariaDB, where they were already familiar with SkySQL. And although Rao only joined them as SkySQL was emerging from MariaDB, he already knew one of the founders from a previous cloud computing company they both worked at some years previous. “Jags and I first crossed paths while working together atPivotal, and when the opportunity to spin out SkySQL arose, we reconnected,” Rao said. “The opportunity to join forces with such a strong team and build something transformative in this space was one I couldn’t pass up. ” Topics Senior Reporter 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?
| 2024-12-11T17:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/11/mariadb-spinout-skysql-secures-seed-funding-to-bring-conversational-ai-to-databases/
| 851 | 1 |
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Bad news for Adrian Dittmann/Elon Musk truthers
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Posted: After days of speculation that X owner Elon Musk was secretly posting underan account named Adrian Dittmann, new evidence suggests Dittmann is, in fact, a real person living in Fiji. Attempts to connect Dittmann and Musk go back at least to 2023; Dittmann frequentlymakes fawning postsabout Musk, and his voice (as heard on numerous X Spaces) sounds quite similar. But a story inThe Spectatorappears to have identified the real Dittmann, the son of a German software entrepreneur who’s started multiple companies in Fiji. This Dittmann was included ina Fijian government videoof a recent warehouse opening. Hacker and writermaia arson crimewsubsequently took credit for working with Ryan Fae to track Dittmann down. In a blog post, theyoffered more detailed evidencethat the Dittmann in Fiji is the Dittmann on X — for one thing, the Dittmann in the warehouse video appears to be wearing the same ring as one featured in multiple cooking videos that Dittmann posted (and subsequently deleted) on X. Crimew wrote that the Spectator article was not “very good” and that the pair was “unhappy with how our work was used without credit. ” Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage. TechCrunch's AI experts cover the latest news in the fast-moving field. Every Monday, gets you up to speed on the latest advances in aerospace. Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly. By submitting your email, you agree to ourTermsandPrivacy Notice
| 2025-01-05T17:14:25 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/bad-news-for-adrian-dittman-elon-musk-truthers/
| 252 | 0.9 |
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Ask Sophie: Does the H-1B visa require founders to give up equity and control?
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Sophie Alcorn, attorney, author and founder ofAlcorn Immigration Lawin Silicon Valley, California, is an award-winning Certified Specialist Attorney in Immigration and Nationality Law by the State Bar Board of Legal Specialization. Sophie is passionate about transcending borders, expanding opportunity, and connecting the world by practicing compassionate, visionary, and expert immigration law. Connect with SophieonLinkedInandTwitter. TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Ask Sophie” columns;use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off. Dear Sophie, I’m currently in the U. S. working for my employer on an H-1B. I’ve been wanting to start my own company, but I’ve been working on boosting my accomplishments for the O-1A because I’ve read in your past columns over the years that transferring an H-1B to a startup comes with a lot of downsides for startup founders, including giving up control and equity. How has that now changed? — Future Founder Hey Future! The future is now! I appreciate your entrepreneurial spirit and your great question! In October, the U. S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a newproposed rulethat removed the downsides of theH-1Bspecialty occupation visa for startup founders that you mentioned. “If more entrepreneurs are able to obtain H-1B status to develop their business enterprise,” the proposed rule states, “the United States could benefit from the creation of jobs, new industries, and new opportunities. ” After reading this column, I urge you and others to make your voice heard about the rule. The DHS is accepting public comments on the rule through December 22, 2023. After the comment period closes, the DHS will go through the comments, possibly make changes to the rule based on the comments, and then issue a final rule and effective date, which I’m anticipating will be in place in time for the next H-1B lottery in March. You can submit a comment at the top of theproposed ruleby selecting the “SUBMIT A FORMAL COMMENT” link. Comments must be made in English. However, business owners and non-citizens are eligible to comment. You can even file a comment anonymously! As you know, an employer sponsor must file an H-1B petition on behalf of an employee as is the case with all work visas. There’s no self-sponsorship available for work visas, and your H-1B is tied to the employer who sponsored you and the job and location specified in the petition. The clarification in the DHS’ proposed rule provides more flexibility to founders by already eliminating the need to reduce their majority stake in their startup and the freedom to grow their startup without limitations on their ability to do so (without the need for a future regulation on this point). One of the H-1B legal requirements includes demonstrating that an employer-employee relationship exists between the company sponsoring the individual for an H-1B and the prospective H-1B holder. To meet this requirement, the previous common wisdom for startup immigration attorneys was to advise startup founder clients to find a co-founder, board member — or two — who can hire them, supervise them, hold them accountable for poor job performance, and fire them. In addition, we previously found through my experience working with hundreds of clients that an employer-employee relationship was easier to prove to immigration officials if the H-1B candidate startup founders personally owned less than 50% of their startup. However, the great thing now is that the proposed rule confirms that even without regulatory changes, founders who hold more than half of the equity in their startup can still qualify for an H-1B or transfer their H-1B to their startup without relinquishing control of their startup to a co-founder or board. Now, to prove an employer-employee relationship exists with their startup, founders just need to submit the required Labor Condition Application approval from the U. S. Department of Labor and an employment agreement or an offer letter from their startup! Despite all theimprovementsto the annual H-1B cap-subject process that would result if the proposed rule is finalized, getting a cap-subject H-1B visa remains a challenge. The lottery is held only once a year. Moreover, the number of H-1B registrants increases every year while the number of available H-1Bs has remained the same at 85,000 since 2005, the last time Congress changed the annual limit. Sad fact: The number of H-1B visas available in fiscal years 2001, 2002, and 2003 was 195,000, more than double the number available now. As long as the H-1B registration fee remains low (it currently costs only $10), I recommend having your startup register you in the H-1B lottery in March while you continue strengthening your qualifications for theO-1Aextraordinary ability visa. If you do get selected in the H-1B lottery in March, you may benefit from a new stateside visa renewal pilot program, which the U. S. Department of State plans to begin by the end of this year. This will allow H-1B holders to renew their H-1B visa and get it placed in their passport within the United States. Stay tuned! I will bring you the latest when the State Department issues more details on the pilot program. Because the O-1A criteria are nearly identical to theEB-1Aextraordinary ability green card criteria, pursuing the EB-1A, which is typically the fastest employment-based green card to get, is within reach! A downside of the proposed regulation is that startup founders would get an initial stay on the H-1B of only 18 months, and the first extension of the H-1B would also be good for only another 18 months. After that, a founder’s H-1B could be renewed for three years. Currently, the H-1B visa is valid for an initial three-year period and can be renewed for another three years regardless of whether the H-1B visa holder is a startup founder or not. In your comment to the DHS on the proposed rule, make sure the DHS knows that the shorter initial stay and renewal for startup founders needlessly burdens startups with the added cost and time commitment of filing an additional H-1B renewal when instead, those startups could be focusing on their business. You’ve got this! — Sophie Have a question for Sophie?Ask it here. We reserve the right to edit your submission for clarity and/or space. TheSophie Alcorn Podcastfollows origin stories of the heart. If you’d like to be a guest, she’s accepting applications! Topics Founder 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?
| 2023-12-06T19:05:13 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/06/ask-sophie-does-the-h-1b-visa-require-founders-to-give-up-equity-and-control/
| 1,127 | 1 |
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Pitch Deck Teardown: Pepper Bio’s $6.5M seed deck
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Happy New Year, and welcome to the 78th installment ofPitch Deck Teardown! This week, we are taking a closer look atPepper Bio‘s seed pitch deck thatlanded the company $6. 5 million. With the slogan “The end of untreatable,” the company is taking on a hell of a challenge: Finding solutions for all those illnesses doctors can’t target well at the moment. Unlike CancerVax (which Iripped apart in a previous teardownfor being completely unbelievable), Pepper Bio has a strong team and a lot of promise. We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own,here’s how you can do that. Before we dive in, I have to admit that I don’t deeply understand this particular slice of biotech, and I had to do a fair amount of Googling to fully understand the deck. As such, there’s a chance I may get some things wrong here. That also speaks to an important point, though: Your deck needs to be well-targeted to its audience, and I’m probably not the audience in this case. If I had been working with Pepper as one of my pitch coaching clients, I’d have encouraged them to make the story come to life a lot more, with examples and anecdotes that are more relatable for a general population. Having said that, the simple truth is that I’mnotthe target audience for this deck: biotech investors are. Give Anna’s story from November a read for some context, and then we’ll get to the pitch deck itself: The thing that confuses me the most about this pitch deck is thatsomeof the slides are incredibly accessible, while others are. Well, we’ll get to that in just a moment. I love a good personal story. Tying yourself to the problem you are trying to solve helps a story come to life; it prevents a narrative from getting abstract or obtuse and enables you to speak from the heart. In this case, the CEO tells the story of their grandmother, and how the absence of treatments for Alzheimer’s was a sad outcome. Obviously, I haven’t heard the voice-over to this slide, but I think there are many ways it could be improved (a photo of the grandmother in question, perhaps?). Still, this is a good first step. There’s a subreddit called Explain Like I’m 5 where people attempt to explain complex topics as if the reader were a five-year-old. Pepper Bio lost me a bunch of times in this deck, but then hits us with this incredible duo of slides: This slide is a masterpiece. It explores the problem space the company is trying to address in incredibly simple words. And then comes the mic drop: I love this pair of slides for their simplicity and power. They nail the narrative and help set the scene beautifully for what is to come. In a world that’s often laden with deeply technical language, Pepper Bio sets itself apart for a moment. This slide is, both in terms of the visuals and content, a masterpiece. It identifies three significant therapeutic areas with substantial market opportunities: oncology, neurodegenerative diseases, and inflammatory diseases. The financial figures provided are pretty impressive, indicating robust compound annual growth rates for each category. The startup’s identification of oncology as a market with a value of $201 billion in 2021 and a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 9. 7% is particularly notable. This suggests a deep understanding of a sector that is both in critical need of innovation and holds significant financial promise. The stark statistic that one out of six people worldwide dies from cancer underscores the profound impact that advancements in this area could have. It then goes on to repeat similar numbers for neurodegenerative diseases and inflammatory diseases, each with huge market sizes and promising growth rates. Overall, the slide does an excellent job of highlighting Pepper Bio’s potential reach and impact in areas that are not only financially vast, but also of critical importance to global health. A hell of a combo. Now, of course, the companydoesneed to show that it isn’t spreading itself too thin and that it makes sense to operate in all of those market segments. But that’s a nitpick: Overall, this is one of the better market size slides I’ve ever seen. In the rest of this teardown, we’ll look at three things Pepper Bio could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck! There are a lot of things to love here, but we have some serious flops, too: On three whole slides (slides 15 through 17), the company says it is generating revenue but then doesn’t explain how much. Each of these slides includes ranges and suggestions, which frustrates me and makes me suspicious. If you say you’re generating income, then it’s probably easy to show how much money has flowed into the bank account. It’s rather strange to leave that crucial bit out. It would have been far better to show this as a chart or graph to give some idea how much revenue has been booked. I’ve read this slide a half dozen times and I cannot wrap my head around what it is saying: I don’t know what “HCC” is — it isn’t defined in the deck. It could be hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), which, per the Mayo Clinic, is the most common type of primary liver cancer. But it could also be something else. There’s plenty of space on this slide to spell it out. Also, I am curious about the sample size here. How many animals were tested? What type of animals? I’m not sure what “vehicle control” means, either. What is a “vehicle” in this context? Is that a technical term? Could it just say “control group”? Does “standard of care” refer to the regular treatments currently used for this type of tumor? If so, what is that treatment? What does “Pepper Bio target” mean in this context? The cells the company is targeting? I’m having to do a lot of guesswork here, and I’m left confused. The company talks about animals and “the clinic,” but I’m not sure if this means that it plans to continue to treat animals for this illness, or whether that means it is planning to start treating humans? Wouldn’t there be some sort of FDA approval process? All in all, this slide is a huge piece of confusion sandwiched between needlessly technical language, in my opinion. The company raised $6. 5 million, but the slides never explain what the company is planning to accomplish with the money. The deck is pretty hand-wavey about grand visions for the future, and I have no doubt that Pepper Bio, if it delivers on its promises, can continue to raise money and be successful. But as an investor, you’re trying to gauge what the next step of the journey is going to be, and whether that will generate enough traction to get the company to a good place. That’s completely unclear here, which makes it very hard to determine whether $6. 5 million is a reasonable amount to raise and whether the company is on the right track. If you want your own pitch deck teardown featured on TC+,here’s more information. Also, check outall our Pitch Deck Teardowns and other pitching advice, all collected in one handy place for you! Topics At TechCrunch, Haje (He/Him) covered general tech news and focused mostly on hardware. He has founded several companies to varying degrees of success, spent a while in the VC world, and has been a journalist and TV producer since the dawn of his career. He is more-than-averagely interested in photography and can often be found with a camera slung over his shoulder. He wrote a book about pitching startups to investors, and you can find him on @Haje on Twitter, or at Haje. me for everything else. 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?
| 2024-01-05T15:00:43 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/05/sample-seed-pitch-deck-pepper-bio/
| 1,389 | 1 |
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AI-driven manufacturing database Keychain raises $5M for European push
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Brands are constantly trying to streamline how they source packaging materials and ingredient suppliers for their products in order to quickly meet consumer demand. However, even today this process can involve some laborious wandering around trade shows. Keychainis an AI-powered platform that aims to quickly connect the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry with manufacturing partners using its database of 30,000+ manufacturers and 20,000+ brands and retailers. The company has now raised a $5 million investment led byBright Pixel Capital, the VC arm of the European retail conglomerateSonae Distribuição, owner of European retailer Continente. Founders Oisin Hanrahan (CEO) and Umang Dua previously founded home services marketplace Handy, which wasacquiredby ANGI Homeservices. They started Keychain with Jordan Weitz. “There are easily 200 to 300 trade shows a year for manufacturers,” Hanrahan told TechCrunch. “One has 70,000 people go to it. Brands and retailers spend a fortune trying to interact, and there’s no digital product for this — and no one manufacturer or retailer has the ability to organize the data using AI. We’ve probably spent $3 million on building the data asset, and I think we’re probably 10x to 15x more efficient because of our ability to use AI. ” He said traditional brokers have historically profited by creating information asymmetry that drives up the costs of goods, and Keychain is using AI to eliminate these fees and other costs. “We launched it just under a year ago, and it didn’t really work for the first two months,” he said. “Then we got it right, and the data just started to take off, and the whole thing started to work. ” “Brands and retailers use the products to submit projects. They are currently submitting over a billion dollars in projects alone, and we started selling to U. S. manufacturers a few months ago,” he added. Hanrahan noted the startup is now also launching two new platforms — one in packaging, and another in ingredients — as well as taking a strategic investment from one of the largest retailers in Europe. “We’re not obviously saying when, but we do plan to launch in Europe later on this year,” he said. Since November 2023, Keychain hasraiseda total of $38 million from leading venture firms BoxGroup, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and SV Angel, as well as CPG giants General Mills, The Hershey Company, and Schreiber Foods
| 2025-02-12T14:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/12/ai-driven-manufacturing-database-keychain-raises-5m-for-european-push/
| 390 | 0.9 |
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Exxon wants to drill enough lithium out of Arkansas to power 1M EVs per year
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Fossil fuel giant Exxon is betting its U. S. lithium operation will power a new generation of electric vehicles. The U. S. has hundreds of thousands of tons of “recoverable” lithium, which could go to use in batteries for cars, handhelds and renewable energy storage, a2021 U. S. Geological Surveysaid. Yet, the country hasjust onecommercial-scale lithium mining site today, in Nevada — run by chemical manufacturer Albemarle. The Biden administration is pushing for more lithium mines — despiteopposition from indigenousandenvironmentalgroups — and now Exxon is committing to drill it out of the ground in Arkansas. In doing so, Exxon is potentially challengingTesla— which is working on extracting lithium from clay in Texas. Numerous startups are also working on lithium extraction. Lilac Solutions, for example, wants to pull lithiumfrom the Great Salt Lakein Utah. There’s alsoGM-backed EnergyX, which raised $50 million in April to “unlock” lithium in North America. On Monday, Exxonstatedthat it aims to start producing lithium in 2027. The company said the “potential customers” it’s talking with includeelectric vehicle and battery makers. By the start of the next decade, Exxon intends to produce “enough lithium to supply the manufacturing needs of well over a million EVs per year. ” Exxon executive Dan Ammann told CNBC that the conglomerate wants to “get in early” on domestic lithium mining. Exxon wasfirst to lithium-ion battery productionin the 70s, yet it bailed on the business quickly, because it did not see its potential to scale. Lithium is a crucial component in modern batteries, which in turn power the switch to renewable energy sources and electric vehicles. Ammann said in a statement that Exxon’s direct lithium extraction tech will come with “far fewer environmental impacts than traditional mining operations. ” However, direct lithium extractionstill poses environmental risks, including high freshwater consumption. More broadly, Argentinian researchers warned in a 2023 paper that ecosystems around “lithium deposits are extremely fragile and linked in a food chain in which ecosystem services are crucial for livestock and rural populations. ” Topics Senior Reporter, Climate 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?
| 2023-11-13T22:30:16 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/13/exxon-wants-to-drill-enough-lithium-out-of-arkansas-to-power-1m-evs-per-year/
| 411 | 0.9 |
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|
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Google’s bringing Gemini to your car with Android Auto
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Google is bringing Gemini, its generative AI, to all cars that support Android Auto in the next few months, the companyannouncedat its Android Show ahead of the company’s2025 I/O developer conference. The company says adding Gemini functionality to Android Auto and, later this year, to cars that run Google’s built-in operating system, will make driving “more productive — and fun” in theblog post. “This is really going to be, we think, one of the largest transformations in the in-vehicle experience that we’ve seen in a very, very long time,” Patrick Brady, the VP of Android for Cars, said during a virtual briefing with members of the media ahead of the conference. Gemini will surface in the Android Auto experience in two main ways. Gemini will act as a much more powerful smart voice assistant. Drivers (or passengers — Brady said they are not voice-matching to whoever owns the phone running the Android Auto experience) will be able to ask Gemini to send texts, play music, and basically do all the things Google Assistant was already able to do. The difference is users won’t have to be so robotic with their commands thanks to the natural language capabilities of Gemini. Gemini can also “remember” things like whether a contact prefers receiving text messages in a particular language, and handle that translation for the user. And Google claims Gemini will be capable of doing one of the most commonly paraded in-car tech demos: finding good restaurants along a planned route. Of course, Brady said Gemini will be able to mine Google listings and reviews to respond to more specific requests (like “taco places with vegan options”). The other main way Gemini will surface is with what Google is calling “Gemini Live,” which is an option where the digital AI is essentially always listening and ready to engage in full conversations about … whatever. Brady said those conversations could be about everything from travel ideas for spring break, to brainstorming recipes a 10-year-old would like, to “Roman history. ” If that all sounds a bit distracting, Brady said Google believes it won’t be. He claimed the natural language capabilities will make it easier to ask Android Auto to do specific tasks with less fuss, and therefore Gemini will “reduce cognitive load. ” It’s a bold claim to make at a time when people are clamoring for car companies to move away from touchscreens and bring back physical knobs and buttons — a request many of those companies are starting to oblige. There’s a lot still being sorted out. For now, Gemini will leverage Google’s cloud processing to operate in both Android Auto and on cars with Google Built-In. But Brady said Google is working with automakers “to build in more compute so that [Gemnini] can run at the edge,” which would help not only with performance but with reliability — a challenging factor in a moving vehicle that may be latching onto new cell towers every few minutes. Modern cars also generate a lot of data from onboard sensors, and on some models, even interior and exterior cameras. Brady said Google has “nothing to announce” about whether Gemini could leverage that multi-modal data, and that “we’ve been talking about that a lot. ” “We definitely think as cars have more and more cameras, there’s some really, really interesting use cases in the future here,” he said. Gemini on Android Auto and Google Built-In will be coming to all countries that already have access to the company’s generative AI model, and will support more than 40 languages. Check outhow to watch the livestreamand more from Google I/O. Topics Sr. Reporter, Transportation 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?
| 2025-05-13T17:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/googles-bringing-gemini-to-your-car-with-android-auto/
| 682 | 1 |
47997ce4da2ba2510e4f6ba4d835d23b
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Amazon upgrades its AI image generator
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Amazon has released an upgraded version of its in-house image-generating model,Titan Image Generator, for AWS customers using its Bedrock generative AI platform. Simply called Titan Image Generator v2, the new model brings with it several new capabilities, AWS principal developer advocate Channy Yun explainsin a blog post. Users can “guide” the images they generate using reference images, edit existing visuals, remove backgrounds and generate variations of images, says Yun. “Titan Image Generator v2 can intelligently detect and segment multiple foreground objects,” Yun writes. “With the Titan Image Generator v2, you can generate color-conditioned images based on a color palette. [And] you can use the image conditioning feature to shape your creations. ” Titan Image Generator v2 supports image conditioning, optionally taking in a reference image and focusing on specific visual characteristics in that image, like edges, object outlines and structural elements. The model can also be fine-tuned using reference images like a product or company logo, so that generated images maintain a consistent aesthetic. AWS continues to remain vague about which data, exactly, it uses to train its Titan Image Generator models. The company previously told TechCrunch only that it’s a combination of proprietary and licensed data. Few vendors readily reveal such information; they see training data as a competitive advantage and thus keep it and info relating to it a closely guarded secret. Training data details are also a potential source ofIP-related lawsuits, another disincentive to reveal much. In lieu of transparency, AWS offers anindemnification policythat covers customers in the event a Titan model like Titan Image Generator v2regurgitates(i. e. spits out a mirror copy of) a potentially copyrighted training example. In the company’s recent second-quarter earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he’s still “very bullish” on generative AI tech like AWS’ Titan models, despite signs of second-guessing from the enterprise and the mounting costs related to training, fine-tuning and serving models. “In the generative AI space, it’s going to get big fast,” he said, “and it’s largely all going to be built from the get-go in the cloud. ”
| 2024-08-06T19:43:54 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/06/amazon-upgrades-its-ai-image-generator/
| 342 | 0.9 |
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|
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Zanifu raises $11.2M to scale its inventory financing offering in Kenya
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Zanifu, a Kenyan fintech providing inventory financing to micro, small and medium-sized businesses, has raised $11. 2 million in debt-equity funding in a pre-Series A round led by Beyond Capital Ventures and Variant Investments. Founders Factory Africa, AAIC Investment, Google Black Founders Fund and existing investor Launch Africa also participated in the round. This brings total debt-equity funding raised by the startup to $12. 7 million. The fintech provides inventory credit to retailers, and the new funding will enable it to expand the solution to distributors too, the startup’s co-founder and CEOSteve Bikotold TechCrunch. Zanifutargets businesses that find it hard to access credit from formal financial institutions for lack of structure, accounting books and assets that can be used as collateral, Biko said. Yet, these businesses require credit to sustain their operations and/or to expand their businesses. Zanifu extends credit to the businesses based on data it collects from them, and their suppliers. The fintech de-risks the line of credit by directly paying their suppliers. “In our first product, we only lent to retailers to help them expand their business, but we found out that distributors have a similar problem,” said Biko. Stock financing varies based on the size of the business, but distributors can access up to $10,000, while retailers get goods whose worth ranges from $200-$500. The startup says it has so far given credit to 13,000 micro-businesses, and has already served 500 distributors following the expansion of its customer base. A 5% – 6% interest is charged monthly, and, so far, a 99. 2% repayment rate has been reported, owing to various factors, including Zanifu’s underwriting algorithm which, Biko says, has gotten better over time. Its customers use an android application to know their credit limit, and make orders. The fintech has integrated multiple payment channels into the app to facilitate swift repayments. It also enables retailers to pay for stock bought from other distributors not included in its database. “We found out that most of these retailers, especially in this market, have multiple distributors. And we increased their limits and allowed them to pay any of their distributors,” he said, adding that Zanifu is building a platform for distributors to update their stock keeping units. Following the new funding, the startup plans to scale its operations in Kenya, shelving its previous plan to expand to Ghana and Uganda — some of the markets where small businesses also find it hard to raise capital for their operations and growth. Around Africa, small enterprises are economic drivers, with studies showing that they make up nearly90%of businesses in the continent, and contribute significantly to job creation. It isestimatedthat Kenya has a $19 billion financing gap for MSMEs. Other companies serving the credit needs of these enterprises in Kenya includePezeshaand Standard-Chartered Ventures-backed Solv. “We have decided to go deep in Kenya. We are focusing on serving more micro-SMEs and also getting more distributors into our fold, and ensuring the capital we are dispersing is actually generating returns for these businesses and helping them grow. So that’s really how we’re looking at it for now. We will go to other markets once we get to profitability,” said Biko, who co-founded Zanifu withSebastian Mithika. The fintech, which is licensed by the Central Bank of Kenya, plans to offer other financial services like insurance, and build tools, to (for instance) help businesses manage inventory and do bookkeeping. Kenyan fintech Pezesha raises $11M backed by Women’s World Banking, Cardano parent IOG Topics Reporter, Africa Annie Njanja formerly covered startups and tech news in Africa for TechCrunch. She has experience in technology, business and health reporting and She holds a MSc. degree in Data Journalism from Columbia University. 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?
| 2023-08-21T09:47:24 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/21/zanifu-raises-11-2m-to-scale-its-inventory-financing-offering-in-kenya/
| 688 | 1 |
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|
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TechCrunch Mobility: The state of EV sales and Rivian secures the next $1B from VW
|
Welcome back toTechCrunch Mobility— your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just clickTechCrunch Mobility! This week I’m publishing an abbreviated version of the newsletter because of the 4th of July holiday. If you’re driving, flying, or taking the train for the U. S. holiday — which AAA projects 72. 2 million people will travel at least 50 miles or more — stay safe out there. The complete newsletter returns next week. I have one important announcement before I sprinkle in a bit of news. TechCrunch Mobility is moving to the Beehiiv publishing platform in a few weeks. Beehiiv provides lots of cool features — like polls! — to help me better engage with you, the reader. It’s a win for you and me. The newsletter emails will continue to come fromnewsletters@techcrunch. com. To ensure you don’t miss a single one, please add the above address to your contacts and move it to your primary inbox. This tells your internet service provider that you love TechCrunch and want to see this newsletter. You may recall last week, a New York Times article reported thatUberco-founder and former CEOTravis Kalanickisworking with investorsto buy the U. S. arm of Chinese autonomous vehicle companyPony AI, and Uber might even help make it happen. Several little birds tell me Kalanick ally and Uber ATG veteranEric Meyhoferis involved. We’re poking around to learn more. In the meantime, here is a little history lesson. Meyhofer was with the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University before officially moving over to Uber in 2015. He eventually became CEO of Uber ATG, the self-driving unit that was later sold off to Aurora. Meyhofer has been connected to Kalanick’s CloudKitchens enterprise via a restaurant automation and robotics business calledLab37, which was initiallyreported by the Spoonback in 2023. Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec atkirsten. korosec@techcrunch. comor my Signal at kkorosec. 07, 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. A catchy new term was coined during a recent recording of theAutonocast, the podcast I co-host with Alex Roy and Ed Niedermeyer (full credit goes to Roy). The term is MVAT, or minimum viable autonomy theater — when companies deploy the minimum viable autonomy product sufficient to perpetuate a narrative of progress. One possible example: Tesla let a Model Y SUVdrive roughly 15 milesfrom its factory to the apartment complex where the car’s new owner lives, completing what CEO Elon Musk called the first “autonomous delivery” of a customer car. If this is a one-off, aka a demonstration, then it’s an MVAT. This isn’t just to pick on Tesla, by the way. Many other companies have posted flashy videos to showcase the capabilities of their respective automated driving technology. But it was a far more common practice in 2015 — as AVs were shooting up to the top of the hype cycle. The second quarter has ended and that means sales and production numbers! While many automakers issue monthly reports, some of the EV companies we monitor only provide quarterly numbers. The electric Hummer is almost outselling the F-150 Lightning Lucid sales inch forward as EV maker pushes to ramp Gravity production Rivian receives the next $1B from Volkswagen as sales struggles continue Tesla faces second straight year of falling sales after another bad quarter Meanwhile,Republican legislatorspassed a reconciliation actthat, among other things, unwinds much of theInflation Reduction Act, including that solar, wind, and clean hydrogen will all lose incentives under the new bill. EV tax credits are also eliminated for new and used electric vehicles and the installation of home EV-charging equipment. The end of the EV tax credit is already rippling through the industry, including companies that don’t even have an EV yet to sell. Slate Auto, the Jeff Bezos-backed EV startup, was planning to sell a pickup truck for less than $20,000 with the EV tax credit applied. But the language on itswebsite has changedto reflect the bill’s passage. Also a bit of news from the world of electric RVs and vans …Pebble, the California-based startupwe’ve written about before, has started customer deliveries of its flagship all-electric travel trailer. AndGrounded, the startup founded by former SpaceX engineers and based in Detroit,delivered its new electric van, called the G3, to its first customer. TheFBIand cybersecurity firms are warning that the prolific hacking group known asScattered Spideris nowtargeting airlines and the transportation sector. Qantas, the Australian airline giant, said itexperienced a data breachthat compromised the personal information of at least 6 million passengers
| 2025-07-04T16:05:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/04/techcrunch-mobility-the-state-of-ev-sales-and-rivian-secures-the-next-1b-from-vw/
| 774 | 1 |
187ec8fcf2f7935733f27b8d819683a5
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Photo layout app Series makes it easier to post your panos to Threads
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Series, an iOS photo app that helps you lay out your photos in creative ways for posting on social media, is now shaping up to become the must-have companion app for users posting their photos to Instagram Threads. On Threads, you can view images full screen, and with the right formatting, you can share full-screen seamless panoramas of your photos as well. This has already led some users to experiment with the new format, as artist Pete Halvorsen did, byexperimenting with different aspect ratiosand thensplitting up photosso users could click on them in full-screen mode and swipe through. This, in turn, prompted Series developer Ryan Carver to add new tools — specifically a tool called TH+ — to cater to the needs of Threads users to make this process easier. Carver has a background in photography and design, having previously led product development at photo-sharing app VSCO and having co-founded Typekit, which sold to Adobe, now Adobe Fonts. But for the past four years, he’s been working as an independent iOS developer, focused mostly on Series. The original inspiration for the app actually came from his own photography, curating and designing a gallery show in 2019, Carver told TechCrunch. “Out of that experience, I wanted two things: One, better tools to explore visual relationships between images, and two, to make it easier to share multiple images together,” he said. “The Instagram Carousel became the canvas for this; it’s such a great format for sharing multiple images in unique layouts,” he noted. He initially created Series as a tool that could design for the Instagram carousel and other social media, including TikTok. The app offers a variety of tools to mix photos and videos together, as well as other features like easy-to-use margin and edge controls, the ability to use layered photos or videos to create backgrounds, flexible layouts to tell stories using Diptychs and Triptychs, plus the option to post carousels and more. Carver says the best way to use Series is to add several photos and then explore the different layouts it offers to tell your visual story — like photo pairings, stacks, grids, and carousels. But after seeing how Threads supported full-screen panoramas, Carver added a new TH+ Frame Ratio to Series within days of Threads launching to the public, he says. The feature has since beendiscovered and usedby Meta employees, includingCTO Andrew Bosworth (@boztank), who postedan impressive Everest Panothat attracted over 7,000 likes and 180 replies. Many users on Threads have since beguntrying out the pano optionby taking one image and then spreading it out across multiple panels for users to swipe through. Some also put the full image at the end of their carousel. To gain access to the TH+ Frame Ratio, Series users will have to upgrade to the Pro subscription. This $15 per year package comes with a bevy of other advanced tools as well, like the ability to import and lay out more than two photos or videos at a time; the ability to split content over more than three panels for Instagram’s Carousel or Threads; high-resolution export; the ability to export video up to 60 seconds long; the ability to preview Instagram Posts or Stories before exporting; custom templates so you can save and apply your favorite looks; power tools for complex layouts; and custom app icons. Since launching version 1. 0 in December 2019, Series has attracted around 5,000 monthly active users, and roughly half are paying subscribers. The app was updated to version 2. 0 in December 2022 with support for video and more layout options, then more recently added the TH+ Frame Ratio with a July release aimed at Threads users. The app has since caught the attention ofInstagram head Adam Mosseri, who responded to a request from Series on Threads asking if there was a dev-relations person for Threads the app maker could speak to. “Working on tighter integration like faster workflow, better preview, more layout options,” Series’ post teased. The app is a free download with in-app purchaseson the App Storeand supports both iPhone and iPad
| 2023-08-16T15:11:18 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/16/photo-layout-app-series-makes-it-easier-to-post-your-panos-to-threads/
| 679 | 1 |
1cdbe99de4f13795e82a08daafe280fa
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Nvidia and Qualcomm join Open Source Robotics Alliance to support ROS development
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The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) this week announced the launch of the similarly named Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA). The new initiative is designed to maintain development for and maintenance of open source robotics projects, with a particular focus on the OSRF’s own robot operating system (ROS). First released in 2007 by erstwhile Bay Area incubator Willow Garage, ROS has played a foundational role in robotics development for decades. In a show of support, Nvidia and Qualcomm have both signed on as “Platinum” members for the new alliance, along with Alphabet’s X spinout Intrinsic. “Nvidia develops with ROS 2 to bring accelerated computing and AI to developers, researchers, and commercial applications,” Nvidia VP Gordon Grigor notes ina releasetied to the news. “As an inaugural platinum member of OSRA, we will collaborate to advance open-source robotics throughout the ecosystem by aiding development efforts and providing governance and continuity. ” In the same release, Intrinsic CEO Wendy Tan White notes, “From the numerous contributions made by our team at Intrinsic across projects like ROS, Gazebo, and Open-RMF as part of the Open Robotics community, to our acquisition of the Open Source Robotics Corporation (OSRC), we’ve invested deeply in the open source community, and we look forward to continuing our support of the ecosystem as an inaugural member of the OSRA. ” Intrinsic acquired Open Robotics’ commercial wing at the tail end of 2022. Former Open Robotics CEO Brian Gerkey (who current serves as Intrinsic’s CTO) has been appointed to the OSRA’s board of directors. As far as the hierarchy is concerned, this seems to be standard tech industry consortium stuff. The OSRF calls it a “a mixed membership and meritocratic model,” in the vein of open source alliances like the Linux Foundation. Of course, the level or meritocratic presentation depends on the level of membership an organization commits to — though pricing notably goes up based on headcount. Along with ROS, the OSRA is tasked with governing Open Robotics’ Gazebo simulator, and Open-RMF, which is designed to serve as a common language to increase robotic system interoperability across companies. Certainly the inclusion of tech behemoths like Nvidia and Qualcomm should go a ways toward helping cement such standards. Both companies are involved in the creation of reference design robots, which serve as the foundation for various robot makers. Other members include Clearpath and PickNik Robotics. Silicon Valley Robotics is serving as an associate member, while Ubuntu developer Canonical is serving in a support role
| 2024-03-19T17:54:01 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/19/nvidia-and-qualcomm-join-open-source-robotics-alliance-to-support-ros-development/
| 413 | 0.9 |
871b8adaabe0264b260516590e73962c
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Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo talks about AI, chatbot platform Poe and why OpenAI is not a competitor
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Last November, Adam D’Angelo found himself at the epicenter of one of the biggest controversies in the tech industry. The board of OpenAI — the $80 billion startup leading the AI bandwagon — had abruptlybootedits CEO,Sam Altman, only toreinstate himjust days later. D’Angelo was on the board that dismissed Altman… and he was (and remains) on the board that brought him back. In fact, he was the only person who kept his seat amidst the ensuing restructuring that saw a lot of the original board leave. It was certainly a rocky time for OpenAI, but it was perhaps doubly so for D’Angelo, since the drama was playing out while his own company, Quora, was taking big steps toward AI. Quora, the crowdsourced Q&A site D’Angelo co-founded and leads as CEO, had been building an AI platform of its own while also fundraising (a$75 million roundthat valued it at $425 million, per PitchBook). The company in February 2023 had launched Poe (short for Platform for Open Exploration), which lets users ask questions of and talk to a variety of chatbots, lets developers build their own bots and offersa bot monetization programandmarketplacesimilar to OpenAI’s GPT Store. Quora’s core Q&A service was facing some big questions, too. Incumbent search engines like Google and Bing were beginning to use AI to produce more fluid results and answer questions, and with tools like ChatGPT andPerplexitybeing widely available, what could Quora do to secure a position as one of the top websites where people could get their questions answered? More crucially, does anyone actually want or need crowdsourced Q&A anymore? For D’Angelo, those questions are intrinsic to his pursuit of AI, which he sees as an important tool that people can use to tap the internet’s collective knowledge. An important, if understated, figure in tech for years, he’s been involved in efforts to tap the internet’s store of knowledge for a long time — he was friends with Mark Zuckerberg in high school, where in 2002 the pair built a digital music suggestion service called Synapse that, according to this vintage piece from the Harvard Crimson,beat off acquisition offersfrom Microsoft and more. Later, he became CTO at Facebook when it was just starting out, and then eventually co-founded Quora. All of that was seemingly a long road toward building AI tools for him, it appears. I recently caught up with D’Angelo about the challenges and opportunities in AI today, how to build and support a developer community and what role humans can play when it comes to sharing and accessing knowledge. Here are a few highlights from our conversation: The hype around AI seems to be having less of an impact on the search for information than you might think. D’Angelo said that Quora is seeing record numbers of users despite the proliferation of AI tools — although he declined to update the 400 million monthly active users figure itdisclosed last July. Still, there is a bridge between what Quora set out to do and D’Angelo’s interest in AI. Recently, in a conversation withDavid George, a general partner at a16z, D’Angelo said he was drawn to social networking because he was actually interested in AI. The latter was hard to develop at that time, but he saw social networks as an alternative architecture for achieving the same idea: People, assembled in a social network, in his view, almost played the role of living, large information models, as they could provide news, entertainment and more to each other. He worked on that concept when he was with Facebook, and later, founded Quora to distill the role social networks could play in answering questions. Now, AI is taking over that role. “In the past, humans were substituted for AI to provide answers. You could ask a question like, ‘What is the capital of California?’ and humans would answer that on Quora. Now, you can use AI tools to get that answer,” he said. But AI, at least in its current shape today, cannot provide answers to all the questions people can have. That, D’Angelo believes, helps people retain a lot of value. “Quora has always been founded on the idea that humans have a lot of knowledge they have access to in their heads that’s not on the internet anywhere. And AI will not have access to any of that knowledge,” D’Angelo said. He acknowledged that AI still hasa hallucinationproblem, which makes it hard to rely on such answers, even if newer, more advanced models are slowly making progress in tackling that issue. Quora opened up Poe to all users last yearafter a few months of closed beta testing. Since then, the company has introduced tools tocreateandbrowse the botson its marketplace. The company’s pitch is that consumers get to use all the different kinds of models or bots on the platform. For developers, the allure lies in the possibility of reaching millions of users without having to worry about distribution across platforms. And developers can earn money on Poe in two ways: The first is through a referral when a user becomes a Poe premium subscriber via their bot; the second is bysetting a per-message rate, so they get paid based on how often people use their bot. In essence, Poe offers developers and users access to different large language models, but its functionality is similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT Store. But that means both platforms face some of the same challenges. They make it easy for anyone to create bots with prompts, which makes it hard for developers to stand out. D’Angelo told me that there are already a million bots on the platform, compared to3 million custom GPTs on ChatGPT. For reference, it took Apple’s App Store more thanfive years to cross the million-app mark. Both Poe and GPT Store also suffer from a ton of spam, similarly named bots, bots claiming to escape plagiarism, and even ones that flirt with copyright law. Poe has also released a feature that lets users chat withmultiple bots in one conversation. All that noise makes it hard to choose a bot that will do the job well. Despite these challenges, D’Angelo says that Quora wants to help developers earn sustainable money by improving bot discovery. “One of our goals with developers is to be able to make a living [out of making AI bots] and cover their operational costs,” he said. “We have taken a big step forward with the pay-per-message feature, but we also want to help developers get distribution inside the platform as much as possible. So, we are working on improving our recommendation system so more people can find out about the bots. ” Poe is growing steadily, but it is still a lot smaller than ChatGPT. Market intelligence firmSimilarwebsuggests Poe has 4 million monthly active users in the U. S. (iOS and Android) and 3. 1 million monthly active users worldwide (Android only). Compare this to ChatGPT, which now averages 100 million users a week. D’Angelo said that the company will stay away from ads, instead relying onPoe’s $19. 99 per month subscription productto generate revenue. That is in contrast to some of the other AI-powered tools on the market:Perplexity,Bing SearchandSearch Generative Experience (SGE)by Google all feature ads. Quora and D’Angelo declined to disclose revenue figures, but data from analytics firm Sensor Tower indicates that Poe users have spent $7. 3 million on subscriptions since its launch, amounting to close to 40,000 paid users. In comparison, ChatGPT has more than 1 million paid subscribers, according to Sensor Tower. Despite stating the importance of human answers, Quora is already experimenting with answers written by Poe. The site surfaces the AI-written answer to some questions with a link that lets you chat with Poe if you have further questions. D’Angelo said that Quora had already deployed systems to rate different human answers. Now, it is applying techniques like asking users through a survey if an AI-generated answer is useful. “My goal is for the AI-written answers to be fairly ranked and only to be above a human answer if they are more useful than the human answer,” he said. D’Angelo also wants to avoid having Quora tagged as an “answer engine. ” “I think we never really saw Quora as an answer engine. That term kind of implies that there are AI-only answers. Quora is really about human knowledge, and we’ll have AI enhance it,” he said. Quora is also working on AI tools that users can use to write answers and hopes to release them soon. D’Angelo noted that one of the tools it is testing allows users to generate an image based on their answers. The company is using AI in a few other ways, too. One involves trying to catch bots or users using automation to answer questions on Quora. D’Angelo didn’t share details about the project, saying that the company would give a heads-up to perpetrators who are trying to game the system. A fewoutletsandusershave recentlypointed outthat the answer quality on Quora has plummeted. To that, D’Angelo said people feel that the overall standard of answers has decreased because low-quality answers have more visibility. He said AI is helping the company determine the difference between different quality of answers, and the early results look promising. D’Angelo declined to discuss any of the OpenAI drama — “I just can’t talk about any of this stuff,” he said. “I’m not here to represent OpenAI. I can just represent Quora. ” But he did say that he doesn’t see OpenAI as a competitor, because the bigger startup has, well, bigger ambitions. “There is some sense of overlap in terms of what users can do on the GPT Store and what they can do on Poe. But that’s minor in the grand scheme of things. OpenAI is working towards this big mission to build AGI [Artificial General Intelligence]. And at Quora, we are looking to make AI products available to the world — including OpenAI’s products. ” Quora also continues to be a “big customer” of OpenAI and D’Angelo expects more collaboration with the company than competition. “We spend a lot of money as a customer with OpenAI, because OpenAI is the biggest source of models for Poe,” he added. While D’Angelo did mention that Quora pays “tens of millions” to developers on Poe and companies whose models the platform uses, he didn’t explicitly detail how these payments compared to the payout to OpenAI. Quora currently doesn’t have any data licensing deals with any of the major companies, and it is not thinking about building its own model either, D’Angelo told TechCrunch. “We are not in a rush to license our data. We want to make sure our rights and users’ rights are respected. Right now, there is not a lot of clarity around how all of this (AI landscape) will play out. So right now, we are just waiting before taking any steps in this direction,” D’Angelo said. The company’s also relatively fresh out of its last fundraise, so it is focused on building AI across the business and improving revenue growth on its existing products. He said that Quora will go public “at some point,” but that is not the focus right now. 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?
