Typeface, a generative AI startup focused on enterprise use cases, has acquired a pair of companies just over a year after raising $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. Typeface revealed on Monday that it’s purchased Treat, a company using AI to create personalized photo products, and Narrato, an AI-powered content creation and management platform.
Month: September 2024
Nick Frosst, the co-founder of $5.5 billion Canadian AI startup Cohere, has been a musician his whole life. He told TechCrunch that once he started singing, he never shut up. That’s still true today. In addition to his full-time job at Cohere, Frosst is also the front man of Good Kid, an indie rock band
Bolt says it has settled its long-standing lawsuit with its investor Activant Capital. One-click payments startup Bolt is settling the suit by buying out the investor’s stake “after which Activant will no longer hold any interest in Bolt,” the company said in a statement. Activant’s suit accused founder and then CEO Ryan Breslow of adding
Alex Parmley has been thinking about building his latest company, ORNG, since he was working on his last company, Phood. Launched in 2018, Phood was a payments app that let students use dining dollars to order food from third-party apps and merchants anywhere in the world. It built the first campus-integrated debit card and worked
Over the last several years, fusion power has gone from the butt of jokes — always a decade away! — to an increasingly tangible and tantalizing technology that has drawn investors off the sidelines. The technology may be challenging to master and expensive to build today, but fusion promises to harness the nuclear reaction that
Netflix has never quite cracked the talk show formula, but maybe it can borrow an existing hit from YouTube. According to Bloomberg, the streamer is in talks with BuzzFeed to create live episodes of the popular YouTube talk show “Hot Ones.” Netflix and BuzzFeed did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. The show
Last year, I had the unfortunate experience of losing all my playlists when I switched from Apple Music to Spotify. To me, playlists are important. They’re snapshots of a time in your life; maybe your summer of 2016 had a certain soundtrack to it. But, traditionally, music streaming services don’t make it easy to take
Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, will tackle one of the most pressing issues facing today’s tech world — AI regulation — only at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, taking place at Moscone West in San Francisco on October 28-30. Casado is a pioneering figure in software-defined networking and is a key player in the
Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator will expand the number of cohorts it runs each year from two to four starting in 2025, Bloomberg reported Thursday. Y Combinator president Garry Tan told the site that approximately the same number of companies will go through YC each year, despite the change. This means each cohort will
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 once again proved that the startup world isn’t homogeneous when it comes to risk-taking. Let’s have a look. Most interesting startup stories from the week
The rise of neobanks has been fascinating to witness, as a number of companies in recent years have grown from merely challenging traditional banks to being massive players in and of themselves. Dave and Varo Bank are just two examples of such neobanks. Hear Dave co-founder and CEO Jason Wilk and Varo Bank founder and
Indian logistics firm Delhivery has publicly contested the accuracy of metrics presented by competitor Ecom Express in its draft initial public offering prospectus, a rare confrontation in the lead-up to the latter’s market debut. Delhivery, which is backed by SoftBank and already publicly listed, claims that Ecom Express has inaccurately represented Delhivery’s business metrics when
Christina Cacioppo, CEO and co-founder of Vanta, will be on the SaaS Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 to reveal how Vanta is redefining security and compliance automation and driving innovation through AI. Under her leadership, Vanta has achieved a $2.45 billion valuation in just five years and has scaled rapidly to serve over 8,000 companies,
What could be more frightening than Friday the 13th? How about a realization that AI is in its awkward tween stage? At least, it was for the TC Equity pod crew, which this week included hosts Devin Coldewey and Kirsten Korosec along with TC reporters Tim de Chant and Dominic Madori Davis. AI is often
Following the moves of other tech giants, Spotify announced on Friday it’s introducing in-app parental controls in the form of “managed accounts” for listeners under the age of 13. The new feature will initially be offered as a pilot program for parents or guardians on a Family plan in select markets, including Denmark, New Zealand,
