Audible, Amazon’s audiobook business, on Monday announced that it’ll use AI trained on professional narrators’ voices to generate new audiobook recordings. A select, U.S.-based cohort of audiobook narrators will be invited to train AI on their voices starting this week, Audible said. The trained AI will be used to make recordings, and narrators will have
Month: September 2024
The SMB-focused bookkeeping, accounting and finance startup finally has raised $50 million in a Series B round of funding and secured a $150 million credit line, TechCrunch is the first to report. The financing comes just seven months after the fintech company announced it had raised $10 million in funding, and brings Miami-based finally’s total
Companies’ data architecture today looks nothing like it did 20 years ago, but monitoring and tracing tools haven’t followed suit, making it difficult for engineering teams to identify the root cause of errors and latency issues. Israeli developer Eden Federman thinks the solution is distributed tracing, a more advanced observability method, but he found adoption
It’s been an infamous year for software updates gone wrong. But what’s the worst-case scenario for a buggy update? Sonos may be trying to find the answer as its mobile app update continues to derail its best laid plans. In its most recent earnings call, the company announced that it had no choice but to
After weeks in political limbo, France now has a new prime minister, former EU’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier. But parliament remains bitterly divided, generating uncertainty for many economic sectors — including the country’s dynamic startup ecosystem, which had so far benefited from public support. La French Tech isn’t just a term referring to France’s 25,000
Elon Musk has denied a report that one of his companies, Tesla, has discussed sharing revenue with another of his companies, xAI, so that it can use the startup’s AI models. The Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday that under a proposed agreement described to investors, Tesla would use xAI models in its driver-assistance software (known
Nearly 20 years ago, Andrew Bissell was sitting in the living room of his beachfront home in the Edinburgh area. He and his wife, Susan Lang-Bissell, had just sold their medical imaging startup, and he was pondering his future. “Do we retire or do we go again?” Bissell told TechCrunch. Around that time, he was
When Apple unveiled its AI plans at WWDC in June, analysts suggested the feature could put the iPhone 16 on track for another “supercycle.” Like the addition of 5G before it, industry watchers believed that Apple Intelligence’s arrival might convince holdouts to bite the bullet and upgrade their device. We’ll have a much better picture
After a rough couple years, YouTube creators The Try Guys said they’re on-track to reach profitability, with subscriptions to their three-month-old, ad-free service 2nd Try now accounting for 20% of the company’s revenue. Of course, those numbers also mean The Try Guys remain reliant on other revenue streams, including YouTube advertising. But in an interview
The most cliche advice for startup founders is to identify a problem in your life and find a way to solve it. A founder with multiple exits under his belt, Paul Freedman, has a big problem: His beloved Oakland A’s are moving to Las Vegas by way of Sacramento. “It’s interesting how much a sports
In 2022, Carta’s business license was revoked in Illinois for failing to pay franchise tax, a tax on national corporations doing business in the state, according to state records seen by TechCrunch. In 2024, Washington state terminated cap table software Pulley’s business license, according to state filings. Carta spokesperson Amanda Taggart told TechCrunch that the
As a young immigrant in Brooklyn, Mo Shaikh often pondered over his father’s taxi earnings. His father would say he made $100, but Shaikh couldn’t understand why only $60 made it home. (The rest, he learned, went to intermediaries.) This early experience sparked his curiosity about financial systems, but also their shortcomings and the need
Warp, a young payroll startup in New York, is in the spotlight following controversial posts from an account tied to the company. On Thursday, an account posting under the name Vittorio wrote on X, “i like White people more, they do more, they are better for the roles i need to climb the kardashev scale
Bluesky keeps growing: The company announced that as of Friday morning, it had added 3 million new users, bringing its total user count to more than 9 million. In other words, the social platform’s user base has grown by around 50 percent in the week or so since a Brazilian court banned X (formerly Twitter).