| 2024-05-06T10:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/06/adam-dangelo-quora-poe-open-ai/
| 1,945 | 1 |
8269b56f1b6f5f068446ab5a7397ad0a
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Tesla ‘digs its own grave with the Cybertruck,’ Convoy collapses and Rivian scores a win at Rebelle
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Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Your usual host Kirsten was shredding off-road at the Rebelle Rally this week, so I’ll be taking over the newsletter. Let’s jump in with a few words about Tesla. Ah, but before Rebecca goes. it’s me, Kirsten, popping in here to share a bit of what I saw and experienced atRebelle Rally 2023, a 2,120-kilometer off-road and navigation competition. In its eighth year, the Rebelle has become a proving ground of sorts for the 65 all-women teams who participate as well as stock manufacturer vehicles. The catch? GPS and other electronic devices are strictly prohibited. So what am I checking out at thisseeminglynon-tech event? EVs and tech, of course. Oh, and green hydrogen, believe it or not. There were 10 vehicles out of the 65 that fell into the electrified category such as the Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 4xe. Four of those vehicles — all of themRivianR1T pickups — were electric. And this year, one Rivian team took first place in the 4×4 class (there are two classes in the Rebelle) — the first time an all-electric vehicle was on the top podium. The first place finishers, driver Lillian Macaruso and navigator Alexandra Anderson, are both employees ofRivian. OK, Rebecca, back to you. Teslareported its third-quarter earnings this week, and once again,all eyes were on the automaker’s marginsamid ongoing price cuts. Tesla’s shares, which are priced more as a tech stock than as an automaker’s stock, were down after Q3 earnings. Investors were clearly feeling skittish after Tesla reported a gross margin of 17. 9%, down from 25. 1% in the same period last year. That’s also down from Q2’s margins of 18. 2%. As a result,profits fell 44%to $1. 85 billion in Q3 from the same year-ago period. Investors see the falling margins and Tesla’s price cuts as proof that demand is lessening for the vehicles as other EVs take market share and rising interest rates make it difficult for many buyers to afford big ticket purchases. The company also reported thatsolar deployments slipped 48%in Q3 from the same period last year. But the company made up for it by pulling in a 90% spike in energy storage deployments. Tesla also gave some updates about its long-delayed Cybertruck. Initial deliveries are set for an event at Giga Texas onNovember 30. Elon Musk noted that scaling the Cybertruck will be hard and it will take 18 monthsbefore the pickup is profitable. “I mean, we dug our own grave with Cybertruck,” said Musk. The billionaire executive also said Giga Texas will be able to produce about 250,000 Cybertrucks a year starting in 2025. But let’s remember that Musk isn’t great at making predictions. After all, he initially said the Cybertruck would be on the market by 2021. Expect some of these numbers to be pushed out, too. Want to reach out with a tip, comment or complaint? Email Kirsten atkirsten. korosec@techcrunch. comor Rebecca at rebecca. techcrunch@gmail. com. Reminder that you can drop us a note attips@techcrunch. com. If you prefer to remain anonymous,click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps. This week was the trade showMicromobility America. Here are some of the best bits that came out of it: Birdis now doing e-bikes again? But instead of the VanMoof knockoff of previous years, Bird has partnered withTradeHubb, an e-bike supplier, andSpring, a strategic retail growth company, to launch the bike. You might recall that Bird last yearditched its retail bike offeringto focus on shared rides in an attempt to reach profitability. The struggling company was also recently delisted from the stock market. Who knows what’s going on behind the scenes? I tried reaching out to learn more, but no response. If you have a tip, hit me up! The team atRide Reviewlaunched theRider’s Choice Awardsagain, for those who want to vote. Winners will be announced January 25. The folks behind Micromobility America also launched theElectric Rider Alliance, a 501c6 membership organization that is set up to “create a level playing field in the transportation industry for the small electric vehicle ecosystem through standards, lobbying and governance. ” In other news. Bolt Mobilityis introducing distance-based pricing for some of its micromobility vehicles. The aim here is to incentivize riders to slow down and ride more safely, rather than racing the clock. An e-scooter that looks like a Cybertruck? Check outInfinite Machine’s first product, the P1, which ison sale now. MeetShane, atwo-wheeled EV concept space-pod-looking thingfrom the creator of the original hoverboard, Shane Chen. Kirsten here again!Convoyisn’t a traditional deal of the week, but its collapse sure got my attention. The digital freight broker told employees this past week it was shutting down due to what executives described as a “massive freight recession. ” It turns out that disrupting the freight business is hard. The abrupt closure, which wiped out investors, comes about 18 months since the Seattle-based companyraised $260 millionin fresh funding that pushed its valuation to $3. 8 billion. I went back and read aninterview TechCrunch conductedwith Convoy co-founder and CEODan Lewis. A few things he said stuck out, namely what led him to start the company in the first place. The former Amazon and Google executive, who has a background in strategy and management consulting, told TechCrunch that when he was struck by the urge to start a company, he researched the money-attracting industries of the world, and then, using AngelList, saw how many companies were trying to disrupt those industries. Here’s the nugget: His search yielded thousands of companies that were working on industries ranging from telecommunications and fashion to video games and food. Billions of dollars were going into trucking each year but fewer than 30 startups showed an interest in the field. “I saw a massive opportunity and few people going after it,” Lewis told TechCrunch. And then later, when asked if his method of deciding on a direction for a startup is still a good method, Lewis said, in short, yes. Readthe whole interviewfrom May 2022 here. Other deals that got our attention. Hayden AI, an AI and geospatial analytics company, raised $53 million in a Series B funding round led by the Drawdown Fund. The company’s tech is being used by government agencies to enforce traffic violations that obstruct transit buses and capture data to help increase ridership and improve traffic efficiency. Commercial fleet insurance startupNirvana Insurancehasraised a $57 million Series Bto expand its big data platform, hire new staff and grow its business in the trucking industry. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with General Catalyst and Valor Equity Partners also participating. The round doubles Nirvana’s valuation to more than $350 million post-money. Supply chain logistics companyTransfixraised a $40 million Series F. The company is backed by New Enterprise Associates, G Squared and Canvas Ventures. EV charging companyWallboxhas acquired the operations and assets of German-based EV charging solutions companyABLfor €15 million. Together the plan is to deploy more than 1 million chargers globally. Volta Trucksfiled for bankruptcy proceedings in Sweden as difficulties with suppliers proved a hindrance to raising funds. Volta said the bankruptcy in August of Proterra, an EV parts supplier, and the uncertainty over its own battery supplier means it needed to cut down the number of trucks it could produce. Volta, which is based in Sweden but has operations in the U. K. , also said it would file for bankruptcy in Britain. Cruise, General MotorsandHondaare launching arobotaxi service in Japanunder a new joint venture. The service will launch with Origin vehicles in Tokyo in 2026. Speaking ofCruise, theNational Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)hasopened an investigationinto the GM subsidiary’s AV system following several incidents involving pedestrians in San Francisco. The most recent one left a woman stuck under a Cruise robotaxi after being hit by a human-driven vehicle. FoxconnandNvidiaare building “AI factories” to help accelerate AVs, robotics and other smart applications. The AI factories position the two against Tesla, which is building the Dojo supercomputer to do more or less the same thing — take in vast amounts of data, train it, tweak code and send it back out to self-driving cars. Waymoreleased alightweight simulator called Waymaxfor the AV research community. The simulator is designed to train multiple agents to perform complex, realistic behaviors. BMW Groupsays it will adopt the NACS charging standard in the U. S. and Canada. Drivers of BMW, Mini and Rolls-Royce brands will gain access to Tesla Superchargers in early 2025, and in that same year, BMW says it will implement NACS in EVs sold in the U. S. and Canada across those same brands. Speaking of NACS, global EV charging networkChargePointhas officially opened its AC and DC piles and is now deploying NACS connectors across its network. General Motorsisdelaying its $4 billion planto convert the Orion Assembly plant into an EV truck factory to late 2025 amid softening EV demand and, we’re guessing, the ongoing UAW strike. Kiahas startedtaking reservations for its EV9full-sized SUV. Reservations are $750 and can be applied to the purchase of the company. This is one of the first vehicles Kia has allowed customers to reserve in advance. Lucidmissed Wall Street delivery estimatesin the third quarter by about 500 vehicles. The automaker delivered 1,457 of its luxury Air sedans, reporting flat growth year-over-year. The results sent shares down as investors worried about softening demand for Lucid’s only EV. California-based EV startupPebbleunveiled aprototype of its flagship all-electric travel trailer. The $100,000 EV is designed to support a digital nomad looking to get lost in the wilderness — it can live off-grid for seven days. Commercial EV startupREE Automotivehas reported an order book that now totals $25 million for its modular battery EV platforms, dedicated to B2B customers. About 10,000 ofRivian’s all-electric vans aredelivering packagesthroughout the U. S. forAmazon. Teslahas urged the Biden administration to adopt stricter fuel economy standards than the NHTSA has proposed. Most other automakers have already said the NHTSA’s proposal was unfeasible, so Tesla’s call on regulators to double down seems to be yet another way theEV maker can one-up its competitors. Toyotahas also joined the NACS bandwagon. The automaker will build certain Toyota and Lexus vehicles from 2025 onward with an NACS port. EVTOL companyArcher Aviationplans tostart air taxi operations in Abu Dhabiin 2026. From there, Archer says it will expand across the UAE as part of a memorandum of understanding with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office. TheUnited Auto Workersstrike isaffecting CES. Stellantiscanceled its planned presentations for the tech trade show in January, citing the cost of ongoing UAW strikes. Zipcarisgetting hit with a finefrom the NHTSA for “renting vehicles with open, unrepaired recalls. ” One recall concerns 2015–2017 Ford Transit Vans, which continued to appear on Zipcar’s platform despite safety issues with the vehicles. Autobrainshired Uri Yacovy, a former SVP at Mobileye, as its chief operating officer. Logistics companyFlexportislaying off 20% of workers, or about 600 people, topping off a spate of staff upheavals at the company
| 2023-10-22T19:15:29 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/22/tesla-digs-its-own-grave-with-the-cybertruck-convoy-collapses-and-rivian-scores-a-win-at-rebelle/
| 1,841 | 1 |
d79615b1133188b042664061de46eb21
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News publisher files class action antitrust suit against Google, citing AI’s harms to their bottom line
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A new class action lawsuit filed this week in the U. S. District Court in D. C. accuses Google and parent company Alphabet of anticompetitive behavior in violation of U. S. antitrust law, the Sherman Act, and others, on behalf of news publishers. The case, filed by Arkansas-based publisher Helena World Chronicle, argues that Google “siphons off” news publishers’ content, their readers and ad revenue through anticompetitive means. It also specifically cites new AI technologies like Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and Bard AI chatbot as worsening the problem. In the complaint, Helena World Chronicle, which owns and publishes two weekly newspapers in Arkansas, argues that Google is “starving the free press” by sharing publishers’ content on Google, losing them “billions of dollars. ” In addition to new AI technologies, the suit points to Google’s older question-and-answer technologies, like the “Knowledge Graph” launched in May 2012, as part of the problem. “When a user searches for information on a topic, Google displays a ‘Knowledge Panel’ to the right of the search results. This panel contains a summary of content drawn from the Knowledge Graph database,” the complaint states. “Google compiled this massive database by extracting information from Publishers’ websites — what Google calls ‘materials shared across the web’ —and from ‘open source and licensed databases,’” it says. By 2020, the Knowledge Graph hadgrownto 500 billion facts about 5 billion entities. But much of the “collective intelligence” that Google tapped into was content “misappropriated from Publishers,” the complaint alleges. Other Google technologies, like “Featured Snippets” where Google algorithmically extracts answers from webpages, were also cited as shifting traffic away from publishers’ websites. More importantly, perhaps, is the suit’s tackling of how AI will impact publishers’ businesses. The problem was recently detailedin a report on Thursday by The Wall Street Journal,which led with a shocking statistic. When online magazine The Atlantic modeled what would happen if Google integrated AI into search, it found that 75% of the time the AI would answer the user’s query without requiring a click-through to its website, losing it traffic. This could have a major impact on publishers’ traffic going forward, as Google today drives nearly 40% of their traffic, according to data from Similarweb. Some publishers are now trying to get ahead of the problem. For example,Axel Springer just this week inked a deal with OpenAIto license its news for AI model training. But overall, publishers believe they’ll lose somewhere between 20-40% of their website traffic when Google’s AI products fully roll out, The WSJ’s report noted. The lawsuit reiterates this concern, claiming that Google’s recent advances in AI-based search were implemented with “the goal of discouraging end-users from visiting the websites of Class members who are part of the digital news and publishing line of commerce. ” SGE, it argues, offers web searchers a way to seek information in a conversational mode, but ultimately keeps users in Google’s “walled garden” as it “plagiarizes” their content. Publishers also can’t block SGE because it uses the same web crawler as Google’s general search service, GoogleBot. Plus, it says Google’s Bard AI was trained on a dataset that included “news, magazine and digital publications,” citing both a 2023reportfrom the News Media Alliance anda Washington Post article about AI training datafor reference. (The Post, which worked with researchers at the Allen Institute for AI, had found that News and Media sites were the third largest category of AI training data. ) The case points to other concerns, too, like changing AdSense rates and evidence of improper spoliation of evidence on Google’s part, by its destruction of chat messages — an issue raised in the recent Epic Games lawsuit against Google over app store antitrust issues,which Epic won. In addition to damages, the suit is asking for an injunction that would require Google to obtain consent from publishers to use their website data to train its general artificial intelligence products including Google’s own and those of rivals. It also asks Google to allow publishers who opt out of SGE to still show up in Google search results, among other things. The U. S. lawsuit followsan agreement Google reached last month with the Canadian governmentwhich would see the search giant paying Canadian media for use of their content. Under the terms of the deal, Google will provide $73. 5 million (100 million Canadian dollars) every year to news organizations in the country, with funds distributed based on the news outlets’ headcount. Negotiations with Meta are still unresolved, though Metabegan blocking news in Canada in August,in light of the pressure to pay for the content under the new Canadian law. The case also arrives alongside the filing of the U. S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Googlefor monopolizing digital ad technologies, and references the 2020 Justice Department’scivil antitrust suitover search and search advertising (which are different markets from digital ad technologies in the more recent suit). “The anticompetitive effects of Google’s scheme cause profound harm to competition, to consumers, to labor, and to a democratic free press,” reads anannouncementposted to the website of the law firm handling the case, Hausfeld. “Plaintiff Helena World Chronicle, LLC invokes the Sherman Act and Clayton Act to seek class-wide monetary and injunctive relief to restore and ensure competition for digital news and reference publishing and set up guardrails to preserve a free marketplace of ideas in the new era of artificial intelligence,” it states. A Google spokesperson offered a statement on the lawsuit, saying “This lawsuit is meritless. People have many ways to access information and news content today – through publishers’ websites, dedicated apps, social media platforms, print papers and more. Google links people to publishers’ websites more than 24 billion times each month – at no cost to them. ” The complaint is available below. Helena World Chronicle, LLC v. Google LLC and Alphabet IncbyTechCrunchon Scribd Editor’s note: This post was updated after publication with a statement provided by Google on Friday evening
| 2023-12-15T17:56:02 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/15/news-publisher-files-class-action-antitrust-suit-against-google-citing-ais-harms-to-their-bottom-line/
| 988 | 1 |
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Zoom brings local data storage to paying European customers
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Zoom has announced a slew of privacy-focused features and services, as the video communication company looks to appease customers concerned about where their data resides. With Europe pushinga digital sovereignty agenda, U. S. companies have been clambering to convince customers across the continent that they’re serious about handing over more control around data storage and processing. Amazon’s AWS cloud unit recentlyannounced its digital sovereignty pledge, while TikTok is in the process ofopening localized data centersas part of abroader European charm offensive. Elsewhere,MicrosoftandGoogle are alsopaying heed to the growing calls to bring data closer to where their customers need it. And it’s against that backdrop that Zoom today revealed that it will support localized data storage in the European Economic Area (EEA), where premium (i. e. paying) customers can choose specific data from its webinars, meetings and team chat tools to store in local data centers —in Europe this will mean Frankfurt at first, though Zoom does also have data centers in Amsterdam, Leipzig and Zurich. Zoom also confirmed that data may still be shared with its U. S. operations in very specific or “exceptional” circumstances, for example in relation totrust and safety. To support this latest rollout, Zoom said it will also set up a dedicated technical support team for European customers that opt-in to the program. Elsewhere, Zoom is also rolling out audit log tracking globally, where company administrators can track when logs are exported and deleted. And it also has launched a new tool, located in the same privacy dashboard as the data residency feature, to help admins respond to data subject access requests (DSAR) and delete personal data, such as names or email addresses that may have been collected. This is a core tenet of regulationssuch as Europe’s GDPRand itsCalifornian CCPA counterpart, designed to ensure a product’s users can access information on what personal data a company holds on them, and request deletion of certain data. Topics Senior Reporter 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?
| 2023-06-06T12:00:37 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/06/zoom-brings-local-data-storage-to-paying-european-customers/
| 397 | 0.9 |
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|
iOS 17 beta includes further hints that the iPhone 15 Pro will have an ‘Action Button’
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Apple has released iOS 17 beta 7 to developers and it includes further hints that the iPhone 15 Pro will have an “Action Button. ” The new details, which were first spotted by9to5Mac, seem to corroborate previous rumors that Apple will replace the mute switch with a new Action Button. iOS 17 beta 7 adds haptic feedback patterns for when the user enables or disables silent mode. These patterns will make the device vibrate more prominently when the user switches between them, which would be useful for new phones with an Action Button. Previous iOS versions only included a quick haptic feedback for when the user enables Silent Mode, but never for when Silent Mode is disabled. Although the new haptic feedback for when Silent Mode is turned on is available for all iPhone models, the feedback for switching back to normal mode is unused. 9to5Mac was able to replicate the new haptic pattern when turning off Silent Mode. With the mute switch, it’s easy to know if Silent Mode is enabled or not, and if it’s replaced by a solid state button, haptic feedback will help users know which mode the phone is in. According toMacRumors, the new Action Button will allow users to replace the action of enabling or disabling Silent Mode with the option to trigger a Focus Mode, record a Voice Memo, trigger Siri Shortcuts or open the device’s Camera. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurmanreported last month that the new Pro models will come with titanium frames, as opposed to stainless steel, making them stronger and lighter. Their screens will also have thinner bezels. Apple is expected to announce its new iPhones and Apple Watches in mid-September. Apple services growth continues to counter iPhone sales slide in Q3 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. 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?
| 2023-08-23T15:07:01 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/23/ios-17-beta-includes-further-hints-that-the-iphone-15-pro-will-have-an-action-button/
| 410 | 0.9 |
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|
What You Need to Raise a Series A Today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024
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Raising a Series A round in today’s competitive market can be a daunting task. To equip seed-stage founders with the insights and strategies needed for success,TechCrunch Disrupt 2024will host a crucial session on the Builders Stage titled “What You Need to Raise a Series A Today. ” This session will bring together some of the industry’s most experienced investors to share what they and their firms are looking for in their next Series A deals. Attendees of this session will gain unparalleled insights from these industry veterans, learning what investors are currently seeking and how to position their startups for success. From understanding the key metrics and milestones that matter to investors, to crafting a compelling narrative that highlights their startup’s unique value proposition, founders will take away the knowledge and confidence needed to secure their Series A funding. Let’s meet these Series A mavens! Renata Quintini, co-founder and managing director ofRenegade Partners. Renata has spent the past 15 years investing in founding teams that are transforming the trajectory of humanity through technology. Before co-founding Renegade Partners, she was a partner at Lux Capital, specializing in early-stage deep technology investments. Joining Renata will beCorinne Riley, partner atGreylock. Corinne has a strong track record of partnering with early-stage founders who are creating data and AI products at both the infrastructure and application layers. She has worked with companies such as Adept, Baseten, Braintrust, Common Room, Opal and WarpStream. Rounding out the panel,Elizabeth Yin, co-founder and general partner atHustle Fund, will be joining us onstage. Elizabeth’s experience spans pre-seed investing, having been a partner at 500 Startups where she managed seed-stage investments and ran an accelerator program. She co-founded and successfully exited an adtech company, LaunchBit, providing her with a well-rounded perspective on the entrepreneurial journey. TechCrunch Disrupt is where you’ll find innovation for every stage of your startup journey. Whether you’re a budding founder with a revolutionary idea, a seasoned startup looking to scale or an investor seeking the next big thing, TechCrunch Disrupt offers unparalleled resources, connections and expert insights to propel your venture forward. More than 10,000 startup leaders will be attending this year’s event on October 28-30 in San Francisco. Purchase your tickets here. 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?
| 2024-07-02T16:30:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/02/what-you-need-to-raise-a-series-a-today-at-techcrunch-disrupt-2024/
| 442 | 0.9 |
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Wealthy Harris donors are reportedly pressing for ouster of FTC Chair Lina Khan
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Posted: Some of Vice President Kamala Harris’ wealthier donors are informally asking for FTC Chair Lina Khan to be replaced,reports Bloomberg. It’s not really surprising: Her expansive definition of antitrust enforcement has countless industries frantic, and the largest corporations opposed her appointment from the start. Khan’s FTC, which has opposed mergers that would have been waved through by previous FTC chairs, has seen mixed success. Buther nomination by President Biden in 2021was clearly a challenge to longstanding doctrines that allowed mega-corporations, including “Big Tech,” to consolidate power. She went so far as tocall them “mob bosses” in a recent interview with TechCrunch. The donor pressure may be misplaced, considering that Khan’s term ends later this month. While she will remain in place until the next agency chief is appointed, chances are this will extend her term by months, not years. Meanwhile, the donors reportedly also expressed a dislike of SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, whose term ends in June 2026. 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
| 2024-09-06T20:52:35 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/06/wealthy-harris-donors-are-reportedly-pressing-for-ouster-of-ftc-chair-lina-khan/
| 225 | 0.9 |
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OpenMeter makes it easier for companies to track usage-based billing
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In enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS), usage-based pricing — a pricing model in which customers are charged only when they use a product or service — is gaining ground. Accordingto a report from VC firm OpenView, approximately 60% of SaaS businesses offer some form of usage-based pricing today. Recently, Apigee, Google Cloud’s API management platform, made the shift, as did vertical software giant Autodesk. But while usage-based pricing has its advantages, it can be tougher to keep tabs on from a billing perspective. Often, companies paying for usage-based-pricing products struggle to figure out what to bill their own customers for said products. “This is a new challenge for engineers, as they need to build a real-time infrastructure to put cost control in place and integrate usage data with product and revenue teams,” Peter Marton, co-founder and CEO ofOpenMeter, told TechCrunch in an interview. “Real-time data is a challenge from the consumer side, too. A tight feedback loop between customers interacting with usage-based products and the consumption reflected on their billing and usage dashboards is essential for controlling spending. ” Marton experienced issues with “metering,” as he calls it, firsthand while working at Stripe as a staff software engineer. There, he ran into blockers collecting usage-based pricing data from different providers and infrastructure and aggregating and analyzing this usage together. In search of a solution, Marton teamed up with András Tóth, an ex-Cisco software engineer and Marton’s former colleague at RisingStack, a software dev firm, to launch OpenMeter, which meters customer usage of apps. As Marton explains, OpenMeter — built on Apache Kafka, an open source toolkit for handling real-time data feeds — processes “usage events” across a company’s tech stack. It then turns the events into human-readable consumption metrics, which it funnels to billing and finance dashboards as well as customer relationship management databases for product and revenue teams to review. OpenMeter can also enforce usage and rate limits. And it can execute usage-based or hybrid pricing, allowing companies to more transparently bill (at least in theory) their customers. “OpenMeter is … built for engineers, and offers a composable architecture to process real-time usage data and control cost,” Marton said. “Enterprise companies choose OpenMeter for its composability. It’s hard to replace decades of monetization infrastructure at once, so we built a solution that engineering teams can incrementally adopt. ” Now, OpenMeter isn’t the only game in town when it comes to vendors addressing metering dilemmas. There’sMetronome, which recently raised $43 million for its software that helps companies offer usage-based billing, andAmberflo, which is building tool sets to transform SaaS pricing with metered usage. Elsewhere, M3ter furnishes SaaS businesses with usage-based pricing solutions. So what sets OpenMeter apart? Well, for one, it’s open source. OpenMeter’s software is freely available to use, with paid options for enterprises that prefer managed plans. Marton implies that it’s also cheaper than the competition — though he acknowledges that exact pricing is still being worked out. “Competitors in the usage-based space only cater to the revenue teams with a closed source, billing-first approach,” he said. “OpenMeter focuses on the new generation of AI companies. ” In any case, OpenMeter has managed to achieve a measure of early success, raking in $3 million from Y Combinator (which incubated it), Haystack and Sunflower Capital. Marton says that the company, which has four employees at present based out of its San Francisco office, has “multiple” market-leader AI companies as customers — but wasn’t willing to share their names. “The economic downturn prompted companies to have tighter control around spending, necessitating understanding per-user cost and enforcing usage quotas, while revenue teams need to find actionable insights in usage data to find new revenue streams,” Marton said. “It’s a tailwind for OpenMeter. ”
| 2024-03-12T18:35:10 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/12/openmeter-makes-it-easier-for-companies-to-track-usage-based-billing/
| 620 | 1 |
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OpenAI co-founder John Schulman leaves Anthropic after just five months
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Posted: OpenAI co-founder and prominent AI researcher John Schulman has left Anthropic after five months,accordingtomultiplereports. Credited as one of the leading architects of ChatGPT, Schulman left OpenAI last August for its direct competitor, Anthropic. Hepostedabout the decision on X, saying it stemmed from a desire to deepen his focus on AI alignment — the science of ensuring AI behaves as intended — and engage in more hands-on technical work. “[At Anthropic], I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in,” Schulmanwrote. Schulman hasn’t publicly addressed his departure from Anthropic, nor has he indicated what he plans to do next. In astatement provided to Bloomberg, Anthropic’s chief science officer, Jared Kaplan, said that he was “sad to see John go,” but “fully support[s] his decision to pursue new opportunities. ” 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
| 2025-02-06T16:15:09 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/06/openai-co-founder-john-schulman-leaves-anthropic-after-just-five-months/
| 207 | 0.9 |
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Fortnite is expanding its horizons with a Lego building game and a Rock Band successor
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The first fruit of the partnership betweenFornite-maker Epic Games and Lego is due out this week — along with a pair of other games within a game that expand Fortnite’s horizons considerably. The hybrid Lego/Fortnite experience is billed as a “survival crafting LEGO adventure” and will debut this Thursday, December 7. Lego Fortnite, which Epic describes as its own live service game, is designed for ages 10 and up and players can probably expect a big multiplayer game world that incorporates building elements of the Lego games. The new kid-friendly Fortnite experience will “encourage creativity, experimentation and collaboration through play,” which could make for a pretty different experience from the chaotic and zany but tense-by-definition battle royale. The companies aren’t sharing much else about what to expect from gameplay, the map or its mechanics yet beyond a few general teaser images. Epic and the company synonymous with clicking together fun little bricks firstannounced their partnershipin April of last year. At the time, the companies said they were teaming up to build “a fun place for kids to play in the metaverse” in a long-term collaboration. A year and a half later, the term “metaverse” may have fallen out of vogue — blame Meta’s flopped rebrand for that one — but online multiplayer games, customizable avatars and in-game goods probably haven’t approached peak popularity yet. Beyond Lego Fortnite, Epic also just announced Rocket Racing, a “supersonic arcade racer” by the team that created Rocket League, and Fortnite Festival, a music game from the makers of Rock Band that lets players perform onstage “with hit music by their favorite artists. ” Lego Fortnite might be the star of the show, but Epic is clearly expanding its horizons massively this year, both through partnerships and by building out new games via its recent-ish acquisitions of Rocket League developerPsyonixandHarmonix, the studio behind Rock Band. In the run-up to the launch of Lego Fortnite, Epic has introduced 1,200 Lego-ified skins in its own game, which just entered a new season (Chapter 5, Season 1) over the weekend. That includes a Lego version of some Fortnite classics like Peely, Raven and the Cuddle Team Leader (the creepy pink bear). The adventure is building ✨#LEGOFortnitelaunches in Fortnite on December 7, 2023. pic. twitter. com/rHofGkstk5 — LEGO Fortnite (@LEGOFortnite)December 2, 2023 Lego Fortnite won’t be Epic’s first foray into courting young players. Regular Fortnite is kid-friendly, though Epic has found itself in hot water with regulators over how it handles its young player base. Last year, theFTC fined Epic for $520 millionafter dark pattern designs in its in-game store lured young players to make purchases. The FTC also scrutinized Epic’s handling of young players’ online safety — concerns that prompted Fortnite to add “cabined accounts” that put special restrictions on accounts for players who aren’t old enough to provide digital consent (kids under the age of 13 in the U. S. ). While Fortnite remains popular — though quantifying justhowpopular can be difficult — the hit battle royale game has plenty of competition these days. On the younger side of its player base, Epic clearly wants to compete with Roblox and Minecraft, two game empires ubiquitous among under-13 gamers that offer open online experiences where kids can play and build worlds together. By partnering with Lego on a collaborative building game (presumably less of an adult-friendly high-octane fight to the death) and rolling out two other alternative gaming experiences, Epic looks to be piecing together a solid foundation for its vast long-term online gaming vision — whether we’re calling it the metaverse or not. FTC fines Fortnite maker Epic Games $520M over children’s privacy and item shop charges Fortnite developer Epic Games and Lego partner to build a metaverse aimed at kids
| 2023-12-05T06:02:35 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/04/lego-fortnite-rock-band-fortnite-festival-rocket-racing/
| 624 | 1 |
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|
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|
Amazon says it’ll spend $230 million on generative AI startups
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Amazon says that it willcommitup to $230 million to startups building generative AI-powered applications. The investment, roughly $80 million of which will fund Amazon’s second AWS Generative AI Accelerator program, aims to position AWS as an attractive cloud infrastructure choice for startups developing generative AI models to power their products, apps and services. Much of the new tranche — including the entire portion set aside for the accelerator program — comes in the form of compute credits for AWS infrastructure, meaning that it can’t be transferred to other cloud service providers like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. To sweeten the pot, Amazon is pledging that startups in this year’s Generative AI Accelerator cohort will gain access to experts and tech from Nvidia, the program’s presenting partner. They will also be invited to join the Nvidia Inception program, which provides companies opportunities to connect with potential investors and additional consulting resources. The Generative AI Accelerator program has also grown substantially. Last year’s cohort, which had 21 startups, received only up to $300,000 in AWS compute credits, amounting to around a combined $6. 3 million investment. “With this new effort, we will help startups launch and scale world-class businesses, providing the building blocks they need to unleash new AI applications that will impact all facets of how the world learns, connects, and does business,” Matt Wood, VP of AI products at AWS, said in a statement. Amazon’s growing spending on generative AI tech, which includes efforts like its $100 millionAWS Generative AI Innovation Center,free credits for startups using major AI modelsand itsProject Olympusmodel, comes as the company looks to catch up to tech giant rivals in the blooming — and increasingly competitive — generative AI space. While Amazon claims that its various generative AI businesses havereached“multiple billions” in run rate, the company is widely perceived as having missed the boat on generative AI. AWS originallyplanned to unveil its own generative AI modelakin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT code-named Bedrock — which eventually became Amazon’sBedrockmodel hosting service — at its annual conference in November 2022, according to The Information. But major bugs forced the organization to postpone the launch. (Amazon PR disputes this. ) Amazon’sAlexa division has been beset with challengesas well, thanks to technical setbacks and political infighting, as reported by Fortune’s Sharon Goldman this week. Nine months after a splashy press demo of a “next-gen” Alexa, the new Alexa is reportedly far from ready for prime time — the result of insufficient training data, inadequate access to training hardware and other roadblocks. Amazon also passed on early opportunities to back two leading AI startups, Cohere and Anthropic. The company later tried to invest in Cohere, but was rejected — and had to settle for a co-investment (albeit alarge one, totaling $4 billion) in Anthropic with chief rival Google. Besides the recent departure of Howard Wright, AWS’ head of startups, who managed startup relationships at the org, a hurdle in Amazon’s way is growing scrutiny from regulators over Big Tech’s investments in AI startups. The U. S. Federal Trade Commission recently opened aninquiryon Microsoft’s backing of OpenAI, as well as Google and Amazon’s investments in Anthropic. European policymakers havesignaledthey’re skeptical of such deals as well
| 2024-06-13T15:43:11 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/13/amazon-says-itll-spend-230-million-on-generative-ai-startups/
| 531 | 1 |
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|
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|
Microsoft faces UK antitrust probe after hiring Inflection AI founders and employees
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Microsoft is facing a full regulatory probe in the U. K. after the tech giant hired thecore team behind Inflection AI, a U. S. -based OpenAI rival in which Microsoft had previously invested. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) todayannouncedthat it’s launching a “phase 1” merger inquiry, which kicks off a 40-working day investigative period where it will gather evidence and decide whether to proceed with a full probe. The news comes four months after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadellalaunched a new consumer AI divisionspearheaded by the founders of Inflection AI, including deep learning scientistKarén Simonyanand Google DeepMind co-founderMustafa Suleyman. At the same time, Nadella confirmed that a number of other Inflection AI membershad joinedMicrosoft’s new AI unit (Bloombergreported that mostactually joined), one of whom was Jordan Hoffmann, an AI scientist and engineer who isnow heading up Microsoft’s U. K. AI hub in London. At the heart of the concerns is that big tech companiesare adopting a new M&A approachdesigned to circumvent regulatory scrutiny around AI, in what some have dubbed the “quasi-merger,” which may involve anything from strategic investments to scooping up startup founders and technical talent. Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a massive surprise, as theCMA revealed in April that it was conductingpreliminary enquiries into a triumvirate of AI partnerships. One of those was Microsoft’s recentinvestment in Mistral AI, a French startup (anddouble unicorn) working on AI foundation models. It didn’t take long for the CMA to conclude that the investmentdidn’t qualify for investigationunder current merger regulations, given that Microsoft’s stake of less than 1% wouldn’t give the tech giant any meaningful clout in the future direction of the startup. The CMA is also currently looking at Amazon’s$4 billion investment in U. S. -based AI company Anthropic, while it is alsoexpected to launch a full probeinto Microsoft’sclose partnership withChatGPT-maker OpenAI,similar to the European Commission in the EU. With the phase 1 inquiry now under way, the CMA has until September 11 to reach a decision on whether the hiring is tantamount to a “merger,” and if it is, whether it’s likely to damage competition in the United Kingdom. If the CMA decides that it does, it will then proceed the case to a more in-depth “phase 2” probe which can take around six months. Topics Senior Reporter 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?
