Startups

OpenAI is on an M&A tear. Days after acquiring database tech firm Rockset, OpenAI has purchased Multi (previously Remotion), a startup developing a enterprise-focused, video-first collaboration platform. A source familiar with the matter says that the deal is technically an acquihire and that most of Multi’s team — around five people — will join OpenAI

Major investor Prosus has written off its 9.6% stake in Indian edtech firm Byju’s to zero, signaling a loss of confidence in the once-promising startup. Prosus, the largest external investor in Byju’s, disclosed the adjustment in its assessment of Byju’s worth on Monday. Prosus wrote off the startup “due to the significant decrease in value

Just a few weeks ago, 18-year-old best friends Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landschoot graduated from high school.  While most teens their age would be living it up in their last summer before college or the adult jobs that await them, Fitzgerald and Van Landschoot are hunkered down in a VC office in Boulder, Colorado.

When former YouTube product manager Kevin Xu, known as “Sir Jack A Lot” on Reddit, turned $35,000 into $8 million trading stocks between 2020 and 2022, many people thought his fortunes, and his way of investing, had peaked, just like 2021’s memestock craze had. Xu doesn’t agree, though, and he’s now building a startup for

In 2013, there were 26 reported school shootings in the U.S. That figure rose to 82 a decade later. America has a school shooting problem, this much we can agree on. The cause of — and solution to — the issue, on the other hand, is where things start to fall apart. It has become

OpenAI has acquired a company, Rocket, building tools to drive real-time search and data analytics. In a post on its official blog, OpenAI said that it would integrate Rockset‘s technology to “power [its] infrastructure across products.” Members of Rockset’s team will join OpenAI, and Rockset’s existing customers will be transitioned off of Rockset’s platform “gradually.”

Gynger, a platform that lends capital to companies for technology purchases, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by PayPal Ventures, it told TechCrunch exclusively. The financing brings the New York-based startup’s total venture capital raised to $31.7 million and included participation from Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture fund), Velvet Sea Ventures,

AI-powered language learning app Speak is on a tear. Since launching in its inaugural market of South Korea in 2019, Speak has grown to over 10 million users, CEO and co-founder Connor Zwick told TechCrunch. Its user base has doubled every year for the last five years, and Speak now has customers in more than 40

LTK (formerly LiketoKnow.it and RewardStyle), the influencer shopping app with 40 million monthly users, announced on Thursday the launch of a free direct message tool for creators to instantly share pre-set responses with followers.  The new tool, called LTK DM, is integrated into the posts section of the LTK app. When a creator shares an

The U.S. is facing an accountant shortage. Fewer first-time candidates took the CPA exam in 2022 than in 2006, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. One possible reason people aren’t as interested in the field is the large amount of drudge work involved: Accountants have to rifle through large amounts of unstructured

Henrik Fisker once envisioned a burgeoning EV empire at the startup he named after himself, which was to be led by the Ocean SUV. But cracks started showing in that vision almost as soon as the Ocean hit the road in 2023.  Fisker cut production targets multiple times, failed to meet sales goals and laid

Golf has exploded in popularity in recent years thanks to the pandemic and the popularity of Netflix’s Full Swing documentary series. More than 531 million rounds of golf were played in the U.S. in 2023 alone, according to the National Golf Foundation. Because of this surge in interest, golfers are finding that nabbing a tee

Series A to B startups — check out the ScaleUp Startups Exhibitor Program at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024! Why Join the ScaleUp Startups Exhibitor Program? Amplify Your ReachShowcase your groundbreaking innovation on the Disrupt Expo Floor, where you’ll catch the eye of 10,000 tech leaders and investors. This is your moment to shine and forge connections

One red-hot category in the generative AI space is customer support, which isn’t surprising, really, when you consider the tech’s potential to cut contact center costs while increasing scale. Critics argue that generative AI-powered customer support tech could depress wages, lead to layoffs and ultimately deliver a more error-prone end-user experience. Proponents, on the other

