Ali Rathod-Papier has stepped down from her role as global head of compliance at corporate card expense management startup Brex to join venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as a partner and compliance officer, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Rathod-Papier and a16z declined to comment on the move. According to her LinkedIn profile, Rathod-Papier now “oversees a16z’s
Month: June 2024
YouTube appears to be taking a firm stance against Premium subscribers who attempt to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to access cheaper subscription prices in other countries. This week, a number of users took to Reddit to express their frustration after their Premium plans were canceled for using a VPN to purchase the subscription
The U.S. is facing an accountant shortage. Fewer first-time candidates took the CPA exam in 2022 than in 2006, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. One possible reason people aren’t as interested in the field is the large amount of drudge work involved: Accountants have to rifle through large amounts of unstructured
As the U.S. Surgeon General is calling for a warning label on social media sites, similar to those found on tobacco products, one startup is launching a set of new tools that put the power to fight app addiction into users’ own hands. Designed for iOS, Roots offers an improvement over traditional screen-time apps by
Four years after acquiring Shine, a French fintech startup that offers bank accounts to freelancers and very small companies, Société Générale has announced plans to sell Shine to Ageras. In 2020, TechCrunch reported that Société Générale spent around €100 million to acquire Shine. It wasn’t a huge acquisition but it attracted quite a bit of
Henrik Fisker once envisioned a burgeoning EV empire at the startup he named after himself, which was to be led by the Ocean SUV. But cracks started showing in that vision almost as soon as the Ocean hit the road in 2023. Fisker cut production targets multiple times, failed to meet sales goals and laid
C12 is announcing that it recently raised an €18 million funding round ($19.4 million at today’s exchange rate). Originally founded in 2020 as a spin-off from the Physics Laboratory of the École Normale Supérieure, the company has been working on a unique process to create quantum computers based on carbon nanotubes. While the concept of
Golf has exploded in popularity in recent years thanks to the pandemic and the popularity of Netflix’s Full Swing documentary series. More than 531 million rounds of golf were played in the U.S. in 2023 alone, according to the National Golf Foundation. Because of this surge in interest, golfers are finding that nabbing a tee
Pok Pok, a kids app maker focused on building play-based learning experiences for the preschool set, has made a name for itself in the iOS developer community after winning both an App Store award for cultural impact and an Apple Design Award. But now the company is ready to expand its reach by bringing its
Series A to B startups — check out the ScaleUp Startups Exhibitor Program at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024! Why Join the ScaleUp Startups Exhibitor Program? Amplify Your ReachShowcase your groundbreaking innovation on the Disrupt Expo Floor, where you’ll catch the eye of 10,000 tech leaders and investors. This is your moment to shine and forge connections
Ask any of the health-focused VCs to name one of the top AI startups and one name comes up over and over again: a company based in Pittsburgh called Abridge. And it’s a startup that launched before OpenAI was a household name and LLMs entered the common Valley vocabulary. In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practicing
When people think about the water they use, they tend to think about drinking water out of the tap or maybe their daily shower. But about 70% of the water we use goes toward growing the crops that feed us, a number that swells to as high as 90% in low-income countries. Finding water for
One red-hot category in the generative AI space is customer support, which isn’t surprising, really, when you consider the tech’s potential to cut contact center costs while increasing scale. Critics argue that generative AI-powered customer support tech could depress wages, lead to layoffs and ultimately deliver a more error-prone end-user experience. Proponents, on the other
Move over, Perplexity. There’s a new AI-powered search engine in town — and its creators think it can best the many, many other attempts out there. Called Genspark, the platform taps generative AI to write custom summaries in response to search queries. Type in a search like, “What’s the best baby formula for newborns?” and
In the nearly 20 years that James Quazi has been a climate tech founder and operator, he’s seen a lot. From solar to geothermal, energy audits to energy storage, he’s had a front row as homeowners have sought to slash their energy use. He’s also been able to observe what makes those startups successful. “You