| 2024-07-16T13:40:51 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/microsoft-faces-uk-antitrust-probe-after-hiring-inflection-ai-founders-and-employees/
| 453 | 0.9 |
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|
Adapty releases a web-based solution for app makers to earn money outside app stores
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Over the last few years,developershaveincreasinglycomplainedabout paying feesto Apple or Google for App Store or Play Store distributions. App makers have often said that both companies make it difficult for them to earn money outside of their systems. New York-based app revenue management platformAdaptywants to change that with its new offering called FunnelFox, which helps acquire customers through websites or web apps. The idea behind FunnelFox is simple: It helps app makers create quizzes or experiences on the web to acquire or onboard customers. And once the customer pays, they get a link to download the app. This way, the app makers don’t have to pay up to 30% of the app store tax. “A year ago, I had a chat with our top customers of the revenue tracking product and realized that they acquire a big chunk of customers through the web by building acquisition funnels internally. We thought that this is a big opportunity and decided to build FunnelFox to make web funnels easier for everyone,” Adapty CEO Vitaly Davydov told TechCrunch over a call. Adapty has been working with a closed set of more than 100 customers for over a year to try out FunnelFox. The company said it has tracked $20 million in revenue during this phase, and customers have seen their revenue double as compared to direct revenue from mobile in-app purchases. FunnelFox has a drag and drop tool to build quizzes to acquire customers. It also has an AI component, which can suggest different questions based on the App Store or Play Store link of the app. The startup has two core parts of the business: an SDK that helps app makers with subscriptions and a platform for marketers to target audiences and understand the lifetime value of a customer. FunnelFox is the latest edition of its suite. Customers can use FunnelFox separately from Adapty while using another app revenue tracking solution, such asRevenueCat. FunnelFox works on a revenue sharing basis, with the company taking a cut on user acquisitions. Adapty plans tiered pricing for FunnelFox, but didn’t specify exact details. Adapty has raised$2. 5 million in capital. Davydov said that the company is profitable. While the startup is not actively looking for funding, it is open to exploring fundraising. The company serves 10,000 applications and has tracked $1. 2 billion in revenue per year. This is up from 2,500 apps it tracked in 2022. Davydov said the company is consistently growing both in terms of number of apps and revenue tracked. The startup wants to add more AI to its products. For Adapty, it wants to use AI to help app makers create payment screens that will give them better conversion rate by suggesting design and rates. 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?
| 2025-03-20T14:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/20/adapty-releases-a-web-based-solutions-for-appmakers-to-earn-money-outside-app-stores/
| 529 | 1 |
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Severe outage knocked WhatsApp down
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WhatsApp, the Meta-owned ubiquitous messaging app, was inaccessible to many users around the globe due to a “major disruption” earlier Wednesday. Tens of thousands of users reported issues sending and receiving messages on the social app, used by more than 2 billion users each month. The outage started at around 1:15 p. m. Pacific time, according to user messages, and lasted about 40 to 50 minutes. Meta’s business website earlier said the outage had caused a “major disruption. ” It’s unclear what caused the outage. Topics Reporter, India 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?
| 2023-07-19T20:47:38 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/19/whatsapp-down-2/
| 163 | 0.8 |
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|
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Investors prefer debt over equity (but not venture debt)
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We are in very interesting times today. It’s rare to see so many tectonic shifts happening in real time: High interest rates, declining equity values, SVB and other banks failing with a continued contagion risk and a recession looming. There has been an aggressive shift in assumed equity returns compared to fixed income returns. The data tells a clear and extreme story. Simply put, equity risk premiums (ERPs) have broken down well below the ranges that were established since 2008. The ERP calculates the projected S&P returns versus the returns of 10-year treasury bills (data from Morgan Stanley). The below chart is important to the startup audience because it speaks to why fundraising is extremely challenging right now and why valuations are coming down so dramatically. Opportunity cost is powerful indeed. For the venture world specifically, this dynamic is compounded by the venture debt markets cooling, which in turn makes equity the most viable option for most. Deployment of VC capital continues to slow down. SVB measured the inflow and outflow of deposits by a metric called total client funds (TCF), which has been negative since the first quarter of 2022 (five straight quarters now). This trend is continuing in 2023: VC capital deployment declined another 60%, and deal count has dropped about 25% from a year earlier. Declining venture activity combined with dropping ERPs is a clear signal that there needs to be a material correction in private tech company valuations. However, anecdotally, we have seen that private company valuation expectations have remained lofty relative to obvious public comparables. Venture debt, which helps fill the gaps for companies that want equity alternatives, grew in popularity last year: Over $32 billion of venture debt was issued in 2022, about four times the amount in 2012 ($8 billion). This practice lets companies avoid an updated valuation mark because they get to delay an equity raise. The rationale goes something like: “Take from Peter at a later date to pay back Paul plus interest (and warrants). ” That rationale can be crippling for unprofitable companies; the success of the debt instrument for both the borrower and lender is solely based on the company’s ability to raise equity in the future to pay down the debt. In the wake of SVB’s collapse, venture-lending practices are being questioned. The venture debt market has been jolted in the short term and will change in several ways: Capital markets are changing, which means financing options for companies are changing as well. The clear trend is that companies’ optionality is shrinking. With optionality around fundraising trending lower, more companies will look to pursue primary stock offerings. We will continue to see additional downrounds like with Stripe, Tonal and Dataiku. Many venture-backed companies are in strong cash positions due to large raises in 2021 and/or aggressive cuts in spending, but most are dealing with both slowing fundamentals and aggressive multiple compression in their public comparable groups. Waiting for a rebound in public market multiples in order to preserve previous valuations has not proven to be a good strategy, and now an increasingly larger group of companies are competing for a smaller pool of VC and crossover capital. Topics Founder & Portfolio Manager Contributor 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?
| 2023-04-18T11:30:15 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/18/investors-prefer-debt-over-equity-but-not-venture-debt/
| 610 | 1 |
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KIT Plugins, an audio software startup that helps producers and musicians enhance their sound, raises $1 million
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KIT Plugins, a music software development startup, has raised $1 million in seed funding led by Copycat Holdings. The Nashville-based startup offers digital audio emulations of rare analog gear to help producers and musicians record quality studio sound. The startup was founded in 2020 by CEO Matt Kleinman with the aim of giving producers and musicians access to audio plugins across creative and mixing tools to help them enhance their sound quality. Kleinman approached John McBride, the owner of Blackbird Studio, to create a company that would create software out of the studio’s collection of analog gear. Kleinman, an audio engineer and producer who worked with big names like Fifth Harmony and Big Machine Records, says he was aware of the need for digital audio emulations, or audio plugins, in the music industry. “The initial idea came from the sort of a hole in the market more than anything,” Kleinman told TechCrunch in an interview. “Blackbird is a pretty amazing facility within the music space and John has a collection of vintage equipment that is pretty much unparalleled. I had access to this amazing equipment and I would talk to friends who didn’t have access to software that could recreate that equipment as well as we wanted it to. I saw an opportunity to bring Blackbird into the plug-in world. ” KIT Plugins has now also inked a deal with the Norman Petty Recording Studio, which features audio gear that hasn’t been used in years, Kleinman says. The startup currently has three plug-ins in production emulating the sounds from the studio. The startup’s primary focus is analog emulation, which means that it’s taking physical electronic equipment, such as a preamplifier or an equalizer, and turning it into software that lets you recreate that sound. “You can download the software and you can load it up on your computer,” Kleinman said. “And when you’re creating music on your laptop or your desktop at home, you can capture that same sound as running through that equipment in the real world. And this has benefits. One is of course that $100 is a lot cheaper than buying a lot of this vintage equipment. The other benefit is for people like John who have access to the equipment but can’t travel with it. It’s sort of a two-edged blade in that sense. It helps people who can’t afford the gear, but it also helps people who may have the gear but can’t travel with the gear. ” Kleinman says KIT Plugins’ target demographic is wide, as the startup’s current customer base is established hobbyists and professionals. When starting out with the Blackbird plug-ins, the startup was more focused on people that were already in the music space, but as its new products come out, KIT Plugins is targeting anyone who wants get started in music production. As for the new funding, the startup plans to use it to accelerate its business by creating more plug-ins faster and speeding up the development of new technology with the help of artificial intelligence. KIT Plugins currently offers nine audio plug-ins that range from $29 to $200. The startup currently has more than 6,000 paid customers, and has seen an average monthly paid customer growth of 9% and an order growth of 14% monthly since its launch. In terms of the future, the startup wants to be more than just a plug-in company, as it aims to be a platform where people can come together and collaborate. To achieve this, the company recently launched a subsidiary brand calledNOIZ Hubthat currently has a YouTube channel that offers educational content for the audio community. As noted earlier, KIT Plugins also wants to leverage AI, as the company wants to use the technology to support creatives. “The question everyone’s trying to answer, and we’re no different, is how does AI integrate into our future,” he said. “My mission is to be a company that uses artificial intelligence to support creatives. AI is there to help you do your job, not replace your job. My hope over the next you know, four or five, six years is to build a place where people can learn and find the right tools. Music production is probably one of the hardest things to get into. It took me a long time to feel confident in my ability as a musician and a producer. I want to make that easier. ” 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. 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?
| 2023-10-11T13:00:26 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/11/kit-plugins-audio-software-startup-help-producers-musicians-enhance-their-sound-raises-1-million/
| 855 | 1 |
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Elon Musk confirms X is soon launching two new premium tiers
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Elon Musk today said that X (formerly Twitter) is going to soon launch two new premium tiers, confirming previous reports and code sightings. The owner of the platform said that one tier will cost lower than the current $8 per month plan, but won’t reduce ads. The other tier will be a more expensive one, which will remove all ads. The current premium planpromises to show “half ads” to subscribers. Musk didn’t mention the prices of these new tiers. Two new tiers of X Premium subscriptions launching soon. One is lower cost with all features, but no reduction in ads, and the other is more expensive, but has no ads. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk)October 20, 2023 Earlier this month,@aaronp613found references inX’s code about three separate premium tiers. Separately,Bloombergalso reported that the company is testing multiple paid plans to bring in more revenue. Notably, Meta is said to be thinking aboutan ad-free tierin response to an EU Courtjudgment, which says users should have an option for an ad-free tier if they refuse consent for the company to process their data. TikTok also confirmed recently that it is testingan ad-free tier. It’s not clear if X’s move is in response to the EU Court ruling. Musk & co. are trying new ways to increase X’s revenue. Earlier this week, the company started testinga $1 per year plan for new usersin New Zealand and the Philippines for basic functionality like posting, liking and reposting. The social network said that this move was toreduce the number of bots on the platform, and wasn’t meant to be “a profit driver. ” Earlier this month, Reuters reported that sinceMusk’s takeover ad revenue has constantly dropped. So it’s not surprising for Musk to make moves to bolster subscription revenue. As the company is trying to attract advertisers with former NBCU exec Linda Yaccarino as CEO, it is trying to publish metrics that look appealing. Earlier this month, Yaccarino said thatX has around 245 million daily active usersand500 million daily posts. 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?
| 2023-10-20T06:21:26 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/19/elon-musk-confirms-x-is-soon-launching-two-new-premium-tiers/
| 409 | 0.9 |
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Jumia plans to raise more than $100 million in secondary shares to drive stalled user growth
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African e-commerce company Jumia is selling 20 million American depositary shares over the next couple of weeks, TechCrunch has learned. The at-the-market transaction is to take advantage of strong results despite a volatile market. Given Jumia’s share price of around $5. 70 when the stock market opened on Tuesday, the e-commerce company could potentially raise approximately $100 million through its new share offering. However, the final amount will depend on the share price, which has since dropped to $4. 90. This decline, from around $11 as of Monday following a 200% rally in the last three months, may be attributed to shareholders reacting unfavorably to news of dilution, the impact of global carry trades, or both. It’s not the first time Jumia has taken this approach. Between 2020 and 2021, the e-tailer raised almost $600 million through the sale of secondary shares. CEO Francis Dufay, who isundertaking his first secondary share sale, said on a call with TechCrunch that this time, Jumia is raising this money to accelerate its business after making significant progress on cost management and efficiency. “The new funding will be used to expand our supply chain network, particularly by enhancing logistics to reach smaller cities and broadening our overall network,” Dufay remarked. “We also plan to invest in technology, focusing on marketing and vendor technology, which we believe will significantly impact growth. Bottom line, after deep, fundamental, hard work on cost and efficiency, we believe the time is right to shift the cursor towards growing and invest some extra money so we can scale the company faster and break even faster. ” Specifically, the funds will improve Jumia’s cash position, which currently stands at $92. 8 million (comprising $45. 1 million in cash and cash equivalents and $47. 7 million in term deposits and other financial assets) from its Q2 2024, itsmost recent financial report. That’s compared to the platform’s liquidity position of $120. 6 million in Q4 2023 and $101. 5 million in Q1 2024. The funds raised will also be used for other purposes, including customer acquisition, product assortment, supply retention and adding more vendors to its marketplace. Jumia’s active customer base has hovered around two million for several quarters. The number represents a 6. 0% quarter-over-quarter compared to Q1 2024 and flat year-over-year growth between Q2 2023 and Q2 2024. “Our customer base is still relatively small, around two million active consumers per quarter, while we work in markets with over 600 million people. So we can do much more on the customer base,” said Dufay. Subsequently, orders increased 7% year over year to 4. 8 million. Jumia ascribes the growth to the diversification of its product assortment, another area it intends to double down on with the new capital raised. However, despite the increase in orders, Jumia’s GMV and revenue declined 5% and 17% year-over-year to $170. 1 million and $36. 5 million, respectively. As with most of Jumia’s financial reports, sincenew management took overin Q4 2022, a recurring theme has been that these numbers typically highlight a year-over-year improvement on a constant currency basis but fluctuate in dollar terms due to devaluation. For instance, Jumia’s GMV in constant currency grew 35. 0% year-over-year while revenue increased 15%. “The devaluation that happened both in our two biggest potential markets, Egypt and Nigeria, at the end of Q1 had a significant impact on our revenues quarter over quarter,” Dufay said. “However, we have seen some signs of stabilization and a sharp reduction of the spread between the official and parallel market rates. More importantly, our ability to drive GMV growth in constant currency illustrates that our value proposition is working. ” Turning to profitability, Jumia’s adjusted EBITDA loss, which excludes finance costs, decreased 10% to $16. 3 million — in line with the reduction in operating loss, down 8% year-over-year to $20. 2 million — and driven primarily by cost-savings initiatives. WhileJumiahas long used both adjusted EBITDA and operating loss to measure its losses and path to profitability for years, Dufay insisted on the call that the 12-year-old e-commerce platform is keener to report loss before income tax from continuing operations, which includes finance costs, such as the impact of FX and the cost of cash repatriation. Loss before income tax from continuing operations was $22. 5 million, down 27% year-over-year. “We’ve emphasized this KPI more over the past quarters due to the currency volatility and the associated costs it creates. Reporting the full picture is essential for companies exposed to such volatility. For instance, Mercado Libre in Latin America also prefers to look at the loss before income tax rather than EBITDA,” said the CEO. “During their recent results announcement, they highlighted how currency volatility in Argentina impacts finance costs. Therefore, focusing on loss before income tax offers a more comprehensive view when operating across multiple markets with currency fluctuations. ” Topics Reporter, Africa 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?
| 2024-08-06T23:00:38 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/06/jumia-plans-to-raise-more-than-100-million-in-secondary-shares-to-drive-stalled-user-growth/
| 887 | 1 |
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Today! Final hours to save on Disrupt 2024 passes
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It’s come down to this, startup fans. Today’s the last day to beat the buzzer and claim the biggest discount on passes toTechCrunch Disrupt 2024, taking place October 28–30. Here’s a simple question: What the heck are you waiting for? Buy one of these passes — Attendee, Founder or Investor — before Friday, March 15 at 11:59 p. m. PT, and you’ll save $1,000. Take a look at what each pass type offers: Attendee: Includes full event and networking access for all three days of Disrupt. Investor: Includes the Attendee benefits plus investor-only perks and networking, like access to a StrictlyVC session. Founder: Includes the Attendee benefits plus founder-only perks and networking like access to the Deal Flow Cafe. Students and nonprofits should also book now to beat the same deadline to get a deep discount! TechCrunch Disrupt is the epicenter of the startup ecosystem. More than 10,000 people from around the world will gather to learn, hear about and exhibit dynamic new technology, startups, larger industry trends and prognostications made by legendary tech visionaries. Whether you’re looking for an angel round, a new job or a new co-founder, the opportunities at Disrupt 2024 are boundless. During this savings countdown, we announced ourcall for content programand urged you to apply toStartup Battlefield 200and discussed a plethora of networking opportunities at Disrupt. Whew, that’s a lot — and it’s only March! TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 takes place in San Francisco on October 28–30, and it promises to be our biggest and best yet. This is the last day to save $1,000. What are you waiting for?Buy your Disrupt pass today! Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling outthis form. 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?
| 2024-03-15T16:00:20 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/15/today-final-hours-to-save-on-disrupt-2024-passes/
| 365 | 0.9 |
45e869f43aab7b18a7143aa1f86bf910
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Scale AI is being investigated by the US Department of Labor
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Department of Labor (DOL) is investigating the data-labeling startup Scale AI for compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act, TechCrunch has learned. That’s a federal law that regulates unpaid wages, misclassification of employees as contractors, and illegal retaliation against workers. The investigation has been active since at least August 2024, a document seen by TechCrunch shows. And it’s ongoing, according to a person directly familiar with the matter. The mere existence of an investigation doesn’t mean Scale AI has done anything wrong, of course, and the investigation could find in favor of the company or be dismissed. Scale AI is based in San Francisco andwas valued last year at $13. 8 billion. It relies on an army of workers it categorizes as contractors to do essential AI work, like labeling images for Big Tech and other organizations. Scale AI spokesperson Joe Osborne told TechCrunch that the investigation was initiated during the previous presidential administration and that Scale AI felt that its work building, testing, and evaluating AI was misunderstood by regulators then. Osborne said that Scale AI has worked extensively with the DOL to explain its business model and that conversations have been productive. More generally, Osborne said that Scale AI brings more “flexible work opportunities in AI” to Americans than any other company and that feedback from its contributors is “overwhelmingly positive. ” “Hundreds of thousands of people use our platform to showcase their skills and earn extra money,” Osborne said. Scale AI is indeed a popular gig work platform. But it has recently faced legal challenges from some ex-workers over its labor practices. Two lawsuits were filedagainst the startup — one in December 2024 and the other in January 2025 — from former workers alleging they were underpaid and misclassified as contractors instead of employees, denying them access to protections like overtime pay and sick days. Scale AI has strongly disputed the lawsuits, saying that it fully complies with the law and works to ensure its pay rates meet or surpass local living wage standards. Scale AI’s international labor practices were also the subject of an investigation by theWashington Post in 2023. Workers overseas described to the Post demanding work at low pay as contractors. The company said at the time that pay rates were continually improving. The U. S. Department of Labor’swebsitesays it is able to resolve most cases administratively but that employers who violate the law may be subject to fines and potentially imprisonment. The DOL also has the power to force employers to reclassify their workers as employees. For example, in February 2024, hotel staffing startup Qwick settled a DOL case by paying $2. 1 million and announcing that all California workers performing work using the Qwick app would be classified as employees, Bloomberg Lawreported. Scale AI also appears to be among the Silicon Valley firms seeking and seeing favor with the new presidential administration. Its CEO and founder Alexandr Wang, for instance,attendedDonald Trump’s inauguration in Januarylike many other tech CEOs. More telling, Scale AI’sformer managing director, Michael Kratsios, is President Trump’s nominee as new director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Kratsios previously served as the U. S. ’s chief technology officer during the first Trump administration. In this position, Kratsios will advise Trump on science and technology matters. This position has no oversight over the Department of Labor. Kratsios was part of a Senatehearingon February 25 but has not been confirmed yet. Kratsios didn’t respond to a request for comment. U. S. Department of Labor spokesperson Michael Petersen told TechCrunch that it cannot confirm or deny the existence of any investigation, per long-standing policy. Topics Senior Reporter 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?
| 2025-03-06T21:27:53 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/06/scale-ai-is-being-investigated-by-the-us-department-of-labor/
| 683 | 1 |
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Near Space Labs nabs $20M to take its high-res imaging Swift robots into the stratosphere
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When it comes to creating images of Earth from above, satellites, drones, planes, and spacecraft are what tend to come to mind. But a startup calledNear Space Labshas a very different approach to taking high-resolution photos from up high. Near Space Labs is building aircraft, called Swift, that are raised by helium balloons and then rely on air currents to stay up, move around to take pictures from the stratosphere, and eventually glide back down to earth. On the back of significant traction with customers using its images, the startup has now raised $20 million to expand its business. Bold Capital Partners (a VC firm founded by Peter Diamandis of XPRIZE and Singularity University fame) is leading the Series B round. Strategic backer USAA (U. S. Automobile Association) is also investing alongside Climate Capital, Gaingels, RiverPark Ventures, and previous backers Crosslink Capital, Third Sphere, Draper Associates, and others that are not being named. Near Space Labs has now raised over $40 million, includinga $13 million Series Ain 2021. The startup is the brainchild of Rema Matevosyan (CEO), Ignasi Lluch (CTO), and Albert Caubet (chief engineer) — all three of whom worked in space and physics technology and research prior to starting the company. Matevosyan is Armenian, growing up in what she described as a “very technical” family of physicists, programmers, and amateur astronomers. After studying mathematics as an undergraduate in Yerevan, she moved to Moscow for graduate school, where, at the Skolkovo Institute, she first met Lluch, who had come to study there from Spain. Both were drawn to what, at the time, was thought of as the MIT of Russia. Indeed, it was around 2017, and the institute then was in a joint venture with MIT to fill out that ambition. It was through that relationship that the trio applied to an accelerator called Urban-X in New York. Matevosyan found living in the U. S. to her liking, and she now runs the company from there. If Near Space is about floating high above Earth to get a better perspective on what is going on down below, there is a metaphor in that description for Near Space and its founders. The partnership between Skolkovo Institute and MITended in February 2022, one of the by-products of the sanctions that the U. S. leveled on Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Urban-X accelerator wasshut downby its primary backer, BMW, this year. Near Space is still here, though, and it’s growing. Matevosyan said one of the startup’s biggest customer segments to date has been the insurance industry, which subscribes to Near Space’s imagery to track and understand the impact of large-scale disasters like fires and hurricanes. (USAA is a major insurer and financial services provider, alongside its other activities for motorists in the military, veterans, and their families. ) For now, Near Space covers only specific areas of the U. S. , but it plans to scale up. Matevosyan said that can be done relatively easily, since the company requires no special licenses to fly — its Swift aircraft are only “powered” by balloons, need only wind currents, and can move about the stratosphere unmanned. The startup aims to ultimately cover 80% of the U. S. population twice a year with its 7 cm imagery. Near Space claims it can do in hours what might take 800,000 drones days or weeks to execute. The company will also be building more customized coverage plans for customers, which it says will be tailored to end users’ operations. Today, those users are primarily in the area of insurance, but some of the funding will also be used to explore opportunities in other segments. Matevosyan cited agriculture as an area where the startup could have an opportunity. A lot of farms, small and large, have tried to use drones to determine the state of their crops, but this was not scalable, she said, because it was not accurate enough. “Drones were taking small samplings and extrapolating, [but] that really didn’t take off, because if a chunk of land is not healthy, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest of the farm is unhealthy. ” Using drones to survey everything proved too costly to execute, while satellites can’t provide decent enough resolution for the right cost to those would-be customers. Military use is one area that seems like an obvious use case, but Near Space has yet to pursue that opportunity. Matevosyan describes the Swift as “dual use,” and it could include a limited amount of payload. But she said the company has yet to pursue anything outside of commercial use cases. Given the direction the world is moving and the geopolitical climate, it will be interesting to see if that remains the case for a technology that seems supremely versatile and relatively cheap. Still, that versatility is one reason why investors are so interested. “The idea of low-cost aerial imagery is valuable for many parties, not just insurance,” said Will Borthwick, the principal at Bold who led on this investment. “Even when you think about the advent of AI, which requires timely and high-quality data to work properly, it’s the moment in time for something like this. ”
| 2025-04-29T13:11:04 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/near-space-labs-nabs-20m-to-take-its-high-res-imaging-swift-robots-into-the-stratosphere/
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Lightup wants to shine a light on data quality with $9M Series A
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We all know how important data quality is. That’s where the timeless phrase “Garbage in, garbage out” came from. As the pace of data creation accelerates, and it gets used in a variety of ways across a company to make business decisions, deliver quality customer experiences and drive machine learning models, making sure the data is accurate has become ever more crucial. Lightupwants to put data quality in the spotlight, and today the company announced a $9 million Series A investment to continue building their data quality solution. The company has now raised over $20 million, according to Crunchbase data. Lightup builds on the work that CEO and co-founder Manu Bansal began with his first startup, Uhana, whichwas acquired by VMwarein 2019, shortly before he launched his latest venture. He said companies building data pipelines didn’t have much choice when it came to data quality beyond building it themselves, and he saw his next opportunity. “We were building data pipelines with Kafka and Spark and whatnot, and all the tools that we could find to solve the data quality problem were built for spreadsheets worth of data, which were being processed interactively, as opposed to millions of events per second moving through an automated pipeline,” Bansal told TechCrunch. As he and his co-founders looked for a solution and spoke to other companies, they realized they had stumbled onto an unmet need and decided to build it. “We looked around for solutions and all we heard was that people were just building their own ad hoc solutions when they could afford to do it. And others were just running on prayers. And we said, ‘Yeah, this needs solving. ’” He said their secret sauce is leaving the data in place, regardless of whether it’s stored in Snowflake, Databricks or another data storage solution. This reduces the overhead of checking the data pretty dramatically because they’re not making a copy of the data, and they’re taking advantage of resources that are already in place from the service provider. “We leverage the compute fabric of those scalable data warehouses and data lakehouses instead of moving data. So the big difference for us is that traditional systems would take out data from where it lives, and we leave it in place,” Bansal said. They then look for anomalies in the data that would suggest a problem, create a report and deliver it to a human to make the final data quality decisions. They don’t have write access to the data, and that’s by design. The company launched in 2019 and it took a couple of years to build the solution. Today, the startup has 20 employees with plans to hire more with the new money. He believes that being distributed is helping him build a more diverse workforce. “We love that because we’re distributed, we’re seeing people from different time zones, different cultures, and different ways of approaching problems. And if you look around the team right now, you will find some very impressive diversity already,” he said. The $9 million investment was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Newlands with participation from Spectrum 28 Capital, Shasta Ventures, Vela Partners and Incubate Fund. The deal closed at the end of March
| 2023-08-02T13:00:35 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/02/lightup-wants-to-shine-a-light-on-data-quality-with-9m-series-a/
| 536 | 1 |
53f058c207c7faabbb0b9d592343ca45
|
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As Robinhood eyes global expansion, CEO says: ‘We’ve made a lot of progress’
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Ten years ago,Robinhoodwas founded to “democratize” stock trading, or more simply, to make it more accessible for anyone to trade stocks. Over time, the now publicly traded company has broadened its offerings – allowing users to do far more than just buy shares of stocks. Today, its goal is simple: To democratize finance for all, according to CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev – who was on the Fintech Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. “We started with trading and investing. But more recently, we’ve been helping customers with their comprehensive set of financial needs. So we see a world where we can not only help you trade [stocks or crypto], but we can help you save for retirement. And we can help you build up an emergency fund. And we can help you sort of manage your money holistically regardless of what stage you are, and really help you achieve your financial goals and I think that that’s been really resonating with customers,” Tenev said. Acknowledging that a few years ago, people might not have taken Robinhood seriously as a place to save for retirement, Tenev believes the narrative around his company has changed. Last December, the Menlo Park, California-based fintech launched a waitlist for its new offering,Robinhood Retirement, which it described as the “first and only” individual retirement account (IRA) with a 1% match on every eligible dollar contributed. For Gold members, the match increased to 3%. Some have argued that the move was in part a way to slow user attrition. But Tenev remains bullish. “The same tools and economic benefit of no commissions that make it a no-brainer to be a trader also make it a no-brainer to build a portfolio, and become a passive-long term investor,” he said. “We rolled out retirement, and now we’re seeing Robinhood being mentioned and discussed in all sorts of other forums. At one time, Robinhood was probably considered more of a toy product, but now people are saying, ‘We just can’t ignore this anymore. ’ ” Last quarter, Robinhoodachieved GAAP profitability for the first time, helped by higher interest rates. The road to get to this point was not without its bumps. The company made headlines in early 2021 when it wasblindsided by the surge in interestfrom the first big “meme stock” after Redditors and other retail investors rallied around Gamestop and sent its price into the stratosphere. As reported by TC, Robinhood famously froze trades around GameStop and some adjacent hot stocks as the company teetered on the edge of what its platform — and its pocketbook — could handle. When it comes to the Gamestop debacle specifically — which threatened toimplodethe company — Tenev is also confident that if the same situation were to occur, Robinhood would be “across the board much better equipped to handle it. ” Generally, in 2020 and 2021, Robinhood’s product roadmap “took a backseat,” according to Tenev. “I think the most important thing was just making sure that we were stable, that we were scaling and that we could actually handle the demands on the business,” he recalls. “I think we’ve made a lot of progress. The customer support, the infrastructure, and the reliability of it has improved dramatically. ” Added Tenev: “And as we got out of that into the new regime of high interest rates, we’ve been able to focus again on accelerating the product roadmap. ” For example, itacquired startup X1earlier this year and has plans to launch its own credit card. The company is also forging ahead on its international ambitions. Robinhood is planning to launch in the United Kingdom in the next few months – a move that had been actually planned for 2020. “Inaddition to rolling out all sorts of products to help customers manage their money here, we can expand overseas and as a technology company, I think we have certain advantages that our competitors can’t match,” Tenev said. “We don’t need a ton of brick and mortar. We rely on automation to provide a lot of the services that we offer. And so we can take the infrastructure that we’re building and now expand to the UK, and to Europe and Asia and really to make it so that anyone with a smartphone can access Robinhood. ” Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign up for The Interchangehere. Topics Sr. Reporter 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?