Online sports apparel retailer Fanatics has agreed to settle and drop a lawsuit that it filed against troubled one-click payments provider Bolt in March, according to court documents obtained by TechCrunch. The settlement occurred as Bolt was in the thick of a new gambit to raise a large round of financing, including a “cramdown” threat
We’re out-of-this-world excited to announce that we’ve finalized our dedicated Space Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. It joins Fintech, SaaS and AI as the other industry-focused stages — all under one big roof. To top it off, we’re thrilled to share we’ll be hosting a pitch competition this year called “The Space Challenge, powered by
Cohost, a would-be X rival launched to the public in June 2022, is shutting down, the company announced via the social network’s staff account earlier this week. The service had operated much like Twitter, offering users the ability to follow others, view posts in a feed, and like and repost content shared by others. However,
Antonio Moraes, the grandson of a late prominent Brazilian billionaire, was never interested in joining the family-owned conglomerate of construction companies and a bank. Shortly after graduating from college, he founded one of Brazil’s first impact funds, which invested primarily in companies that made healthcare more accessible and affordable. But while attending Stanford University, where
Working away on his PhD in Munich only a few years ago, Stephan Herrmann (now a doctor) couldn’t have conceived of a time when his idea for a carbon-negative power plant would attract millions in funding. But now, together with Reverion co-founder Felix Fischer, he has a $100 million backlog of orders for his invention
Vinyls are back in vogue and some people are building their CD collections back up in anticipation that they’ll also be cool again, but the fact remains that most people listen to music today using streaming services. Indeed, just two services, Spotify and Apple Music, took up about 45% of the industry’s market share as
Humanz, a marketing platform for content creators and brands, has entered the U.S. market, the company announced on Thursday. Having launched in Israel in 2017, Humanz has gained strong traction in global markets, including Europe, Latin America, South Africa, and the Middle East. Currently, Humanz works with over 300,000 content creators and has facilitated more
Is a business coach really worth the investment? Execs often seek coaches to bolster aspects of their work, like communication skills and their productivity. At least anecdotally, these skills do appear to get better with coaching — a survey from the nonprofit International Coach Federation found that 80% of execs who hired a coach saw
iFixit, everyone’s favorite gadget repair gadfly, is launching a portable soldering iron. The gadget is designed to make component repair more accessible for home users. The timing of the announcement isn’t lost on anyone, dropping the same week as Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event. While Apple has been more open to user repairs in recent years,
The coolest startup in the Bay Area isn’t making AI robots or self-driving taxis. It’s actually a baseball team. As his beloved Oakland A’s plan to leave the Bay, serial entrepreneur Paul Freedman sought out a different type of venture. What if he could take what he learned from leading edtech startups to build the
In a development that will surprise few, former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann’s climate/crypto/carbon-credit startup Flowcarbon appears to be in the process of curling up to die, Forbes reported today. Buyers of its “Goddess Nature Token,” pitched as the first step in putting carbon credits on the blockchain, have reportedly been contacted about receiving refunds over
OpenWeb, a New York startup whose tools help publishers engage users, has a unique problem. Its co-founding CEO reportedly won’t leave, even though it announced a new CEO. According to CTech, on Tuesday, OpenWeb’s chairman, Tim Harvey, sent an email to employees, saying he’s becoming CEO and thanking longtime CEO Nadav Shoval for his “incredible
Huawei on Tuesday launched the Mate XT Ultimate Design, which is a long name for a big phone. The handset ups the ante for foldables in terms of both displays and pricing. The device starts at CNY 19,999 (roughly $2,800). Paying about a grand north of your standard foldable price gets you a unique three-screen
HUSSLUP founder and CEO H Schuster notified users on Wednesday that it would be taking an “indefinite hiatus” starting Friday, according to an email seen by TechCrunch. The job search and networking app for the entertainment industry was launched to the public in January after being in an invite-only beta phase for the past three
On today’s episode of Equity, Rebecca Bellan sat down with Alok Sama, a Morgan Stanley veteran and former president and CFO of SoftBank Group International. They discussed the latest Apple tech announcements, Sama’s views on the AI hype cycle, and changes to the technology investment landscape since the dot-com era. He also provided insights from