The company whose tech powered the sensational MyHeritage app that turned classic family photos into lifelike moving portraits is back with a new implementation of its technology: Transforming still photographs into ultra-realistic video, capable of saying whatever you want. D-ID’s Speaking Portraits may look like the notorious ‘deepfakes’ that have made headlines over the past
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If you’ve ever had to take out a loan, you know just how many documents are involved in the approval process. It’s a lot. The process is tedious and time-consuming, and in many more cases than you’d expect — still manual. Ocrolus is a startup that is hoping to change that with an automation platform
We started this competition with 20 impressive startups. After three days of fierce pitching in the virtual yet incredibly competitive Startup Battlefield arena, we have a winner. The startups taking part in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. Like last year, we reproduced the nail-biting excitement
Bigeye on Thursday announced a $45 million in Series B funding, just six months after securing a $17 million Series A round. Coatue led the new investment that included existing investors Sequoia Capital and Costanoa Ventures. Together, the San Francisco-based company has brought in a total of $66 million, which also includes a $4 million
Well that was fast. London grocery delivery upstart, Jiffy — which was only founded in April this year — has nabbed $28 million in Series A funding around half a year after initial £2.6M seed raise. It says it’s now raised a total of $35M. The grocery delivery startup operates a network of its own
NTWRK, a video shopping app that has helped to popularize the idea of livestreamed commerce in the U.S., announced today it has closed on $50 million in new funding led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and global luxury group Kering, owners of luxury brands Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and others. The company has
When founder Somdip Dey was a computer science masters student at the University of Manchester, his parents got in a terrible car accident. He sent all of his money back to his parents in India to help with their medical bills, but then he faced a problem familiar to too many: If he wasn’t going
Fintech startups are having one hell of a week. On the heels of Boston-based software-and-payments company Toast’s strong IPO pricing, Remitly priced shares in its own debut above its proposed range yesterday evening. The Seattle-based fintech company sold 12,162,777 shares (7,000,000 primary) at $43 apiece. The company had previously targeted a $42 per-share max price
Twitter’s slate of new product announcements is not slowing down. The company today introduced a number of new initiatives aimed at better serving the conversations and community using its platform, including support for tipping with crypto, NFT authentication, and plans for other experiments designed to provide more context about a conversation to those just joining
The ocean is important to countless industries, but we still only have a rough idea of what it’s like as a whole at any given time. To foster a new generation of ocean-monitoring floats and other devices, Sofar Ocean Technologies and DARPA are publishing an open hardware standard called Bristlemouth so that researchers will have
Behavioral health is not only a business for Jake Cooper, it is also personal. The Grow Therapy co-founder and CEO has been managing ADHD since he was a child. He began working with a psychiatrist, and his parents could afford the $300 per session, but when they tried to find an in-network clinician, they came
Open banking — a new approach to payments and other financial services that disrupts traditional card-based infrastructure by linking directly into banks — is having a moment. On the heels of open banking startup TrueLayer hitting a $1 billion valuation in its latest round after seeing strong traction for its services, today another open banking
EU lawmakers are finally set to standardize charging ports for consumer electronics devices like smartphones and tablets — announcing a proposal today that, once adopted, will see the region settle on USB-C as a universal charging port for gadgets which will also include cameras, headphones, portable speakers and handheld videogames consoles. Some smaller consumer electronics
Making smartphones more accessible is always a good idea, and Google’s latest features bring quick actions and navigation to people whose expressions are their primary means of interacting with the world. Project Activate and Camera Switches let users perform tasks like speaking a custom phrase, or navigating using a switch interface, through facial gestures alone.