| 2023-09-19T22:57:47 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/robinhood-ceo-on-the-companys-evolution-weve-made-a-lot-of-progress/
| 800 | 1 |
3703c9792c7cbac7c0018fca90ea8579
|
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Drone couriers and virtual faces among Alchemist Accelerator’s demo day highlights
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Today is demo day atAlchemist Accelerator, which focuses on very early stage startups from technical founders. Fifteen companies are presenting in this batch, but here are several we thought worth a closer look. Alchemist also scored an additional $2 million from Mayfield to keep investing like this, so they must be doing something right. You can watch the full set of presentations herewhen the stream starts at 10:30 a. m. Pacific time today. Avol Aerospaceis basically an American take on Matternet’s (also an Alchemist alumni) medical sample transport dronesover in Switzerland. I’ve written those up over the years and the concept is pretty high-touch but has genuine promise for improving times for getting labs done, transporting organs and blood, and so on, instead of using ground couriers. Of course in a Swiss city studded with medical centers you can get away with a quadcopter. If it’s 50 miles, you want something like Zipline’s fixed-wing craft. Avol has staked out an interesting middle ground: a small VTOL craft that transitions to winged flight after takeoff. And to minimize FAA barriers to launch, it has a remote pilot. Imagine that! Matternet’s automated drone-docking station makes its real-life debut in Switzerland Of course, in a sense that limits scaling, but the sample delivery industry isn’t trying to go from 1 to a million, more like 10 to 100 over the next year. They’re raising a seed round now and hoping to work with hospitals around the country. Syntonymis taking the tech behind vtubers and applying it in everyday video calls, replacing your face in real time to preserve your privacy. Now, this isn’t meant for meetings with your team or calls with your family, but rather in applications like in-car monitoring or telehealth, where a person’s expressions and general look are needed, but they might rather not have their face going to some database. It can run as a cloud service, on-premise or even as a virtual camera on your phone (and a little on-screen indicator serves as notice that your face is notyourface). It’s an interesting play, but I do wonder whether it will be something people want to pay for as the culture around video calls and surveillance shifts. I wouldn’t mind being able to put on a mask now and then, to be sure. Yes, there are ethical considerations. We should talk about them! Elaitrais in the “AI radiology assistant” category, which is surprisingly broad since that kind of imaging is done increasingly frequently for an increasing number of conditions. In the case of breast cancer, imaging called Digital Breast Tomosynthesis can turn up precancerous or otherwise suspicious tissues, but it can be hard for even experts to read correctly 100% of the time. Like other screening and diagnosis assistants, Elaitra’s Viewfinder software isn’t in any way intended to replace expert analysis, but to help speed up and improve the expert’s workflow. They’re piloting the software now with some hospitals and clinics, and hope to make Viewfinder a standard, low-cost step in breast cancer screening and treatment. I don’t pretend to understand what ERPs are used for day to day, since I’m just a writer. But I’ve heard in multiple industries that the old enterprise resource planning systems that companies have relied on for years just don’t work well with a lot of modern workflows, especially in fast-moving industries or SMBs. So it’s not surprising that folks from Astra were frustrated enough with what they were using to split off and build their own. Redshiftis their solution, a new ERP-type thing that integrates with modern services everyone uses and doesn’t cost a quarter of a million dollars. Look, I already said I don’t know what these things are actually for, but I’ve seen other companies spun out of the exacting processes of spaceflight and that’s as good an origin story as any. Better than most, really. Mayfield’s $2 million investment is a follow-on from an earlier $500,000 one. It seems they’re hungry for technical founders and Alchemist specializes in that, but they didn’t attach any big riders to the check. “It’s a very open-ended investment,” said Alchemist CEO Ravi Belani. “They were an initial LP, so there’s a lot of trust. ” The accelerator is also trying a new model to reach out to founders across the globe that want a partner in the bay. “This is an experiment, to try to create bridges to pockets of the world where we don’t have a good foothold,” Belani explained, essentially by fast-tracking startups referred by partner firms. He gave the example of a VC firm in Turkey, Simya — which, incidentally, actually translates to Alchemist — which is one of the early partners. “They’re trying to compete for the best startups in and around Turkey, but there are bigger funds than them,” Belani said. “In the past, they’d just have to go and compete with them, but now they can say, ‘Hey, with our firm comes access to Alchemist in Silicon Valley. That gives them an edge. And if that company had decided to go direct to us, we would have only invested $50,000; now they’re getting $250,000 from the partner — that’s the minimum [for this program], but they can do more. ” Will it pay off? It could help connect the vast amounts of talent and capital that don’t have convenient access to Silicon Valley — which is itself notoriously inward-looking. Alchemist Accelerator’s latest startups range from sneakernet for energy to solar panel cleaning bots Topics Writer & Photographer Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. His personal website is coldewey. cc. 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?
| 2024-01-30T15:05:31 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/30/drone-couriers-and-virtual-faces-among-alchemist-accelerators-demo-day-highlights/
| 1,009 | 1 |
171815781abf525c70590dc38a6eb8ec
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OpenAI’s Sora is launching today — here are highlights from the first review
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Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, is launching Monday — at least forsome users. YouTuber Marques Brownlee revealed the news in a video published to his channel this morning. Brownlee got early access to Sora, and gave his initial impressions in a 15-minute review. Sora lives onSora. com, Brownlee said, the homepage for which shows a scroll of recently generated and OpenAI-curated Sora videos. (It hadn’t gone live for us here at TechCrunch as of publication time. ) Notably, the tool isn’t built intoChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform. Sora seems to be its own separate experience for now. Videos on the Sora homepage can be bookmarked for later viewing to a “Saved” tab, organized into folders, and clicked on to see which text prompts were used to create them. Sora can generate videos from uploaded images as well as prompts, according to Brownlee, and can edit existing Sora-originated videos. Using the “Re-mix” feature, users can describe changes they want to see in a video and Sora will attempt to incorporate these in a newly generated clip. Re-mix has a “strength” setting that lets users specify how drastically they want Sora to change the target video, with higher values yielding videos that take more artistic liberties. Sora can generate up to 1080p footage, Brownlee said — but the higher the resolution, the longer videos take to generate. 1080p footage takes 8x longer than 480p, the fastest option, while 720p takes 4x longer. Brownlee said that the average 1080p video took a “couple of minutes” to generate in his testing. “That’s also, like, right now, when almost no one else is using it,” he said. “I kind of wonder how much longer it’ll take when this is just open for anyone to use. ” In addition to generating one-off clips, Sora has a “Storyboard” feature that lets users string together prompts to create scenes or sequences of videos, Brownlee said. This is meant to help with consistency, presumably — a notorious weak point for AI video generators. But how does Sora perform? Well, Brownlee said, it suffers from the same flaws as other generative tools out there, namely issues related to object permanence. In Sora videos, objects pass in front of each other or behind each other in ways that don’t make sense, and disappear and reappear without any reason. Legs are another major source of problems for Sora, Brownlee said. Any time a person or animal with legs has to walk for a long while in a clip, Sora will confuse the front legs and back legs. The legs will “swap” back and forth in an anatomically impossible way, Brownlee said. Sora has a number of safeguards built in, Brownlee said, and prohibits creators from generating footage showing people under the age of 18, containing violence or “explicit themes,” and that might infringe on a third party’s copyright. Sora also won’t generate videos from images with public figures, recognizable characters, or logos, Brownlee said, and it watermarks each video — albeit with a visual watermark that can be easily cropped out. So, what’s Sora good for? Brownlee found it to be useful for things like title slides in a certain style, animations, abstracts, and stop-motion footage. But he stopped short of endorsing it for anything photorealistic. “It’s impressive that it’s AI-generated video, but you can tell pretty quickly that it’s AI-generated video,” he said of the majority of Sora’s clips. “Things just get really wonky. ” OpenAI’s end of the year event is here. The company is hosting “12 Days of OpenAI,” a series of daily…
| 2024-12-09T17:24:21 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/09/openais-sora-is-launching-today-heres-highlights-from-the-first-review/
| 593 | 1 |
f9b7dda389b4be71b7b8c0ad561c2202
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TechCrunch+ Roundup: FinOps for all, 15 investors who are taking pitches, Steve Blank on AI
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Summer 2023 has been the hottest on record since 1880, but while early-stage founders were sweating over their pitch decks, the investors they hoped to connect with were playing pickleball in Jackson Hole or relaxing poolside with cocktails in Palm Springs. “People tend to be out of the office longer than usual this time of year,” says Kittu Kolluri, founder and managing director of Neotribe Ventures. Full TechCrunch+ articles are only available to members. Use discount codeTCPLUSROUNDUPto save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription. “I suggest reaching out right before Labor Day to set up a meeting in September or wait and start your outreach altogether next month. ” With that in mind, here’sthe latest edition of How to Pitch Me,a recurring column that gathers tips, insights and strategies from early-stage investors who are interested in making deals right now. There’s a lot of actionable advice in here: If you’re wondering how much previous experience with AI investors are looking for, which questions to ask once you’re in the room, or just need a level set on CEO salaries, please read. Thanks very much to everyone who participated: Walter ThompsonEditorial Manager, TechCrunch+ How to pitch me: 15 investors talk about what they’re looking for in August 2023 Less than a year after raising $1. 5 million for biowaste-processing startup Mi Terro, founder Robert Luo landed a $1. 5 million pre-seed funding round for Tanbii, a carbon-management platform. Here’s the winning deck he used: Pitch Deck Teardown: Tanbii’s $1. 5M pre-seed deck The Dutch wordgezelligliterally means “cozy” or “pleasant,” but because it’s so highly adaptable, it can sometimes be hard to translate. “FinOps” is similar: The harmonious synthesis of engineering and operations, this new practice seeks to optimize cloud costs and infrastructure. However, “while most IT leaders genuinely believe that FinOps is the answer to cloud cost complexity, it’s clear there is still a lot left to learn,” writes Kyle Campos, CTO at CloudBolt. Embrace these FinOps best practices to ace your cloud strategy To receive the TechCrunch+ Roundup as an email each Tuesday and Friday, scroll down to find the “sign up for newsletters” section on this page, select “TechCrunch+ Roundup,” enter your email, and click “subscribe. ” AI-related startups scooped up $40 billion in venture funding in H1 2023, according to PitchBook. “That’s almost a quarter of all the money invested in that time,” notes Alex Wilhelm, who wondered whether “smaller startups are at an insurmountable disadvantage in the AI race,” given the inherent advantages enjoyed by giants like Salesforce and Microsoft. The technology’s potential upside is on everyone’s lips, “but I am also worried about who is going to make all the money,” writes Alex. Will the power of data in the AI era leave startups at a disadvantage? Dear Sophie, Back in 2018, the Cato Institute estimated it would take 151 years for a person born in India to get a green card in the EB-2 category. How has that changed in the wake of the pandemic, the Great Resignation, and the tech layoffs? How has the EB-1 category changed? — Living in Limbo Ask Sophie: What’s the wait time for EB-2 and EB-1 green card categories for those born in India? Despite the downturn, a recent report from DocSend shows a 16% year-over-year increase in the number of pitch decks founders are sharing with investors. “Pre-seed founders have responded to the investor pullback by creating shorter decks,” says Justin Izzo, the company’s research lead. “They are rearranging the opening slides in ways I hadn’t seen before. ” The average length of a pitch deck has shrunk by nearly 16% over the last year, which “means you have to be very intentional about what to include,” writes Haje Jan Kamps. That 30-slide deck won’t cut it anymore Known as the progenitor of the lean startup movement, entrepreneur/educator Steve Blank says generative AI is far more than a typical hype cycle. Thanks to the “dumb money” investors are slapping down and the tech’s labor-saving potential, “it’s probably increased productivity by 50%, and that’s if you’re using it poorly,” he told TechCrunch+. “It dawned on me that we’re going to take this whole lean startup pipeline, and if not by the end of this year, certainly in the foreseeable future, that machines will be doing this a lot better than human beings,” Blank said. Steve Blank: AI will revolutionize the ‘lean startup’ Previously, climate reporter Tim De Chant interviewed several CEOs and founders of fusion startups to learn more about the challenges facing an industry that could literally transform human civilization. For part two, he asked seven entrepreneurs about what it will take to make this tech commercially viable: 7 founders explain what fusion power needs to go mainstream
| 2023-09-01T17:16:23 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/01/techcrunch-roundup-finops-for-all-15-investors-who-are-taking-pitches-steve-blank-on-ai/
| 791 | 1 |
6f2c79974dc65cf04bf68946f6586976
|
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TikTok rolls out new accessibility tools, including AI-generated ALT text
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TikTok announced on Wednesday that it’s expanding its suite of accessibility tools by rolling out AI-generated ALT text for photos, a high-contrast mode, and support for device-level bold text preferences. TikTok introduced support forALT text for photosa few weeks ago, allowing creators to provide descriptive text for photos to help users with screen readers understand the visual content through spoken descriptions. Now, the company is testing AI-generated ALT text to automatically describe photos out loud when creators don’t add alt text manually. The company says AI-generated ALT text will make TikTok more accessible for people with visual impairments. The move comes as Instagram has beenusing AI for ALTtext since 2018. As for the new high-contrast mode, users will be able to switch it on with the new “color contrast” option in the app’s accessibility section. Doing so will increase the foreground color of text, icons, and user interface elements. This change will make TikTok more usable for people with low vision or sensitivity to low contrast, the company says. TikTok now also adheres to a user’s device’s bold text setting, which means that it will automatically display all in-app text in bold when enabled. This enhances readability for users who prefer or rely on bolder fonts. “We know that when people feel seen, heard, and supported, they’re empowered to share their stories, create and connect with others in meaningful ways,” the company said in ablog post. “That’s why we’re focused on continuously building products that serve everyone. We see accessibility not just as a responsibility, but as an opportunity to innovate and foster a more inclusive platform for our global community. ” The new features join TikTok’s existing suite of accessibility tools, which includes features like auto-generated captions for video content, dark mode, text-to-speech, and the ability to adjust text size across the app. 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. 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?
| 2025-05-14T15:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/14/tiktok-rolls-out-new-accessibility-tools-including-ai-generated-alt-text/
| 424 | 0.9 |
85fbf626f5dd311202eee376370a8ebb
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Siro lands $50M to expand its AI-powered coaching for sales reps
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An increasing number of meetings have an AI note-taker present that transcribes the call and provides action items. Sirowants to do the same for sales folks who are on the ground and talking to customers face-to-face. The company on Wednesday announced it has secured $50 million in a Series B round led by SignalFire with participation fromDick Costolo and Adam Bain’s VC firm 01 Advisors. Square CPO Saumil Mehta; the founders of business management software Squire, Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant; former Yelp SVP of Engineering Michael Stoppelman; and former Snap Engineering VP Ding Zhou also participated. To date, Siro has raised a total of $75 million. Founder Jake Cronin’s idea for Siro came from an experience in college. For a summer, he had the option of working at an amusement park or selling kitchen knives door to door. He chose the latter and earned good money from it. The next year, he opened an office to hire other sales reps and have them sell knives. But he realized that he couldn’t be on the ground to help coach all the junior reps. A few years later, after working at McKinsey, Cronin started building Siro — coding the core product himself. “When I was running the knives sales office, I realized a lot of sales work is manual, and good software could have a lot of value,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. “The more I researched sales, I thought that the biggest opportunity here is not in data enrichment or customer relationship management, but it is in improving the lives of sales reps who are on the ground. ” Siro transcribes sales meetings via an app. Features include a company-wide dashboard where sales folks can submit successful calls and sort them by engagement from peers, allowing other reps to listen to top calls and get insights about improving on-ground sales visits. Cronin said that Siro trains models for specific industry verticals — for example, for HVAC sales coaching. The company also uses a general-purpose model to gauge how a salesperson is building rapport and handling rejections. Wayne Hu, a partner at SignalFire, said that the VC firm always wants to invest in companies that have a strong business advantage in data for particular segments. “Siro’s solution is helping digitize the ‘dark matter’ of offline conversations comprising field sales engagements, which has broad extensibility across verticals and depth in downstream actions that can be instrumented from this data, such as customer and product insights,” he told TechCrunch via email. 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?
| 2025-05-21T16:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/siro-lands-50m-from-signalfire-to-expand-its-ai-powered-coaching-solution-for-on-ground-sales-reps/
| 495 | 0.9 |
7d40b7ecffc278512b36b4a07a300a5e
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Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning
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In an effort to get ahead of its competitors in the travel ecosystem, online travel agency Expedia said it will soon launch an AI assistant to bolster features like search, itinerary building, trip planning and real-time updates like flight delays. The company, which runs a variety of online travel aggregators and metasearch engines, is debuting a bot named Romie that’s been trained on a mix of in-house and OpenAI models. The bot can help users search for hotels, build itineraries for their trips and make small changes. The bot can be included in iMessage chat groups, or you can talk to it one-on-one on WhatsApp. For these apps, the bot sits behind a phone number and leverages ChatGPT. You can chat with Romie by mentioning the bot on iMessage and ask it to summarize an itinerary it has built or suggest restaurants. The bot can take you directly to the Expedia app with links to an itinerary or suggestions. Expedia is also introducing smart search on its site, which lets users describe what kind of hotels they want instead of selecting filters. For instance, you can type “Rooftop and view of the sea” while searching for hotels, and the search will return the best hotels with those features. The company is testing all these features with a limited audience through its EG Labs program, which allows U. S. -based users to try the new features. Expedia said it pulls in data from various sources like AccuWeather and Yelp to tailor the search and the bot. The company said this allows it to update travelers on flight changes or changes in weather. It can also suggest, for example, hotels near the airport in case of a canceled flight. Expedia started experimenting with AI last year when it introducedan in-app travel planning experience that used ChatGPT. It seems the company is now working on integrating AI into its core feature set. Expedia’s rivals have also made some moves. Booking. com introducedAI-powered trip planning featuresin June 2023, and Airbnb has testedAI-aided review summariesand isaiming to build what it calls the “ultimate concierge. ”In March, Kayak launcheda new conversational tooland a screenshot-based price comparison feature. Startups are also banking on AI-powered features to take on incumbent travel platforms. Costanoa Ventures-backed Mindtrip is buildingan AI travel agent for users, while Vancouver-basedPilot is using AI to make travel planning more social. Layla, which counts firstminute capital, M13, Booking. com’s co-founder Andy Phillipps, Skyscanner co-founder Barry Smith and Paris Hilton as investors, is buildingan end-to-end travel recommendation appwith the help of existing data and creator content. The company also acquired FLYR. com and Jason Calacanis-backedAI itinerary builder Roam Around earlier this year. Rathi Murthy, CTO of Expedia Group, told TechCrunch over a call that despite a ton of competition in the space, the company is confident that its solution will stand out because it plays multiple roles. “While everybody talks about AI assistants, for me, having an AI assistant that is a travel agent, personal assistant, concierge, and always there at the ready for you to make changes, remedy your trip, and remove fit across the entire process proactively is a game changer. […] We have been able to take the Expedia experience outside of our ecosystem and into channels like iMessage or WhatsApp and take advantage of that, which I think is unique,” he said. Murthy said that the only reason Romie can’t be used in WhatsApp group chats yet is they have not yet figured out the dynamics of how the bot would work in that setting rather than any technical challenges. Expedia also said it would launch a cross-date price comparison tool, an AI-powered help page, and guest review summaries as part of its spring update. 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?
| 2024-05-14T17:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/14/expedia-starts-testing-ai-powered-features-for-search-and-travel-planning/
| 698 | 1 |
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Volkswagen takes 5% stake in XPeng as part of Chinese EV deal
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VW Group announced Wednesday a pair of deals with Chinese automakers aimed at shoring up sales in China. The German automaker said it will invest $700 million into Chinese automaker XPeng as part of a deal to jointly develop and produce two mid-sized EVs for China. Volkswagen will acquire a 4. 99% stake in XPeng, under the agreement. The new battery-electric vehicles will be produced at VW’s new development, innovation and procurement center in Hefei and sold in China under the Volkswagen brand. Earlier this year, VW Group announced plans toinvest €1 billion($1. 1 billion) into the facility, called 100%TechCo. , in an attempt to respond to China’s fast-changing consumer needs. The EVs will have DNA from each automaker. The vehicles will be based off ofXPeng’s flagship G9 SUV. The connectivity and advanced driver assistance system software, which is often compared to Tesla’s FSD system, will also come from XPeng. The models are expected to start production in 2026,according to XPeng. In a separate agreement, which was also announced Wednesday, VW brand Audi said it’s expanding its partnership with SAIC to produce luxury EVs for the Chinese market. The companies plan to develop a new platform for premium EVs. The company didn’t announce any other details, including when these EVs might hit the marketplace. Both deals come as VW has seen sales fall in China — one of its most important markets — as EV leaders Tesla and BYD roar ahead
| 2023-07-26T15:55:16 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/26/volkswagen-takes-stake-in-xpeng-as-part-of-chinese-ev-deal/
| 241 | 0.9 |
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Elon Musk sets new date for Tesla robotaxi reveal, calls everything beyond autonomy ‘noise’
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Elon Musk says he will show off Tesla’s purpose-built “robotaxi” prototype during an event October 10, afterscrappinga previous plan to reveal it August 8. Musk said Tesla will also show off “a couple of other things,” but didn’t explain what that meant. The comments, made on Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call Tuesday, largely confirms Bloomberg’soriginal reportabout the delay, including that it was driven by Musk’s desire to redesign certain elements of the prototype. Muskconfirmed earlier this monththat he requested an “important design change to the front. ” “Moving it back a few months allowed us to improve the robotaxi, as well as add in a couple other things for the product unveil,” Musk said during the call. The Tesla robotaxi — and the “unsupervised” full self-driving software that Musk says will run them — is at the center of the company’s future. Earlier this year, he laid off more than 10% of Tesla’s global staff in a bid to reorganize the company toward developing artificial intelligence-powered products, including a “balls to the wall” push toward developing autonomy. That AI-focused future is bumping up against the company’s primary profit center of selling EVs, though. Tesla reported Tuesday that it made$1. 5 billion in profitfor the second quarter of 2024, down 45% from the same period last year. That profit was padded by a record $890 million in regulatory credit sales, too, though Tesla reported a $622 million restructuring charge that dragged down its earnings. And while total revenues were up 2% year-over-year, automotive revenues dropped 7% to $19. 9 billion. This performance follows what was already a rough start to the year for Tesla, where it saw a 55% year-over-year drop in profit in the first quarter. The company is now looking at a real possibility of selling fewer EVs in 2024 than it did in 2023, which would represent a stunning reversal of its prior growth trajectory. Tesla has massaged this by telling investors that it is between “two major growth waves,” pinning hopes of more sales on the new (but polarizing and expensive) Cybertruck, and mysterious future models that could be sold at a lower MSRP. That’s all “in the noise,” though, according to Musk. Tesla’s long-term value lies in autonomy and autonomy alone, he stressed on Tuesday’s call. That includes the company’s humanoid robot effort, dubbedOptimus, which got a sneaky delay this week. But it mostly centers around Musk’s longest running promise that he has yet to deliver on: self-driving cars. With that in mind, Musk tried to focus investors’ attention to the October 10 event. Not much is publicly known about what Tesla will show off, though there was anillustrationof a small robotaxi prototype in the biography of Musk written by Walter Isaacson in 2023. Musk has spoken about making the vehicle available to people through Tesla’s app, similar to how Uber and Lyft operate. He’s also claimed Tesla owners will be able to put their own cars on the shared network once the company makes its Full Self-Driving software advanced enough to handle all driving — something it is still far from accomplishing, despite the name. Despite years of promises, Musk has struggled to execute on the idea of fully self-driving cars, and as a result Tesla is being sued by owners and investigated by numerous government agencies. Asked on the call when Tesla would be able to offer its first unsupervised robotaxi ride, Musk said he believes it could be possible by the end of this year. But he added that it also could happen in 2025, and that he is “overly optimistic” with his predictions. This story has been updated with more details from Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call. The article originally published at 2:45 p. m. PT. Topics Sr. Reporter, Transportation 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?
| 2024-07-23T23:50:17 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/23/elon-musk-sets-new-date-for-tesla-robotaxi-reveal-calls-everything-beyond-autonomy-noise/
| 701 | 1 |
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Terran Orbital sues former CTO who joined call for leadership shake-up
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Terran Orbital is suing its former CTO, Austin Williams, a little over a month after he and other shareholders publicly called for a change in company leadership. Williams was a co-founder of satellite design and manufacturing company Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, which was acquired by Terran Orbital in 2014, and has since become core to the business. He is one of a handful of senior engineers who quit in November 2022; according to reportingfrom SpaceNewsat the time, the trio resigned amid ongoing disagreements between the engineering and manufacturing departments on how to meet production targets. Terran Orbital’s complaint filed on November 13 alleges that Williams did not provide proper advance notice of termination per his employment agreement. The company further alleges that his conduct acted against the company’s best interest and with a lack of good faith, in breach of his fiduciary duty and in harm to the company. Williams, the complaint states, “acted with oppression, fraud, and malice. ” The company further states that Williams was “aided and abetted” by some number of unknown people, which it identifies in the suit as “[John] DOES 1-100. ” Terran will update the complaint “when the true identities of any DOES are ascertained,” the suit says. The suit against Williams comes a little over a month after he and other investors publicly called on Terran’s board of directors to make drastic change to company leadership — including by installing a new CEO in place of Marc Bell and “reconstituting” the board. The group of investors, which holds approximately 8. 4% of the outstanding shares in the company,publicly released their letter to the boardcalling for these changes on October 12. The group declined to comment on this story. The group, which includes Tyvak’s other co-founders Jordi Puig-Suari and Roland Coelho, say in their letter that the company is “operating from a position of weakness due to leadership missteps, lack of internal controls, poor corporate governance, and a loss of public market confidence. ”They cite a backlog worth $2. 6 billion and the company’s pitiful stock price — $0. 81 as of today. The first letter states that Williams would “welcome the opportunity to explore” returning to the company provided the changes are implemented. The group has sent two more letters; the third letter was sent on November 9, just four days before Terran filed its lawsuit against Williams. In it, they reiterate their request to meet with the board to discuss their proposals, including discussing the CEO candidate the group identified to replace Bell. “It is simply unacceptable that the Board has refused to meet with us and rather has decided to adopt a seemingly hostile and dismissive attitude toward us as shareholders,” the letter says. “We believe such a stance only further erodes shareholder value and market confidence in Terran. ” While the lawsuit will have to be evaluated on its merits, it’s uncommon for a company to sue a departing executive a full year later over failing to give adequate notice. Observers, such as other shareholders, may reasonably interpret the company’s actions in this context as retaliatory or punitive, regardless of the outcome. The suit was filed in the Superior Court of California under case number 30-2023-01361218-CU-BC-CJC. 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. 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?
| 2023-11-27T23:09:05 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/27/terran-orbital-sues-former-cto-who-joined-call-for-leadership-shake-up/
| 675 | 1 |
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Fearless Fund has made a big deal since settling its controversial lawsuit
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Fearless Fund has made a big move since it settled a lawsuit with the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER). The firm announced on Thursday a seven-figure investment into the e-commerce platform Zimi, co-founded by Audrey Djiya and Peter Nsaka. Zimi offers inventory management, handling and storage, and border logistics specifically to help businesses in emerging markets, like Africa, sell to the rest of the world. The company officially launched in August and already has a few clients, according to its website. Fearless Fund’s CEO and co-founder Arian Simone declined to reveal the exact investment figure. This marks back-to-normal for the firm, which is investing out of its second fund and which received a multi-million-dollar follow-on investment last summer,TechCrunch previously reported. The investment news comes just weeks after Fearless Fund settled a lawsuit filed against it by the AAER. The AAER claimed that a grant that Fearless Fund created for Black women entrepreneurs discriminated against non-Black founders. Fearless Fundspent a year fightingthe lawsuit, resulting in a preliminary injunction being upheld against the grant program. One of the firm’s co-founders, Ayana Parsons,stepped downfrom her leadership role during this time. Last month, Fearless Fund and AAER came to a settlement agreement that would see to the end of the grant program, ensuring that the case didn’t make its way to trial and causing a domino effect that could impact other grant programs that service marginalized founders. Simone says the firm has been doing well since the settlement and is “investing in companies and continuing our mission of funding entrepreneurs. ” She added that the firm has completed “multiple investments this year and is actively diligencing numerous opportunities. ” It recently announced a $200 million debt fund in partnership with a CDFI to offer loans between $5,000 and $250,000 to overlooked founders. She said that Fearless Fund remains focused on its mission to support women of color founders and is looking to back more fintech, beauty, and companies working in logistics. The deal with Zimi closed in late September. Zimi’s CEO Djiya told us that the company is still in the process of raising its round, which is expected to close soon. The company took part in this year’s spring Y Combinator cohort and, like all YC grads, received investment from YC as well. Djiya said that Fearless Fund reached out to Zimi about an investment and that the company decided to bring Fearless Fund on as its lead investor because Simone experienced firsthand the challenge Zimi is trying to fix and they believe that the best investors are those who understand the problem a company is trying to solve. “Further, Fearless’ experience with working with consumer brands, who we’re building for, and international presence, will be helpful to Zimi in the long run,” Djiya continued. “We also really love the team. ” The company plans to use the fresh capital to hire more in operations and engineering and grow the consumer base, and plans to implement more artificial intelligence. 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. 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?
| 2024-10-11T19:15:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/11/fearless-fund-has-made-its-first-big-deal-since-settling-its-controversial-lawsuit/
| 604 | 1 |
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Google Cloud expands its database portfolio with new AI capabilities
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Google is hosting a version of its Cloud Next conference in Tokyo this week, and it’s putting the focus squarely on tweaking its databases for AI workloads (because at this point in 2024, AI is the only thing these major tech companies want to talk about). These include updates to its Spanner SQL database, which now features graph and vector search support, as well as extended full-text search capabilities. This wouldn’t be a Google announcement without someGemini-powered features. These include Gemini in BigQuery and Looker to help users with data engineering and analysis, as well as governance and security tasks. Google argues that while the vast majority of enterprises think that generative AI will be critical to the success of their business, they also know that much of their data remains unmanaged, leaving it outside the scope of their analytics and AI initiatives. “They have to really get out of all of their existing data silos and data islands, and get to a consolidated multimodal data platform, spanning structured and unstructured data — [because] GenAI is terrific at analyzing unstructured data — and combining data at rest with their data movement, so real-time data and data at rest processing,” explained Gerrit Kazmaier, Google’s VP and GM for database, Data Analytics and Looker. Activating this enterprise data flow, he argued, is what a lot of these new features are all about. Spanner powers most of Google’s own products like Search, Gmail and YouTube and its customer list includes the likes of Home Depot, Uber, Walmart and others. And while Spanner can handle a massive volume of data, vector and graph databases are a necessity to bring enterprise data into GenAI applications and enrich existing foundation models. “What we’re thinking about is what would it really take for us to take Spanner’s availability, scale, relational model, and really expand that to be the best data platform for operational GenAI apps,” said Andi Gutmans, Google’s VP and GM for databases. Like so many database vendors, the first step here for Google is adding graph capabilities to Spanner, using the emerging GraphQL standard. Enterprises can then use this graph to augment their GenAI applications — and the foundation models that power them — using retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which is currently the de facto standard for this use case. Also new in Spanner are full-text search and vector search, with the vector search capabilities backed by Google’s ScaNN algorithm. “With Spanner Graph, full-text search and vector search, we have evolved Spanner from … being the most available, globally consistent and scalable database, to a multi-model database with intelligent capabilities that seamlessly interoperate to enable you to deliver a new class of AI-enabled applications,” Google says. In addition to these AI-centric updates, Spanner is getting a new, optional pricing structure. Dubbed “Spanner editions,” the idea here is to offer a tier-based pricing model that offers them more flexibility. Currently, Google Cloud customers had to choose between a single-region offering and a multi-region version, which also offered a bundle of additional features like replication. Google also on Thursday announced a major update to Bigtable, Google’s NoSQL database for unstructured data and latency-sensitive workloads. Bigtable now features SQL support (or more precisely, support for GoogleSQL, the company’s own SQL dialect), making it significantly easier for virtually any developer to use the service. Previously, developers had to use the Bigtable API to query their databases. Currently, Bigtable supports roughly 100 SQL functions. For the Oracle database fans out there, Google will now allow them to host their Oracle Exadata and Autonomous database services right in the Google Cloud data centers — and they can link their applications between Google Cloud and the Oracle Cloud. For Google, that means more workloads in its cloud and for Oracle, at least, it means these users are still paying their licensing fees, even if they aren’t using the Oracle cloud. Also new in Google Cloud is support for open source Apache Spark and Kafka for data streaming and processing, as well as real-time streaming from Analytics Hub (Google’s service for securely sharing data between organizations). Topics Editor 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?
| 2024-08-01T15:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/01/google-cloud-expands-its-database-portfolio-with-new-ai-capabilities/
| 760 | 1 |
9ac46fd5f5a922ba6f8df3aeffbc9a36
|
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The Biden campaign is looking to hire a seasoned meme lord
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This is not a joke: According to a job listing, President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign needs someone to manage memes. The “Partner Manager, Content and Meme Pages” hire will “initiate and manage day-to-day operations in engaging the internet’s top content and meme pages. ” The job pays up to $85,000. Yes, it’s absurd to be a professional meme manager. But in this age, digital organizing is just as valuable as canvassing IRL at a farmers market. If a candidate is trying to meet voters where they are, then they need to be online, where going viral can mean connecting with millions of people. That’s why Biden’s campaign has aTikTok account, even though the presidentsigned a billthat could effectivelyban the app. “I do think that we can and should infuse relevant, trendy and fun moments into how we are communicating, especially on digital platforms,”Annie Wu Henry, a creator and digital communications strategist,told TechCrunchin February. “But while we’re doing that, we need to continue to be strategic and intentional and mindful, even if it’s a meme. ” Even before making this hire, the Biden campaign has already relied on memes to appeal to voters. The Dark Brandon meme, which stems from alt-right conspiracy theories about the president, has been so ubiquitous on Biden’s campaign accounts that it feels stale. But the people seem to love it: Last August, Dark Brandon merch accounted for54% of the campaign store’s total revenue, according to Axios. Former president Donald Trump has also embraced memes as he campaigns for his return to the White House. WhenTrump’s mugshotpredictably went viral, his campaign immediately started selling T-shirts, mugs and beer koozies with the image, accompanied by text that says “Never Surrender. ” Biden is far from the first candidate to notice that what happens online can sway an election. For as long as social media has existed, it’s been a valuable tool for political organizers, but the pandemic accelerated campaigns’ embrace of digital tactics. When Ed Markey (D-MA) ran for reelection to the Senate in 2020, Gen Z posters around the country concocted“the Markeyverse,”an organic online movement to make sure a climate-friendly senator kept his seat. Meanwhile, the anonymous online personality Organizer Memes has been hostingmeme trainingsfor political organizations such as the South Carolina Young Democrats. In these trainings, participants collaboratively make memes, discuss what makes a good meme, and learn how to use existing meme templates to react in real time to breaking political news. Given the Biden administration’s potential to ban TikTok, young people may see through the campaign’s attempt to woo them with memes. But if nothing else, embracing social media is proof that a campaign is at least trying to engage a younger demographic. 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. 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?
