An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved. Now, users on decentralized apps like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol, can easily follow people on other networks, see their posts,
Month: June 2024
Dealt, a French startup formerly known as Mon Super Voisin, raised a €6 million funding round ($6.5 million at today’s exchange rate) a few months ago. More importantly, the startup went through an important pivot. And this funding round proves that this strategy was the right one. It’s an interesting lesson for early-stage founders who
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
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
It’s fair to say the Ai Pin launch didn’t go the way Humane planned. This week, the well-funded startup is dealing with another on a long list of mounting issues. The company Wednesday issued an email requesting customers discontinue use of its egg-shaped charging case. The warning was issued “out of an abundance of caution,”
Animating a 3D character from scratch is generally both laborious and expensive, requiring the use of complex software and motion capture tools. Cartwheel wants to make basic animations as simple as describing them, generating a basic movement with AI and letting creators focus on more expressive tasks. “There hasn’t been a lot of new stuff
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
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco is the must-attend event for startup founders aiming to make their mark in the tech world. This year, founders have three exciting ways to participate, each tailored to maximize exposure, networking, and growth opportunities. Here’s how founders can join us this October: Attend with a Founder Pass Investing in
Brendan Smith didn’t intend to be in the critical minerals business. He initially thought his high-tech filters would be good at desalination. But it was hard to beat existing systems, so he and his advisor, MIT professor Jeffrey Grossman, quickly ruled it out. After a few years “where we sort of intentionally meandered,” they found
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
Lance Riedel and Nigel Daley both spent decades in search discovery, but it was while working at Pinterest, to launch Pinterest Shopping, that they began to understand how search engines can do personalized searches for online shopping. Most people expect online shopping to involve typing in a keyword then expecting a search engine, like Google,
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
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.
Since the shock of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, solar energy has been having a moment in Europe. Electricity prices have been going up while the investment required to get solar panels installed on your roof has been going down. This is due to new subsidies, better technology and several European startups that are working
Audio streaming service TuneIn is teaming up with Discord to bring free live radio to the platform. This is TuneIn’s first collaboration with a social platform and one that is likely to help it reach a larger audience. Discord has a vast user base of 200 million, while TuneIn today touts 75 million monthly active
The Raspberry Pi 5, the small-but-mighty computer that has become quite popular with tech hobbyists and industrial companies, is now also an AI computer. The company just released the AI Kit, a $70 extension kit with a neural network inference accelerator that can be used for local inferencing. For this new extension module, Raspberry Pi
Try to imagine the number of parts that go into making a rocket engine. Now imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting approvals to purchase the part you eventually do select, and tracking those parts until they arrive at your HQ. It’s exactly as complex as it sounds – but it
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,
If content is king, then the focus today is on how the king is expanding the empire: Print and traditional media first got augmented by websites, and now websites are being augmented by a fast-expanding landscape of apps, social media platforms and content created by artificial intelligence. Now, a company that’s building for that content
Monzo has announced its 2024 financial results, revealing its first full-year pre-tax profit. The company also confirmed that it’s in the early stages of expanding into the broader European market via a new base in Ireland. The news comes shortly after the U.K.-based neobank raised a couple of hefty tranches of funding, starting with $430
The Great Rollback is here. The phrase refers to Big Tech starting to slash some of the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs that were implemented shortly after the murder of George Floyd. Most recently, Zoom announced that it laid off its DEI team. Google and Meta have started to defund their DEI programs, and
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
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
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
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
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
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
Spotify has announced it’s hiking subscriptions for customers in the U.S., the second such price increase in the space of a year. The music-streaming giant reports that premium pricing will increase in July from $10.99 to $11.99, representing a rise of nearly 10%. The Duo and Family plans will go up to $16.99 and $19.99,
With fewer than 400,000 inhabitants, Iceland receives more than its fair share of tourists — and of venture capital. Both are good reasons to pay attention to what’s going on and coming out of this unique island nation. “We need more pillars to our economy,” Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir, Iceland’s Minister of Higher Education, Science and
Wesley Chan is often seen in his signature buffalo hat; however, he may be even more well-known for his ability to spot unicorns. Over the course of his career in venture capital, he’s invested in over 20 unicorns, including AngelList, Dialpad, Ring, Rocket Lawyer and Sourcegraph. Five of those went on to become decacorns: Canva,