The South Korean startup ecosystem has grown over the last decade as major tech firms and venture capital from the West has sought to make inroads in the country. No surprise there: South Korea has long been one of Asia’s strongest economies. Startups here have enjoyed good access to funding, benefiting from Big Tech companies
Month: August 2024
Elle Russell, co-founder of Cairns, Australia-based NightCafe, which offers a suite of AI-powered art-creating tools, prefers to avoid the spotlight. “I like to remain hidden behind my monitors,” she told me in a recent interview. NightCafe is similarly low profile. The company, which Russell helped her partner, Angus Russell, launch five years ago, doesn’t get
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco is just two months away, and we’re still looking for enthusiastic and driven volunteers to assist our events team. Don’t miss this opportunity to be part of something big! If you aspire to be a startup founder, marketer or event coordinator, this experience is a rare chance to see
Traditionally seen as private financial entities, family offices are key players in the supply of venture capital, using startup investments as a way to diversify their portfolios and engage with groundbreaking technologies. Catch Eti Lazarian, principal of Elle Family Office, and Bruce Lee, CEO and founder of Keebeck Wealth Management, on the Builder’s Stage at
Stock-trading startup Public has acquired the brokerage accounts of Carta’s secondaries business, TechCrunch has confirmed. Carta, best known for its cap table management software, sits on a stockpile of data. It tried to expand into the bubbling hot secondary marketplace brokerage business, but in January, a startup customer publicly accused Carta of using the startup’s
OpenAI is in talks to raise a new round of funding at an eye-popping $100 billion-plus valuation, sources told The Wall Street Journal this week. It turns out investors have already proven they are willing to value the company that high to get on OpenAI’s coveted cap table. Multiple companies that track or facilitate secondaries
A top court in Brazil ordered an immediate, country-wide suspension of the X platform on Friday after a months-long legal battle with Elon Musk’s social media company over content moderation, according to Bloomberg. The court added that anyone using VPN to access the X platform would be subject to daily fines of 50,000 reais
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week was a bit of a carryover from the one before as Bolt’s drama keeps unfolding — another story to be continued. But capital also flew
Esthita Kabra always knew she wanted to work with Airbnb. When she first came up with the idea for her company By Rotation a few years ago, a fashion-sharing platform, she looked to other gig economy businesses like Airbnb as inspiration. She launched By Rotation in 2019, transforming it from a side hustle to a
Startups aren’t giving up on the idea of AI-powered pins, with the latest device from Plaud focused on just one task: taking notes. A few months ago, companies like Humane and Rabbit launched their own gadgets powered by generative AI. It’s probably too early to fully write off any of those companies or products, but
A new service from the makers of the Mammoth app for Mastodon intends to bring the creator economy to the fediverse, also known as the open social web. Sub.club, launching on Thursday, will allow creators on Mastodon — a decentralized Twitter/X rival — to offer paid subscriptions and content by way of premium feeds. In
Agriculture in India provides livelihood support to over 42% of its population, contributing 18% to the country’s GDP, according to government data. However, the agri-input market, which provides inputs for the sector — be it seeds, pesticides, herbicides, or cultivation and harvesting tools — largely relies on traditional channels, including local offline marketplaces. The sector
Atlassian on Thursday announced that it has acquired Rewatch, an AI-powered meeting notetaker, screen recording tool and video hub. The company plans to integrate Rewatch into Loom, the asynchronous video messaging platform it acquired for $975 million last October. But maybe even more importantly, it also plans to integrate it into its recently launched Rovo
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., at Google’s Bay View campus in Mountain View, California, on Wednesday, May 1, 2024. Image Credits: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg / Getty Images Google suffered a major defeat when U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta found that the tech giant had acted illegally to maintain its monopoly in
One of the people who successfully sued the National Association of Realtors (NAR) to change real estate commissions has co-founded a new real estate startup. It all began in 2017 when Josh Sitzer and his wife listed their home for sale in Kansas City. The couple was frustrated by the fact they had to pay