Alexander Chachava Contributor Alexander Chachava is a serial entrepreneur, investor and managing partner at LETA Capital, a technology investment firm. Russian-speaking and Eastern European technology entrepreneurs are acknowledged as some of the most technically skilled in the world. As a case in point, Coursera’s 2020 Global Skills Index found that Russian learners had the highest
Flieber wants to help e-commerce retailers get back to what they do best: selling. The New York-based company announced Wednesday $12 million in Series A financing to continue developing its inventory optimization platform that uses analytics and machine learning to give multi-channel brands a leg up when it comes to determining what the ideal stock
There’s a lot of value in waste; just ask metals processing company Nth Cycle, which has developed a technology to help mining and recycling companies recover every bit of critical minerals from their operations. The company calls its technology “electro-extraction,” and Nth Cycle’s founder and CEO Megan O’Connor likened it to a water filter in
Design software startup Canva has been making news of late. The company just raised $200 million at a $40 billion valuation, and co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht gave the vast majority of their equity (around $13 billion) to charity through the Canva Foundation. We sat down with Perkins at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 to talk
LG Electronics, the Korean tech giant that once was a leading player in mobile phones but is now winding down that business, is making an acquisition that points to its ambitions in another, emerging area: next-generation automotive hardware and services. Today the company announced that it will be snapping up Cybellum, an Israeli automotive cybersecurity
Cobo, a Singapore-based crypto asset management platform, raised a $40 million Series B to accelerate the development of decentralized finance as a service (DFaaS). The round was co-led by DST Global, A&T Capital and IMO Ventures. The company will use its proceeds for the development of DeFi as a service (DFaaS) infrastructure and its existing
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today we got the gang together — Natasha and Danny and Alex — to chat about the most recent IPOs in tech-land, namely debuts from Freshworks and Toast. TechCrunch has covered their pair of firms somewhat closely during their IPO run, as
The amount of plastic pouring into our oceans is set to triple by 2040, and the bulk of the un-recycled plastic in the world is generated by an enormous industry: consumer packaged goods (CPG). The world is rife with waste from such goods, but as people become more aware and look to minimize the waste
Julio Vasconcellos Contributor Julio Vasconcellos is the managing partner of Atlantico, a venture capital fund focused on Latin America. He was previously the founder of Canary and Peixe Urbano, and was Facebook’s first employee in Brazil. More posts by this contributor Latin America’s digital transformation is making up for lost time Over the past year,
Synergy Research released some seemingly paradoxical numbers from the European cloud market this week. The good news was that the firm found for the period beginning in 2017 through the second quarter of this year, the market grew fourfold, to €7.3 billion ($8.8 billion USD), while European cloud vendor revenue doubled. The bad news? Those
Pollutants pouring from smokestacks around the world may be bad news for the atmosphere, but if you catch them before they get out there, you could reduce emissions and collect some valuable materials at the same time. That’s what Carbix aims to do with its carbon-sequestering reactor, which would extract minerals from emissions while staying
Cellino, a company developing a platform to automate stem cell production, presented today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 to detail how its system, which combines A.I. technology, machine learning, hardware, software — and yes, lasers! — could eventually democratize access to cell therapies. It aims to bring down costs associated with the manufacturing of human cells,
News that Klarna is waiting for more favorable market conditions before going public felt a little odd yesterday. Today, hesitation to go public feels downright strange. New pricing information from U.S. tech unicorn Toast and Indian tech unicorn Freshworks indicate that the IPO market is more than welcoming. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Facebook today provided an update on how Apple’s privacy changes have impacted its ad business. The company had already warned investors during its second quarter earnings that it expected to feel an even more significant impact in its ad targeting business by Q3. This morning, it reiterated that point, but also noted that it had
Our world is drowning in human-generated microplastics. And while these tiny fragments of non-biodegradable plastic — floating in the sea, embedded in the soil — are hard to see with the naked eye they pose a gigantic threat to life. Inexorably, plastic pollution is finding its way into the human food chain, with unknown implications
Weather forecasting is a notoriously challenging field, but it’s an endeavor that is becoming ever more vital to the daily functioning of our planet. Climate change is intensifying the scale and devastation of natural disasters, from wildfires and typhoons to floods and cyclones. Knowing precisely when and where a disaster strikes (or, even, just getting