The chess world is currently consumed by a drama as lurid and compelling, in its way, as the Don’t Worry Darling fracas. Involving implications of cheating at the highest levels of play, the feud between the world champion and an upstart challenger has prompted speculation on the existential threat to chess posed by an AI
In addition to the groundbreaking news that YouTube would begin to monetize Shorts videos and revamp its Partner Program, the company today also announced a new offering for creators who leverage music to back their videos: Creator Music, now in beta testing. This new destination will introduce a large catalog of songs that creators can
Synthetic speech tech startup Murf gives a voice, literally, to content creators of all sizes. Murf, which now has a library of more than 120 human-parity AI voices across 20 languages, announced today it has raised $10 million Series A funding led by Matrix partners. Participation came from returning investors Elevation Capital and several prominent
Ivorian payments-led fintech startup Julaya has extended its pre-Series A round by $5 million. The company, which facilitates B2B payments for businesses in Francophone West Africa, mainly via mobile money channels, has raised a total of $7 million in the financing round. In 2019, West Africa reported the most live mobile money services in any
You can’t cut what you can’t measure. For many companies, carbon emissions are something of a black box. Energy goes in, products and emissions come out. The first two are simple enough to monitor and understand, but without an expert on hand, the emissions profile is harder to pin down. “If people can’t access this
Managing cap tables and equity at high-growth companies can be a complicated (and sometimes messy) business, a fact that founders and employees often discover too late. That’s given rise to a wave of companies building software to help, and today a European leader in that pack is announcing some funding to fuel its own growth.
As you can tell from the Mickey Mouse-shaped disco ball in the photo above, Season 31 of “Dancing with the Stars” (DWTS) premiered on Disney+ last night. This marked the first time the streaming service livestreamed a TV show. With instances of live TV apps crashing across the sports streaming space (looking at you DirecTV!),
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The crypto industry seemed to age several decades over the past bull run, maturing in some places while barreling ahead in ambitious new pursuits, including DeFi, NFTs and web3. And while scams continued to proliferate and hacker heists became a weekly occurrence, the space onboarded an onslaught of retail investors and fostered feverish excitement among
In the early hours on Monday, a Tesla Megapack battery caught fire at a key California power storage facility, the state’s largest utility said in a statement to TechCrunch. According to PG&E, the utility “became aware of a fire in one Tesla Megapack at its Elkhorn Battery Storage facility” at around 1:30 a.m. in Moss
Somehow, some way, the third quarter is nearly over. That means we’re gearing up for a wave of venture capital data that will start to drop in less than two weeks’ time. We’re itching to get our hands on the final numbers because the third quarter of 2022 is a pretty damn important data point.
Its 2015 acquisition of Aldebaran didn’t go as smoothly as SoftBank hoped. At the time, the French robotics startup was best known for its Nao, which had become a fairly ubiquitous presence in research facilities across the globe. The small humanoid robot formed the foundation for the rebranded SoftBank Robotics’ best-known creation, Pepper. Nao mostly
Earlier this summer, a Google exec admitted that TikTok was eating into its core Search business, particularly among younger users. But that’s not all TikTok is now being used for, a new Pew Research Center study indicates. According to the findings from a report that examined Americans’ use of social media for news consumption, 33%
“To be able to shitpost, you have to understand the subject matter really well,” Antimatter founder Jonathan Libov deadpans. “In a sense, shitposting is the highest form of consciousness.” Silly as it may sound, Libov is onto something. With a five-person team and a bit of venture funding, Antimatter is building the most memey educational
Amid the festivities at its fall 2022 GTC conference, Nvidia took the wraps off new robotics-related hardware and services aimed at companies developing and testing machines across industries like manufacturing. Isaac Sim, Nvidia’s robotics simulation platform, will soon be available in the cloud, the company said. And Nvidia’s Jetson lineup of system-on-modules is expanding with
InnovaFeed, a vertical insect farm operator that’s rearing insects for animal and plant nutrition, has raised $250 million in a series D round of funding led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. While countless companies are developing alternative and more sustainable ways for humans to get their protein fixes such as through
