Scores of accelerator programs run every year with the aim of identifying and cultivating founders in the earliest stages of building a company. Only a fraction seek out founders that are explicitly aligned with some set of values — let alone classically conservative values like...
As the planet warms due to human-caused climate change, damage from wildfires has increased with it. The amount of forest area burned by wildfires increased 320% from 1996 to 2021, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System. While building tech to slow the progression...
Banking-as-a-service startup (BaaS) Synctera has conducted a restructuring that has resulted in a staff reduction, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. While Synctera did not share how many employees were impacted, a report in Fintech Business Weekly pegs the number to be about 17 people, or...
Apple SVP Greg “Joz” Joswiak just confirmed via the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that the company’s annual World Wide Developer Conference is set for June 10-14. In what is no doubt a nod to the company’s artificial intelligence ambitions, the exec is...
The European Union published draft election security guidelines Tuesday aimed at the around two dozen (larger) platforms with more than 45M+ regional monthly active users that are regulated under the Digital Services Act (DSA) and — consequently — have a legal duty to mitigate systemic...
Adobe today announced Firefly Services, a set of over 20 new generative and creative APIs, tools and services. Firefly Services makes some of the company’s AI-powered features from its Creative Cloud tools like Photoshop available to enterprise developers to speed up content creation in their...
The startup emerged from stealth with a goal of extending the range of EVs while also eliminating fossil fuels from home heating. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Artifact, the well-received AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, may not be shutting down as planned. The company announced in January the award-winning app would be winding down operations as the market opportunity wasn’t “big enough to warrant continued investment.”...
Brands want to use generative AI to personalize their marketing efforts — but they are also deathly afraid of AI going off message and ruining their brand. At its annual Summit conference in Las Vegas, Adobe today announced GenStudio, a new application that helps brands...
What do you call an AI company that is suffering from very public gyrations regarding its business health, place in the market, and leadership structure? Well, you might call it Stability AI. And no, that’s not some sort of elaborate wordplay. We’re being literal. Stability...
Web browsers have realized they are one of the best ways for users to access the present set of AI tools, so they are working on being the first-choice containers for that. SigmaOS, a Y Combinator-backed company, is now banking on users’ desire to utilize...
Not many startups can claim Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta as paying customers, but Confetti can. And the list doesn’t stop at a quintet with a collective market value of $10 trillion — the New York-based company says it works with Zoom, Netflix, Stripe,...
Dan Laufer swore off ever founding a startup again after he sold apartment rental platform RentLingo in 2021, but Laufer also couldn’t ignore the potential to solve a problem he saw unfolding as the head of product and marketing at Nextdoor. “The top use of...
Ionobell, a seed stage startup, claims its silicon material will be cheaper than the established competition. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
As the crypto space heats back up, so has funding for new startups. 0G Labs, a web3 infrastructure firm,” has raised $35 million in a pre-seed round, the team exclusively told TechCrunch. If $35 million sounds like a lot for a pre-seed round, it really...
Since the last time we spoke, Viam didn’t pivot exactly, according to founder and CEO Eliot Horowitz — it’s more of a “rebrand.” Roughly six months ago, the Manhattan-based startup made a concerted effort to broaden its focus. The no-code development platform previously focused its...
Just about everyone is trying to get a piece of the generative AI action these days. While the majority of the focus remains on the model vendors like OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere, or the bigger companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon, there are in...
The startup is attempting to solve hydrogen's supply problem by focusing not on novel materials, but on manufacturing. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Unlike other meal service providers that want you to be customers for life, Chiyo’s goal is to get you off of its program. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Time is slipping away! With only 4 days left, the clock is ticking on your chance to snag the early-bird savings for TechCrunch Early Stage 2024. Don’t miss out — secure your ticket now and save $200 before the 11:59pm PT deadline on Friday, March...
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Thoras.AI founders Nilo Rahamani and Jennifer Rahamani weren’t even a twinkle in their parents’ eyes, but their parents were forced to flee along with their older siblings. Eventually they ended up immigrating to the U.S. and settling...
Controversial crypto biometrics venture Worldcoin has been almost entirely booted out of Europe after being hit with another temporary ban — this time in Portugal. The order from the country’s data protection authority comes hard on the heels of the same type of three-month stop-processing...
Alexandre Boulanger is better know for building self-balancing exoskeletons at Wandercraft. For his next trick the Paris-based robotics entrepreneur is fronting work on a far lighter kind of wearable: An arm-worn patch for monitoring chronic kidney disease (CKD). The medtech startup — Metyos — where Boulanger...
A cybersecurity startup called Cyera is betting that the next big challenge in enterprise data protection will be AI, and it’s raising a big round of funding as demand picks up for it. The company — which builds AI-enhanced tools to create accurate pictures of...
A new report highlights the demand for startups building open source tools and technologies for the snowballing AI revolution, with the adjacent data infrastructure vertical also heating up. Runa Capital, the venture capital (VC) firm that upped sticks from Silicon Valley and moved its HQ to...
A Scottish company building one of the U.K.’s first all-electric intercity bus networks has raised $14 million (£11 million) in a Series A round of funding as it looks to expand across the entire country. Building any bus network from scratch — electric or otherwise...
Uzum, an e-commerce startup offering online shopping, fintech and food deliveries to millions of customers in Uzbekistan, has raised $114 million in funding, becoming the country’s first unicorn with a valuation of $1.16 billion. Uzbekistan is fertile ground for startups, given the fact that people...
Here’s the harsh truth behind personal care products: you’re mostly buying water and plastics. The main ingredient in a bottle of shampoo or shower gel is water, and by far. It is mixed with a bunch of active ingredients. And because it’s a “pre-mixed” product,...
Last year, Salesforce, the company best known for its cloud sales support software (and Slack), spearheaded a project called ProGen to design proteins using generative AI. A research moonshot, ProGen could — if brought to market — help uncover medical treatments more cost effectively than...
Maju Kuruvilla is no longer CEO of one-click checkout company Bolt. He is replaced by Justin Grooms, Bolt’s global head of sales, who is now interim CEO, according to Grooms’ LinkedIn profile. Kuruvilla didn’t have much to say about the change but did confirm it...