Throne, which lets fans gift items to creators from their wishlist, is launching a new gifting portal for family and friends called Happy Wishlist. However, the more interesting bit of the story is that last year, the company returned the money it had raised from...
Yet another AI-powered fraud detection software provider is laying off staff. Inscribe, whose platform works to detect fraud in areas like business underwriting, tenant screening, and onboarding, has cut just under 40% of its staff, which equates to dozens of employees. The news follows that...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday episode, in which we dig through the most critical stories and themes from...
Turo, the venture-backed, peer-to-peer car rental service reported its fourth-quarter and full-year financial performance this week in an updated IPO filing. The company first filed an S-1 to go public in early 2022, later updating the document quarterly in preparation for an eventual offering. TechCrunch...
Senator Maggie Hassan wrote to Meta and other platforms asking what they're doing to protect girls after The New York Times found some parents posting suggestive images of their daughters online....
For Fund II, Artemis intends to continue leading and co-leading investments and will target around 20 new companies. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Baron Capital, an investor in Indian food delivery startup Swiggy, has increased the value of its stake in the Indian firm, implying a valuation of $12.16 billion, surpassing the $10.7 billion post-money valuation at which Swiggy secured funding in early 2022. New York-based Baron Capital...
An architect of the EU's tough new Digital Markets Acts says Apple would be a logical first candidate for investigation under the law, which aims to “break open” tech platforms....
On Tuesday, startup Anthropic released a family of generative AI models that it claims achieve best-in-class performance. Just a few days later, rival Inflection AI unveiled a model that it asserts comes close to matching in quality some of the most capable models out there, including...
Zora, a NFT-based social network platform is continuing its expansion beyond the crypto-sphere into the hot artificial intelligence market, Dee Goens, the startups’ co-founder said on Chain Reaction. Not to be confused with Sora, the text-to-video tool offered by OpenA, Zora aims to help creators,...
Lensrentals, a titan in the online rental service for photo, video, audio and lighting equipment, has announced its acquisition of BorrowLenses, a key competitor in the space of photographic and video equipment rentals, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. It’s a competitive space in a commodity market,...
AI2 Incubator, spun out of the Allen Institute for AI in 2022, has secured a windfall $200 million in compute that startups going through its program can take advantage of to accelerate early development. “Our community of hundreds of AI practitioners are desperate for compute,”...
Emails released by OpenAI to refute a lawsuit from Elon Musk show how he, Sam Altman, and other cofounders were motivated by fears of Google's dominance....
Sunnyvale-based Brevian wants to make it easier for business users to build custom AI agents. Currently, the company is focused on support teams and security analysts — areas where both the use cases and training sets are well defined — but plans to expand to...
People worry that advances in AI will lead to job losses, but rarely does a company’s CEO openly admit that AI will help to reduce their headcount. Turnitin, a plagiarism detection company whose CEO Chris Caren last year warned that, in 18 months, his company...
This week, Anthropic, the AI startup backed by Google, Amazon and a who’s who of VCs and angel investors, released a family of models — Claude 3 — that it claims bests OpenAI’s GPT-4 on a range of benchmarks. There’s no reason to doubt Anthropic’s...
Anonymous social apps are in for a reckoning. Yes, again. This week, University of North Carolina (UNC) System President Peter Hans announced a plan to block the use of popular anonymous social apps on campus, including Yik Yak, Fizz, Whisper, and Sidechat. The ban would...
Thanks to an uncertain economy, cybersecurity budgets are in a tight spot. According to a 2023 survey from IANS and recruiting firm Artico Search, more than a third of chief information security officers (CISOs) kept their security spending the same — or slightly reduced —...
Jalon Hall was featured on Google’s corporate social media accounts “for making #LifeAtGoogle more inclusive!” She says the company discriminated against her on the basis of her disability and race....
Before we go any further, a question: What makes a computer an AI computer? Is it simply the ability to execute AI-powered tasks? To run LLMs locally? Is it something deeper? Is any computer that is capable of running any form of artificial intelligence/machine learning...
Build something people want. It’s a simple concept — and one that Y Combinator loves to repeat — but one that can be hard to get right when building a startup. How strongly a technology good or service resonates with potential customers is often called...
Homomorphic encryption, a complex technique that uses cryptographic algorithms to keep data secure as it travels around networks and to third parties, continues to elude mass-market scalability and thus adoption — not least because currently, the complexity that makes it so effective also makes it...
While many entrepreneurs are currently facing the harsh reality of a VC funding crunch, Qonto isn’t one of them. The Paris-based business banking startup still has hundreds of millions of cash on hand. And it is using an undisclosed portion of its cash reserve to...
On Tuesday the country’s techiest city backed a ballot proposition that tapped into concerns about crime, giving the police more freedom to use drones and other surveillance technology....
Tech giants have to comply with a new EU law that is set to change the internet. It aims to force open the biggest platforms to encourage competition and give users more choice in their digital lives....
The largest funding rounds raised by startups are becoming rarer and rarer. For upstart companies working on the future of energy, however, the market is surprisingly strong. The venture deceleration, and its late-stage glaciation, are not stopping the companies that want to reinvent energy from...
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies for more wide-ranging...
Web3-enabled fantasy sports platform Sorare laid off 22 employees based in its New York office in February. The move comes as the startup wants certain teams to be concentrated at the company’s Paris headquarters to improve communication and efficiency, a source familiar with the matter...
Kurs Orbital, a startup founded by Ukrainian space industry veterans, has closed a new tranche of funding to accelerate the commercialization of its satellite servicing technology. The two-year-old company aims to unlock a new era for human activities in space by enabling capabilities like satellite...
Showee's shower is designed for people with disabilities, both physical and intellectual. But Showee has another selling point: Water savings. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....