Month: May 2024

Netflix announced during its Upfronts presentation on Wednesday that it’s launching its own advertising technology platform only a year and a half after entering the ads business. This move pits it against other industry heavyweights with ad servers, like Google, Amazon and Comcast.  The announcement signifies a significant shake-up in the streaming giant’s advertising approach.
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Go Digit, an Indian insurance startup, has raised $141 million from dozens of investors as part of an initial public offering that starts on Wednesday. Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Bay Pond, Mirae Asset Management, Steadview Capital, and HSBC, as well as Indian mutual funds operated by SBI, ICICI, Axis, Tata
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Looking Glass makes trippy-looking mixed-reality screens that make things look 3D without the need of special glasses. Today, it launches a pair of new displays, including a 16-inch mode that runs $4,000. There’s also a 32-inch display, with a ‘if you have to ask how much it costs you can’t afford it’ price tag. The
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Google’s upgrading its image generation tech to keep apace with rivals.  At the company’s I/O developer conference in Mountain View on Tuesday, Google announced Imagen 3, the latest in the tech giant’s Imagen generative AI model family. Demis Hassabis, head of DeepMind, Google’s AI research division, said that Imagen 3 more accurately understands the text
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Sona, a workforce management platform for frontline employees, has raised $27.5 million in a Series A round of funding. More than two-thirds of the U.S. workforce are reportedly in frontline jobs, which might be anything from customer service and healthcare to retail environments and hospitality. But managing this vast workforce, ensuring roles are filled and
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Maad, a B2B e-commerce startup based in Senegal, has secured $3.2 million debt-equity funding to bolster its growth in the western Africa country and to explore fresh opportunities in the wider Francophone region. The seed round was led by Ventures Platform, with participation from Seedstars International Ventures, Reflect Ventures, Oui Capital, Launch Africa, Voltron Capital
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StrictlyVC events deliver exclusive insider content from the Silicon Valley and global VC scene while creating meaningful connections over cocktails and canapés with leading investors, entrepreneurs and executives. And TechCrunch is excited to join forces with key players in the London investment community at our next StrictlyVC event. We’re pleased to have Saul Klein, co-founder
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Pepper, the e-commerce platform for food distributors, continues to edge into Sysco and US Foods territory by giving smaller, independent distributors a technology leg up.  The company developed an ordering system specifically for independent food distributors that supports catalogs of over 100,000 items and enables these companies to launch mobile apps and websites so that
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Buy-now-pay-later services have become so ubiquitous that BNPL may as well just be another way to say ‘debt.’ But in Mexico, where BNPL platform Aplazo operates, a large underbanked population makes BNPL more like an alternative to cash. The four-year-old Mexican fintech startup facilitates fractionated payments to offline and online merchants even when the buyer
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In the third episode of “Creative Dialogues,” an interview series produced by the filmmaking division of generative AI startup Runway, multimedia artist Claire Hentschker expresses a fear that AI will commoditize the artistic process to the point where art homogenizes, regressing to a sort of derivative sameness. “Are you getting this increasingly narrower average of
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Smart ring maker Oura is launching two new features focused on heart health, the company announced on Friday. The first claims to help users get an idea of their cardiovascular age, while the second feature aims to estimate their cardio capacity. Depending on a person’s results, Oura will offer strategies on how to sleep, move,
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