Brothers Tobie Morgan Hitchcock and Jaime Hitchcock spent years building cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) systems together, ranging from tools to let golf courses measure “golfer engagement” to online platforms designed to assess job candidates. While the systems they built had wildly different functions, the unifying thread running through all of them was a dependence on databases

Tinybird is not so tiny anymore. The enterprise data startup TechCrunch first covered three years ago has been growing at a rapid pace and recently raised a $30 million Series B funding round. According to a source, the company is now valued at $240 million. Originally from Madrid and now also based in New York,

Today’s the day, startup founders. It’s your final opportunity to join Startup Battlefield 200, the world’s preeminent startup competition, at TechCrunch Disrupt in October. It’s your last chance to launch on a global stage like 900+ other Startup Battlefield companies have, including Vurb, Trello, Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, TripIt, Redbeacon, Qwiki, Getaround and Soluto. Startup Battlefield

Proton, the Swiss company behind a suite of privacy-focused apps such as ProtonMail, is following in the footsteps of Signal and Mozilla by transitioning to a new non-profit foundation model. The newly setup Proton Foundation will serve as the main shareholder to the existing corporate entity that is Proton AG, which will continue as a

When Kinnect dropped a new app that’s all about preserving epic family tales and awkward holiday moments for generations to come, I knew I needed to take a closer look at its angel deck. The app is clever and can be thought of as a digital family scrapbook on steroids. This app isn’t just about

Amazon says that it’ll commit up to $230 million to startups building generative AI-powered applications. The investment, roughly $80 million of which will fund Amazon’s second annual AWS Generative AI Accelerator program, aims to position AWS as an attractive cloud infrastructure choice for startups developing generative AI models to power their products, apps and services.

The financial reporting and auditing process is not often on the list of sexy topics that technology startups want to go after. And yet, when errors are made on financial reports, like the one Lyft had earlier this year, it can have dire consequences for a company. Just ask Lyft. After years of performing reporting

The hospitality industry is back, baby. And with it comes a chance for technology startups to not only help hotels streamline their operations, but also focus on how they can improve the guest experience. “The predominant traveler today was born in an age where they are very comfortable with technology,” Harman Singh Narula, Canary Technologies

Layoffs are tough. This year alone, we’ve already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies according to layoffs.fyi. Looking for ways to grow your network can be even harder during uncertain times. To help those who’ve been impacted by a layoff within the last year (from any company, region, or industry) and are still looking

It’s not the sexiest of subject matters, but someone needs to talk about it: The CFO tech stack — software used by the chief financial officers of the world — is ripe for disruption. That’s according to Jonathan Sanders, CEO and co-founder of fledgling Danish startup Light, which exits stealth Wednesday with $13 million in

Jordan Meyer and Mathew Dryhurst founded Spawning AI to create tools that help artists exert more control over how their works are used online. Their latest project, called Source.Plus, is intended to curate “non-infringing” media for AI model training. The Source.Plus project’s first initiative is a dataset seeded with nearly 40 million public domain images

A Finnish startup called Flow Computing is making one of the wildest claims ever heard in silicon engineering: by adding its proprietary companion chip, any CPU can instantly double its performance, increasing to as much as 100x with software tweaks. If it works, it could help the industry keep up with the insatiable compute demand

The UAE is facing a good problem: Its real estate market is booming, and there is no shortage of buyers. Dubai rents in 2024 jumped 23% year-on-year back up to pre-pandemic levels, and sales are up 18%, according to Deloitte, and this upward trend is set to continue for the coming years. No doubt some

Dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S.: 65.1 million households have one, according to the American Pet Products Association. But while cats are not far off, with 46.5 million households with one, a lot of innovation in the pet category has focused exclusively on dogs. And even if the service serves both species,

BlackRock, an investor in Byju’s, estimates that its stake of Indian edtech giant, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth nothing. The write-down in its estimations, disclosed in an SEC filing, makes Byju’s one of the most spectacular startup slides in recent memory. BlackRock’s disclosure for the period ending March this year follows a

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Anna will be covering for him this week. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Most interesting startup stories from the week As the end of 0% interest rates keeps taking its toll,