Wearables are coming in an increasing array of shapes, form factors and guises these days as health and fitness tracking proliferates. Here at 4YFN at the MWC tradeshow we spotted a new one: A stick-on patch for tracking athletes’ sweat to monitor salt loss and...
Payments infrastructure giant Stripe said today it has inked deals with investors to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a tender offer at a $65 billion valuation. Notably, the valuation represents a 30% increase compared to what Stripe was valued at last March...
With so much fresh competition in social apps right now — plus the usual set of social media platforms and messaging giants sucking up attention — it might feel like there’s precious little room to innovate in this slice of the consumer market. But the...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, focused on startup and venture capital news that matters. We pull...
A new product for startups resulted in some big business coming Coverdash’s way, including new distribution partners and customer growth. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Long ago Mobile World Congress, which we’ve been covering all week, absorbed a side event for startups, the idiosyncratically named “Four Years From Now”. The event is now well and truly inside the Borg Starship that is MWC, and every year runs a startup competition...
Developers are adopting AI-powered code generators — services like GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer, along with open access models such as Meta’s CodeLlama — at an astonishing rate. But the tools are far from ideal. Many aren’t free. Others are, but only under licenses that...
SambaNova, an AI chip startup that’s raised over $1.1 billion in VC money to date, is gunning for OpenAI — and rivals — with a new generative AI product geared toward enterprise customers. SambaNova today announced Samba-1, an AI-powered system designed for tasks like text...
OpenAI’s Sora, which can generate videos and interactive 3D environments on the fly, is a remarkable demonstration of the cutting edge in GenAI — a bonafide milestone. But curiously, one of the innovations that led to it, an AI model architecture colloquially known as the...
Black Tech Nation Ventures launched in 2021 to address the funding gap for Black founders amid a wave of venture diversity initiatives after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Three years later, amongst growing backlash against DEI and diversity-focused investments, the firm’s mission may...
Pitches are critical in the quest for funding and first customers. It’s rare, however, for innovators to get truly candid insight on their pitches before stepping in front of VCs. Here’s your chance for something different: We’re excited bring back “So You Think You Can...
Lightricks, the company that makes popular apps like Facetune and Videoleap, announced a new AI-powered filmmaking tool called LTX Studio today. The studio helps creators from the ideation phase to generate an AI-powered short clip to understand how a storyline would play out. LTX Studio,...
Any tech company moving into the auto space needs a manufacturing partner. But the Apple's EV died as it lived: alone....
A number of major AI services performed poorly in a test of their ability to address questions and concerns about voting and elections. The study found that no model can be completely trusted, but it was bad enough that some got things wrong more often...
In one of the VC world’s greatest ironies, investors have lately been clamoring to back startups that are helping other startups shut down. So whether a VC-backed startup is succeeding or shuttering, investors themselves are finding ways to make returns for their limited partners while...
At CES 2023 a startup hardware company called Displace launched the 55-inch “Display Flex,” a “wireless” $3,000 4K OLED TV that sticks to walls without a traditional mounting. The launch created a sensation at the time, and today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona I...
Biotech startup SynFlora brought an enticing pitch for a new type of skin treatment technology to 4YFN at the MWC tradeshow in Barcelona this week. The Spanish startup, whose three co-founders all have PhDs, is working to improve understanding of the skin’s microbiome and engineer...
Lizcore, a sport tracking startup out of Barcelona, caught our eye on the 4YFN show floor at MWC this week. It’s done what this climber — frankly — thought impossible: Come up with a way to digitize and upgrade the indoor climbing experience that bouldering...
Over the last decade we’ve seen data grow in increasing importance to enterprise software, and that role has grown even more pronounced more recently with the rise of large language models. At the same time, there has been a corresponding rise in regulation around the...
GitHub today announced the general availability of Copilot Enterprise, the $39/month version of its code completion tool and developer-centric chatbot for large businesses. Copilot Enterprise includes all of the features of the existing Business plan, including IP indemnity, but extends this with a number of...
Photoroom, the AI-based photo editing app out of Paris that has been growing like a weed targeting people doing business online while also attracting a lot of casual users to boot, has confirmed that it’s closed its latest funding round: $43 million at a $500...
For obvious reasons, financial teams can spend a great deal of time on corporate treasury management, accounting and bank reconciliation, so anything that speeds up that process usually garners a lot of interest. Today Embat, a Spanish fintech which does what they call “real-time treasury...
As generative AI continues to dominate the headlines, it’s hard sometimes to find actual working business use cases among the hype. Writer is a San Francisco startup that is working to create generative AI writing products with the enterprise in mind. Today, the company announced...
On the fringes of MWC, the world’s biggest mobile phone show, TechCrunch is getting a demo of a new kind of AI device. The small black box sitting in front of us on a table in a hotel lobby in Barcelona is designed to tap...
Our founder-focused summit, TechCrunch Early Stage, is back in Boston on April 25! And we are looking for some incredible volunteers to help us make this event happen. If you are interested in finding out what goes into building tech events, apply to volunteer. If...
It can cost a fortune in 2024 to find an analogue camera, buy film (and maybe special batteries) for it, and take pictures that then need to be paid to be developed. Yet the experience had a charm and a simplicity to it. For those...
Zacua, which has a regional presence in San Francisco, Madrid, Mexico and Singapore, is targeting startups addressing sustainability, productivity and urbanization. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
GenAI has its issues. But if there’s one thing it excels at, it’s surfacing answers from vast pools of data. Enter Glean, whose software connects to enterprise first- and third-party databases to field plain-English requests (e.g. “How do I invest in our company’s 401k?”) from...
Hyped AI startup Humane has announced plans for its first international market, inking a deal with South Korean carrier SK Telecom. The announcement comes shortly after the San Francisco-based company revealed it was pushing back the shipping date of its Ai Pin device from March to...
Yesterday, Mistral AI, a Paris-based AI startup working on foundational models, announced a new large language model that could rival OpenAI’s GPT-4, a chat assistant and a distribution partnership with Microsoft yesterday. But Microsoft and Mistral AI buried the news — or at least an important...