| 2024-05-22T22:32:15 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/22/the-biden-campaign-is-looking-to-hire-a-seasoned-meme-lord/
| 633 | 1 |
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OpenAI ‘considered’ building a humanoid robot: Report
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Posted: OpenAI has recently exploredbuilding its own humanoid robot, according to The Information. The report cites “two people with direct knowledge” of those conversations. The ChatGPT maker has been involved in the space for some time now, by way of financial backing. It has thus far invested inFigureand1X, along with the “general purpose AI” firmPhysical Intelligence. In 2021, OpenAIabandoned such ambitionsafter quietly closing its robotics division. Of course, plenty has happened in the past three years, with breakthroughs in both hardware and the AI systems that power them. Short of making some big-ticket startup acquisitions, a re-formed OpenAI robotics division would have a lot of catching up to do in an already competitive young category. 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
| 2024-12-24T17:19:41 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/24/openai-considered-building-a-humanoid-robot-report/
| 181 | 0.8 |
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French small launch startup Latitude closes $30M Series B
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French small launch developerLatitudehas closed $30 million in new capital as it eyes the first flight of its Zephyr rocket in 2025. While other rocket companies are going bigger, developing even more massive rockets, Latitude is taking a different approach: light, small and hopefully cheap enough to beat out competitors. Its first rocket, Zephyr, will stand at just 62 feet and will be capable of delivering up to 100 kilograms of payload to low Earth orbit. (For reference, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has a payload capacity of 22,800 kilograms to LEO. ) The two-stage rocket will be powered by eight 3D-printed engines called Navier, which Latitude is developing in-house. In a statement, Latitude CEO and co-founder Stanislas Maximin said 2024 would be a “pivotal year” before Zephyr’s first flight in 2025. Indeed, the company aims to use the financing to continue developing the next iteration of Zephyr – a slightly larger launcher that will be capable of carrying 200 kilograms of payload by 2028. In addition, Latitude said in a press release that the funding will enable the establishment of a new assembly line, manufacturing the first launcher, additional testing and adding more headcount to the 100-plus person team. Latitude’s existing investors Crédit Mutuel Innovation, Expansion, Bpifrance via DeepTech 2030, and UI Investissement, as well as Blast. club, Kima Ventures and unnamed individual investors, contributed to the round. The company has now raised nearly $55 million to-date. Latitude is part of a growing number of European launch startups looking to boost that continent’s native launch capability, which has been sorely lacking with ongoing delays to next-gen rockets like Arianespace’s Ariane 6. Charles Beigbeder, a European VC with Expansion, called this out directly in a statement, saying that “Europe needs to regain full sovereignty over space launchers. ” The French government has also made its own efforts to support a native space industry – which Latitude is already benefitting from. The country’s DeepTech 2030 fund aims to invest over 50 billion euros to kickstart France’s deep tech ecosystem. 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. 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?
| 2024-01-23T22:50:51 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/23/french-small-launch-startup-latitude-closes-30m-series-b/
| 476 | 0.9 |
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Elon Musk threatens to charge for X, OpenAI launches DALL-E 3 and Cisco acquires Splunk
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Welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering the past few days in tech. The TC crew — including this reporter — is coming off the high of Disrupt, which hopefully some of you, dear readers, were able to attend in person. Fret not if you didn’t — there’s always next year, and other TC events besides. And over the coming days, TC’s YouTube channel will have all thehighlightsfor your on-demand viewing pleasure. But the world didn’t stop turning for Disrupt. This week was as newsy as any other, what with Elon Musk threatening to charge all X (formerly Twitter) users a fee, OpenAI launching DALL-E 3 and Cisco acquiring Splunk in a deal worth $28 billion. Elsewhere, outgoing TC editor-in-chief Matthew Panzarino published his iPhone 15 review, Apple released iOS 17, Y Combinator got defensive and Microsoft researchers accidentally exposed terabytes of data. And that’s just scratching the surface. If you haven’t already,sign up hereto get WiR in your inbox every Saturday. Now, on to the news! A fee for X:Early this week,X owner Elon Muskfloated the idea that the social network formerly known as Twitter may no longer be a free site. In a livestreamed conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Musk said that the company was “moving to a small monthly payment” for the use of the X system, suggesting that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of increasing bots on the platform. OpenAI unveils DALL-E 3:OpenAI unveiled DALL-E 3, an upgraded version of its text-to-image tool, which usesChatGPT— OpenAI’s viral AI chatbot — to take some of the pain out of prompting. Via ChatGPT, subscribers to OpenAI’s premium ChatGPT plans, ChatGPT Plus andChatGPT Enterprise, can type in a request for an image and hone it through conversations with the chatbot, receiving the results directly within the chat app. Cisco buys Splunk:Cisco has a reputation ofbuilding the companythrough acquisitions, but it’s tended to stay away from the really huge ones. That changed this week when the company announced it was acquiringSplunk for $28 billion. WithSplunk, Ron writes, Cisco gets an observability platform that could fit nicely into its security business to help customers better understand security threats. The iPhone 15 goes to Disneyland:For what’s likely his last iPhone review at TechCrunch, Matthew took the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro Max to Disneyland. Literally. He had two days and some change to drag the phones through the parks capturing video, making purchases, using them as virtual tickets and vacation planners for reservations, coordinating a friends and family group, and more. The verdict? The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max prove that there’s much more room for Apple to grow, Matt writes — albeit inward instead of outward. iOS grows up:Romain reviewed iOS 17, whose arrival coincided with the launch of the iPhone 15. He found it to be a “nice and polished” update, spotlighting the overhauled keyboard with AI-assisted autocorrect, a Messages app with vastly improved search, and support for offline maps in Apple Maps. But the highlight is StandBy mode, he says, which displays glanceable information when the iPhone’s charging on a MagSafe dock. Y Combinator goes on the defensive:Storied acceleratorY Combinatorhas been on the defensive as of late. Mary Ann reports on the recent and unexpectedly aggressive reactions from YC leaders, including CEO Garry Tan, to criticism on social media — including to a piecewrittenby TechCrunch’s own Rebecca Szkutak. Microsoft exposes data:Microsoft AI researchers accidentally exposed tens of terabytes of sensitive data, including private keys and passwords, while publishing a storage bucket of open source training data on GitHub. In research shared with TechCrunch,cloud security startup Wizsaid it discovered a GitHub repository belonging to Microsoft’s AI research division as part of its ongoing work into the accidental exposure of cloud-hosted data. Unity backtracks:Unity, the popular cross-platform game and media development engine, is on the defensive after receiving intense backlash over a controversial new fee structure. Devin reports that Unity has done a 180, nixing plans to introduce a widely decried “runtime fee” for current versions of Unity and raising the revenue ceiling above which users must upgrade to the paid version of Unity. In need of a quality podcast? You’re in luck — TC’s got plenty. This week onEquity, the crew hosted two — count ’em,two— podcasts on the ground at Disrupt. The first covered breaking IPO news around Instacart, as well as how Joby is all in on the Buckeye state, growth in the elder tech space and Writer bringing back nine-figure joy. The second was a retrospective, spanning
| 2023-09-23T20:15:12 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/23/elon-musk-threatens-to-charge-for-x-openai-launches-dall-e-3-and-cisco-acquires-splunk/
| 765 | 1 |
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TikTok says it will go dark Sunday unless Biden offers ‘definitive statement’
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It remains unclear whether TikTok will still be available in the United States on Sunday, with the company claiming that President Joe Biden’s outgoing administration needs to offer “definitive” assurances that it won’t enforce a ban. On Friday,the Supreme Court upheld a lawthat would effectively ban TikTok in the U. S. if the app’s owner ByteDance doesn’t sell it. With a sale unlikely to go through in the two days before the law took effect (and ByteDance repeatedly insisting that it won’t sell), it seemed TikTok would disappear from app stores on Sunday, January 19. Reports have suggested that it could alsostop working entirelysince U. S. companies would be banned from providing services that support the distribution, maintenance, or updating of the app. January 19 is also, however, one day before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, and the incoming president hadasked the Supreme Courtto delay the ban so that he could “negotiate a resolution to save the platform. ” While the court did not agree to a delay, the Biden administration also seemed inclined to leave TikTok’s fate in Trump’s hands. In a statement Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that Biden’s position hasn’t changed — namely, that “TikTok should remain available to Americans, but simply under American ownership or other ownership that addresses the national security concerns identified by Congress. ” However, given the timing, Jean-Pierre said “actions to implement the law simply must fall to the next Administration. ” Similarly,a Justice Department statementfrom Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco suggested that “the next phase of this effort — implementing and ensuring compliance with the law after it goes into effect on January 19 — will be a process that plays out over time. ” TikTok, however,responded with a statement of its ownsuggesting that this wasn’t enough for the company and other service providers to continue offering the TikTok app. In TikTok’s view, Biden and the DOJ “failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to the service providers that are integral to maintaining TikTok’s availability to over 170 million Americans. ” The company added, “Unless the Biden Administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19. ” Following TikTok’s comments, Jean-Pierredescribed the company’s statement as “a stunt”and said the administration sees “no reason for TikTok or other companies to take actions in the next few days before the Trump administration takes office on Monday. ” This post has been updated to reflect additional comment from the White House, as well as reports that TikTok could be shut down entirely in the US, not simply removed from app stores
| 2025-01-18T15:22:25 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/18/tiktok-says-it-will-go-dark-sunday-unless-biden-offers-definitive-statement/
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Clean energy investment hits new highs and shows no sign of slowing
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The world is set to invest nearly twice as much in clean energy as fossil fuels this year, according to a newInternational Energy Agency report. While fossil fuel outlays are still significant — about $1. 15 trillion this year — they’ll be dwarfed by clean energy, which is expected to receive $2. 15 trillion in 2025. But the real takeaway is that the energy transition doesn’t show signs of slowing. Plotting the two investment trends is revealing. Over the last decade, fossil fuel investment has been relatively steady, if declining slightly. There has been an uptick since a drop that coincided with the pandemic, but even that shows signs of softening this year. But clean energy investment follows a different path, a far more aggressively positive trend: The curve is up and to the right. For data nerds: A second-order polynomial fit to the fossil fuel investment does a reasonable job of explaining the variance (R2= 0. 74), suggesting the world might be extracting a bit more oil, coal, and gas in the near future. But the same type of equation applied to clean energy figures fits the data far better (R2= 0. 94). Unless the world takes a U-turn — something that hasn’t happened in the 10 years the IEA has collected this data, pandemic included — expect bigger clean energy numbers next year. The big question is whether it’ll be too little, too late. To hit net zero by 2050, the world has to invest an average of $4. 5 trillion annually, according to areportfrom the World Economic Foundation. That’s double this year’s investment, which sounds like a lot. But analysts havepreviously issuedoverly cautious clean energy investment forecasts. The trend in the new IEA data suggests that the goal is within reach. Clean energy’s exponential growth won’t last forever; the trend is likely to taper off in the coming years, just like it did in the mid-2010s. Butas I’ve written before, these sorts of fits and starts are not unusual, and adoption of new technologies is never continuous. Instead, it’s influenced by global economic trends and the learning curve that companies face when incorporating them into their businesses. Ultimately, by 2050, I suspect average annual investment will probably meet or exceed the $4. 5 trillion annual rate that the World Economic Forum calls for. Clean energy technologies are cheaper by the year, which makes them more accessible. Indeed,85% of electricity demand growthin the next two years is going to come from developing and emerging economies, and while cheap coal has driven the narrative in many of those, solar and wind shouldn’t be counted out. The wildcard, of course, is data centers. In the U. S. , at least, utilities are confronting demand forecasts withenormous error bars. Those forecasts may fall short, but utilities tend to err on the side of caution, which means finding more power. Some will turn to gas turbines, others will bet on nuclear. But in the next few years — and likely over the long term — renewables paired with energy storage will have the upper hand. They’re probable winners not just because they’re getting cheaper, but because they’re modular. They can be deployed at a range of scales and prices. It’s easy for them to be everywhere, and that’s something investors love to see. Topics Senior Reporter, Climate 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?
| 2025-06-06T16:49:16 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/06/clean-energy-investment-hits-new-highs-and-shows-no-sign-of-slowing/
| 630 | 1 |
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Embedded accounting startup Layer secures $2.3M toward goal of replacing QuickBooks
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Embedded financeis usually what we hear about when brands and non-financial businesses want to offer financial products or services — like banking, insurance, lending and payments — to provide a better user experience for customers. Layeris leaning into that better user experience, but with embedded accounting. Its customers are those, like Square or Toast, working with small and medium-sized businesses to offer accounting and bookkeeping features inside their own products. These larger companies would embed Layer’s tools into their platform for small businesses to use. SMBs can now access bookkeeping and accounting tools inside the Square or Toast platforms they use to run their business. This is instead of using a separate accounting software, like QuickBooks, to manage their business finances. Justin Meretab, a former product leader on Square’s Banking team, started San Francisco-based Layer in 2023 with Daniel O’Neel, a former engineering leader at Wealthfront. Their goal was to create a set of APIs that allows platform customers to pass data from their small business customers to Layer. Then Layer provides connections to external bank accounts and credit cards to pull in the data and flow that into Layer’s ledger and account system. This allows the small businesses to then build a complete picture of all their financial data. In a way, Layer is likeUnitor Check, but for SMB accounting instead of banking and payroll. In fact, the company aims to completely replace legacy accounting and bookkeeping platforms like QuickBooks, Meretab told TechCrunch. So did investors laugh them out of the room when they explained how they wanted to replace QuickBooks? Kind of. “Many investors we’ve spoken with have told us this is a lofty goal given how much QuickBooks currently dominates the SMB accounting market,” Meretab said. “However, they also agree with our core belief that there’s been a fundamental shift in how SMBs run their businesses that now makes it possible to disrupt QuickBooks’ moat. ” Meretab went on to explain that over the last few years, platforms like Square, Toast and Shopify became the hubs where SMBs run their businesses. These platforms have built deep relationships with those customers, and as a result, increasingly help them manage all of their day to day operations. Meretab was at Square for six years and heard from customers that they wanted to do their accounting directly within these platforms instead of in separate tools. He and O’Neel spoke to potential customers and learned it would be challenging to build that kind of embedded accounting feature internally, so they did it. Layer is not alone here. There are some companies doing embedded accounting for SMBs, like Hurdlr and Fiskl. Meretab said Layer tries to differentiate itself in the general market by focusing on building comprehensive accounting products without making customers do a lot of work themselves, or without them even needing to understand how accounting works. The company has a small set of early customers, four in fact, that have launched their own SMB accounting products embedded within their platforms. Customers serve a wide range of SMB industries, from truck drivers to medical spas, and collectively work with over 100,000 small businesses. “One surprise has been that many SMB users tell us our embedded accounting views are actually the first time they’ve ever seen a clear profit and loss view of their business,” Meretab said. “Many tried to use separate accounting software but found it too complicated or difficult to keep in sync with their main operational software. ” Layer’s different approach has also attracted investors. Better Tomorrow Ventures led a $2. 3 million pre-seed investment into the company and was joined by a group of executives at companies, including Square, Plaid, Unit and Check. The company plans to deploy the new funding into expanding its services to additional small business software platforms this year. It will also expand its team of four across engineering and business operations roles. “Over the course of this year, our goal is to grow customers significantly, like triple the number of customers, and scale revenue,” Meretab said. Topics Senior Reporter Christine Hall wrote about enterprise/B2B, e-commerce, and foodtech for TechCrunch, and venture capital rounds for Crunchbase News. Based in Houston, Christine previously reported for the Houston Business Journal, the Texas Medical Center’s Pulse magazine, and Community Impact Newspaper. She has an undergraduate journalism degree from Murray State University and a graduate degree from The Ohio State University. Diligent Robotics hires two notable Cruise alumni to its leadership team Google announces latest AI American Infrastructure Acadmey cohort Trump taps transportation secretary Sean Duffy as acting NASA chief Cameo’s birthday reminder app, Candl, is a weak attempt at a comeback Samsung to launch a triple-folding phone this year Google brings its AI-powered marketing tools to India after ‘Google tax’ repeal Elon Musk’s xAI launches Grok 4 alongside a $300 monthly subscription
| 2024-05-15T13:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/15/embedded-accounting-layer-2-3m-quickbooks/
| 805 | 1 |
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Socure acquires identity verification startup Berbix for $70M
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Socure, the identity verification service thatraiseda massive $450 million Series E round at a $4. 5 billion valuation during the heady fundraising days of late 2021 (and $100 million earlier in 2021), today announced that it has acquired identity verification serviceBerbixfor $70 million in cash and stock transactions. Berbix previously raised a total of$11. 6 million, including a$9 million Series A roundled by Mayfield in 2020. This marks Socure’s first acquisition. Founded in 2018, Berbix focuses on verifying users’ identities by checking scanned IDs in real time. Using its patent-pending forensics engine, Berbix can help businesses detect fake IDs to reduce fraud and ensure compliance with local regulations. Socure’s platform, meanwhile, takes a slightly broader and multi-dimensional approach that includes both active and passive means to deter fraud in a wide range of sectors, ranging from e-commerce to healthcare. “From a product perspective, Socure is moving with a high velocity into new markets and new geographies, covering e-commerce marketplaces, gig economy, public sector and healthcare, among others,” Socure founder and CEO Johnny Ayers said. “We are finding repeatedly that there is a need for best-in-class active and passive — documentary and non-documentary — identity verification and fraud controls to solve very complex fraud and customeracquisitionchallenges. ” He noted that Socure’s customers are asking for the ability to check IDs online that, combined with the company’s existing tools, can help them ensure that, for example, a driver applying to a grocery delivery service is who they say they are. “Our combined solution is easily quantifiable in terms of speed, accuracy and fraud capture which equate to immediate revenue lift and spend reduction,” said Ayers. He also noted that Socure is in a good position to make an acquisition like this. He noted that Socure’s revenue grew over 50% in 2022, all while other companies in the space were flat to down. “We are looking to be offensive where it makes sense,” he said. “There are a number of companies that made some very interesting investments in innovation in the past couple of years, but unfortunately don’t have the runway or access to capital to continue independently. It makes sense to continue assessing what is in the market. ” Socure already integrated Berbix in its existing Predictive Document Verification service, which is launching version 3. 0 today. The updated service combines Berbix’s forensics engine for spotting fake IDs with Socure’s image capture app and user experience. The company notes that while users can use the document verification service as a stand-alone application, it’s also integrated into the overall Socure platform. This acquisition is part of a wider trend we’ve been seeing, with well-funded startups capitalizing on their ability to acquire companies that may have a hard time raising the next funding round and/or justifying their previous valuations. “The cost of capital in the last 18 months for most companies has gone from single digit to 20-30% or more, which we expect will mean a lot of really great assets are coming to market trying to find a home in the winner in a given space,” said Ayers. “We are seeing that every venture fund is bucketing their portfolio into categories of ‘great,’ ‘good,’ ‘ok’ or ‘not good’ — and anything that’s good or less, they’re going to be more open to trade previously overpriced private stock to a much higher quality stock with higher upside and shorter-term liquidity within the winner of a market. We expect there to be individual point solutions that are just never going to get big enough to be a long-term independent company. ” Berbix raises $9M for its identity verification platform Identity verification startup Socure raises $450M at $4. 5B valuation, adding Tiger Global as new investor Topics Editor 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?
| 2023-06-27T13:00:24 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/27/socure-acquires-identity-verification-startup-berbix-for-70m/
| 697 | 1 |
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Robotaxi haters in San Francisco are disabling the AVs with traffic cones
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A decentralized group of safe streets activists in San Francisco realized they can disable Cruise and Waymo robotaxis by placing a traffic cone on a vehicle’s hood, and they’re encouraging others to do it, too. The “Week of Cone,” as the group is calling the now-viral prank on Twitter and TikTok, is a form of protest against the spread of robotaxi services in the city, and it appears to be gaining traction with residents who are sick of the vehicles malfunctioning andblocking traffic. The protest comes in the lead-up to ahearingthat will likely see Waymo and Cruise expand their robotaxi services in San Francisco. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is set to approve the expansion of both Cruise’s and Waymo’s autonomous vehicle passenger service deployments in San Francisco on July 13. The agency doesn’t give companies permission to operate their AVs on public roads — that’s the Department of Motor Vehicles’ domain. But it does grant companies the authority to charge passengers a fare for that service, which is an essential ingredient to scaling robotaxi and autonomous delivery operations sustainably. In May, the CPUC posteddraft resolutions approving the expansion, despite mounting opposition from city agencies and residents. Opponents called out the string of AVs that have impeded traffic, public transit and emergency responders, and asked that the CPUC move cautiously, set up workshops, collect more data, prohibit robotaxi deployment downtown and during peak hours, and limit the expansion of fleet sizes. Other opponents like the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance and the Alliance for Independent Workers have protested the spread of robotaxis, which they say willeliminate the need for taxiand ride-hail drivers. Safe Street Rebel’s cone campaign is a bid to raise awareness and invite more pissed-off San Franciscans to submit public comments to the CPUC before next week’s hearing. “These companies promise their cars will reduce traffic and collisions, but instead they block buses, emergency vehicles and everyday traffic,” reads one videoposted on social media. “They even un-alived a person and a dog. And they’re partnering with the police to record everyone all the time without anyone’s consent. And most importantly they require streets that are designed for cars, not people or transit. They exist only for profit-driven car companies to stay dominant and make it harder for transit to stay afloat. ” While the above statement is a bit hyperbolic, there are nuggets of truth. Cruise and Waymo vehicles have indeed stopped in the middle of roads, blocking emergency vehicles, public transit and general traffic. Recently aWaymo AV did hit and kill a dog, but it seems that the accident was unavoidable. In 2018, anUber self-driving vehiclewas involved in an accident that killed a pedestrian in Arizona, but so far no deaths have occurred as the result of AVs in San Francisco. And, yes, thepolice have tapped Cruise and Waymofor footage to help solve a handful of crimes, but there’s no evidence that the companies are working in tandem with law enforcement to record everyone all the time. Nonetheless, the group brings up a common concern about unleashing autonomous vehicles onto public roads — the lack of input from everyday people who have to deal with the vehicles on the ground. Congressional efforts to regulate self-driving cars have lagged for several years, so most regulation comes from state departments of transportation and departments of motor vehicles. “I see some tech bros wringing their hands in horror: ‘Won’t someone think of the AVs?!’”tweetedDavid Zipper, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, in response to the cone challenge. “Couldn’t disagree more. California regulators are forcing San Franciscans to become guinea pigs for work-in-progress AV tech. Active protest is a reasonable response. ” Or to put it another way: “Hell no. We do not consent to this,” said Safe Street Rebel. The group is inviting others to follow its lead and disable the vehicles by “gently placing” cones on a driverless — meaning, empty — car’s hood. Some people are apparentlysending in submissions, but it’s unclear how many people have sent images to Safe Street Rebel. The group did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Waymo called the viral hack a form of vandalism. “Not only is this understanding of how AVs operate incorrect, but this is vandalism and encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on our roadways,” the company said in a statement. “We will notify law enforcement of any unwanted or unsafe interference of our vehicles on public roadways. ” Again with the hyperbole. The definition of vandalism is to intentionally damage someone’s property — think slashed tires or broken windows. Waymo probably won’t have any luck sticking a vandalism charge on someone who puts a cone on the hood of its vehicles. Cruise told TechCrunch that it has a strong safety record and that,when compared to a human driver, its autonomous driver had 73% fewer collisions with meaningful risk of injury. “Cruise’s fleet provides free rides to late-night service workers without more reliable transportation options, has delivered over 2 million meals to food insecure San Franciscans, and recovers food waste from local businesses,” said Cruise in a statement. “Intentionally obstructing vehicles gets in the way of those efforts and risks creating traffic congestion for local residents. ” Despite the guerilla protests, the cone trick probably won’t have an effect on the CPUC’s decision. There’s enough support from other stakeholders — including elected officials, accessibility advocates, technology industry groups and business and economic development organizations — for the CPUC to brush dissent under the rug. And according to the upcominghearing’s agenda, it looks like the agency is ready to approve the program authorization. “Cruise’s proposed service is not anticipated to result in significant safety risks,” reads an agenda item. The same sentiment is repeated for Waymo. This article has been updated with a statement from Cruise. Cruise’s autonomous driving tech comes under scrutiny from safety regulators 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. 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?
| 2023-07-07T02:52:20 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/06/robotaxi-haters-in-san-francisco-are-disabling-waymo-cruise-traffic-cones/
| 1,141 | 1 |
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Google offers billing choice for UK Play Store devs in bid to settle antitrust probe
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Google has proposed letting developers offering apps through its U. K. Play mobile app store to have the option to use alternative payment processors for in-app transactions, rather than being locked to its own billing system (GPB), following an antitrust intervention by the U. K. ’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). “Google’s proposed commitments would give app developers the freedom to offer a different billing system of their choosing, known as ‘Developer-only Billing’ (DOB), or offer users a choice between an alternative billing system or Google Play’s billing system, known as ‘User Choice Billing’ (UCB),” the regulator explains in an update on the enforcement. The CMA has opened aconsultationon Google’s proposal which it says it’s minded to accept — inviting developers and other interested stakeholders to respond by May 19. After considering responses it will take a decision on whether to accept the commitments and resolve the case. Last summer, the regulator concluded a year-long study of the mobile ecosystem which identified substantial concerns with the market power of the duopoly (Google with Android and Apple with iOS). At that time, in addition to opening certain other in-depth probes into aspects of the two tech giant’s operations, itannounced it that was taking enforcement actionagainst Google in relation to its app store payment practices. The CMA’sconcern here focused on conditions it sets on developers for in-app payments. So Google’s proposal aims to settle those concerns. In ablog postdetailing Google’s offer, legal director, Oliver Bethell, writes: Under the commitments, developers will be able to add an alternative in-app billing system, alongside Google Play’s billing system, for their mobile and tablet users in the U. K. At checkout, users will be able to choose which billing system to use. These options will be presented in a neutral manner allowing users to make an informed and engaged choice. “Developers can alternatively choose to not offer Google Play billing at all when their users in the U. K. are paying for digital content and services,” he adds. In the blog post, the company also notes that its U. K. proposal would extend the choice of an alternative billing system that it already offers in the European Economic Area (EEA) — where Google has faced a number of antitrust enforcements over the past several years — and in other parts of the world; such asSouth Koreawhere,back in 2021, lawmakers intervened to force Google’s hand on billing. India is another country where Google isgearing up to offer alternative billing— after being slapped with a$162 million fine for antitrust practices last fall. Google, complying with regulatory order, to support third-party billing in India from April 26 For its U. K. offer, Google is proposing to reduce what it bills as the per transaction “service fee” it charges developers for in-app digital sales — aka its cut/commission (or the app store tax, as some critique such fees) — by 4% where a developer offers users a choice that includes GPB but the user selects alternative billing. But if developers opt not to offer Google’s own payment processing system the proposed stick is a slightly lower reduction in Google’s cut — reduced to 3% in that scenario, seemingly incentivizing developers to keep offerings users the option to select its own payment tech. (NB: Google’s baseline service fee for the Play Store starts at 15% for the first $1 million in revenue earned per year, rising to 30% for any annual earnings over that threshold — so, under the alt billing proposal, its fee would remain above 10% in almost all scenarios. For automatically recurring subscriptions Google’s standard cut is 15%. Although it says some types of media content apps may attract a fee that’s lower than 15% under its Play Media Experience Program. ) Here it seems to be offering a blend of what it has already rolled out elsewhere — with developers in South Korea and India getting a 4% fee reduction when using alternative billing, while devs in theEEA were given a 3% reduction last summer. “For both options, developers are still required to meet appropriate user protection requirements, and service fees and conditions will continue to apply in order to support our investments in Android and Play,” Google adds. It also wants to be able to phase in the proposed commitments, arguing this will allow time “for the necessary changes to be made” to its systems — initially making them available to developers of non-gaming apps; and then bringing them to gaming apps “no later than October 2023”. Whether Google gets its way will be up to the CMA which will decide whether to accept the proposal — and that may depend on the kind of feedback it gets. The regulators says it’s especially keen on feedback about Google’s suggested service fee reduction (“under each of UCB and DOB); as well as additional elements including the proposed process for reporting in-app purchase-related turnover to Google (either manually or using APIs) for the service fee to be calculated; the use of information screens and, for UCB, a billing choice screen; and the process it’s proposing for monitoring Google’s compliance with the commitments, especially a commitment it has made not to retaliate against app developers choosing to use UCB or DOB. “Based on the information the CMA has received to date, and for the reasons set out below, the CMA provisionally considers the Proposed Commitments to be appropriate to address the particular Competition Concerns resulting from the Conduct that the CMA has investigated in this case,” the regulator writes in the Executive Summary of itsNotice of Intentto accept the commitments“Both DOB and UCB would allow app developers the opportunity to use billing systems of their choosing (and DOB would allow them to choose not to offer GPB at all), breaking the link that the GPB requirement currently creates between access to Google Play and the use of Google’s proprietary billing system for in-app sales of access to digital content or services. ” “Those app developers opting to use an alternative billing system will have the possibility of establishing direct relationships with customers and overseeing their own transactions. They may also be able to offer pricing deals which are different to prices where GPB is used. Moreover, third party payment processors will be able to offer their services to potential app developer customers for in-app purchases of digital content or services within an app distributed on Google Play, allowing app developers to benefit from increased choice and competition,” the CMA also suggests. Update:TheCoalition for App Fairness, an app industry group that’s been pushing for reform of app storessince 2020, has responded to Google’s UK proposal with scepticism — accusing the company of seeking to reallocate fees so it can continue taking what they argue is an unfair cut. In a statement Rick VanMeter, the group’s exec director, said: We support the CMA’s work to hold gatekeepers accountable and create a free and fair mobile app ecosystem. Google’s proposal to allow third party payment options is nothing more than a reallocation of fees. This proposal would enable them to continue taking a massive cut on services they do not even provide. This solution will not create meaningful competition and is a bad deal for developers and consumers. We will continue working with the CMA to bring real competition to the mobile app ecosystem. 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. 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?
| 2023-04-19T10:50:39 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/19/google-play-store-billing-choice-uk/
| 1,393 | 1 |
46630d1c2ff4b124f1a0ebc119a58939
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Spotify may use AI to make host-read podcast ads that sound like real people
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WithSpotify’s AI DJ,the company trained an AI on a real person’s voice — that of its head of Cultural Partnerships and podcast host,Xavier “X” Jernigan. Now the streamer may turn that same technology to advertising, it seems. According to statements made by The Ringer founder Bill Simmons, the streaming service is developing AI technology that will be able to use a podcast host’s voice to make host-read ads — without the host actually having to read and record the ad copy. Simmons made the statements on a recentepisodeof The Bill Simmons Podcast, saying, “There is going to be a way to use my voice for the ads. You have to obviously give the approval for the voice, but it opens up, from an advertising standpoint, all these different great possibilities for you. ” He said these ads could open up new opportunities for podcasters because they could geo-target ads — like tickets for a local event in the listener’s city — or even create ads in different languages, with the host’s permission. His comments were first reported bySemafor. The Ringerwas acquired by Spotify in 2020, but it wasn’t clear if Simmons was authorized to speak about the streamer’s plans in this area, as he began by saying, “I don’t think Spotify is going to get mad at me for this…” before sharing the information. Reached for comment, Spotify wouldn’t directly confirm or deny the feature’s development. “We’re always working to enhance the Spotify experience and test new offerings that benefit creators, advertisers and users,” a Spotify spokesperson told TechCrunch. “The AI landscape is evolving quickly and Spotify, which has a long history of innovation, is exploring a wide array of applications, including our hugely popular AI DJ feature. There has been a 500% increasein the number of daily podcast episodes discussing AI over the past month including the conversation between Derek Thompson and Bill Simmons. Advertising represents an interesting canvas for future exploration, but we don’t have anything to announce at this time. ” The subtext of this comment indicates Simmons’ statements may have been somewhat premature. That said, Spotify has already hinted that the AI DJ in the app today would not be the only AI voice users would encounter in the future. When Jernigan was recently asked about Spotify’s plans to work with other voice models going forward, he teased, “Stay tuned. ” The streamer has also been quietly investing in AI development and research, with a team of a few hundred now working on areas like personalization and machine learning. Plus, the team has been using the OpenAI model and researching the possibilities across Large Language Models, generative voice, and more. Spotify’s ability to create AI voices specifically leverages IP fromSpotify’s 2022 acquisitionof Sonantic combined with OpenAI technology. It may opt to use its own in-house AI tech in the future, the companyrecently told us. To create AI DJ,Spotify had Jernigan go into a studioto produce high-quality recordings, including those where he read lines with different cadences and emotions. He kept his natural pauses and breaths in the recordings and was sure to use language he already says — like “tunes” or “bangers” instead of just “songs. ” All this is then fed into the AI model, which then creates the AI voice. The company has declined to detail the process in more detail or say how long it took to turn Jernigan’s recordings into an AI DJ. But, given its possible interest in turning its podcast hosts into AI voice models, it must be developing a fairly efficient process here — and one that could possibly leverage a podcaster’s existing recordings. While AI voices aren’t new, the ability to make them sound like real people is a more modern development. A few years ago, Google wowed the world with a human-sounding AI in Duplex that could call restaurants for you to make reservations. But the tech wasinitially slammedfor its lack of disclosure. This month, Appleintroduced an accessibility feature, Personal Voice, that is able to mimic the user’s own voice after they first train the model by spending 15 minutes reading randomly chosen prompts, processed locally on their device
| 2023-05-23T16:49:16 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/23/spotify-may-use-ai-to-make-host-read-podcast-ads-that-sound-like-real-people/
| 692 | 1 |
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Construction marketplace Construex takes in first capital to expand in Latin America
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Construex, an Ecuador-based software-as-a-service marketplace for the construction and design industries, secured $4. 6 million in seed funding. Zacua Ventures and Fifth Wall co-led the round and were joined by ABSeed and Terracotta Ventures. Roberto Arroyo started the company with his brother, Nicolás Arroyo, in 2019 after working in his family’s construction business as well as operating his own housing projects in Ecuador for over 15 years. Some of those projects included managing the procurement of materials and hiring of services in housing and apartment complexes, which is where he got the idea for Construex. “I was having trouble purchasing supplies, and so I started talking to my brother, who has been purchasing for the construction company for a long time, and we started understanding how to help other developers find a solution, too,” Roberto Arroyo told TechCrunch. The Arroyos started Construex in 2019 to digitize the construction industry in Latin America, a market Arroyo estimated to be valued at over $520 billion. The company is among a handful of startups addressing the supply chain in this region, for example,Tülin Colombia. The biggest problem is lack of information, Arroyo said. Just 4% of construction suppliers are tech-enabled, so there is an opportunity to connect construction product suppliers with customers in a way that doesn’t involve calling around for supplies, he said. Construex offers a free version of its platform and takes in revenue from transactions made on the platform, as well as additional services via a subscription model. “We offer a really good CRM to our suppliers,” Arroyo said. “There are virtual reality showrooms and integration through WhatsApp. ” The company has more than 80,000 registered suppliers offering over 700,000 products ranging from architecture to engineering to furnishings. It also has a team of 48 people across two offices. They bootstrapped the company for almost four years and reached profitability as it expanded into Chile, Guatemala and Argentina. It has approximately 500 customers in the subscription model, and the company doubled its revenue this year compared to 2022, Arroyo said. As the company grew, they decided to scale more quickly and go after venture capital to further expand into Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries, while also adding Brazil to the pipeline. Construex recently opened an office in Mexico City. Arroyo has a goal of bringing 1 million suppliers onto Construex over the next few years and expects to multiply revenue by 4x in the next year. Meanwhile, this is ABSeed’s first investment outside of Brazil, according to Geraldo Melzer, co-founding partner of ABSeed. “Roberto Arroyo’s trajectory alongside this market gives him a privileged perspective on the real needs of this industry,” Melzer said in a statement. “We understand that the problems they face today are common to us. Together with Terracotta, a partner fund specialized in proptechs, we want to bring them closer to players in our market and, with multiple hands, build the bridge for them to come here in the near future. ” Latin America’s Q3 2023 venture results show glimmers of light Topics Senior Reporter Christine Hall wrote about enterprise/B2B, e-commerce, and foodtech for TechCrunch, and venture capital rounds for Crunchbase News. Based in Houston, Christine previously reported for the Houston Business Journal, the Texas Medical Center’s Pulse magazine, and Community Impact Newspaper. She has an undergraduate journalism degree from Murray State University and a graduate degree from The Ohio State University. 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?
