Smartphones have long been the dominant device for communicating on the move, outselling their pared-down feature phone counterparts for more than a decade. However, if recent reports are to be believed, a Luddite revival is driving demand for mobile devices capable of, well, not very much. So-called dumbphones can help people with their digital detox
Month: October 2024
A woman in Ohio is being haunted by ghosts. Or maybe she’s not. There’s a dead body buried underneath her house, rolled up inside a rug. Or there’s actually no body at all, despite signals from cadaver dogs. This week’s biggest drama on TikTok tells the story of a woman from Ohio who was building
Nearly every founder has the same concern: how can they ensure their startup has enough cash to deliver on its promise. For most, that means wooing venture capitalists early and often, trading equity in the company and board seats for cash to keep the lights on. For Teague Egan, it also means courting retail investors.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, which takes place from October 28-30 at Moscone West in San Francisco, is rapidly approaching. Today we’re thrilled to announce the 200 startups selected to participate in this year’s Startup Battlefield 200 (SB 200) cohort. TechCrunch’s editorial staff read, vetted and debated over thousands of applications. Narrowing the group down to 200
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 brought us AI funding news, as well as some warnings: Some categories and stages are showing signs of overheating. Luckily, we also spotted
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
StrictlyVC is hosting its first event inside TechCrunch, and if you’re an investor keen to mingle with your peers, you won’t want to miss this opportunity. The StrictlyVC series — which brings the people and stories dominating the headlines straight to an audience of largely VCs, LPs, founders, and operators — is coming to the
The future of work is being redefined, and TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is the place to explore it. As companies look to leverage talent from around the globe, the landscape of hiring is transforming — and there’s a new wave of global HR startups that are making this change possible. Yet, the question remains: Can these
A misfire of YouTube’s systems led to the accidental banning of YouTube channels impacting numerous creators who were informed their channels were removed for “Spam & Deceptive Practices.” YouTube has now apologized for the problem and says it’s rectifying the situation, but did not comment on the cause of the bans, leading creators to wonder
The global pet food market has become fiercely competitive, with an estimated market share of $103.3 billion in 2023 and still growing. This growth has led many companies to target pet owners who are willing to invest in quality food to enhance their pets’ well-being and longevity. In a move to distinguish itself in the
The tech world took a major double take this year when a security startup called Wiz founded out of Israel just four years earlier became the subject of a record-breaking, $23 billion acquisition attempt by Google — an offer the startup boldly proceeded … to refuse. Really? Yes, really. We will be talking to Assaf Rappaport,
One of the co-leads on OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, has left for Google. Tim Brooks, who was heading development on Sora with William Peebles, announced in a post on X that he’ll be joining Google DeepMind, Google’s AI research division, to work on video generation technologies and “world simulators.” “I had an amazing two years
In a world where tech trends often create a frenzy of investments, the temptation to follow the crowd can be overwhelming. But the business of trends is a dangerous game. When everyone is diving headfirst into the latest “next big thing,” the risk of falling off a cliff without genuine understanding grows exponentially. Join us
To some degree, every business that has a presence on the web is in the content business — whether that’s for informing customers, finding new clients, or for SEO. That means managing the production of those texts and images, updating them, and potentially optimizing them for a search engine to index and rank. Since large
YouTube on Thursday announced a series of updates for its short-form video product, YouTube Shorts. These include the ability for creators to upload videos up to three minutes in length. The company says it’s also updating the Shorts player, introducing templates, and adding a new Shorts trends page on mobile devices. Combined, the series of
AI tends to make things up. That’s unappealing to just about anyone who uses it on a regular basis, but especially to businesses, for which fallacious results could hurt the bottom line. Half of workers responding to a recent survey from Salesforce say they worry answers from their company’s generative AI-powered systems are inaccurate. While
These days, private investors have a range of options for investing in startups without having to deal with them in real life. This ecosystem more or less started with AngelList, but there are now a plethora of options — such as Carta, Allocations, Vauban and Odin — that startups can use to raise funding and
Oura on Thursday unveiled the fourth generation of its popular smart ring. The Oura Ring 4 arrives just under three years after its predecessor’s debut. Despite the gap, the new wearable largely refines — rather than reinvents — the experience. The most notable hardware change is the slimmer profile, an odd thing to say about
Poolside, the AI-powered software dev platform, has raised half a billion dollars in new capital. The cash came in the form of a Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures, which also had participation from a who’s who of big tech firms including eBay (via eBay Ventures) and Nvidia. It brings Poolside’s total raised to
Transportation and freight network giant J.B. Hunt is on the hunt for software and digital products that will fuel its business and help it adapt to the modern world — and even dominate the industry. And it’s tapping startup incubator UP.Labs to help build them. On Wednesday at the UP Summit event in Bentonville, Arkansas,
Juno, the popular app that brought YouTube videos to Apple’s Vision Pro, is shutting down, its developer announced on Tuesday. As YouTube had not launched its own app for Vision Pro, Juno filled an important hole in the app ecosystem, by allowing users watch videos in the immersive environment and interact with the player using
ChatGPT maker OpenAI has closed the largest VC round of all time. The startup today announced that it raised $6.6 billion in a funding round that values OpenAI at $157 billion post-money. Led by previous investor Thrive Capital, the new cash brings OpenAI’s total raised to $17.9 billion, per Crunchbase. Thrive invested around $1.3 billion,
Ali Rowghani, a former Y Combinator managing director and former Twitter executive, is launching a venture firm called Maxq. Maxq is targeting $250 million for its debut fund, Maxq Fund I, according to an SEC filing. The firm will focus on seed-stage investments, Axios reported on Wednesday. Rowghani’s former YC colleagues Mia Mabanta, Simon Lu,
Wearing a camera on your face will invariably evoke privacy concerns. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses have addressed the issue to a certain extent with the inclusion of features like a recording light. But any piece of popular consumer electronics will eventually be hacked, often to prove a point. I-XRAY is a project from a pair
Sometimes, you have to start from scratch to make something amazing. Sometimes, you already have most of the ingredients, but you have to do some improvising to make the thing sing. Until today, TechCrunch was in the latter camp. Top reporters who know how to get to the bottom of a story? Check. Must-read news
The offices of plant-based protein startup Heura are tucked away down a narrow street a short distance from one of Barcelona’s main tourist draws. But the team of entrepreneurs and food scientists won’t be remixing their protein cocktails in close proximity to La Sagrada Família for much longer — they’re moving to new, larger digs
Two years ago, Xiaodi Hou was ousted from his position as CEO of TuSimple, an autonomous trucking startup he co-founded that has since shut down U.S. operations and delisted from the stock exchange — and, in an odd twist, the company has pivoted to AI animation and gaming in China. Now Hou is back with
During COVID-19, Wiley Webb embarked on a year-long trip with his wife to try to figure out the most pressing issues in the food system. He talked to people at more than 70 farms and consistently heard that they wanted more buyers. Large buyers told Webb they wanted to find these farm suppliers but couldn’t
Sometimes, a pivot ends up being the smartest decision company leaders can make. See Netflix’s pivot from DVDs to streaming, or Corning’s pivot from lightbulbs to touchscreens. The list of extremely successful startup pivots goes on. And on. And on. A less-prominent (but by no means failed) pivot is Numa’s. Its co-founders killed the startup’s
Last year, Sound Ventures, the 9-year-old, Beverly Hills, California-based venture firm led by general partners Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, and Effie Epstein, announced a new $265 million AI fund that was betting big on large language model companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face. In fact, the plan was to invest in just six companies