Meet Nilos, a startup that wants to bridge the gap between crypto wallets and traditional business bank accounts. The company provides a dashboard that displays all your transactions — whether those are fiat transactions or crypto payments. From this platform, you can initiate payments and reconcile operations across multiple accounts. The startup raised a $5.2
The Peloton Row hasn’t been a particularly well-kept secret over the last couple of years. After long-standing rumors, the connected fitness firm teased the rowing machine in a member’s video back in May. Today it’s finally back with some firm details on the latest major addition to its home fitness offerings. The Row goes up
Metafy, a marketplace for video game coaching, laid off 23% of its staff last week, primarily impacting product, design and engineering teams, founder Joshua Fabian confirmed in an e-mail to TechCrunch. The layoff impacted 12 full-time employees. A Notion page has been created for those looking for their next jobs. Metafy has raised over $30
A group of former Meta engineers is building a platform to help enterprises deploy machine learning models at the speed of big tech companies. Their startup, TrueFoundry, has raised $2.3 million in a funding round. The San Francisco, California-headquartered startup automates repetitive tasks in the machine learning pipeline to allow data scientists and engineers to
Changes are incoming to draft online safety legislation in the UK which continues to attract controversy over the impact on free speech. The draft Online Safety Bill has already been years in the making but new prime minister Liz Truss signalled earlier this month that she wants “tweaks” to ensure it does not harm freedom
Swiftly Systems entered unicorn territory after announcing today that it grabbed another round of $100 million, this time in a Series C. The new funding was led by BRV Capital Management. If you’re feeling some déjà vu, you would be right: this is the second $100 million the retail technology company has raised in the
For more than half a decade, Zopper built a platform for small and medium-sized businesses, helping merchants with invoicing and payments through its point-of-sale platform. It sold that IP to PhonePe in mid-2018, but instead of joining the fintech giant, Zopper has been working on a new venture from scratch and independent of PhonePe. That
The world is headed for a food shortage by 2050 as its population increases, so anything to make it easier for farmers to grow food will go a long way. That’s what InnerPlant founder and CEO Shely Aronov is trying to do with her startup that uses plant physiology to gather loads of data to
When it comes to fintech, consumers have commanded the most attention in the last decade, with banking, credit, investing and other legacy services getting the disruption treatment. But at the same time, there’s been a growing trend for building more for the B2B market, and today one of the newer hopefuls in that space is
After initially disabling the capability, OpenAI today announced that customers with access to DALL-E 2 can upload people’s faces to edit them using the AI-powered image-generating system. Previously, OpenAI only allowed users to work with and share photorealistic faces and banned the uploading of any photo that might depict a real person, including photos of
Xpeng, a Chinese smart electric vehicle startup, has launched its anticipated advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) that automates some driving functions in urban environments. City Navigation Guided Pilot (City NGP), an expanded version of Xpeng’s NGP, which performed tasks like assisted driving on highways based on the navigation route set by the driver, is being
The ways in which we live and get around have evolved over the past few decades. For example, sales of e-bikes are outpacing sales of electric cars in the U.S., according to recent research. And, pre-fabricated and manufactured homes are gaining in popularity as housing shortages persist globally. It appears that their popularity is no
Car companies and battery manufacturers have scrambled over the last few years to secure critical minerals supplies, a race that’s only gotten more intense as consumers snap up every EV that comes off the production line. Demand is so high that the International Energy Agency believes the critical minerals market will grow sevenfold by the
Swedish last-mile delivery companies Instabox and Budbee have have announced plans to merge in a 18 billion krona ($1.7 billion) deal. The two companies, which were both founded out of the Stockholm area in 2015, serve as the delivery and logistics partner for major brands including multinational clothing retailer H&M, offering delivery services directly to