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....
Calling all early-stage founders: Are you ready? TechCrunch is on the hunt for 200 early-stage founders to feature in the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this October. Back in 2022, the Startup Battlefield expanded to include a showcase of the top 200 companies...
Apex Space just moved one step closer to its goal of upending satellite bus manufacturing, with the startup announcing on Tuesday that its first vehicle is healthy on orbit. The company launched its first satellite, the first of a class Apex is calling “Aries,” on...
A coalition of 41 state attorneys general says Meta is failing to assist Facebook and Instagram users whose accounts have been hacked—and they want the company to take “immediate action.”...
In today's episode, we talk about OpenAI bringing receipts to its tussle with Musk, Monzo's big fundraise, a big startup deal, and new climate regulations. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
In an e-mail exchange, Babylon Micro-Farms CEO Alexander Oleson tells me “we’ll have these in every school and apartment one day.” It’s a nice vision, and really the level of belief/commitment required to run a startup — particularly in a field as oft-fraught at vertical...
Making a video game successful is already hard. Doing so while complying with the growing number of child safety laws and regulations around the world is an almost insurmountable task. A new technology company called k-ID aims to make this process much easier for game...
The energy demands of bitcoin mining have sparked controversy in a state that once welcomed those companies with open arms....
A South Korean startup called QuotaLab is on a quest to follow in the footsteps of Carta, the cap table management company that’s used by a host of startups and investors in the U.S. Carta started life as “eShares” in 2012 as a cap table...
Remofirst says that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has grown 10x since it raised its $14.1 million seed round in September 2022. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Open source tools allow anyone to make AI art. They have also been used to produce nonconsensual deepfake porn....