| 2023-11-27T17:00:49 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/27/construction-marketplace-construex-latin-america/
| 640 | 1 |
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Nigerian fintech Zone raises $8.5M seed to scale its decentralized payment infrastructure
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African financial institutions typically scale their solutions using a mix of local and foreign tech. Appzone is one of the standout local fintech software providers for banks and fintechs, providing better pricing and flexibility. For over a decade, the Nigeria-basedAppzonehas functioned as an enabler (at payment rails and core infrastructure) within banking and payments, building custom software and software-as-a-service products for over 18 commercial banks and more than 450 microfinance banks across Africa, including Ghana and Kenya. In 2022, the fintech software provider, founded byEmeka Emetarom,Obi EmetaromandWale Onawunmi, decided to self-innovate by delving into blockchain technology and integrating it with legacy banking and payment systems. As such, it rebranded toZone, a licensed blockchain-enabled payment infrastructure company–and carved out its originalbanking-as-a-service businessinto a separate standalone company, Qore. Today, Zone, its blockchain network that enables payments and acceptance of digital currencies, is announcing that it has raised $8. 5 million in a seed round. Zone’s concept is straightforward: It recognizes that Africa’s current payment infrastructure may not be suitable for transitioning to a cashless future (which may take some time). Therefore, the fintech is developing an interoperable payment infrastructure using blockchain technology — known for its ability to scale infinitely — to connect banks and fintech companies, facilitating transaction flow without intermediaries. Nigerian fintech Appzone raises $10M for expansion and proprietary technology In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Obi Emetarom says Zone is Africa’s first regulated blockchain network for payments and has already signed up over 15 of the continent’s largest banks. It is currently processing domestic transactions for seven of these banks through ATM channels, one of several payment channels through which transactions originate in Nigeria, including POS, fund transfer, web and direct debit. According to the chief executive, eight banks are at various stages of implementation as onboarding processes can take up to six months due to internal procedures such as setting up staging environments, testing and obtaining management approvals. Zone, before its launch, obtained a switching license from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the country’s apex bank, tapping into Nigeria’scentral switch(Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System), which is responsible for the interoperability between various players in the country’s financial system and the swift movement of money between bank accounts. Since the central switch primarily handles fund transfer switching, a few fintechs, like Moniepoint and OPay, have used direct card routing (DCR) to establish direct connections with card issuers, leading to faster transactions with fewer failures for POS transactions, which is Zone’s next focus. “We’re launching and rolling out some new use cases this year. The ATM use case didn’t incorporate fintechs because they don’t deploy ATMs,” said Emetarom. “But with the POS, that brings a use case fintechs are very familiar with – and for that, we are also integrating some of the big fintechs in the country. ” Emetarom explains that Zone aims to empower banks and fintechs to replicate the achievements of OPay and Moniepoint without the necessity for individual integrations. He said that Zone already has these integrations in place and operates as a licensed switch, thus avoiding the risk of violating regulatory guidelines. The blockchain architecture, he added, is such that when a fintech connects to the Zone network, it is provided with a gateway that serves as the environment through which its transactions are sent directly to the bank, to the issuer for authorization, and back. “The bank or fintech becomes a switch because they now have something in their environment that connects them to all the destinations they need to reach rather than going through a third-party switch,” the CEO notes. “So the reliability goes up significantly because we dont have any scenario where they have to rely on a middle intermediary and the fintech has control over their switch because it’s sitting in their environment on their servers or the cloud. ” Emetarom stated that reconciliation and instant settlement are other imminent applications of Zone’s blockchain technology. For instance, when a transaction fails and a customer is debited, a lengthy reconciliation process follows before a refund is issued, often taking days or weeks. Zone’s decentralized architecture will allow for automatic reconciliation and adjustment when discrepancies occur, leading to immediate refunds for customers without needing them to report the issue. In addition, its blockchain technology should provide transparency, allowing the terminal and the issuer complete visibility into the transaction status. Similarly, merchants experience settlement delays when they receive funds. With Zone’s instant settlement feature, funds are delivered to the merchant’s bank immediately after the transaction, addressing liquidity challenges and ensuring smoother operations. “Decentralized routing improves reliability and scalability and provides automated reconciliation to solve chargeback fraud. With Zone, we can harmonize transaction processing and the settlement system, which will be supported by a settlement token,” said the CEO, adding that these functionalities will be rolled out pending approval from the CBN. The payments switch and financial network landscape in Africa typically rely on bank consortiums for infrastructure ownership. Private initiatives have seen mixed success, with few gaining significant traction outside traditional banking; Zone, being one of them, stands out due to its founders who are veterans of the banking industry, a live processing client base, and central bank licensing. So far, Zone has processed transactions at more than 6,000 ATMs for more than 10 million cardholders. Within three months of launching the ATM use case, the fintech processed over $1 million. This traction has garnered excitement among its investors. Flourish Ventures, a global fintech-focused fund, and TLcom Capital, a pan-African venture capital fund, co-led the funding round, which Zone says will assist it in launching additional functionalities and broadening its network coverage to other payment channels, thereby catering to a wider range of clients. In addition, the company, which doesn’t charge implementation fees, hopes to reduce the time it takes to onboard its clients (fintechs and banks) in the coming months. TLcom Capital’s Ido Sum said Zone’sblockchain technology solves a critical payments system challenge and can potentially drive down costs for hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses that rely on digital payments in Africa daily, hence his firm’s backing. “For the first time in Africa, Zone’s technology enables direct communication between participants in the payment ecosystem. We believe this is a fundamental leap that will allow customers to experience a completely new standard of reliability, speed, and cost efficiency at ATMs, POS machines, and online,” added Ameya Upadhyay, a partner at Flourish Ventures. “We are excited by the potential for Zone’s technology to be replicated across borders to advance payment innovation globally. ” Topics Reporter, Africa 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?
| 2024-03-18T09:26:53 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/18/nigerian-fintech-zone-raises-8-5m-to-scale-its-decentralized-payment-infrastructure/
| 1,168 | 1 |
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Solar installer Sunnova races to raise cash as it issues ‘going concern’ warning
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Solar installerSunnovaissued a “going concern” warning as the company runs short on cash. Thestockis currently down around 68% as investors gauge the risk that Sunnova is headed for bankruptcy, a frequent outcome for companies that issue such warnings. In a bid to stave off insolvency, Sunnova said Monday it is planning to refinance debt, raise new debt, and cut expenses. Houston-based Sunnova is one of the largest solar installers in the U. S. , bringing in $840 million in revenue last year. Sunnovareporteda net loss of $447 million in 2024, a narrower loss than the previous year. The company had once been valued at as much as $4. 5 billion. Its market cap has since plunged to around $63 million. The news comes as the solar industry has been bracing for a rough road ahead. Last week, Sunrun, the country’s largest installer,loweredits guidance for cash generation in 2025 on expectations that installations will be flat this year. Much of the industry’s turbulence can be traced to high interest rates and uncertainty about the future of the Inflation Reduction Act. Solar installers have benefited in the past from low interest rates, which make solar loans and leasing attractive to consumers. By spreading the cost of rooftop solar over many years, consumers don’t have to pay up front and often save relative to their monthly utility bills. But as rates have risen, it can take longer for consumers to benefit financially. On the policy front, the Inflation Reduction Actextended tax creditsthat were set to expire at the end of last year. The new credits run through 2032, though the Trump administration has vowed to unravel the law. The outlook isn’t bleak everywhere. First Solar, a large solar manufacturer,beat the streetin its Q4 earnings report, sending the stock up. And in many cases, solar remains the cheapest form of new generating capacity. There’s a reason that insiders refer to the industry as the “solar coaster. ” Topics Senior Reporter, Climate 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?
| 2025-03-04T16:29:20 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/04/solar-installer-sunnova-races-to-raise-cash-as-it-issues-going-concern-warning/
| 402 | 0.9 |
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Investors are scrambling to get into ElevenLabs, which may soon be valued at $3 billion
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ElevenLabs, a startup that makes AI tools for audio applications, is being approached by existing and new investors about a new round, which could value the company as highly as $3 billion, TechCrunch has learned. The two-year-old company specializes in making AI tools to generate synthetic voices for audiobook narrations, and for real-time video dubbing into other languages. One source at an interested VC firm told TechCrunch that investors are scrambling to get into the fast-growing company, and that their firm is willing to offer up to a $3 billion valuation, thinking that’s what it might take to get into the next round. This person said a deal is likely in coming weeks. Investors from two other firms confirmed that ElevenLabs is raising, but are passing on the deal. One of these sources heard secondhand that the company’s annualized recurring revenue (ARR) has grown from $25 million at the end of last year to roughly $80 million in recent months, making it one of the fastest-growing startups developing actual applications for AI. (These investors asked for anonymity for competitive reasons. ) If accurate, that revenue figure means that investors could value ElevenLabs at around 38 times the most recent ARR figure. That multiple is slightly lower than some enterprise-focused companies such asHebbia and Glean. The lower multiple may be because a substantial portion of its revenue comes from consumer usage for narration and personal video dubbing. Consumer revenue is often considered more volatile than revenue generated from corporate clients. The round, if completed at a $3 billion valuation, wouldtriple ElevenLabs’ valuationfrom its Series B in January, which was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. This would be Eleven Labs’ third round in a little over a year, but TechCrunch couldn’t learn the size of the potential investment, as the discussions with investors are still ongoing. Eleven Labs has already raised $100 million. While Google’s Gemini andOpenAI have introducedtheir own human voice models, neither company’s offerings can clone the speech of other humans like Eleven Labs. Other companies that are targeting the synthetic voice generation market includeMurf,Tavus,Resemble AI,RespeecherandLovo. ElevenLabs didn’t respond to a request for comment. Topics Reporter, Venture 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?
| 2024-10-03T23:06:58 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/03/investors-are-scrambling-to-get-into-elevenlabs-which-may-soon-be-valued-at-3-billion/
| 436 | 0.9 |
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‘Buy American’ shouldn’t block our progress toward ‘Internet for All’
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The finish line is within sight. “Internet for All,” as the Biden administration put it, will soon be a reality if America keeps its priorities straight. During his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden set a high bar, “We’re going to buy American,” as the U. S. spends billions of dollars on new broadband connections. This is a smart strategy to create American jobs and boost the U. S. economy, but our leaders must not sacrifice speed in the race to close the digital divide in cases where “Buy American” isn’t yet a realistic option. Strengthened during the pandemic when all finally understood that broadband is a necessity, bipartisan cooperation brought America a once-in-a-generation opportunity to achieve universal connectivity. To date, more than $90 billion has been earmarked by Congress and the administration to finish the private sector’s work of connecting every home in America with broadband internet service. Under the $42. 45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, for example, every participating state — as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia — will receive a minimum of $100 million for internet infrastructure, with more to be doled out based on each state’s proportional number of unserved locations. Cartesianestimatesthat fiber providers will contribute another $22 billion in funds for $64 billion in total, which is “sufficient to achieve the program’s availability goal” of making broadband service “available to all eligible locations. ” That’s a first. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed into law by President Biden on November 15, 2021, also included $14. 2 billion for the Affordable Connectivity Program, which has helpedover 17 millionAmerican families pay for a home broadband connection that they otherwise would struggle to afford. What’s more, the bill set aside $2. 75 billion for Digital Equity programs; $2 billion for the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program; $2 billion for the Rural Utilities Service Distance Learning, Telemedicine and Broadband Program; and $1 billion for a new Middle Mile grant program. This truly is broadband’s moment in the sun. During this sprint toward “Internet for All,” America’s leaders should avoid creating hurdles that will delay progress. Every American deserves to have thechanceto “attend class, start a small business, visit with their doctor, and participate in the modern economy. ” The Build America Buy America Act, which was enacted as part of the IIJA, requires infrastructure projects (including internet infrastructure funded by the BEAD Program) to use domestically sourced materials. But broadband networks are complex; they’re more than just fiber cables. Some essential pieces of the puzzle like certain electronic products aren’t currently manufactured in America and the components that make up those products are not available in the United States. We should always do our best to honor President Biden’s goal to “Buy American,” but not at the expense of leaving Americans offline while they wait for every switch, router and radio to be made in the U. S. After all, the Government Accountability Office recentlyestimatedthat the BEAD Program alone could create 23,000 jobs for skilled telecommunications workers … just to build out the infrastructure. Spending will predominantly go toward U. S. paychecks and balance sheets, even if we need to rely on foreign manufacturers for a limited number of network components. U. S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo recentlyannouncedthat CommScope and Corning are investing nearly $550 million and creating hundreds of new jobs in America to build fiber optic cables. Although the Obama administrationprovideda blanket “Buy American” waiver for IT products in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), recognizing that the U. S. share of global computer and electronics output had dropped 8. 2 percentage points between 1999 and 2009, the Biden administration is right to seek a solution that is balanced, maximizing U. S. production when possible while permitting select network components to be sourced from outside our borders when necessary. There are so many good things happening to close the digital divide, including the Federal Communications Commission recently devoting$66 millionto Affordable Broadband Outreach Grants. Let’s not lose that momentum. Let’s not sacrifice thegreatfor the perfect. It’s time for the Biden administration to guard against the unintended consequences of the “Buy American” ideal and keep its eye on the prize: Everyone in America — including communities of color, rural communities and older Americans — needs broadband now. Topics Contributor 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?
| 2023-04-30T14:00:08 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/30/buy-american-shouldnt-block-our-progress-toward-internet-for-all/
| 800 | 1 |
cd4ba88996dc0799ce449c2ba8d1e5f8
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Tiger Global partner Alex Cook to leave firm, sources say
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Alex Cook, a partner at Tiger Global who oversaw some of its largest fintech investments and India deals, is departing the firm after a tenure of nearly seven years, three people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Cook has briefed multiple people around him about his departure news in recent days, although he hasn’t explained why he was leaving. The sources requested anonymity as the conversations were private. His departure adds to high-profile shifts within Tiger Global. Scott Shleifer, who previously led the firm’s private equity business,moved to a senior advisory role last year. John Curtius, who led the firm’s software investments,left in late 2022. Cook anchored many fintech deals for Tiger Global, including TradingView, TrueLayer, Scalapay, Xendit, Selfbook, Fazz and Refyne. The median size of his deals were about $35 million whereas the median valuation stood at north of $250 million, according to PitchBook. The departure has come as a surprise to at least some founders. Cook spoke frequently — multiple times a week — to founders, according to some accounts. He assumed responsibility for managing relationships with some portfolio startups previously overseen by Shleifer, according to people familiar with the matter. Tiger Global declined to comment. Cook’s focus extended significantly to emerging markets, particularly India, where he frequently visited and met with founders in person. In July 2022, for instance, he told founders in Bengaluru, India, that Tiger Global wasabout to slow its pace of investments, TechCrunch reported at the time. This development comes at a challenging time for the venture industry. Tiger Global raised $2. 2 billion for its latest VC fund, its smallest fundraising effort in a decade and a stark contrast to its previous years of robust investor demand that had allowed the New York-based giant to raise increasingly larger funds, including its record $12. 7 billion fund. At $2. 2 billion, to be sure, Tiger Global is still operating one of the largest funds. Amid this difficult fundraising climate, fueled by investor caution towards VC and private equity investments due to declining returns, Tiger Global announced a significant leadership change in November, with founder Chase Coleman assuming the role of venture chief from Shleifer. Coleman has taken on the responsibility of managing relationships with certain key portfolio startups globally, according to people familiar with the matter. Topics Reporter, India 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?
| 2024-07-31T03:50:48 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/30/tiger-global-partner-alex-cook-to-leave-firm-sources-say/
| 460 | 0.9 |
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|
JFrog and GitHub team up to closely integrate their source code and binary platforms
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GitHub and JFrog announced a partnership on Wednesday that will see a deeper integration between the two companies’ platforms, giving developers and their support teams an easier way to manage both their source code and the resulting binaries across both services. Among other things, this includes the ability to trace code from source to binary packages across both platforms, single sign-on support and unified project structures, including role mapping. Later, there will also be a unified dashboard that will provide a single pane of glass for seeing the results of source- and binary-focused security scans from GitHub’s and JFrog’s respective security tools. At first, this may seem like an odd match, since both companies play in the DevOps space. But since GitHub focuses on source code and JFrog on binaries, the overlap between them is actually relatively small. As it turns out, about half of JFrog’s customers are also GitHub users; as JFrog CEO and co-founder Shlomi Ben Haim and GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke both told me, the main mission here is to make their lives easier. “We are using Artifactory ourselves within GitHub,” Dohmke told me (just as JFrog uses GitHub for managing its source code). “And so it felt natural for us to do more together as we’re thinking about how we can secure the software ecosystem, how we can help our enterprise customers like AT&T and Fidelity or Vimeo. How can we help them to have an end-to end lifecycle? And if you rememberour very first conversation, before I became the CEO, our vision for GitHub is that we are part of a large ecosystem. Copilot Extensionsis all along those same lines: that we have to partner with other companies in our ecosystem to provide our customers — our developers — the best experience. ” Similarly, JFrog’s Ben Haim stressed that his company is all about binaries — and creatingsecurity productsaround that. “JFrog is the only comprehensive software supply chain platform in the world,” he said. “GitLab is a source-code platform, GitHub is a source-code platform. Atlassian with BitBucket — same thing. […] Artifactory is your binary repository and serves the organization as the single source of record. ” GitLab may argue with that description, though, given that the company offers a rather comprehensive DevSecOps platform. But where there is no argument is that enterprises today are looking to consolidate their spending around best-of-breed solutions. Today’s enterprises, Ben Haim said, need to be able to scale, but in a secure way, all while moving increasingly faster and picking the best services in the market. “When you think about where developers live, they live on GitHub and they live on JFrog. […] Basically, this collaboration, this marriage, doesn’t have to be explained to our customers because this is where they are: they are either here for the source code, or here for the binaries — and this together story makes their lives easier,” he said. You can’t say “GitHub” in 2024 and not talk about Copilot, the company’s AI tool. Wednesday’s announcement is no exception, with a deep JFrog/Copilot integration that now extends Copilot Chat to let developers ask questions about which software packages (or which version of those packages) to use, how to best secure them and how to set up JFrog projects, for example. “Chatting with GitHub’s Copilot to select the right and secure software package based on the extensive metadata stored in JFrog Catalog can be a game-changer,” explained John Nuttall, Director of Technology at AT&T, one of JFrog’s and GitHub’s joint customers. “This integration will significantly enhance the efficiency of Copilot users across the software supply chain: binary-focused and code environments. This partnership offers the best of both worlds. ” GitHub’s Dohmke also noted that looking ahead, the plan for GitHub is to bring more agent-like functions to Copilot that work across a security tool likeSentry(which was among the first companies to offer a Copilot extension), GitHub and JFrog’s Artifactory to perform a given action autonomously. Customers like AT&T, Ben Haim told me, want an easier way to move back and forth between GitHub and JFrog, using the same credentials. They also want traceability that tracks a piece of code’s lifecycle from source code to binary and back. Traditionally, the code and binary have always been rather disconnected, but with this integration, a team putting the binary in production can now quickly see which changes were last made to the source code, for example, and work with the specific developer responsible for those changes to fix an issue. The security aspects here are also important. Typically, these customers are also using both GitHub’s and JFrog’s security solutions, but they do not want to have to check two different dashboards. As GitHub’s Dohmke noted, different users may see different dashboards — with the developers likely wanting to see theirs right in GitHub while a security team may prefer to see theirs in Artifactory or elsewhere. “This integration can simplify software supply chain security by displaying source-based security findings from GitHub alongside binary-based security findings from JFrog under GitHub’s Security tab, allowing developers to gain a holistic security view and shorten remediation times to improve the overall security posture,” said Mark Carter, CIO and CISO for Vimeo. “Software supply chain security is top of mind for every CISO, and this joint solution from JFrog and GitHub provides a critical, AI-infused cybersecurity control. ” Looking ahead, the two companies plan to deepen this integration even more. The current solution is meant to address immediate pain points for their customers, Ben Haim said. Later this year, the companies will share a bit more about what’s next at JFrog’s swampUP conference in September. Topics Editor 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?
| 2024-05-29T13:15:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/29/jfrog-and-github-team-up-to-closely-integrate-their-source-code-and-binary-platforms/
| 1,021 | 1 |
f45706b452b4e7bed7fca8264e520151
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|
What’s in the rug? How TikTok got swept into a real-time true crime story
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A woman in Ohio is being haunted by ghosts. Or maybe she’s not. There’s a dead body buried underneath her house, rolled up inside a rug. Or there’s actually no body at all, despite signals from cadaver dogs. This week’s biggest drama on TikTok tells the story of a woman from Ohio who was building a fence in her yard, only to uncover a mysterious rug buried on her property. Viewers speculated that her home could be a potential murder scene, and suddenly, local content creatorKatie Santrywas at the center of her own real-life true crime story, unfolding video by video on TikTok. Before finding the rug, Santry had roughly 6,000 followers on TikTok, where she mostly shared content about her life as a mom, discussing challenging topics like pregnancy, miscarriages, and divorce. However, in just four days, Santry’s TikTok content took a dramatic turn after she found the suspicious rug. Her followers, now climbing toward 2 million, have witnessed everything unfold, from the initial discovery to the arrival of police and cadaver dogs at her house and a subsequent excavation. The idea of a possible body in someone’s yard is unsettling enough, and having millions of people watch it is even crazier. Still, Santry seemed to take comfort in knowing that others were witnessing it. Commenters even encouraged her to continue digging (which we don’t recommend). Stories like Santry’s are becoming startlingly ordinary — not the possible dead body part, but the experience of turning into the main character of the internet at the drop of a hat. The same thing happened toReesa Teesa, a TikToker who posted an hours-long series called “Who TF did I marry?” and ended up witha TV adaptationin the works based on her life. Hailey Welch (Hawk Tuah girl) went viral for a lewd comment she made in another creator’s video when she was randomly interviewed on the street in Tennessee. Now she has a podcast on Jake Paul’s network that’s ranked fifth among all shows on Spotify. Unlike other sudden TikTok stars, Santry isn’t new to social media. Fourteen years ago, she and her sister were early YouTube vloggers, posting “Glee” recaps, thoughts about the Twilight series, and even interviews with the Jonas Brothers. Though Santry left that chapter of her life behind, she clearly learned how to tell a compelling story on the internet. By Thursday, homicide detectives showed up with two cadaver dogs to investigate the dug-up area. Santry livestreamed their visit on TikTok, as viewers anxiously watched on. The cadaver dogs both sat by the hole in the dirt, signaling that the dogs sensed something was amiss. Soon, Santry’s home was cordoned off with yellow police tape. The following day, police officers and crime scene investigators arrived with equipment to dig up the area. Thankfully, no human remains were discovered, but this only makes the rug even more perplexing to viewers. “Maybe the crime occurred on the rug, and it was buried to conceal evidence,” suggested one follower. I think my house is haunted!!!!#ghosthunting#ghosts Other followers were disappointed there wasn’t a body after all, highlighting the internet’s morbid fascination with true crime stories. The true crime genre has boomed over the last decade, in part due to the popularity of the podcast “Serial,” which spawned hundreds of other shows in the same genre. As the internet made unfathomable amounts of public information more easily accessible, some true crime fans became hobbyist detectives, an ethically murky pursuit. Netflix chronicled one such phenomenon in thedocuseries“Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer,” which was one of the streamer’s most popular releases when it premiered in 2019. The series follows two internet vigilantes who set up a Facebook group in 2010 to track down a man who posted a video of him killing cats. As the online community investigated, the story somehow turned even darker when the perpetrator struck again, horrifically murdering a university student. While internet sleuthing can occasionally solve some mysteries, it often reminds us why we should leave such gruesome matters to actual trained professionals. Though detectives didn’t find a body, Santry’s journey isn’t over. According to the TikToker, the police have taken the rug in for testing. That’s good news for Santry’s viewers who are salivating for her next update — but like internet sleuths past, Santry might be digging up more than she bargained for. 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. 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?
| 2024-10-05T15:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/05/whats-in-the-rug-how-tiktok-got-swept-into-a-real-time-true-crime-story/
| 911 | 1 |
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In Orbit Aerospace wants to be the third-party logistics provider for science and industry
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Two-year-old space startupIn Orbit Aerospacewants to be the third-party logistics provider for Earth to space commerce — and to get there, the company just closed a new agreement to validate key technical capabilities on the International Space Station. The El Segundo, California-based company is developing orbital platforms and re-entry vehicles to enable mass manufacturing and research in space. In Orbit’s plans are more than a little ambitious: The idea is to host customers’ factories or labs on an orbital platform. Uncrewed reentry vehicles would autonomously dock and rendezvous with the platforms, and a robotic system would transfer the manufactured material to that vehicle, which would then bring the products back to Earth. “Automation and robotics is the backbone of industrial manufacturing on Earth,” CEO Ryan Elliott said in a statement. “It should be no different in space. ” It would be a mistake to think that In Orbit is trying to compete with in-space manufacturing companies like Varda Space or Space Forge, Elliott said in a recent interview. “Their customers and our customers are fundamentally different,” he said. “We provide logistics, hosting on orbit, [but] we don’t manufacture materials ourselves. ” Elliott and his two co-founders, Antonio Coelho and Ishaan Patel, have been pursuing this effort for a little over two years. To date, the company has raised around $2 million, and the team is currently fundraising to support a demonstration mission in early 2025. For that first mission, the company will work with a satellite bus provider that will host a subscale variant of its orbital platform and reentry vehicle. If all goes to plan, the mission will demonstrate transferring material from the hosting platform to the reentry vehicle, and returning it to Earth. In Orbit has a formidable amount of work ahead. The company needs to nail rendezvous and docking, transferring cargo between two spacecraft and the reentry process. Elliott said rendezvous, docking and reentry were particularly difficult challenges. “There’s just not loads and loads and loads of commercial hardware for parachutes or heat shield material suppliers available,” he said. “Simulation and testing is really difficult, as well. You can’t test reentry in all its different environmental parameters on Earth. There’s only one way to do it, and it’s flight testing. ” The new agreement with NASA is part of how the company is trying to minimize these risks. Under a new space act agreement, In Orbit is partnering with Nanoracks to demonstrate autonomous docking and robotic transfer in a zero-gravity environment. Nanoracks, now owned by Voyager Space, is a long-time commercial resident of the ISS and frequently provides support to newer entrants looking to take advantage of the ISS National Lab. In Orbit’s testing will take place mid- to late-2025 at the earliest, Elliott said. On a slightly longer scale, In Orbit is aiming to launch a second mission in 2026 and then partner with a spacecraft provider to host a manufacturing lab on orbit. The eventual goal is to leave hardware in space, and just launch the reentry capsules that would rendezvous and dock with the platforms on orbit. In Orbit is expecting that its core customers will be manufacturers, which will want to outsource on orbit hosting. Those customers would be the ones to work with, say, pharmaceutical or semiconductor firms looking to manufacture products in space. “The rate of people that we see that want to manufacture stuff in space is exponentially increasing,” Elliott said. “There’s a lot of hype around it. NASA is putting more funding into it. The DoD is really interested. There’s only going to be more. ” 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. 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?
| 2023-12-15T15:00:35 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/15/in-orbit-aerospace-wants-to-unlock-mass-manufacturing-in-space-but-they-wont-be-doing-the-manufacturing/
| 737 | 1 |
d5c2c1402b2507f827a35ecd079cab2b
|
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New space startup Lux Aeterna wants to make satellites reusable
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Satellites can accomplish incredible tasks like provide internet or help monitor wildfires. But many of them ultimately meet a fiery death burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. Others use their last bit of fuel to move to “graveyard” orbits, where they circle the planet in a perpetual deep freeze. A new startup called Lux Aeterna wants to change this. The Denver-based company, which is coming out of stealth today, has designed a reusable satellite called Delphi that it aims to launch — and land — in 2027. If successful, it could help slash the cost to get satellite payloads into space. It would also make the process far more flexible than it is today, since satellites are designed to stay in orbit for years and essentially can’t be modified for other uses. These attributes have already piqued the interest of the Department of Defense, which has made low-Earth orbit animportantpart of the United States’ military strategy. Venture capitalists have also taken notice — and written checks. The startup’s pitch was attractive enough to generate $4 million in pre-seed funding, led by Space Capital and including other early-stage funds like Dynamo Ventures and Mission One Capital. Founder and CEO Brian Taylor said the idea for Lux Aeterna came to him last year while he watched his former employer, SpaceX, launch one of its Starship test vehicles into space. “I want to fill Starship with something amazing, and something that changes the entire industry,” Taylor recalled during an interview with TechCrunch. Starship is the biggest rocket ever built. As part of that, it has the potential to send larger payloads into space than was previously possible. Size matters for people who build satellites and other spacecraft, since they’re often working backward from the simple constraint of what can fit inside a rocket’s cargo area. And Starship is not alone — there are other heavy-lift rockets in the works, too, like Blue Origin’s New Glenn. It’s hard to design a satellite that can survive the brutal forces of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds. But with the extra space afforded by heavy-lift rockets, Taylor said it’s possible to build one that can survive multiple re-entries without having to compromise on the technology because of cost or weight trade-offs. In the case of Lux Aeterna, that means using a heat shield. In the rendering the startup released Wednesday, the Delphi satellite’s conical heat shield is reminiscent of the ones that protected some of NASA’s most famous spacecraft. There’s a reason for that, according to Taylor: Those designs worked. “We definitely looked at what NASA had done in the past on exploratory missions [and] sample return missions, and that really helped justify the architecture that we’ve gone with,” he said. “I think it’s very important, when you’re doing something ambitious like this, that you’re not reinventing the wheel on everything, right?” Taylor declined to get into further specifics about how the Delphi satellite will work or how Lux Aeterna will refurbish the craft between launches. (The design appears to involve the ability to fold the satellite bus structure so that it fits safely behind the heat shield. ) To be sure, he has plenty of experience in the satellite world. In addition to working on Starlink at SpaceX, Taylor also worked on Amazon’s Kuiper satellite program and at space infrastructure startupLoft Orbital. The plan for Delphi is to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in 2027, perform a full orbital flight, and then come back down to Earth. Then Lux Aeterna wants to do that all over again to prove out Delphi’s reusability. From there, Taylor said his team is working on a larger production vehicle that will demonstrate far greater reusability. Despite decades of spaceflight innovation, Taylor said he believes the industry is still very young, which leaves plenty of opportunity for a company like Lux Aeterna to establish a long-running business. “It’s not to the maturity level of [computer] chips. It’s not at the maturity level of automotive,” he said. Satellite reusability will help change that. And while Taylor is committed to that cause, he said he’s thrilled about all the things he can’t imagine that will exist in a space-based economy. “We don’t know what we don’t know is going to come,” he said. “That’s probably the most exciting part. ” Topics Sr. Reporter, Transportation 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?
| 2025-06-25T12:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/25/new-space-startup-lux-aeterna-wants-to-make-satellites-reusable/
| 798 | 1 |
592ea52f9db5f146400a99d889dbdb7b
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Phhhoto’s antitrust claim against Meta is heading back to the courts
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appeals court has overturned a decision in an antitrust lawsuit against Meta, which wasfiled in in late 2021by the long-shuttered social app Phhhoto. In court, the startup alleged that Meta violated U. S. antitrust law by copying its core features and suppressing competition. U. S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto in 2023granted Meta’s motion to dismiss the complaintdue to time limits imposed by the relevant statutes of limitations. However, upon appeal, the court found that the case should have been heard because these time limits should not have applied. The decision means that Phhhoto will get another shot at arguing that Meta behaved in an anti-competitive fashion, ultimately putting its company out of business after copying its features and restricting its growth. Thecasecalls into question if and how Meta used the introduction of an algorithm feed on Instagram to suppress Phhhoto’s content, which led to a decline in Phhhoto’s user registrations and engagement while Meta’s own app gained traction. Phhhoto claims that it discovered the algorithmic manipulation when it used a different account to post a video on Instagram. The same post never gained traction when shared on Phhhoto’s own account, but the other account’s video received more likes and views, even though Phhhoto’s account had 500 times more followers, the lawsuit states. The district court never ruled on these claims because the judge determined the antitrust law known as theSherman Act’sfour-year statute of limitations had run out. Phhhoto also argues that Meta used other anticompetitive tactics to hurt its business. For instance, ahead of Instagram’s launch of an algorithmic feed in March 2016, Phhhoto alleged that Meta withdrew its access to the “Find Friends” API, which allows third-party apps such as itself to tap into Meta’s social graph. In addition, Meta terminated its plans to integrate Phhhoto’s content into the Facebook News Feed, as planned, the lawsuit states. Meta came after Phhhoto with its own competitive product, too: the looping video appInstagram Boomerang, which copied Phhhoto’s technology, the startup said. Phhhoto’s appeal suggested that its case should have been heard by the court because the relevant part of its antitrust claim should have been subject to “equitable tolling based on fraudulent concealment. ” Or, in other words, the court should have paused the statute of limitations because Phhhoto hadn’t discovered the issues with Meta’s algorithmic feed until later. The company found out in December 2018, when documents filed in a federal lawsuit in California were made public, that Meta had run a program calledProject Amplify,which manipulated and reordered posts and content in consumers’ feeds for Meta’s benefit. While the appeals court isn’t making a final decision on the case itself (as it never got to the point of a ruling), it did conclude that the lower court erred at “each step of the fraudulent concealment analysis,” which means the court’s earlier decision against Phhhoto’s antitrust claim was untimely and the case should be heard. The case will be sent back to the district court to be tried. Responding to a request for comment, a Meta spokesperson said “As we have said since the beginning, this suit is baseless and we will continue to vigorously defend ourselves. ” Updated after publication with Meta comment
| 2024-12-10T17:06:17 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/10/phhhotos-antitrust-claim-against-meta-is-heading-back-to-the-courts/
| 533 | 1 |
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Meta debuts AI Studio to let developers build custom chatbots
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Today at its annual Connect developer conference, Meta launched AI Studio, a platform that’ll let businesses build AI chatbots for the company’s various messaging services, including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Starting with Messenger, AI Studio will allow companies to “create AIs that reflect their brand’s values and improve customer service experiences,” Meta writes in apost. Onstage, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg clarified that the use cases Meta envisions are primarily e-commerce and customer support. AI Studio will be available in alpha to start, and Meta says that it’ll scale the toolkit further beginning next year. To accompany the release of AI Studio, Meta says it’s building a sandbox tool to be launched in the coming year that’ll “enable anyone to experiment with creating their own AI. ” The plan is to bring this sandbox to Meta’s metaverse platforms, including Horizon Worlds, at some unspecified point in the future, so that AIs created with AI Studio can power NPCs across different metaverse games and experiences. “From small businesses looking to scale to large brands wanting to enhance communications, AIs can help businesses engage with their customers across our apps,” Meta wrote. “And for creators, they’ll be able to build AIs that extend their virtual presence across our apps. These AIs will have to be sanctioned by them and directly controlled by the creator. ” For this reporter, AI Studio harkens back to 2016, when Facebook firstlauncheda Messenger developer kit for business-focused messaging chatbots. But Meta promises that the bots created with AI Studio aren’t like the rules-based, rigid bots of yesteryear. Powered by large language models like Meta’s own Llama 2, they’re more capable — and dynamic — in their responses. At least in theory. But even the best chatbot tech today isn’t perfect. The aforementioned Llama 2 models — among Meta’s best — havebiases. And Meta’s otherattemptsat LLMs have been found to frequently refer to fake articles that sound right but aren’t actually factual, or omit key details from answers to questions. So we’ll have to see if the bots created with AI Studio hold up to scrutiny. If Meta sticks to its promised release window, it won’t be long before we know for sure
| 2023-09-27T18:12:12 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/27/meta-debuts-ai-studio-to-let-developers-build-custom-chatbots/
| 364 | 0.9 |
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Judge allows authors’ AI copyright lawsuit against Meta to move forward
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A federal judge is allowing an AI-related copyright lawsuit against Meta to move forward, although he dismissed part of the suit. In Kadrey vs. Meta, authors — including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates — have alleged that Meta has violated their intellectual property rights by using their books to train its Llama AI models and that the company removed the copyright information from their books to hide the alleged infringement. Meta, meanwhile, has claimed that its training qualifies as fair use, and it argued the case should be dismissed because the authors lack standing to sue. In court last month, U. S. District Judge Vince Chhabria seemed to indicate he wasagainst dismissal, but he also criticized what he saw as “over-the-top” rhetoric from the authors’ legal teams. In Friday’sruling, Chhabria wrote that the allegation of copyright infringement is “obviously a concrete injury sufficient for standing” and that the authors have also “adequately alleged that Meta intentionally removed CMI [copyright management information] to conceal copyright infringement. ” “Taken together, these allegations raise a ‘reasonable, if not particularly strong inference’ that Meta removed CMI to try to prevent Llama from outputting CMI and thus revealing it was trained on copyrighted material,” Chhabria wrote. The judge did, however, dismiss the authors’ claims related to the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), because they did not “allege that Meta accessed their computers or servers — only their data (in the form of their books). ” The lawsuit has already provided a few glimpses into how Meta approaches copyright, with court filings from the plaintiffs claiming thatMark Zuckerberg gave the Llama team permissionto train the models using copyrighted works and that otherMeta team members discussed the use of legally questionable contentfor AI training. The courts are weighing a number of AI copyright lawsuits at the moment, includingThe New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI
| 2025-03-08T20:05:05 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/08/judge-allows-authors-ai-copyright-lawsuit-against-meta-to-move-forward/
| 313 | 0.9 |
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Diabetes management startup Clivi wants to be ‘Livongo of Latin America’
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Over422 million people around the world have diabetes, with the World Health Organization noting that the majority of those with the disease are living in low-income and middle-income countries. In Latin America, there are over40 million adults with diabetes, according to Statista. And with theglobal digital health marketpoised to reach $1. 5 trillion in the next seven years,Clivi, a Mexico-based diabetes management startup, wants to help control the disease through its comprehensive, technological and personalized approach to diabetes healthcare delivery. “In Mexico, there is an average of one endocrinologist per almost 10,000 patients,” Clivi founder and CEO Ricardo Moguel told TechCrunch. “You might see a doctor every three months, but for chronic conditions, patients need to be making decisions every day. ” Clivi is making a balance between humans and technology by connecting patients with endocrinologists, nutritionists and psychologists and enabling users to access monitoring and treatment plans via their communication channel of choice (e. g. , WhatsApp) so they can better achieve their treatment goals and adhere to lifestyle changes. The company also provides all of the supplies, like glucometer, test strips and blood testing kits, as well as medication. Though health plans start at MX$790 per month, the average patient will pay MX$40 per month with private insurance, Moguel said. He explained that people living with diabetes in Latin America often begin treating their disease late, which can lower their life expectancy by 10 years. Clivi’s goal is to help patients get back four of those years. Since going live in October 2021, Clivi’s platform has helped thousands of patients so far, 94% of whom have achieved diabetes control within six months, Moguel said. The company is currently seeing an average of 2,000 new patients join the platform each month. It also reached $2 million in annual recurring revenue over the past 15 months, and Moguel expects 10x that growth within the next 12 months. Over the next five years, the company intends to serve 1 million people through its digital clinic and diabetes remote monitoring service, Moguel said. Today, it announced $10 million in seed funding toward that goal. The investment was co-led by Dalus Capital and Foundation Capital, with participation from a group of investors, including Cathay Innovation via its C. Entrepreneurs fund; Femsa Ventures; Quiet Capital; 500; Next Billion Ventures; and Conexo. There was also a group of angel investors, including Jüsto founder and CEO Ricardo Weder, Kueski founder and CEO Adalberto Flores, Trust Networks co-founder Suresh Batchu, 99 and Mara founder and CEO Ariel Lambrecht, Meta executive Tara Syed and Reina Madre co-founders Vicente Aristegui and Juan Moctezuma. The new funding will be used to finish out the product, including its artificial intelligence technology, so that more of the functions are automated and doctors can increase their capacity for treating patients, Moguel said. The company is also going to expand its work with enterprises and public health organizations in Mexico. He expects to “dominate the Mexican market and become the No. 1 diabetes clinic in Mexico within the next year. ” “This will help us to prepare the ground before we start expanding our solution to other Spanish-speaking territories across the region,” Moguel said. “This is the master plan to become not just the Livongo of Latin America, but the largest player in terms of diabetes and chronic conditions in the whole of Latin America. ” Taking advantage of Latin America’s market downturn Topics Senior Reporter Christine Hall wrote about enterprise/B2B, e-commerce, and foodtech for TechCrunch, and venture capital rounds for Crunchbase News. Based in Houston, Christine previously reported for the Houston Business Journal, the Texas Medical Center’s Pulse magazine, and Community Impact Newspaper. She has an undergraduate journalism degree from Murray State University and a graduate degree from The Ohio State University. 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?
