Month: June 2024

TechCrunch has kept readers informed regarding Fearless Fund’s courtroom battle to provide business grants to Black women. Today, we are happy to announce that Fearless Fund CEO and co-founder Arian Simone will speak at the Disrupt 2024 Builders Stage in a fireside chat discussing her organization’s fight for racial equity. Fearless Fund was sued last
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French AI startup Mistral is introducing new AI model customization options, including paid plans, to let developers — and enterprises — fine-tune its generative models for particular use cases. The first is self-service. Mistral has released a software development kit (SDK), Mistral-Finetune, for fine-tuning its models on workstations, servers and small datacenter nodes. In the
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Google’s newest startup program, announced on Wednesday, aims to bring AI technology to the public sector. The newly launched “Google for Startups AI Academy: American Infrastructure” will offer participants hands-on training from AI experts and other support for companies solving problems in areas like agriculture, energy, education, public safety, healthcare, telecommunications, transportation, urban development, and
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Sword Health, an AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup, has raised $30 million and let employees sell $100 million worth of equity to new and existing investors, including Khosla Ventures. The round brings the nine-year-old company’s valuation to $3 billion, a 50% increase from the $2 billion value it garnered in its Series D in November 2021. The
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When Stacklet’s founders, Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu, came out of Capital One in 2020 to launch their startup, most companies weren’t all that concerned with constraining cloud costs. But in the ensuing years, as they experienced economic headwinds, first from the pandemic, and then rising interest rates, it became an imperative. As such, Stacklet’s
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We just announced the breakout session winners last week. Now meet the roundtable sessions that really “rounded” out the competition for this year’s Disrupt 2024 audience choice program. With five stellar sessions securing their spot among thousands of votes from across the globe, these finalists proved they’ve got what it takes to make things happen.
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Conner Galloway and Alexander Valys have followed developments in nuclear fusion research since they were roommates at MIT some 20 years ago. For much of that time, it wasn’t the most exciting pastime: breakthroughs were few and far between, and commercial fusion remained perpetually on the horizon, always 20 years away from providing inexpensive, inexhaustible,
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Benjamin Encz’s path to entrepreneurship was long and unusual. Having previously worked as an R&D engineer at FX companies Industrial Light & Magic and DreamWorks on films like “Transformers” and “How to Train Your Dragon,” Encz left the film industry in 2012 to join VC firm Social Capital as an engineer in residence. There, he
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AI mortgage startup LoanSnap is facing an avalanche of lawsuits from creditors and has been evicted from its headquarters in Southern California, leaving employees worried about the company’s future, TechCrunch has learned. LoanSnap, founded by serial entrepreneurs Karl Jacob and Allan Carroll, has raised around $100 million in funding since its 2017 seed round, $90
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Malicious actors are abusing generative AI music tools to create homophobic, racist, and propagandic songs — and publishing guides instructing others how to do so. According to ActiveFence, a service for managing trust and safety operations on online platforms, there’s been a spike in chatter within “hate speech-related” communities since March about ways to misuse
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The StrictlyVC roadtrip continues! Coming off of sold-out events in London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, we’re heading to Washington, D.C. for a cozy-vc-packed, evening at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre on Tuesday, June 11 in partnership with Revolution. StrictlyVC events are known for delivering exclusive insights and fostering meaningful connections among top investors, entrepreneurs, and
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The global spend management sector is experiencing a tailwind of sorts. North America is arguably the biggest market in this space, but spend management companies have seen demand rise across the world, thanks to increasing internet penetration, tech advancements and businesses’ increasing focus on making sure they spend wisely. Indeed, the space is expected to
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Early attempts at making dedicated hardware to house artificial intelligence smarts have been criticized as, well, a bit rubbish. But here’s an AI gadget-in-the-making that’s all about rubbish, literally: Finnish startup Binit is applying large language models’ (LLMs) image processing capabilities to tracking household trash. AI for sorting the stuff we throw away to boost
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