Magic, an AI startup developing models to generate code and automate a range of software development tasks, says that it’s raised a large tranche of cash from investors including ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In a blog post this morning, Magic said that it closed a $320 million funding round with contributions from Schmidt, Jane Street,
It might have been a brat summer, but Apple thinks it’s “glowtime” for its iPhone 16 event. The company announced that it will host the event to unveil new devices on September 9 at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET. The event will take place at the Steve Jobs Theater on Apple’s campus. But
Spotify claims Apple may be again in violation of European regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires interoperability from big technology companies dubbed “gatekeepers.” This time, the issue isn’t about in-app purchases, links or pricing information, but rather how Apple has discontinued the technology that allows Spotify users to control the volume on their
Fluid Truck, a startup that was founded to disrupt the commercial vehicle rental industry, has ousted its sibling co-founders – CEO James Eberhard and chief legal counsel Jenifer Snyder – according to sources familiar with the matter. The shakeup, which employees have described as a hostile takeover, was led by two minority investors on the
Social networking startup and decentralized X competitor Bluesky is introducing new features designed to make its platform less toxic and conversations less combative than on its predecessor. The company on Wednesday introduced a handful of anti-abuse features, including the ability to hide replies, as X offers today, as well as a way to detach your
Meta and Spotify are exploring deeper music integration in Meta’s Instagram app. New findings indicate the companies are testing a feature that would allow users to continuously share what music they’re listening to through Instagram’s Notes. The new functionality was first spotted by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, who often finds unreleased features while they’re still
Last December, OpenAI announced it was opening applications for its second cohort of a six-week accelerator program it had kicked off in 2022. Then things grew very quiet. But OpenAI’s Converge 2 startup accelerator program did indeed take place, according to two sources familiar with the program. TechCrunch also confirmed that the Open AI Startup
ChatGPT creator OpenAI is reportedly in talks to raise a massive tranche of cash led by previous backer Thrive Capital, at a valuation of more than $100 billion. That’s substantially higher than OpenAI’s previous $86 billion valuation, and by far the highest valuation of any AI startup to date. Thrive will reportedly throw in around
Reddit’s mobile and web applications went down on Wednesday afternoon, with more than 150,000 users reporting outages on Downdetector as of 1:30 p.m. in San Francisco. When trying to access Reddit’s homepage, users were met with the message, “Server error. Try again later.” The company itself reported a “degraded status” for Reddit.com as of 1:16
After a long week of coding, you might assume San Francisco’s builders would retreat into the Bay Area’s mountains, beaches or vibrant clubbing scene. But in reality, when the week stops, the AI hackathons begin. In the last few years, San Francisco has exploded with AI hackathons. On any given Saturday or Sunday, technologists give
You’ve got the product — now how do you find customers? And once you find those customers, how do you keep them coming back for more? At TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, taking place October 28-30 in San Francisco, we’re bringing Spenser Skates, April Underwood and Tamar Yehoshua to the Builders Stage to discuss how startups can
It’s been more than a year since Tesla agreed to open its Supercharger network to electric vehicles from other automakers, like General Motors and Ford. But Tesla’s network of nearly 30,000 fast-charging plugs in the U.S. and Canada still remains unavailable to non-Tesla vehicles, according to a New York Times report. The delays come amid
Successful wearables are largely confined to a few select form factors. The wrist still rules the roost or perhaps the ears, depending on how broad your definition is. Glasses are having a moment, while the ring gains traction. The pin/necklace never made much headway, though not for lack of trying. Misfit explored the space, and
Midjourney, the AI image-generating platform that’s reportedly raking in more than $200 million in revenue without a single dime of VC investment, is officially getting into hardware. The company made the announcement in a post on X on Wednesday. Midjourney’s new hardware team will be based in San Francisco, it revealed. We’re officially getting into
San Francisco-based data infrastructure startup Cribl has raised $319 million in a Series E funding tranche led by new investor GV (Google’s corporate venture arm) with participation from GIC, CapitalG, IVP and CRV. Bringing Cribl’s total raised to $600 million, the cash injection values the company at $3.5 billion — up around 40% from Cribl’s
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 7
- Next Page »