Teachers’ Venture Growth, the late-stage venture and growth investment arm of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, is investing $80 million in Perfios, an Indian fintech that provides real-time credit underwriting solutions to banks and other financial institutions. The new investment values Perfios at a valuation of...
Tesla and General Motors may be struggling with self-driving tech, but the opposite is true in Asia. WIRED tested China's top three autopilot systems to see just how far ahead they are....
Kolet is a new French startup created by four experienced co-founders in the French tech ecosystem that wants to make it easier to stay connected when you travel. The company has crafted an interesting distribution strategy for travel eSIM cards and simplified the experience as...
A whiff of anti-AI sentiment got big applause at the SXSW conference in Austin this afternoon. Award-winning writers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as “DANIELS,” originally premiered their film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” at SXSW in 2022. The movie later...
This week, Glacier co-founder Rebecca Hu chats with Found about wish-cycling and robots. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
When we examined venture investment amounts in enterprise SaaS startups, we were surprised at the top categories. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
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. According to a report from VC firm OpenView, ~60% of SaaS businesses offer some form of usage-based pricing today. Recently,...
The price of bitcoin has climbed to a new all-time high. But assigning the cryptocurrency a value is anything but trivial....
“We’re fundamentally a software company,” Locus CEO Rick Faulk says with a laugh. We look like a robot company, but we’re actually a software company.” It’s a familiar refrain from companies whose most public-facing products are hardware. That’s certainly the case with Locus, which produces...
In June 2023, the cofounder of “Russia's Google” landed on the EU sanctions list. Now, he's free to build again....
The long-running dearth of IPOs could be coming to a close, partly due to Reddit’s upcoming public debut. Expected to list this month, Reddit saw its valuation soar during the pandemic. Now, the company is fighting to retain as much of its final private-market price...
Deepgram has made a name for itself as one of the go-to startups for voice recognition. Today, the well-funded company announced the launch of Aura, its new real-time text-to-speech API. Aura combines highly realistic voice models with a low-latency API to allow developers to build...
The wings of time are flying fast, and so is the countdown to the biggest savings on passes to TechCrunch Disrupt — taking place October 28–30 in San Francisco. Here’s the thing: You have only four days left to save $1,000 on your pass. How...
A young startup is setting out to help enterprises cut their cloud costs by writing “more efficient” code — and it has secured $6.8 million in fresh funding from notable backers including Alphabet’s GV, Spark Capital, and Lightspeed. Polar Signals, as the company is called,...
Death, as the famous saying goes, is one of the inevitable certainties of life. But that doesn’t make coping with it any easier — not least because while loved ones are grieving, they must also handle a dizzying number of practical tasks, from organizing funerals...
Recalls are costly for — and damaging to — any company, no matter the size or market. For instance, McKinsey estimates that, for businesses manufacturing medical devices, recalls have been as high as $600 million in recent decades. The reputational impact tends to be lasting;...
By using cell-free technology, Tierra is able to cut down protein manufacturing from months to weeks and enable customers to order proteins online. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
DoorDash hopes to reduce verbally abusive and inappropriate interactions between consumers and delivery people with its new AI-powered feature that automatically detects offensive language. Dubbed “SafeChat+,” DoorDash is leveraging AI technology to review in-app conversations and determine if a customer or Dasher is being harassed....
AI might be the “it thing” of the moment. But that doesn’t mean it’s getting easier to deploy. According to 2023 S&P Global survey, about half of companies with at least one AI project in production are still at the pilot or proof-of-concept stages. The...
MIT professor Mike Stonebreaker has been at the forefront of database technology for over 50 years. The former Turing Award winner invented the Ingres and Postgres databases and helped launch a number of companies including Streambase Systems (acquired by Tibco in 2013), VoltDB, Tamr and...
Nanonets, a startup using AI to automate back-office processes, has raised $29 million in a new funding round led by Accel India as it seeks to improve the accuracy of automation processes that involve large amounts of unstructured data. Processing unstructured data from documents like...
If you want to ask Google’s AI chatbot a question about an upcoming election, you will have to do it from a country where there are no elections taking place. TechCrunch has learned that the search giant has started to restrict queries made Gemini when...
We’re getting closer to this year’s Early Stage get-together in Boston, which means that it’s time to add three more names to our ever-expanding list of whip-smart speakers coming to present, and answer your most burning questions. Today, I’m stoked to announce that Felicis’s Tobi...
Tavus, a four-year-old generative AI startup that helps companies create digital “replicas” of individuals for automated personalized video campaigns, has confirmed a fresh $18 million in funding and revealed that it’s opening its platform for third-parties to integrate its technology into their own software. Reports...
Get-rich-quick hustlers say it’s a great time to push AI-generated kids videos on YouTube. WIRED found some channels targeting children that appear to be already embracing the technology....
Autonomous vehicle software company Applied Intuition has raised $250 million in a round that values the startup at $6 billion, as it pushes to bring more artificial intelligence to the automotive, defense, construction and agriculture sectors. The eye-popping funding round is the latest example of...
France-based startup Nijta, whose flagship product Voice Harbor anonimizes voices for AI, raised €2 million in funding from various sources, including deep tech VC fund Elaia. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Tigran Gambaryan, a former crypto-focused US federal agent, and a second Binance executive, Nadeem Anjarwalla, have been held in Abuja without passports for two weeks....
Barcelona-based cleantech startup SolarMente recently added Leonardo DiCaprio to its cap table, hence becoming the actor's and activist's first investment in the country. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Even as quick commerce is slowly fading in many markets and several heavily-funded startups have folded in the past two years, India is emerging as a striking outlier where the model remains vibrant. India’s quick commerce market has witnessed a staggering 10-fold growth between 2021...