| 2023-06-20T13:01:26 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/diabetes-management-clivi-livongo-latin-america-healthcare/
| 704 | 1 |
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J2 Ventures, focused on military healthcare, grabs $150M for its second fund
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J2 Ventures, a firm led mostly by U. S. military veterans, announced on Thursday that it has raised a $150 million second fund. The Boston-based firm invests in startups whose products are purchased by civilians and the U. S. Department of Defense. While many emerging VCs are struggling to raise second funds, J2’s latest vehicle is more than double its $67. 5 million debut fund from 2021. At first blush, the firm may seem to be benefiting from VCs’ growinginterest in defense tech. But J2 has no interest in positioning itself as a defense tech investor. “Our portfolio is national-security adjacent, but not defense-focused,” said Alexander Harstrick, J2’s managing partner. The firm does not invest in technologies that protect critical national infrastructure or help deter attacks, such as drones, robotics, or surveillance tech. Instead, J2 backs companies whose products help maintain the well-being and healthcare of nearly3 million peopleemployed by the U. S. military. Harstrick said that the Department of Defense (DoD) has historically adopted new technologies before they became popular with civilians. And it’s not just the internet, which waspartially developed bythe military. “The Department of Veterans Affairs was the first to use telemedicine,” Harstrick said. “They were also the first to adopt electronic health records. ” J2’s healthcare investments include Tasso, a maker of needle-free blood draw tech, and Lumia Health, a wearable device that measures blood flow to the brain. The firm also backs cybersecurity, infrastructure, and advanced computing startups likeFemtosense, a developer of energy-efficient AI chips for smart devices. J2 backs companies at the pre-seed stage to Series A and writes checks that range from $1 million to $5 million. The firm’s limited partners include JPMorgan and New Mexico State Investment Council. Harstrick served as a military intelligence officer in the U. S. Army Reserve and was deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Before starting J2, he was an investor in the Defense Innovation Unit. Topics Reporter, Venture 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?
| 2024-07-04T11:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/04/j2-ventures-focused-on-military-healthcare-grabs-150m-for-its-second-fund/
| 396 | 0.9 |
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AWS pledges to spend $5B in Mexico, launches new Mexico server region
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In anannouncementTuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, said it plans to invest $5 billion in Mexico over the next 15 years as a part of a “long-term commitment” in the region. A portion of that investment is a new server region launching today, AWS Mexico (Central) Region, that will allow AWS customers to run applications and serve end users from AWS data centers located in Mexico. AWS estimates that construction and ongoing operation of AWS Mexico will add approximately $10 billion to Mexico’s GDP and support roughly 7,000 “full time equivalent jobs. ” To be clear, AWS won’t be hiring ~7,000 new Mexico-based staff. Rather, the company is anticipating that “external businesses” within the “AWS supply chain in Mexico,” like construction and telecommunications firms, will create these jobs. That may turn out to be an optimistic estimate. Data center projects often createfewerjobsthanpromised. The AWS Mexico server region, which AWSfirst announced last February, is the company’s third infrastructure project in the country aftersmaller effortsin 2020 and 2023. The data center market in Mexico is booming. Accordingto one source, tech companies are expected to spend over $7 billion on data center infrastructure in the country in the next five years, and around a dozen projects are currently underway. The city of Querétaro, where AWS Mexico is located, has become the investment epicenter. Google launched a cloud data center in Querétaro in December, while Microsoft spun up a server farm in the city last May. As many as 73 data centers are expected to be constructed in Mexico over the next five years — a volume that experts say will seriously impact the country’s power grid. Accordingto the Mexican Data Center Association (MDCA), an industry group, the new installations could consume as much as 1,492MWh of electricity by 2029, enough to power ~150,000 homes. To meet the energy demand, the MDCA estimates that the Mexican government and companies will need to invest at least $8. 73 billion to upgrade Mexico’s grid and power supplies. Environmental advocates have also raised concerns about the data centers’ long-term impact. Data centers are typically water-hungry; they require water not only to cool components like chips, but to maintainsafe operating humidity levels. Querétaro has been suffering from drought for two years, and Mexico’s 2025 dry season isexpectedto last for at least six months. AWS said that its AWS Mexico data center will be air-cooled and “will not require the ongoing use of cooling water in operations. ” Microsofthas saidthat its data center in the region would use new tech to reduce its use of water for cooling, and Google has pledged to partner with “environmentally responsible” supplies to reduce consumption
| 2025-01-14T14:26:13 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/14/aws-pledges-to-spend-5b-in-mexico-launches-new-mexico-server-region/
| 445 | 0.9 |
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Inflection AI CEO says it’s done trying to make next-generation AI models
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Just last year, Inflection AI was as hot as a startup could be,releasing best-in-class AI modelsit claimed could outperform technology from OpenAI, Meta, and Google. That’s a stark contrast compared to today, as Inflection’s new CEO tells TechCrunch that his startup is simply no longer trying to compete on that front. Between then and now, there’s of course beena major change at Inflection. Microsofthired then-CEO Mustafa Suleyman to run its own AI businessand paid the startup $650 million to hire most of its staff and license its technology. Several months ago, Inflection announced it was starting tolimit usage on its consumer AI chatbot, Pi, while pivoting more toward enterprise customers. Instead, Inflection announced on Tuesday it has now acquired three AI startups, in just the last two months, to build up the tools it can offer global enterprise customers using AI models available today. The company also is not ruling out licensing AI models from its former competitors in the future. The Federal Trade Commission is reportedlyinvestigating Microsoft’s partial acqui-hireof Inflection to see whether the deal was structured in a way that would reduce competition. According to Inflection’s new CEO, Sean White, who was put in place after the deal, his startup is no longer competing on building the next generation of AI models but still can compete on the enterprise front. “I am not going to, and don’t feel the need to, compete with a company that is trying to build the next 100,000-GPU system,” said White in an interview with TechCrunch, seeming to reference the handful of well-funded companies that can build frontier AI models today — including Microsoft, the new home of Inflection’s founders. “When I say we can’t compete with them, I think part of it is that I don’t want to compete with them trying to make that next-generation model,” White clarified. “I do think we’re actually still competing with them, particularly for the enterprise. But in the end, our solution of how we architect this and the tools that we’re bringing are really that enterprise layer that actually is going to meet their needs. ” White thinks today’s AI models are just fine to address the needs of most enterprises today. He even goes a step further, saying he’s skeptical about howtest-time compute scaling, which many are calling the next generation of AI models, can address business use cases. Inflection’s CEO says AI labs have cunningly reframed high latency as “thinking” in order to make consumers feel better about their models. “I mean, there’s a little piece of me that says, ‘Haha! Now we all have latency in our inference, so we’re going to call it thinking,’ as opposed to just saying, ‘Yeah, we’ve just got more latency because these things are getting bigger and harder,’” said White. Instead of pressing on the cutting edge of AI research, Inflection is now trying to think more practically to offer AI tools for enterprises. Inflection announced on Tuesday it had acquired two small startups as part of that effort: Jelled. AI, which uses AI to manage employee inboxes, and BoostKPI, which offers AI data analytics tools. Last month, Inflection announced it hadacquired Boundaryless, an automation consulting firm in Europe to expand its presence overseas. White says Inflection is still using its own models today but says that doesn’t mean they won’t use other AI models in the future. Part of Inflection’s value proposition now is that its AI can run on premise, compared to offerings from leading AI labs, which must be run in the cloud. This can be especially appealing to enterprises that want to keep their data secured. These acquisitions have helped Inflection build up an array of talent and products. However, the startup will also face intense competition on the enterprise AI front. Salesforce has gone all in on AI agents in recent months, while Meta recently unveiled a new business AI unit. In terms of startups, Anthropic and Cohere are continuing to build products specific for business customers. That said, Inflection feels it’s better suited to compete in the enterprise space today, instead of pushing against frontier AI labs to make increasingly capable AI models. Topics Senior AI Reporter 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?
| 2024-11-26T14:00:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/26/inflection-ceo-says-its-done-competing-to-make-next-generation-ai-models/
| 772 | 1 |
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Seed funding: Everything founders should know about fundraising, seed rounds and more for 2024
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If you’re looking at the current seed funding climate and thinking it’s rough out there, you’re not alone. The last few years have been a roller coaster for startups. First came the uncertainty in the early days of the pandemic, then came the exuberance mid to late in the pandemic when cash flowed freely to startups of nearly every stripe. Seed funding sizes were up, and so were valuations. Today, things aren’t quite so copacetic. Money is tighter, and the hurdles for startups are higher. But for entrepreneurs early in their journey, that doesn’t mean it’s not a good time to raise a seed round. “I’ve been really excited by the types of entrepreneurs that we’ve been meeting in the seed stage ecosystem right now,”Talia Goldberg, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, told TechCrunch+. “In some ways, when the markets are down a bit, the real entrepreneurs come out. ” To understand what’s happening with seed rounds this year, TechCrunch+ spoke with Goldberg and two other seasoned investors:Pae Wu, general partner at SOSV, andMaren Bannon, partner at January Ventures. They offered their perspectives on what milestones they look for when evaluating seed-stage pitches, what sorts of round sizes and valuations they’re seeing, and what advice they’re giving their portfolio companies. The definition of a seed-stage startup has been evolving over the years as round sizes and valuations creep higher. Investors are also expecting to see a bit more from prospective companies, in terms of market fit and revenue. The pandemic is partly to blame, Bannon told TechCrunch+. “There was a lot of capital in the COVID era that came in — all these angel funds, operator funds, rolling funds, a lot of that was spreading capital at pre-seed,” she said. As a result, pre-seed valuations were higher than they are today. But recently those funds have backed off, Bannon added, which has depressed pre-seed valuations. For companies that have raised pre-seeds in the last few years, that can make subsequent fundraising more challenging. “The bar is higher now,” Wu told TechCrunch+. “Investors are starting to ask diligence questions that in 2021 would have been Series A kind of questions. ” Despite investors’ increasing scrutiny at the seed stage, all three investors TechCrunch+ spoke with acknowledge that they don’t expect startups to have it all figured out at this point. “At the very highest level, you’re investing in people,” Goldberg said. “At the seed stage, even if you have a product and a market, it’s highly likely that you’re going to be changing a bit. The market is going to evolve, and the products are going to evolve. Having a really strong vision and thesis as to where you’re going is critical. ” Bannon concurred, adding that “at seed, most startups don’t have product-market fit, but they should be showing that they have some early signs of it. ” Beyond expectations about product-market fit, seed round milestones have been ramping up over the years. Recently, the seed round has started to resemble Series A rounds of yesterday. “I’m advising our portfolio companies that $300,000 to $1 million in ARR is strong to go raise a seed round,” Bannon said. Three years ago, the high end of that was enough to raise a solid Series A. There are some exceptions, such as deep tech companies or AI startups, she added, where an interesting story or compelling team can raise with less traction in the market. “But I think in general, investors are just looking for more traction than they were a couple of years ago. ” While revenue is not required for deep tech startups, “substantive traction on the business side” is, Wu said. That might include partnerships or collaborations with bigger companies. Investors also want to see a strong proof of concept along with a strong timeline to get to a pilot-scale demonstration. “These are not hard and fast rules, but having clear determination that your thing can work in the real world is where things are at these days,” she said. Round size at the seed stage is highly variable. In December and January, median deal sizes were $2 million, according to a TechCrunch+ analysis of PitchBook data, with most falling between about $800,000 and $4 million. The median pre-money valuation was $10 million, and the majority spanned $5 million to $20 million. Those valuations might be a holdover from previous years, Bannon said. She’s been seeing a lot of bridge rounds where the valuations aren’t updated. “You’re taking these inflated prices from two years ago, doing a bridge, and that’s kind of bolstering the market,” she said. Though valuations might be inflated, investors remain generally optimistic about this year’s outlook. AI is a driving force. “It’s no longer just buzz. There’s a lot of substance,” Goldberg said. “If you look back, some of the best times to be investing are at the beginning of these major platform shifts and new market areas. ” But that doesn’t mean a rewind to 2021, when deals were closing quickly. “Everything’s still taking a long time,” Wu said. “Everybody’s bar is higher, and there are also a lot of early stage companies that are raising. That means that seed stage funds can be quite selective and are not necessarily as prone to FOMO as they had been before. ” No matter what the market looks like, though, investors are always looking for new portfolio companies. “We have to make investments both in good markets and in bad markets,” Goldberg said. The trajectory of today’s seed rounds are somewhat correlated to what happens to startups in the later stages of fundraising. “If the later stage recovers, then the seed stage will just keep going up,” Bannon said. In previous years, a strong team could show up with a good pitch and walk out with a solid seed round. “In 2021, you could raise off of one part of your story being really incredible, like an amazing founding team,” Bannon said. “Now it feels like you need an amazing founding team and a compelling business idea and a good market and a little bit of customer traction. I think investors have gotten burned by some of the buzzy teams that have come out and haven’t had something meaningful built. ” Once a startup has those pieces in place, there are other things to consider when planning a seed round. “Time it around an inflection point,” Bannon said. Founders should start laying the groundwork well in advance, she added, so that when revenue or customer growth starts taking hold, they’re ready to pitch. When founders do walk into a pitch meeting, Goldberg urges them to be prepared not just for the pitch, but also for who is listening. It’s important that founders know the differences between angels, seed funds, and larger venture firms, she said. Also get to know what animates specific investors. The best pitches, she added, are those where the founders clearly show why they’re the best people to bring a product to life. Goldberg advises founders to manage the fundraising process carefully, to think about who to talk to and when so that when a deal does come together, one firm takes the lead to anchor the round. Without a clear lead, the process can be like “herding cats,” she said, and occupy a lot of a founder’s time. “Make sure that you’re not being overly aggressive, but also aren’t stuck in no-man’s-land where you have a lot of people that aren’t saying no, but not really saying yes. ” In the end, the best way to successfully raise a seed round is to build a business that people want to invest in, Wu said. “Worry less about story, and worry a lot more about making your company a real company. That’s the number one thing. ” Topics Senior Reporter, Climate 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?
| 2024-02-11T17:00:46 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/11/seed-funding-everything-to-know-2024/
| 1,382 | 1 |
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OpenAI reverses course, says its nonprofit will remain in control of its business operations
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OpenAI hasdecidedthat its nonprofit division will retain control over its for-profit organization, after the companyinitially announcedthat it planned to convert to a for-profit organization. According to the company, OpenAI’s business wing, which has been under the nonprofit since 2019, will transition to a public benefit corporation (PBC). The nonprofit will control and also be a large shareholder of the PBC. “OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, and is today overseen and controlled by that nonprofit,” OpenAI Board Chairman Bret Taylor wrote in astatementon the company’s blog. “Going forward, it will continue to be overseen and controlled by that nonprofit. ” OpenAI says that it made the decision “after hearing from civic leaders and engaging in constructive dialogue with the offices of the Attorney General of Delaware and the Attorney General of California. ” “We thank both offices and we look forward to continuing these important conversations to make sure OpenAI can continue to effectively pursue its mission,” Taylor said. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015, but it converted to a “capped-profit” in 2019 and was trying to restructure once more into a for-profit. When it transitioned to a capped-profit, OpenAI retained its nonprofit wing, which currently has a controlling stake in the organization’s corporate arm. OpenAI had said that its conversion, which it argued was necessary to raise the capital needed to grow and expand its operations,would preserve its nonprofitstatus and infuse it with additional resources to be spent on “charitable initiatives” in sectors such as healthcare, education, and science. In exchange for its controlling stake in OpenAI’s enterprise, the nonprofitwould reportedly stand to reap billions of dollars. Many disagreed with the proposal, including early OpenAI investor Elon Musk, who filed a lawsuit against OpenAI opposing the company’s planned transition. Musk’s complaint accuses the startup of abandoning its nonprofit mission, which aimed to ensure its AI research benefits all of humanity. Musk had sought a preliminary injunction tohalt OpenAI’s conversion. A federal judgedenied the requestbut permitted the case to go to a jury trial in spring 2026. A group of ex-OpenAI employees and Encode, a nonprofit that co-sponsored California’sill-fated SB 1047AI safety legislation,filed amicus briefsseveral weeks agoin support of Musk’s lawsuit. Separately, a cohort of organizations, including nonprofits and labor groups like the California Teamsters, petitioned California Attorney General Rob Bonta to stop OpenAI from becoming a for-profit, claiming the company had “failed to protect its charitable assets. ” Several Nobel laureates, law professors, and civil society organizations had alsosent lettersto Bonta and Delaware’s attorney general, Kathy Jennings, requesting that they halt the startup’s restructuring efforts. The stakes were high for OpenAI, which needed to complete its for-profit conversion by the end of this year or next or risk relinquishing some of the capital the company has raised in recent months,according toreports. It’s unclear what consequences may befall OpenAI now that it’s reversed course. In a letter to staff on Mondayalso publishedon OpenAI’s blog, CEO Sam Altman said he thinks OpenAI may eventually require “trillions of dollars” to fulfill its goal of “[making the company’s] services broadly available to all of humanity. ” “[OpenAI’s nonprofit] will become a big shareholder in the PBC in an amount supported by independent financial advisors,” wrote Altman. “[W]e are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. … We look forward to advancing the details of [our] plan in continued conversation with them, [our partner] Microsoft, and our newly appointed nonprofit commissioners. ”
| 2025-05-05T18:05:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/05/openai-reverses-course-says-its-nonprofit-will-remain-in-control-of-its-business-operations/
| 573 | 1 |
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App Store users are downrating Twitter’s rebranding to X with 1-star reviews
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Many people have mixed feelings over Twitter’s rebranding to X, in preparation for its transformation into owner Elon Musk’svisionof an “everything app. ” But on the U. S. App Store, users have been venting their frustrations over the name change, leading to a surge in 1-star negative reviews, a new analysis shows. According to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, nearly 78% of all the U. S. iOS reviews of the newly renamed X app have been 1-star reviews since July 24th,the day of the official rebrand,compared with just 50% over the previous two weeks. (50% is still not a great number and one that speaks to other user complaints about the numerous changes Twitter has made under Musk’s ownership. ) The new one-star reviews are in direct response to the rebrand, Sensor Tower notes, as users wrote how they’re upset with the new logo and name. “Bring back the BIRD,” writes one user. “GIVE US BACK THE BIRD!!!” shouts another. “What is X?,” asks a third reviewer. “Good app gone bad,” adds a fourth. “Ugly,” another complaint states, followed by one dubbing the new app a “dumpster fire,” and so on. However, the rebranding has not been all bad news for the company formerly known as Twitter. In fact, Sensor Tower’s data indicates that X’s worldwide installs grew 20% week-over-week in the wake of the rebranding. There was a related 3-4% increase in weekly user growth, as well. Earlier this month, X CEO Linda Yaccarino claimed theapp usage was at an all-time high, and on July 28, X ownerElon Musk postedthat monthly users had reached a new high this year. Neither exec was forthcoming with the exact dates and times that usage peaked, though. Despite the growth, Sensor Tower’s analysis revealed some troubling numbers, too. Per its panel, time spent per user fell 7% for the week, and daily sessions per user fell 6% following the renaming of the app to X. “Though Twitter usage and engagement typically display some volatility due to seasonality and the news cycle, some of the declines in engagement may be attributable to users’ frustration with changes to the app,” said Abe Yousef, Senior Insights Analyst at Sensor Tower. Of course, such a dramatic rebranding was likely to cause a backlash. Arguably, Twitter had not been a successful company under prior leadership, so there is some rationale behind giving the app a massive makeover and a new purpose. Still, it remains to be seen if X can thrive after losing the trust and goodwill of some of its longtime Twitter users in the process
| 2023-08-02T20:00:03 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/02/app-store-users-are-downrating-twitters-rebranding-to-x-with-1-star-reviews/
| 431 | 0.9 |
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Square says daylong outage caused by DNS error
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Square said there was “no evidence” a cyberattack caused an outage that left customers and small businessesunable to use the payment giant’s technologyon Thursday through early-Friday. The payments technology giant said in a post-mortem of the daylong outage that the outage was caused by a DNS issue. DNS, or domain name system, is the global protocol that converts human-readable web addresses into IP addresses, which allow computers to find and load websites from all over the world. But if a company’s DNS settings are misconfigured or incorrectly changed, at worst it can cause the entire company to appear as if it’s dropped off the internet. That’s what happened with Square. “While making several standard changes to our internal network software, the combination of updates prevented our systems from properly communicating with each other, and ultimately caused the disruption. The issue also affected many of our internal tools for troubleshooting and support, making them temporarily unavailable,” Square said ina blog post. DNS issues are not rare; if anything, they’re relatively commonplace because DNS is notoriously complicated and easy to get wrong. There is an adage in cybersecurity circles: It’s always DNS, and if it’s not DNS, it’s probably BGP (a similarly complicated internet protocol that, like DNS, can beset eventhe world’s biggest companies). Because DNS relies on distributed servers around the world — many offered by internet providers and networking providers — new DNS settings can take anything from a few minutes to hours, sometimes days, to fully propagate globally. Square did not say more about how the DNS issue went down. Brenden Lee, spokesperson for Square’s parent company Block, declined to comment further on the outage or TechCrunch’s request for more information. In 2021, Notion experienced a DNS issue that saw the note-taking appfall offline for several hours, prompting the company to tweet at its web host for help. Months later, an outage at Akamai — a major provider of DNS services — washit by an outage, causing a knock-on effect to some of the world’s biggest sites, including banks and airlines. That said, cyberattacks targeting DNS services are not unheard of. In 2016, several enormous waves of junk traffic targeting internet giant Dynknocked the company’s DNS servers offline, effectively taking down Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Shopify and other major online sites that relied on Dyn’s services. The cyberattack was caused by a huge botnet of hijacked internet devices ensnared by the Mirai malware. Updated with response from Block. Square says it has resolved daylong outage
| 2023-09-11T13:20:06 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/11/square-daylong-outage-dns-error/
| 415 | 0.9 |
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As net retention plummets, AI could be the savior software companies need
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New data shows that net retention at software companies has been halved in recent quarters, partially explaining the slowdown of revenue growth at tech firms. This isn’t wholly surprising, since net retention forms a core plank of the SaaS economic modeland has been under extreme pressure, as we noted last week. This is because software companies are finding themselves trying to meet two seemingly contradictory asks: Tighten costs and stop letting growth slow too muchwhileyour existing customer base reins in spending. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read itevery morning on TechCrunch+or getThe Exchange newsletterevery Saturday. If you need a refresher: Net retention (aka, net dollar retention and net revenue retention) is a measure of how much existing software customers spend on your product over time. The metric isnormalized to 100%, which indicates that a software company’s existing customers are spending no more and no less than they did before. Net retention metrics over 100% tell us that existing customers are spending more, while anything less than 100% signifies a fall in total spending. Enterprise software companies are expected to enjoy net retention comfortably above 100%. The higher this metric, the better, because if you can land customers that continue to spend more on your product over time, your company not only buys revenue with sales and marketing spend, but it also nets future growth. And since software revenue tends to be high margin by nature, that boost to revenue brings with it gobs of gross profit that can offset costs. In other words, declining net retention not only makes the SaaS economic model dicier than it was before, but it also means software companies will find it harder to lose less money and keep expanding at the same time. Now to the new data. Accordingto Altimeter investor Jamin Ball, median net retention at public SaaS companies has followed the following curve in recent quarters: As we are more interested in how far above 100% these numbers are, this decline from 120% to 111% is not a difference of just 7. 5%, but a shocking 45% fall over just two short quarters. It appears the trend we detailed last week was described accurately, and it was uglier than expected. Worse, as we are discussingmediannet retention rates, we can assume that at least half of all public software companies were under the 111% mark. We’ll get more data as companies continue to report their quarterly results, so expect the numbers to move a little, but this does not look good. Lower net retention, slowing growth and lots of SaaS companies are still in the red. Issoftware really just not that good a business? I think there’s more nuance to what’s happening here. You can get asubscription to Slackfor as little as $7. 25 per user, per month. Sure, that’s the cheap tier, but still it’s incredibly inexpensive. You can spend more — a stonking $12. 50 per month — for the next tier up, or you can get an enterprise plan like my parent company Yahoo for more features, though I presume it’s possible to negotiate a volume discount at that point. Frankly, I have no idea how many workers Yahoo has in total, but if you do a little mental math, you can come up with an estimate for what my company, which hasrevenue in the billions, is paying for Slack. To be honest, Slack is software that we could not do business without. As a manager of a small team, at least I could not. And we’re probably paying Salesforce the equivalent of a few salaries to keep the whole thing running. That’s insanely cheap. The situation isgreatfor Yahoo, but it’s not that good for Slack or its own parent company, which is facilitating a simply massive amount of commerce in return for what amounts to a few basis points at most. If Slack were a physical good, it would probably consume more of our total expenditure. Hell, if it was a line item like fuel at a trucking company, it would account for a greater portion of our gross margin. So when I think about Slack’s revenue growth rate —20% year-over-year in Salesforce’s most recent quarter— I wonder if it is so low because the market expects to pay too slim a fraction of the benefits it gains from software for the hosted code itself. How did we end up here? That’s a tricky question, but I wonder if it’s partly venture capital’s fault. “Fault” may be too strong a word, but because net retention rates have historically been high, startups could afford to charge less for their products than they otherwise could have, as any customer would eventually end up spending more. Ask for less now and get more later, all while living off the money VCs have invested. In effect, that will teach customers to expect a piece of software to cost less than lunch for every person who uses it for a month. But declining net retention blows a hole through that math. So, how do software companies revitalize net retention, drive prices up and generate more cash? Of all the numbers that have come out in 2023, I thinkthis one from Microsoft is the most important(emphasis ours): Today at Microsoft Inspire, we’re excited to unveil the next steps in our journey: First, we’re significantly expanding Bing to reach new audiences with Bing Chat Enterprise, delivering AI-powered chat for work, and rolling out today in Preview — which means that more than 160 million people already have access. Second, to help commercial customers plan, we’re sharing thatMicrosoft 365 Copilot will be priced at $30 per user, per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers, when broadly available; we’ll share more on timing in the coming months. Third, in addition to expanding to more audiences, we continue to build new value in Bing Chat and are announcing Visual Search in Chat, a powerful new way to search, now rolling out broadly in Bing Chat. Is $30 per month a lot of money? Yes. Microsoft 365 E3 costs $36 per monthby itself for a year, so the introduction of an AI tool like Copilot could all but double that figure. That’s a massive,massiveshift in value that will be captured by Microsoft’s productivity suite with the addition of a new feature. Provided that the market will bear the cost of the new service — and is actually interested in paying for it — Microsoft will have set the bar incredibly high for the amount the market must pay for AI-driven features in the LLM era. For startups and other software companies, such a towering bar for AI pricing grants room to greatly expand how much each customer spends in the coming quarters. It could help rebuild net retention rates and get the metric back on track. That alone would help make SaaS companies more profitable and spur them to grow faster. What’s more, if new customers also buy larger packages with AI-powered tools as part of the same deals, new customer acquisition could become more profitable. It would be a win all ’round for software companies. We are currently stuck staring at seemingly bedraggled results from enterprise software companies because their customers are spending conservatively. But there could be good news just around the corner, provided services with generative AI become as powerful as expected and are as in demand as hoped. Topics Senior Reporter 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?
| 2023-08-18T16:30:42 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/18/ai-could-save-the-day-for-software-companies/
| 1,318 | 1 |
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From Brex exec to venture capitalist
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Welcome toTechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at a Brex exec’s jump to join venture firm a16z, Klarna selling off its payments unit and some mega-raises. To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Tuesday at 7:00 a. m. PT,subscribe here. Ali Rathod-Papier has stepped down from her role as global head of compliance at corporate card expense management startupBrextojoin venture firm Andreessen Horowitz(a16z) as a partner and compliance officer, TechCrunch exclusively learned. The hiring comes at an interesting time for a16z, which had invested in Synapse, the banking-as-a-service startup that filed for bankruptcy in April and has since beenunder firefor an estimated $85 million worth of missing customer funds. Another Brex exec, Sam Blond (former chief revenue officer), alsoleft the companyto become a venture capitalist. But he ended upstepping down from his role at Founders Fundearlier this year, saying at the time “full-time investing / being a VC isn’t the right fit for me. ” Gynger, a platform that lends capital to companies for technology purchases, hasraised $20 millionin a Series A round led byPayPal Ventures. There are plenty of companies out there to help startups fund technology purchases through a variety of methods. Gynger’s model stood out in that it works withbothbuyers and sellers of technology. The startup offers vendors that are selling technology a way to offer embedded financing through an accounts receivable platform that provides “flexible” payment terms. To date, Gynger has facilitated thousands of payments for its customers across hundreds of vendors, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Okta. Finbourne, which has built a platform to help financial companies organize and use more of their data in AI and other models,raised $70 millionat a just over $356 million post-money valuation. Cadana, whose APIs and white-label products allow global workforces to integrate payments and payroll management into their existing systems, has emerged from stealth with a total of$7. 4 million in funding. Paris-basedHero, which is building an ambitious banking product for small companies, hasraised a $12. 2 million all-equity funding roundled byValar Ventures. Materia, which integrates into a firm’s existing workflow software and applications to help break down the silos that exist in accounting firms’ troves of unstructured data, hasemerged from stealth with $6. 3 million in funding. Four years after acquiringShine, a French fintech startup that offers bank accounts to freelancers and very small companies,Société Généralehas announced plans to sell Shine to Ageras. In 2020, TechCrunchreportedthat Société Générale spent around €100 million to acquire Shine. It wasn’t a huge acquisition but it attracted quite a bit of coverage at the time, as it was more than just a tech or talent deal. Romain Dillet gives us the scoophere. Klarna to exit checkout business after finding conflict of interest with rivals Adyen and Stripe Elon Musk’s X revenue has officially plummeted, new documents show Revolut seeks valuation of more than $40bn in employee share sale Celcoin raises $120. 5 million for new M&As Mexican fintech unicorn Clip lands $100m investment Amplify Life Insurance raises $20M in Series B funding Klarna rival Zilch raises $125 million with aim to triple sales and accelerate path to IPO Verituity raises $18. 8M for payout verification Want to reach out with a tip? Email me atmaryann@techcrunch. comor send me a message on Signal at 408. 204. 3036. You can also send a note to the whole TechCrunch crew attips@techcrunch. com. For more secure communications,click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and links to encrypted messaging apps. Topics Senior Reporter, Fintech 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?
| 2024-06-25T17:05:00 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/25/from-brex-exec-to-venture-capitalist/
| 666 | 1 |
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British International Investment backs India’s Aye Finance in $37M funding
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Aye Finance, an Indian startup that offers its digital lending platform to small firms, has raised $37. 18 million in a fresh funding round led by British International Investment, as it looks to continue to help micro enterprises grow their businesses and employees expand their incomes. The all-equity Series F round, which does not involve any secondary transactions and takes Aye’s total fundraising to nearly $200 million, involves the participation of Waterfield Fund of Funds and the startup’s existing investor A91 Partners. In 2020, the startupraised $27. 5 millionin its Series E funding round led by Alphabet’s CapitalG. Founded in 2014,Aye— means “Yes” in English and “Income” in Hindi — provides business loans in the form of mortgage, hypothecation and term credit to underserved micro enterprises that find it challenging to secure their working capital requirements from traditional lenders, including banks, with an average ticket size of $1,800. The startup uses a mix of its in-house technology and analytics to offer a range of financial solutions to enterprises based on their need. To date, the 10-year-old company has touted to have disbursed more than $959 million of credit to over 700,000 unorganized businesses. It competes with the likes of Capital Float, Lendingkart and Indifi, which all work toward offering credit to small enterprises in the South Asian nation. Aye told TechCrunch that its revenue increased by 45% to $77. 10 million in the financial year 2023 from $53. 12 million the previous year. Additionally, it plans to go public in the financial year 2026. One key reason for startups like Aye and others to gain enough traction in India is the lack of credit for small businesses. India is home to over 63 million micro, small and medium-sized businesses, whichcontributeto nearly 30% of the country’s gross domestic product as well as over 43% of all exports and employ over 123 million people, per government data. The government does consider the importance of these businesses in the country’s overall growth and has introduced a number of initiatives to ease their credit requirements. However, several small businesses still find it hard to get funds to start and sustain their operations, as some government schemes and programs’ eligibility requirements do not match their business models or scale, while some involve lengthy processes. Startups like Aye are utilizing that gap by offering credit through their platforms. “We believe there is immense potential in lending to underserved micro enterprises, and the fresh capital will provide a strong fillip to our compounding story,” said Sanjay Sharma, co-founder, MD and CEO of Aye Finance, in a prepared statement. “Aye Finance is on a growth journey, and we are delighted to partner with BII, who have a deep understanding of the financial services sector in India. This equity raise is a testament to the strong conviction that investors have in a high-quality franchise such as Aye. ” The Gurugram-headquartered startup, which has a presence across 22 states through its 395 offices, says it has over $959 million of assets under management and delivered over $9. 59 million of profit after tax in the first six months of the financial year 2024. “Our investment in Aye Finance underscores our commitment to back companies that have a strong development impact philosophy and promote financial inclusion for India’s underserved groups. The team from Aye stands out for its dedication and experience in offering tech-enabled financing solutions with high potential for scalability,” said Gaurav Malhotra, director for Financial Services, British International Investment. Topics Reporter 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?