XReal has largely flown under the radar here in the States. The Beijing firm’s Air 2 Pro AR glasses got a bit of review love late last year, but the product is seldomly mentioned among the Metas, Apples and HTCs of the world when discussing mixed reality. This week at the AWE (Augmented World Expo) conference
Brothers Tobie Morgan Hitchcock and Jaime Hitchcock spent years building cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) systems together, ranging from tools to let golf courses measure “golfer engagement” to online platforms designed to assess job candidates. While the systems they built had wildly different functions, the unifying thread running through all of them was a dependence on databases
Zal Bilimoria has been a solo general partner since 2018, and has no plans to stop. And he credits the decision to former colleague, David Lee, who started Refactor Capital with him in 2016. He said that he would not have been able to start the Burlingame-based firm without Lee, a former Google executive who
Tinybird is not so tiny anymore. The enterprise data startup TechCrunch first covered three years ago has been growing at a rapid pace and recently raised a $30 million Series B funding round. According to a source, the company is now valued at $240 million. Originally from Madrid and now also based in New York,
Loop, the car insurance company co-founded by Harlem Capital co-founder John Henry, has laid off staff as the company struggles with fundraising. Henry took to Instagram to post the email his co-founder Carey Nadeau sent to impacted staff on June 16th. Nadeu also posted the letter to LinkedIn. It stated that this was the “absolute
The race to high-quality, AI-generated videos is heating up. On Monday, Runway, a company building generative AI tools geared toward film and image content creators, unveiled Gen-3 Alpha, its latest AI model for generating video clips from text descriptions and still images. Runway says that Gen-3 delivers a “major” improvement in generation speed and fidelity over
Today’s the day, startup founders. It’s your final opportunity to join Startup Battlefield 200, the world’s preeminent startup competition, at TechCrunch Disrupt in October. It’s your last chance to launch on a global stage like 900+ other Startup Battlefield companies have, including Vurb, Trello, Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, TripIt, Redbeacon, Qwiki, Getaround and Soluto. Startup Battlefield
Food technology startup Tender Food Inc. is a four-year-old startup elbowing its way into a market that is already crowded with well-known brands. It’s doing so well that it already secured a contract with Clover Food Lab’s fast-food chain in the Boston area. The Somerville, Massachusetts-based company, formerly known as Boston Meats, develops plant-based alternative
DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, says it’s developing AI tech to generate soundtracks for videos. In a post on its official blog, DeepMind says that it sees the tech, V2A (short for “video-to-audio”), as an essential piece of the AI-generated media puzzle. While plenty of orgs including DeepMind have developed video-generating AI models, these models
Proton, the Swiss company behind a suite of privacy-focused apps such as ProtonMail, is following in the footsteps of Signal and Mozilla by transitioning to a new non-profit foundation model. The newly setup Proton Foundation will serve as the main shareholder to the existing corporate entity that is Proton AG, which will continue as a
When Manny Griffiths worked with a personal injury lawyer after his wife’s car accident, he was surprised by the lack of information and communication from their lawyer regarding their claim. The couple sometimes wouldn’t hear from their lawyer for months and found the entire process to be really opaque. Griffiths dug deeper and learned that
Oyo, the Indian budget-hotel chain startup, is finalizing a fresh fundraise of about $100 million to $125 million that slashes its valuation to $2.5 billion, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. That’s a steep decline in the Gurgaon-headquartered startup’s value, which was worth $10 billion in 2019. The startup, struggling to raise from
At first, John Pasmore was excited about ChatGPT. The serial founder had been in the artificial intelligence space since at least 2008. He recalled the days when experts declared it would take decades before the world saw anything like a ChatGPT. Fast-forward — that day has now come. But there is a catch. ChatGPT, one of
I regret to inform you that i can’t tyoe on thjdi thing yet. The Clicks keyboard case has arrived, and it’s delightful, if not entirely practical for everyday use — at least, not without weeks of practice. The new device, which adds a keyboard with physical buttons to the bottom of your iPhone, evokes a sense of nostalgia
YouTube continues its efforts to circumvent ad blockers. Earlier this week, ad blocker SponsorBlock posted that the Google-owned video service is testing out server-side ad injection with a limited number of users. Essentially, this means that both the ad is injected into the video before it arrives on your device (in contrast to client-side ad
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