Jolla has taken the official wraps off the first version of its personal server-based AI assistant in the making. The reborn startup is building a privacy-focused AI device — aka the Jolla Mind2, which TechCrunch exclusively revealed at MWC back in February. At a livestreamed launch event Monday, it also kicked off preorders, with the
Month: May 2024
OpenAI is removing one of the voices used by ChatGPT after users found that it sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson, the company announced on Monday. The voice, called Sky, is now being paused after OpenAI used it when demoing its new GPT-4o model last week. “We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a
Pine Labs, a merchant commerce startup, has received approval from a Singapore court to merge its local entity with its Indian unit, and transfer all its assets and properties, effectively permitting the firm to shift its operations to India. Pine Labs disclosed the court order in a recent regulatory filing seen by TechCrunch. Pine Labs
Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the top entertainment and sports talent agencies, is hoping to be at the forefront of AI protection services for celebrities in Hollywood. With many stars having their digital likeness used without permission, CAA has built a virtual media storage system for A-list talent — actors, athletes, comedians, directors, musicians,
When Jeffrey Wang posted Monday to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral. He said so many others wanted in, he could have ordered over 100 units. “I had way too many people than I could handle,” Wang,
When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying to sell their innovative tech through old-school methods like repeated cold emails and calls. Khanna, a former product marketer, and Hughes, a former sales manager,
A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to city streets, these startups are taking their tech off-road. Two recent entrants — Seattle-based Overland AI and New Brunswick-based Potential — are poised to get
IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims that could pay off in a big way. Biotech has been creeping out in recent years to touch adjacent industries, as companies find how much
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. We’ve been drowning in AI news this week. Google’s I/O set the pace: At its keynote, the word “AI” came up on average once per minute
A few years ago, you couldn’t go to a fintech meetup without ending up in a conversation about embedded finance. In 2020, we even wrote that embedded finance might represent fintech’s future. The distribution strategy lets fintech companies integrate their services into other products and services, which in turn gives users access to new features
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also take your brand center stage with your own event during the most anticipated tech gathering of the year? Yes, you read that right — you
Carbon credits (and the trading thereof) is big business, but it can be needlessly complicated to get those resolved. Goodcarbon just raised a €5.25 million (around $5.5 million) round to put a dent in that market. Let’s take a look at the deck the company used to bring home that sack of cash. We’re looking
YouTube TV has announced that its ‘multiview’ feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube TV rolled out the feature to iPhones and iPads. The feature, which first launched in March 2023, is aimed at sports viewers who want to
More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over $12 million. The startup has built infrastructure and a unified API that enables companies to access raw data from virtual meeting platforms like Google Meet,
Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate. His family was involved in all types of real estate projects, from ground-up construction to managing residential, commercial and retail properties. But unlike his parents, Mor also had a passion for technology. His interest in tech was reinforced
Bolt founder Ryan Breslow has proposed a settlement with investor Activant Capital this week, which could put an end to a lawsuit brought by Activant. The investor accused Breslow of adding $30 million to Bolt’s balance sheet in the form of personal debt and removing board members when they urged Breslow to repay it. Activant
The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after the United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday. The trustee is asking to convert the company’s debt reorganization Chapter 11 bankruptcy Synapse into a liquidation Chapter 7, according to court documents. The trustee wrote that the need
Spencer Gore has a battery startup. But he doesn’t want his batteries to end up in electric vehicles, at least not yet. “There are a lot of interesting downmarket segments of automotive that are underserved today that are faster to get into than, say, the traction battery in EVs,” he told TechCrunch. Take the traditional
Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission. The letter, which was obtained by TechCrunch, says Sony Music has “reason to believe” that the recipients of the letter have “may already have made
There’s apparently a lot of demand for an on-demand handyperson. Khosla Ventures and Pear VC have just tripled down on their investment in Honey Homes, which offers up a dedicated handyman to take care of all the random tasks on a homeowner’s to-do list. The company raised $9 million last June in a Series A
TechCrunch Disrupt has always been the ultimate convergence point for all things startup and tech. In the bustling world of innovation, it serves as the “big top” tent, where entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts, and industry leaders gather to witness the unveiling of groundbreaking technologies, engage in thought-provoking discussions, and forge invaluable connections. As we gear up
Wind is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but wind farms come with an environmental cost as wind turbines can wreak havoc on bird populations. Meet Spoor, the startup using AI to help wind farms mitigate that risk. Spoor is a software that uses machine
As anticipated, numerous AI-related announcements were made at this year’s Google I/O 2024 conference, including the unveiling of a new feature for Google TV. Gemini, the company’s family of generative AI models, will enhance the smart TV operating system so it can generate descriptions for movies and TV shows. When a description is missing on
Chang She, previously the VP of engineering at Tubi and a Cloudera veteran, has years of experience building data tooling and infrastructure. But when She began working in the AI space, he quickly ran into problems with traditional data infrastructure — problems that prevented him from bringing AI models into production. “Machine learning engineers and
The U.S. restaurant industry is expected to pass $1 trillion in sales for the first time this year, despite wider economic pressures on consumers. Now Restaurant365, a startup building tech to manage those businesses, has raised a hot $175 million to capitalize on that growth. The funding is being led by ICONIQ Growth, with KKR
The brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 took businesses that depended on oil and gas energy by surprise. Suddenly, renewable energy became crucial to survival. But how best to buy it? That was the germination of the idea behind trawa, a Berlin-based renewable energy supplier that recently raised €10 million in a seed
Back in February, Google paused its AI-powered chatbot Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after users complained of historical inaccuracies. Told to depict “a Roman legion,” for example, Gemini would show an anachronistic group of racially diverse soldiers while rendering “Zulu warriors” as stereotypically Black. Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized, and Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of
PayHOA, a previously bootstrapped Kentucky-based startup that offers software for self-managed homeowner associations (HOAs), is an example of how real-world problems can translate into opportunity. It just raised a $27.5 million Series A round in an environment where nearly $30 million Series A rounds are no longer common. PayHOA founder and CEO Mike Bollinger has
For years, Sammy Faycurry has been hearing from his registered dietitian (RD) mom and sister about how poorly many Americans eat and their struggles with delivering nutritional counseling. Although nearly half of all adults in the country are affected by chronic conditions linked to unhealthy diets, health plans have a limited number of in-network registered
Heating and air conditioning is usually pretty boring stuff, performed by appliance-like boxes with uninspired designs, from sheet metal outdoor units to cheap plastic indoor mini-splits. Not Quilt. The heat pump startup unveiled its first products on Wednesday, and they sport the sort of sleek and intuitive designs you’d expect from veterans of Apple, Nest,