In the world of modern AI, data is more than just a resource — it’s the fundamental core that aligns decision-makers, supports processes and enables innovation. As AI applications become more robust and pervasive, the pace of such advancement is only as good as the evolution of the data infrastructure behind it. We are delighted
Antonio Nuño, Fatima Alvarez, and Enrique Rodriguez have been friends since they were five years old. As teenagers, they became volunteers helping indigenous communities — first in Mexico, then in other countries — and saw that many of the women were artisans. The trio came to realize that these artists “made very beautiful things in
Some Canva customers are experiencing serious sticker shock, while the company is pointing to new AI features to justify the price hike. The company has established itself as a simpler, more affordable alternative to legacy design software, but the “more affordable” part of the equation is becoming a little less true, with some Canva Teams
BDO, the auditor for Indian edtech startup Byju’s, has resigned with immediate effect, marking the second auditor departure for the embattled startup in about a year and further intensifying concerns about its financial health and governance. In a scathing resignation letter, BDO subsidiary MSKA highlighted multiple issues with Byju’s, including significant delays in financial reporting,
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. The event will take place at the Steve Jobs Theater on Apple’s campus. But for people who won’t
It’s tempting to think the trend of EV startups merging with special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) to go public has ended, seeing how many of them are struggling or defunct. But that’s not quite true. A startup called Thunder Power Holdings went public on the Nasdaq exchange in June through a SPAC, and is now
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. You won’t find any Founder Mode discourse in this week’s newsletter, although the memes keep coming. Instead, here’s your usual dose of startup news, from oversized rounds,
Hydrogen startup C-Zero has raised $5 million of an $18 million funding round, according to an SEC filing. The company is developing a way to strip hydrogen from methane without emitting carbon dioxide. The resulting hydrogen can be used in a range of industries today, including ammonia and petrochemical production, and potentially others in the
Venture capitalist Tim Draper’s international pitch competition, “Meet the Drapers,” is partnering up with TikTok as it heads into its seventh season. Under the new tie-up, entrepreneurs will pitch their startups to the public through the short-form video app for one of the show’s upcoming episodes. The general public will then be able to vote
Europe doesn’t have many large language model (LLM) makers but one of these rare AI beasts — Germany’s Aleph Alpha — appears to be preparing to rule itself out of the running, per Bloomberg, which has an interview with CEO Jonas Andrulis on its pivot to a broader generative AI-support play. The idea with a
Vay, a startup that has put a teleoperated twist to car-sharing in Berlin and Las Vegas, is expanding into commercial and business-to-business services buoyed by recent deals with French automaker Peugeot and Belgium-based Poppy. Vay isn’t a traditional ride-hailing or car-sharing startup, nor does it operate a robotaxi service. And yet, when customers in Las
Salesforce has acquired Own Company, a New Jersey-based provider of data management and protection solutions, for $1.9 billion in cash. Own is Salesforce’s biggest deal since buying Slack in 2021. In a press release, Salesforce GM Steve Fisher said that the acquisition “underscores [Salesforce’s] commitment to providing secure, end-to-end solutions that protect our customers’ most
Launching a phone company is a remarkably difficult — some even say foolish — thing to do. OSOM Products, which rose out of the smoldering ashes of Essential in 2020, is closing shop. Android Authority was first to report the news, after gaining access to an internal announcement from CEO Jason Keats. OSOM always had
French clean tech startup Calyxia has profitability within sight. The company just raised a $35 million Series B round that will help it further ramp up industrial production of its sustainable alternatives to microparticles and microcapsules, setting it on the path to net profitability by 2026. But co-founder and CEO Jamie Walters says the B
Software documentation — the resources that explain how software works and how to use it — has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. Once mostly in the form of PDFs and static plaintext, docs today are more interactive and user-friendly than they used to be. But crafting them is still a time sink. Han
For over two decades, Jay Chandarana relied on commercial banks to meet the day-to-day, working capital needs of his family business, the sesame seed exporter Dhaval Agri. It was an arrangement that basically worked: the company grew to have a 13% share of the country’s total exports, making it the largest sesame seed exporter in