Shadowfax, one of the largest logistics service providers to hyper-local and on-demand delivery businesses in India, has raised $100 million in a new funding round as it clocks an yearly growth of over 35%. TPG NewQuest led Shadowfax’s Series E financing round, which includes some...
Everyone has a story in them, as someone famous once said. A startup called Inkitt believes that it can use AI to turn the strongest of these into blockbusters and to build a new “Disney” for the 21st century around that content. Now, it’s raised...
If the court backs provocative laws from Texas and Florida that limit social platforms’ ability to moderate content online, life could become radically different....
A team led by former Twitter engineers is rethinking how AI can be used to help people process news and information. Particle.news, which entered into private beta over the weekend, is a new startup offering a personalized, “multi-perspective” news reading experience that not only leverages...
The company draws heavily on drilling techniques pioneered by the oil and gas industry. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
On the heels of Microsoft’s investment and partnership with French Large Language Model startup Mistral AI, the company continues to work hard to try to dispel the image that it’s blocking competition through its deep partnership (and financial stake) in OpenAI. Today the company launched a...
Google is hopeful it will soon be able to ‘unpause’ the ability of its multimodal generative AI tool, Gemini, to depict people, per DeepMind founder, Demis Hassabis. The capability to respond to prompts for images of humans should be back online in the “next few...
Today we talked about how Google wants to bring AI to its mobile ecosystem, why investing in Europe is easier said than done, and the big earnings week ahead. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is gradually building an alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic as its latest announcement shows. The company is launching a new flagship large language model called Mistral Large. When it comes to reasoning capabilities, it is designed to rival other top-tier...
Darwin AI’s system that connects with a company’s customer relationship management tool and evaluates possible sales leads and escalates the ones, most likely to buy, to a human salesperson. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
A few months ago, OpenAI launched the GPT Store, a marketplace where people can create and list AI-powered chatbots customized to perform a number of tasks (e.g. coding, answering trivia questions and so on). The GPT Store is powerful, to be sure. But using it...
The co-founders of Israeli food tech startup Ingrediome, an alum of SOSV’s Indie Bio program, say they are inventing better tasting lab-grown protein that's up to 10 times less expensive to produce. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
When two former Meta employees dug into why the website of Iowa's Clayton County Register was spewing dubious posts about stocks, they uncovered a network of sites slinging seemingly AI-made content....
Interview Kickstart, a profitable startup helping tech professionals acquire career-advancing skills, has raised $10 million in its maiden funding from Blume Ventures, the companies said on Monday. The San Francisco-based startup, founded in 2014, assists engineers learn from employees of top tech companies or their...
Wirecard whistleblower Pav Gill has founded a startup, Confide, that aims to protect whistleblowers from retaliation—and stop them resorting to the press....
While North American VCs can see the potential value in backing European startups, it hasn't been easy for firms to launch strategies. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
As a part of a multi-part series, TechCrunch is highlighting women innovators — from academics to policymakers — in the field of AI. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Welcome to the very last issue of The Exchange! With TechCrunch+ sunsetting this month, The Exchange column and its newsletter are also coming to an end. Thank you for reading, emailing, tweeting, and hanging out with us for so many years. P.S. A special thanks...
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. Weekend team, we have something both short and sweet for you: A dig into the Reddit...
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own....
TechCrunch has launched a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Byju Raveendran, the founder of eponymous edtech group Byju’s, told employees on Saturday that he continues to remain the chief executive of the startup and that rumors of his firing have been “greatly exaggerated,” a day after a shareholder group voted to remove him at...
Well-known accelerator group Techstars announced a slew of changes to its operations this week, including the shuttering of some of its city-based programs. Criticism from former members of its decisions lit social media channels who argued that the famed startup accelerator has lost focus on the...
Earlier this week, accelerator group Techstars announced changes to its operations. But what was planned internally to be an exciting new chapter for the organization ended up being somewhat of a PR nightmare. Techstars found itself facing criticism for some of its decisions and execution...
A court filing in the U.S. Department of Justice’s case against Google over its alleged monopoly in the search market has revealed a few notable tidbits about the state of the search market competition, including the inner workings, revenue, and, in some cases, exit prices...
Reddit says it wants to reward users by letting them buy into the company’s public listing. Some say it’s too risky—others say they won’t pay a company they’ve already given hours of free labor to....
Google has apologized (or come very close to apologizing) for another embarrassing AI blunder this week, an image-generating model that injected diversity into pictures with a farcical disregard for historical context. While the underlying issue is perfectly understandable, Google blames the model for “becoming” oversensitive....
House staging is a significant part of the real estate industry, and while Realtors have traditionally staged houses physically before posting a listing, it’s an expensive and time-consuming process. A startup called Virtual Staging AI is making it possible for Realtors to virtually stage a...
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Rivian launched with a promise to revolutionize the way we think about trucks and SUVs but...
People are more likely to do something if you ask nicely. That’s a fact most of us are well aware of. But do generative AI models behave the same way? To a point. Phrasing requests in a certain way — meanly or nicely — can...