| 2023-12-13T04:30:39 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/12/british-international-investment-aye-finance-funding/
| 657 | 1 |
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Connected fitness is adrift post-pandemic
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Over the past four years, the connected fitness space has experienced some of the highest highs and lowest lows in the venture world. According to figures from Crunchbase,funding — predictably — peaked in 2021. As a whole, the fitness category accounted for $6. 4 billion raised over 376 rounds. In May of 2021, Peloton announced that it would be funding an Ohio-based production facility to the tune of $400 million. That was a drop in the bucket: The company generated $4. 13 billion in revenue for the year, more than a 40% increase over 2020. On Monday, the fitness company announced that it wasseeking to refinance its debt. It also entered into a five-year, $1 billion loan as it looks to bring on a new CEO following Barry McCarthy’s exit earlier this month after two years with the company. Ultimately, Peloton got high on its own supply, assuming that pandemic-fueled gains were the new normal. Competitor Tonal (which Peloton had reportedly considered acquiring in 2022),laid off more than one-third of its staffin 2022. In April 2023, it announceda new CEOand a $130 million round at a significantly reduced valuation. Still, it was more than happy to offer a trade-in program at the end of the year, after Lululemon stopped sales ofits Mirror devices. The pandemic has certainly had long-term impacts on the economy. For instance, while work from home has obviously declined from its COVID heights, a report earlier this year notes that it’s still in the areaof three to four times more commonthan it was in 2019. Connected fitness’ big bet was that while some regression was inevitable, the cultural shift was going to be permanent. Ultimately, however, many were eager for a “return to normality,” and arrival of vaccinations, coupled with lowered rates of infection, emboldened many to get back to the gym. Unlike commuting into an artificially lit cubical farm five times a week, plenty of people genuinely enjoy the experience of working out in person. The struggle isn’t universal, however. Hydrow, which raised $55 million in 2022, purchaseda majority stakein AI-based strength training firm Speede Fitness earlier this month. The firm has done a good job capitalizing on interest around rowing machines, even as Peloton’s answer to the category was entirely overshadowed by its very public struggles. Despite some major regressions and broader economic headwinds, there’s always money to be raised if you’ve got a compelling enough product. Ultimately, however, those rounds should be consistently lower than they were in the home fitness salad days. For a recent example, Kabata, the maker of the “world’s first AI-powered dumbbells,” announced a $5 million seed round on Tuesday. That’s follows a$2 million seed roundraised in May 2022. I wouldn’t want to be a connected fitness firm raising in 2024. As my financial adviser recently told me, “the best time to buy a house is last year. ” When you’re working to bring a product to market, you can’t always wait until the market forces are ideal. Seems that we may never see the likes of 2021 again for connected fitness
| 2024-05-22T16:56:27 |
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/22/connected-fitness-is-adrift-post-pandemic/
| 512 | 1 |
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Lucid Motors wins bankruptcy auction for Nikola’s Arizona factory and other assets
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EV startup Lucid Motors has emerged as a surprise winner in the bankruptcy auction for electric trucking company Nikola’s Arizona factory and other assets, according to a late Thursday night courtfiling. Lucid committed around $30 million in cash and non-cash considerations in exchange for the factory, Nikola’s lease on its Phoenix headquarters, and “certain machinery, equipment and inventory,” according to the filing. As part of the deal, Lucid is planning to make offers to around 300 former Nikola employees, the company told TechCrunch. Those offers will go to both salaried and hourly employees across manufacturing, engineering, software, assembly, vehicle testing, and warehouse support, Lucid said ina press release. “As we continue our production ramp of Lucid Gravity and prepare for our upcoming midsize platform vehicles, acquiring these assets is an opportunity to strategically expand our manufacturing, warehousing, testing, and development facilities while supporting our local Arizona community,” Marc Winterhoff, Lucid’s interim CEO, said in a statement. Lucid will not acquire any of Nikola’s hydrogen trucking assets or its customers, according to therelease. Lucid beat out three other unnamed bidders in an auction that started on April 7 and went multiple rounds, according to a courtfiling. The sudden appearance of Lucid in the Nikola bankruptcy proceedings is a shock for multiple reasons. Nikola had been trying to sell itswhole businesssince it filed for bankruptcy protection in February. Lucid is focused on making passenger EVs and has never dealt with hydrogen-powered electric vehicles, which is a big piece of Nikola’s nascent business. More recently, Nikola’s founder Trevor Milton — who was convicted of fraud in 2022 but waspardonedby President Trump in March — wasevaluating a bid of his own on the startup’s assets. Nikola convinced the court to block Milton from inspecting its factory and other assets in person ahead of the auction, which was held April 7. Lucid has its own factory in nearby Casa Grande, Arizona, and so it sees value in acquiring more warehousing space, testing equipment, and employees, according to the company. While Lucid was the top bidder for these assets at the auction, the bankruptcy judge is allowing objections to the sale to be filed until 12:00 p. m. ET on Friday, April 11. A hearing is scheduled for 1:30 p. m. ET. This story has been updated with information from Lucid Motors’ press release and additional court filings about the auction. Topics Sr. Reporter, Transportation 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?
| 2025-04-11T03:06:15 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/10/lucid-motors-wins-bankruptcy-auction-for-nikolas-arizona-factory-and-other-assets/
| 474 | 0.9 |
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How to build a robust and adaptive data culture that instills investor confidence
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Securing funding for startups has never been a walk in the park, and the current economic volatility has made it even more demanding. According to PitchBook’s 2023 report, capital demand surpasses supply by a daunting 50. 5% for early-stage and 67. 1% for growth-stage ventures. Startups cannot rely on impressing with just metrics to attract investors. Investors want more; they want to understand the “why” behind a startup’s success, delving into the long-term growth trajectory. In my capacity as the CEO ofAryng, a data science consulting firm that helps startups and growing enterprises drive success with their data, I recently engaged in an insightful conversation with Cathy Tanimura, VP of Analytics and Data Science at Summit Partners. We discussed the critical role of building and nurturing a robust data culture. In a time when investors are exercising heightened caution, a strong data culture proves invaluable. When you have a strong data culture, investors are able to gain insight into the “reasons” behind success. They understand how your data team solves problems, optimizes fund allocation, and identifies revenue-driving insights. A data-focused approach signals a company’s ability to run its business efficiently. As Cathy aptly put it, leaders should “know the drivers of your business, what makes your customers tick, what’s important to your growth, what’s helping or hindering you from growing and then work backward into the data that you need to have the insights about those drivers. ” Cathy went on to add how data culture can help align metrics with goals, manage risks, streamline due diligence, optimize data retrieval, and ensure control and transparency. Building this culture empowers founders to compellingly articulate their journey to potential investors. It signals a commitment to data-driven decisions over gut instincts, a trait that gives confidence to cautious investors. As I absorbed Cathy’s perspective, I felt inspired to share my experience-driven strategies on how startups and growing companies can build a robust and adaptive data culture that can help them kickstart this initiative. While the strategies I’m about to share aren’t necessarily a step-by-step sequence, one thing is clear: Data culture starts at the very top. Leadership is the engine that drives a strong data culture in an organization. The core of establishing a thriving data culture in these settings hinges on leaders making decisions grounded in data-driven insights. In my experience, many startups kick off with decision-making based on hunches. However, as they evolve and grow, depending solely on hunches becomes a limitation. It’s crucial to differentiate between hunches and structured hypotheses. Hunches often rely on intuition without concrete data, whereas hypotheses involve crafting specific statements based on existing data and logic. This transition can set them on a path of rigorous experimentation and data analysis, resulting in more informed, data-driven decisions. I strongly recommend executives adopt this hypothesis-driven approach. It deepens their understanding of complex cause-and-effect dynamics within their operations, cultivating a culture of data-driven excellence. Let’s talk about objectives and key results (OKRs) — a solid framework that guides businesses in making data-driven decisions. It’s all about accountability, paving the way for a results-focused culture rooted in clear-cut hypotheses. Every decision that leaders make should carry a precise expectation of its business impact, fitting into broader company goals. I also suggest embracing net-zero budgeting. This strategy urges executives to dig deep into expenses, ensuring resources are allocated efficiently. By implementing OKRs and net-zero budgeting systematically, any startup can navigate data-driven decision-making while optimizing resource utilization, ultimately driving growth and success. To build a strong data culture, startups need to see their data team as a revenue center rather than a cost center. This means giving the head of data a seat at the table, reporting directly to the CEO or a CXO with significant P&L experience. By having an internal champion who actively drives the data agenda, a growing enterprise can ensure that good data science is always an active part of their growth strategy. Investors agree that data teams are an investment, not a cost to be deferred. Furthermore, having a head of data and a data team will centralize data function. Instead of having multiple data processes scattered across departments, having a head of data brings them into a more coordinated system. Whether it’s creating the data strategy that will drive decision-making, maintaining data integrity and security, providing insights through intelligent analytics, or managing a scalable data infrastructure, the head of data is indispensable for any startup’s data culture. Unlike larger corporations, startups and growth companies don’t have the luxury of unlimited resources to drive multiple initiatives. Instead, they must zero in on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most for business success. My proposed solution is the KPI DuPont exercise, a visual method that helps businesses better understand their KPIs and the metrics that drive them. The process is most effective when the entire executive leadership team (ELT) is involved, and with support from the head of data, it typically takes four to six weeks to complete. Once the KPI DuPont is finished, the leadership can now identify the initiatives (use cases) that have the most impact on driver metrics and, consequently, on their KPIs. This alignment between use cases and business outcomes ensures that the results are directly linked to the top driver metrics from the KPI DuPont. The KPI DuPont exercise creates a visual tree that links each KPI to its immediate driver metrics, allowing for up to five to 10 levels of metrics. This structure often mirrors the actual organization’s hierarchy. For example, if a business is divided into geographic regions and further segmented into distinct product lines, the KPI DuPont will accurately reflect this hierarchical structure. This exercise achieves more than just aligning the leadership team’s approach to measuring success; it reveals significant opportunities for swiftly improving KPIs. For instance, if the KPI is revenue growth and a metric situated four levels down pertains to customer retention, which currently stands at, say, 60% below industry standards. Then enhancing it by 5% could result in a substantial 3% increase in revenue growth, which can be equivalent to a significant incremental revenue (please note that these figures are for example purposes only). These opportunities, unveiled during the exercise, can be assessed, and the top three to five can be prioritized, leading to a substantial boost in revenue growth. By ensuring that their initiatives align with the most impactful KPIs, startup and growth companies can also easily demonstrate to investors how their endeavors directly contribute to the bottom line. As startups experience rapid growth, it comes as a mixed blessing, bringing a bag of opportunities and a bundle of challenges. On the one hand, it opens doors to enhanced insights, increased efficiency, and better decision-making. On the other hand, it ushers in complexities such as data volume, organization, and accessibility. Maintaining a clear focus becomes critical as businesses expand. Every startup at some point in its journey grapples with a common challenge: data inconsistencies, with vital metrics like subscriber counts and revenue often refusing to play nicely together. It’s important to remember that there’s no such thing as “perfect data. ” So, what’s the solution? Identifying the top 300 to 500 crucial metrics for the business is the way to go. But it’s not enough just to identify them; it’s about ensuring everyone in the organization has access to accurate versions of these metrics, and that’s where the single source of truth (SSOT) driven by KPI dashboards comes into play. Another essential component in this strategy is the use of KPI dashboards, which offer a visual representation of KPI DuPont, making quick and informed decision-making possible. For instance, you can see revenue growth at 15% and all the relevant driver metrics. The key is to make these dashboards user friendly and easily accessible so that everyone on the team gets into the habit of using them. While KPI dashboards serve the CXOs, supporting metrics are necessary for detailed business insights, extending down to front-line roles. These 300 to 500 metrics should also be consolidated into an SSOT, allowing access to data, information, and insights from a single repository. This avoids data silos and keeps everyone on the same page when it comes to KPIs. In addition, KPI dashboards, supported by SSOT, simplify due diligence processes, enabling accurate presentations of the business’s status to potential investors. To illustrate how these strategies come to life in a real-world scenario, let me share a case study featuring a payment orchestration startup. This startup was grappling with issues related to conversion rates, pricing, and cost optimization. Furthermore, they faced data inconsistencies, which eroded trust in their data and hindered their progress. To address these challenges, we started by building a KPI DuPont with their leadership team, delving down to level 6 to identify key metrics and their drivers. We then aligned their OKRs with the relevant metrics identified in the KPI DuPont. This eye-opening process shed light on the varying perspectives of the company’s leaders regarding what’s essential to drive the business forward. This exercise served as the foundation for a unified vision and guidelines, represented by the KPI DuPont and, eventually, the KPI dashboard. At the same time, we identified top business use cases with the potential to significantly impact drivers of key KPIs. In parallel, we assessed the tech infrastructure to identify gaps in the SSOT and technical skills. Using these business use cases as our north star, we charted a roadmap to drive tangible business results. Our key initiatives included: Undergoing this transformation in just nine months, the startup achieved an $8. 4 million revenue uplift and a $1. 7 million reduction in losses. The CTO hailed this process as a “game-changer,” underscoring the monetary value attached to nurturing a data culture. It empowered teams to solve problems, optimize fund allocation, and identify revenue-driving insights, and this is the kind of data-driven approach that investors want to see. Data culture isn’t just a trendy buzzword; it’s a strategic necessity that forms the bedrock of smart decision-making, rooted in facts and the results of experimentation. It provides startups and growth companies with the confidence they need for a successful journey. The strategies I shared are integral to this process. Developing a robust data culture doesn’t happen overnight; it requires sustained effort and commitment, particularly from leadership. When implemented effectively, a strong data culture isn’t some abstract notion — it’s quantifiable and directly influences profitability. It’s crucial for startups and growth companies to shift their perspective on data. Unlike larger enterprises, they operate under different constraints. They need to be resourceful and discerning to extend their runway to the next funding round. While fundraising is a top priority for startups, nurturing a robust data culture can significantly contribute to their overall success. Topics Contributor 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?
| 2023-11-18T13:35:22 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/18/how-to-build-a-robust-and-adaptive-data-culture-that-instills-investor-confidence/
| 1,871 | 1 |
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It doesn’t look like Y Combinator’s summer Demo Day batch will surprise us much
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Y Combinator hosts a Demo Day for its latest batch of companies twice a year, and starting tomorrow until Thursday, the startup accelerator and investor will debut 218 companies from its summer 2023 cohort. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read itevery morning on TechCrunch+or getThe Exchange newsletterevery Saturday. As always, the TechCrunch team will be tuned in and looking for favorites from both days, and we’ll have a few notes on certain groups of startups from the larger batch. This morning, we’re digging into the big numbers from across the hundreds of companies that will present this week, looking at where they are based, what sort of technologies they are pursuing and in which areas founder interest has waned. Upfront, if you are a venture capitalist looking to invest in creator-economy focused startups, you are in for a bad time. However, if you want to invest in or join a very early-stage developer tools startup, you are in luck! It’s worth noting that there are just 218 startups in this summer batch, according to Y Combinator. This is less than the 270 we saw during the winter 2023 batch earlier this year — we presume that there are a dozen or so that are in stealth at the moment, so we’ll be on the lookout for more final figures. That said, the second YC cohort of the year always tends to be smaller than the first. Last year’s winter batch had 235 companies, but it was quite a bit lower than the 393 companies we saw in 2021. It’s not completely surprising to see smaller batches from the accelerator, asYC has been shrinking its cohort sizesin light of the volatile market for a while now. Still, these lower numbers are a reminder of just how much the venture and startup economy has changed over the past couple years. We’re going to break down the cohort by sector and geography. We don’t want to shock your system this early on a holiday week, but there aren’t very many web3-focused startups in the upcoming Demo Day contingent. We spot a mere three web3 startups in the entire group, which makes them about 1. 4% of the known total. That’s very modest. In a shock to precisely no one, it’s still popular to build enterprise software for other companies and sell it using a SaaS model. Of the 218 companies in the cohort, 58 have something to do with “SaaS,” another 83 are in the B2B game, and enterprise software racked up another 15 entries. We found some other active pockets, too: Developer tools has 49 startups, fintech has a solid 27 (or a bit more than 10% of the cohort), climate has 10 companies, and productivity and health tech have nine each. And then there is AI: We have a whopping 69 startups tagged with “artificial intelligence,” 47 with “generative AI,” 17 for “AI assistant,” and another 11 in the “automation” bucket. Naturally, there is some overlap between the categories (Order. link, for example, is tagged in the SaaS, sales, sales enablement, AI, and AI assistant groups), but it’s still an impressive run of startups considering the group numbers are only slightly more than 200. Is it shocking? No. Surprising? Maybe a little. Everyone joked for a bit that people who were into crypto have now moved on to AI, but the center of gravity has most certainly shifted toward AI, at least when it comes to tech startups. The center of gravity in this batch has shifted geographically, too. More precisely, it’s moved back to North America. Of the 218 known companies in this summer batch, 184 are based either in the U. S. or Canada (Mexico is grouped with Latin America in YC’s directory). That’s roughly 84% of the cohort, compared to around 60% in the previous summer batch. The YC of the post-COVID era, then, is more U. S. -centric than it once was. Or maybe its heavy international focus was more of a periodic parenthesis. It makes sense: In-person batches are likely harder for international teams to join than the virtual ones YC pivoted to at the height of the pandemic. However, a company saying it’s based in the U. S. doesn’t mean the same thing as it did a few years ago. Now that people can travel again, it is not as hard for companies to list the U. S. as one of their locations. More importantly, YC companies are less tied to a single location than they used to be: 46 teams describe themselves as partly remote, and 33 say they’re fully remote. Still, this batch looks nothing out of the ordinary. The median YC S23 company is building AI for businesses, is monetized by SaaS, and is based in North America. Will this enthuse VCs? Will we find gems, both within this mainstream trend and outside of it? Stay tuned for our coverage this week
| 2023-09-05T17:00:47 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/05/y-combinator-s23-batch/
| 822 | 1 |
343863776ac35e53038d0496190d3597
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Tesla Cybertruck deliveries set for November 30
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Tesla has finally set a date for the first deliveries of the Cybertruck. CEO Elon Muskposted on social mediaWednesday that the Cybertruck delivery event, which traditionally means a few select customers get to take possession of their vehicles, will be held November 30 at the company’s Austin gigafactory. The news of the delivery event comes on the same day that Tesla reported its third-quarter earnings, results that showed a44% drop in profitsfrom the same period last year. Notably, the Cybertruck delivery date wasn’t included in the earnings report. The report did include a note that pilot production of the Cybertruck has started at Giga Texas, the company’s factory near Austin, Texas. Tesla also said the Cybertruck “remains on track for initial deliveries this year. ” Tesla had promised to deliver the Cybertruck to customers in the summer of 2023, and then later, in the third quarter. Both of those deadlines came and went. Tesla hasn’t shared how many Cybertrucks it will put into customers’ hands during the delivery event. Production of the vehicle is expected to ramp in 2024. According to the Q3 earnings report, the gigafactory will have capacity to produce less than 125,000 Cybertrucks once it reaches mass production, a number that Musk said Tesla should hit in 2025. And based on Tesla’s balance sheet, it appears the company is pouring money into Cybertruck production. The EV maker’s operating expenses increased 43% year-over-year to $2. 4 billion, due in part to Cybertruck. “I do want to emphasize that there will be enormous challenges in reaching volume production with the Cybertruck,” said Musk during Wednesday’s earnings call, noting that it will take about 18 months until the Cybertruck is cash-flow positive. “I think it is our best product ever. It is going to require immense work to reach volume production and be cashflow positive at a price that people can afford,” continued the executive. “If you want to do something radical and innovative and something really special like the Cybertruck, it is extremely difficult because there’s nothing to copy. You have to invent not just the car, but the way to make the car. So the more uncharted the territory, the less predictable the outcome. ” Tesla also said it increased spending on AI development as the company works to get itsDojo supercomputerup and running. Dojo is designed to train Tesla’s neural networks to advance the automaker’s self-driving capabilities, as well as its humanoid robot Optimus. This article has been updated with statements from Elon Musk on the profitability of Cybertruck. Tesla’s margins remind us that it’s an automaker, not a tech company Topics Senior Reporter Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch, where she covers Tesla and Elon Musk’s broader empire, autonomy, AI, electrification, gig work platforms, Big Tech regulatory scrutiny, and more. She’s one of the co-hosts of the Equity podcast and writes the TechCrunch Daily morning newsletter. Previously, she covered social media for Forbes. com, and her work has appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, i-D (Vice) and more. Rebecca has invested in Ethereum. 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?
| 2023-10-18T21:27:59 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/18/tesla-cybertruck-deliveries-set-for-nov-30/
| 589 | 1 |
3d8ce68fd64441d599519d917ccf962e
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Europe adopts US data adequacy decision
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The European Union has adopted a new transatlantic data adequacy agreement with the U. S. The much anticipated decision means there’s an immediate resolution to legal uncertainty around exports of EU users’ personal data by U. S. companies — a problem that’s affected thousands of businesses in recent years, big and small, including the likes ofMetaandGoogleto name a couple of the most high-profile examples. Speaking during a press conference announcing adoption of the U. S. adequacy decision, EU justice commissioner Didier Reynders sounded confident that this time — the third such high-level data transfer arrangement the bloc’s executive has granted the U. S. — will indeed be third time lucky. “With the adoption of the adequacy decision, personal data can now flow freely and safely from the European Economic Area to the United States without any further conditions or authorizations,” he said. “Therefore, the adequacy decision, ensure that data can be transmitted between the European Union and the U. S. on the basis of a stable and trusted arrangement that protects individuals and provides legal certainty to companies. ” Political agreement on the EU-U. S. Data Privacy Framework (DPF) was announced back inMarch 2022but it’s taken over a year to get all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, while the prior mechanism for simplifying exports of data over the pond was invalidated by EU judgesalmost three years ago. So the adoption of a new adequacy deal really does pull the shutter down on years of legal uncertainty affecting major U. S. cloud services and scores of other digital players. That said, the big question for the DPF is how enduring this third EU-U. S. data adequacy agreement will be — and that very much remains to be seen, despite the EU taking more time than it did last time to sweat the detail of the new framework. At today’s press conference Reynders was sounding a lot more bullish than usual on this topic, arguing the framework is not simply a copy/paste of earlier (failed) transfer mechanisms but “a very different system” — one he suggested is “a very robust solution” to an entrenched legal divide. He also suggesting the EU has listened closely to feedback as it worked to finalize a framework he claimed ensures “full compliance with the conditions set in the ruling of the EU’s highest court. ” “This was my mandate and my focus in these negotiations, and this is reflected in the solutions we have obtained,” he suggested. “They specifically address the requirements set by the court as regards the need for limitations and safeguards for access to data by U. S. intelligence agencies in line with the principles of necessity and proportionality and the need to ensure effective redress for EU individuals. ” Nonetheless, legal challenges to the DPF are on the way. Both predecessor arrangements (i. e. ,Safe HarborandPrivacy Shield) were struck down by the bloc’s top court after judges found exported personal data was not protected to the required legal standard given risks posed by sweeping U. S. surveillance powers. And privacy campaigners are warning the new framework could be in front of the CJEU (Court of Justice of the European Union) within months. One key point for critics is that since Privacy Shield’s demise, we have still not seen reform of U. S. surveillance powers, with no moves by lawmakers to accept the need to reform the controversial FISA 702 provision and pass protections for foreigners’ information. That means, at root, the DPF is still papering over the same fundamental legal conflict between EU privacy rights and U. S. surveillance powers, and it could inexorably face the same assessment of inadequacy once EU judges get to scrutinize the detail. In recent months, a number of other EU institutions haveraised concernsthat the Commission’s planned replacementlacks clarity, also suggesting the tweaks on the prior approach may fall short of delivering the necessary essential equivalence in protection for data when it’s over the pond. Although there has also been a recognition by bodies such as the European Data Protection Board that the DPF goes further than earlier data transfer deals. The question is whether it goes far enough to meet the CJEU’s bar. The Commission decision itself doesn’t mean much since it’s solely responsible for adopting EU adequacy decisions — and Reynders conceded that today’s green light is essentially a “unilateral” decision by the EU’s executive — so the bloc’s lawmakers are in the luxurious position of getting to mark their own homework once again, despite a history of getting these self-same equations wrong. Privacy campaign group noyb — whose founder and chairman, Max Schrems, was behind the original complaint against Facebook’s EU-U. S. data transfers — remains critical of the framework. Responding to the Commission’s adequacy decision announcement today,noybconfirmed it will lodge a legal challenge — saying it has “options for a challenge” ready to be sent to regulators and expects the issue to be back with the CJEU by the beginning of next year. So we are "partners" with the US, but the US continues to say that EU citizens are "second class" and do not have fundamental rights (under the 4th Amendment). #TADPF — Max Schrems 🇪🇺 (@maxschrems)July 10, 2023 If noyb’s slated timeline holds, it would still have to be followed by months (or even years) of deliberation by the bloc’s court. So a final verdict on the DPF could be years away. (For some comparative context, legal questions pertaining the DPF’s predecessor, Privacy Shield, were referred to the court inMay 2018— with the CJEU ruling striking down the mechanism landing in July 2020. ) For now, Schrems and noyb argue the new framework is largely the same as the Privacy Shield that failed to pass must with EU judges — dismissing the main changes highlighted by EU and U. S. teams involved in negotiating the replacement deal, such as the U. S. apparently adopting an EU law principle of “proportionate” data use. This amounts to proportionality theater, noyb suggests, arguing the U. S. is not assigning the same definition to the term that EU judges would understand in the Executive Order attached to the DPF where the U. S. now vows its surveillance of foreigners will be “proportionate. ” They are also also unimpressed by an attempt in the DPF to rework another problem that led to the CJEU skewering Privacy Shield — related to redress. So instead of the latter’s ombudsperson, the DPF offers up a civil liberties protection officer and what’s being named as a “court” but that, they point out, is not actually a court of law; rather it’s a “partly independent executive body” — hence summing up the changes as only “minor improvements. ” “They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Just like ‘Privacy Shield’ the latest deal is not based on material changes but by political interests,” argued Schrems in a statement. “Once again the current Commission seems to think that the mess will be the next Commission’s problem. FISA 702 needs to be prolonged by the U. S. this year but with the announcement of the new deal the EU has lost any power to get a reform of FISA 702. ” Anticipating the key lines of attack, Reynders took some time to tackle both areas in his remarks today — fleshing out why the Commission thinks this deal is different and will stick. He said: We have achieved significant changes to the U. S. legal framework to address these two sets of requirements. This new framework is substantially different than the EU-U. S. Privacy Shield as a result of the Executive Order issued by President Biden last year following our negotiations. The necessity and proportionality requirements are now clearly spelled out through binding and enforceable safeguards in the U. S. legal order. In practice this means that when deciding whether and to what extent U. S. intelligence agencies should access data, they will be required to balance the same factors as those required by the case law of the EU Court of Justice. These factors include the nature of the data, the seriousness of the threat, or the likely impact on the rights of individuals. On that basis, each U. S. intelligence agency has reviewed its internal rules and procedures to implement these new requirements at the operational level. On the reworked redress mechanism, Reynders described it as “an independent and impartial tribunal that is empowered to investigate complaints lodged by Europeans and to issue binding remedial decisions,” also noting the body has the power to oder the deletion of data collected in violation of the requirements of necessity or proportionality. He further emphasized that the Commission has paid attention to accessibility of redress — suggesting the mechanism has been designed to be “user friendly” and noting there’s no charge for EU people to lodge a complaint (which he stipulated they can do in their own language via their local data protection authority, which will then channel the complaint to the relevant authorities for them). He emphasized: Very low admissibility requirements will apply. In particular, the complainant will not have to demonstrate that their data has been accessed by U. S. intelligence agencies. This is very important and this is crucial to ensure effective access to redress in an area which is by nature secret. Before the [tribunal] the complainant’s interest will be represented by a special advocate, again, free of charge with the necessary security clearances. These proceedings involve a certain degree of secrecy. With a special advocate, the court will take its decision only after hearing both sides. Finally, the functioning of this redress mechanism, including due process aspects and compliance with the decisions of the new court, will be overseen by an independent body specifically responsible for data protection, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. “The principles of the Data Privacy Framework are solid and I’m convinced that we have made significant progress which meets the requirements of the Court,” Reynders also said, before offering a word of caution to U. S. authorities vis-à-vis the need to actually deliver on their commitments. “At the same time the Commission will be paying particularly close attention to implementation of this new legal framework and will not hesitate to react in case of any problems or issues,” he warned. Cynics might say the whole EU-U. S. adequacy saga is simply a way for lawmakers on either side of an immoveable legal schism to buy another few years’ grace (and keep the wheels of commerce turning) by repeatedly kicking the flash-point down the road — leaving EU regulators and courts saddled with the resulting fallout (and businesses facing yet another expensive legal mess if the deal ends up being unpicked yet again). It’s a point of view that’s lent credence when you consider how Meta, which has been subject to a complaint over its EU-U. S. data transfers for around a decade — and was finally,earlier this year, ordered to suspend data flows after EU privacy regulators confirmed the breach of the bloc’s data export requirements — has never actually had to stop shipping out Europeans’ data despite the exports being found to be unlawful. In May the tech giant was given a period of around six months to comply with the data suspension order. Now, a few weeks on from that order, we have a freshly ratified high-level transfer mechanism for the company to latch on to — meaning it can simply ignore the still ink-wet suspension order by switching its claimed legal basis for data exports to the DPF and avoid actually having to suspend any data flows, essentially dodging hard enforcement (albeit, witha bill of around $1. 3 billion to pay). This seemingly never-ending dance — which noyb dubs a frustrating “legal ping pong” — illustrates how challenging it is for EU citizens to exercise the privacy rights the law claims exists to protect their information, even as tech giants with lucrative data-mining business models get to carry on trampling people’s rights as per usual, just so long as they make enough profit to be able to write off any penalty payments as a cost of doing business. Still, Reynders had a word of caution for U. S. tech giants today: “It will be for the companies to show that they’re in full compliance with the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]. ” And on that front, Meta, at least, does have agrowing headache as EU regulators— and,most recently, the CJEU— have cast doubt upon the legal basis it claims for processing people’s data for ad targeting. So even if the adtech giant won’t now be forced to cut off all its EU-U. S. data flows, some hard reforms to how it operates its behavioral advertising business in the EU do now look unavoidable. MEPs raise concerns over draft EU-US data transfer deal EU confirms draft decision on replacement US data transfer pact 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. 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?
| 2023-07-10T15:49:37 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/10/eu-us-data-privacy-framework-adoption/
| 2,336 | 1 |
74a891afc495a0ec6f33aa2645d2f39f
|
{"bias_density": 0.29, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 2, "age_bias": 4, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 7, "concerns": ["High demographic bias indicators"]}
|
DoorDash seeks dismissal of Uber lawsuit
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DoorDash has asked a California Superior Court judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Uber that accuses the food delivery company of stifling competition by intimidating restaurant owners into exclusive deals. DoorDash argues inits motionthat Uber’s claim lacks merit on all fronts. On a post on its websiteon Friday, DoorDash said, “the lawsuit is nothing more than a cynical and calculated scare tactic from a frustrated competitor seeking to avoid real competition. It’s disappointing behavior from a company once known for competing on the merits of its products and innovation. ” In its post, DoorDash added that it will “vigorously” defend itself, and positioned the company as one that “competes fiercely yet fairly to deliver exceptional value to merchants. ” A hearing has been set for July 11 in California Superior Court in San Francisco County. Uberfiled its lawsuit against DoorDashin February. The ride-hailing giant alleged DoorDash, which holds the largest share of the food delivery market in the U. S. , threatens restaurants with multimillion-dollar penalties or the removal or demotion of the businesses’ position on the DoorDash app. Uber responded to the DoorDash request in a statement sent to TechCrunch. “It seems like the team at DoorDash is having a hard time understanding the content of our Complaint,” reads the emailed statement from Uber. “When restaurants are forced to choose between unfair terms or retaliation, that’s not competition — it’s coercion. Uber will continue to stand up for merchants and for a level playing field. We look forward to presenting the facts in court. ” Uber requested a jury trial in its original complaint. The company has not specified the amount of damages it is seeking. Separately, DeliverooconfirmedFriday that DoorDash offered to buy the European food delivery company for $3. 6 billion
| 2025-04-25T23:25:31 |
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/25/doordash-seeks-dismissal-of-uber-lawsuit/
| 294 | 0.9 |
d553582e880b719f4e42b063e3bf6e2e
|
{"bias_density": 0.43, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
|
Backed by Gradient, Fileread uses large language models to make legal discovery more efficient
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Legal discovery is one of the most time-consuming parts of litigation and typically involves team of specialists combing through towers of documents. Fileread, a startup that uses large language learning models (LLMs) to create tools for faster and more efficient discovery, announced today it has raised $6 million in seed funding. The round was led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused fund, with participation from Soma Capital. Fileread’s tools are meant to increase the chances of crucial information being found in the discovery process, at a faster speed. Co-founder Chan Koh told TechCrunch that while he was studying engineering at Caltech, his parents lost his childhood home during the housing crisis of 2008 and did not understand the law well enough to find relief. “Witnessing my parents grapple with the shock of losing something they’d worked so hard to attain was incredibly painful,” he said. “After graduating, I was motivated to build something that could have aided my parents and others in similar situations. ” Fileread was founded in 2020 shortly after its team, led by Koh and co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Hu, began collaborating with the Deliberate Democracy Lab of Stanford University to analyze their deliberations. Freya Zhou joined then as COO and co-founder, and Fileread built its first LLM platform. This made them realize the power LLMs have in finding the right passages from enormous amounts of text and that legal discovery had similar problems to deliberations, but at much larger scale. For example, Fileread is currently being used on a case with more than a million documents, with only a team of 40 to 50 specialist reviewers. Fileread can help them save them by answering time-consuming queries. Users can ask Fileread anything related to the content of the documents uploaded to its platform. For example, if they ask “who was involved in the transactions,” Fileread returns a list of all possible answers highlighted in the original document. Legal teams can safeguard against wrong answers because Fileread provides citations to each answer from its LLMs, which direct users to the original sources of truth that generated the LLM response in the first place. Some other startups in the legal space include Casetext and Harvey. Koh said Fileread differentiates from Casetext because Casetext’s primary focus is on case research instead of discovery. Meanwhile, Harvey is focused on serving the broader legal services market. Fileread’s new funding will be used on hiring, scaling its product and finding new ways to use LLMs for legal applications. Topics Senior Reporter Catherine Shu covered startups in Asia and breaking news for TechCrunch. Her reporting has also appeared in the New York Times, the Taipei Times, Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Disclosures: None 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?
| 2023-07-11T13:00:07 |
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/11/fileread/
| 540 | 1 |
b0d7b9c2bf8f2842671be2209847a9f5
|
{"bias_density": 0.46, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 1, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 3, "concerns": []}
|
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