The most sophisticated AI systems today are capable of impressive feats, from directing cars through city streets to writing human-like prose. But they share a common bottleneck: hardware. Developing systems on the bleeding edge often requires a huge amount of computing power. For example, creating DeepMind’s protein structure-predicting AlphaFold took a cluster of hundreds of
A ruling by the European Union’s top court today is set to unblock a raft of litigation brought by consumer protection organizations seeking to apply the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standard against tech giants such as Facebook and Twitter over issues like whether they gather properly informed consent to process people’s data. In
Fleet, a startup offering a service that helps to track and manage enterprise devices like laptops, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by CRV with participation from angel investors including GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij. Fleet CEO Mike McNeil says that the new capital — which values the company
Raquel Urtasun founded Waabi in 2021 after spending nearly three years as Uber’s R&D head of Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Waabi’s mission is to develop an AI-first approach to speed up the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles, starting with long-haul trucks. To do so, her company raised an $83.5 million Series A with Khosla Venture’s
Oware co-founders Raza Kasmi and Adil Nasar Managing goods as they make their way through multiple warehouses and logistics providers is one of the biggest headaches that businesses in the supply chain face. After leaving his job at Careem, Adil Nasar founded a company that sources, manufacturers and distributes lights in Pakistan, and experienced those
Do you hear that? It’s the sound of every Meta executive breathing a deep sigh of relief, because unlike last quarter, Facebook’s daily active users (DAUs) are up… a little. For the second time since its rebrand from Facebook, Meta has reported its quarterly earnings. Last time, the Facebook platform reported its first decline in
ARMO, the Tel Aviv-based company behind Kubescape, the popular open source Kubernetes security platform, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global. New investor Hyperwise Ventures as well as existing investors Pitango First and Peled Ventures also participated in this round. Kubescape, which developers can access
Ben Franklin once famously said that in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. But that doesn’t make dealing with either particularly natural and easy. Tech is rushing in to fill that gap, and today a Berlin-based startup called Taxfix, which has built a popular mobile assistant to address
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. It’s April 27, 2022, and here’s a thing we didn’t see coming: May. What the hell happened to this month, this year? As the summer equinox draws closer, the weather warms up
While working as the head of treasury at Braintree, Boris de Souza once discovered a $90 million payment that went “missing” for over two weeks because of poor payments infrastructure. “It was my first week on the job, and I received an email from a client saying ‘I think you shorted us $90 million,’” he
Meta announced during its Q1 2022 earnings call that Reels, its short-form video feature and TikTok rival, now makes up more than 20% of the time that people spend on Instagram. The company also noted that video, overall, makes up 50% of the time that users spend on Facebook. Although Meta didn’t specify how much
UIPath, the RPA company that went public a year ago, was once hotter than hot in a space that was sizzling. Consider that it raised $750 million in February, 2021 at an astonishing $35 billion valuation. It went public a couple of months later to much fanfare, finishing its opening day of trading above that
Motherboard/Vice had an explosive report on Facebook’s business yesterday that’s sure to raise fresh questions over the lack of enforcement of European privacy laws against the adtech giant. The report is based on a leaked internal document written last year by privacy engineers on its Ad and Business product team. The document, which is entitled ABP
TikTok is one of the world’s fastest-growing social media platforms. Sensor Tower recently released its “Q1 2022: Store Intelligence Data Digest” report in which TikTok was the top app by worldwide downloads in Q1 2022. The app surpassed 3.5 billion all-time downloads in the first quarter of 2021, becoming just the fifth app (and the
Setting up a stack of data tools is a difficult exercise for any startup to undertake, involving picking and choosing among a wide variety of tools and approaches. Mozart Data’s founders have a background in data wrangling and have built a platform of tools that makes the decisions for you, while leaving room for flexibility
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha was out due to a family matter, so Alex
Some believe that online marketing and advertising, as we largely think of them today, are dying a slow death and is getting replaced by something else: the rise of the influencer/creator. Today, one of the companies hoping to make a killing on that shift is announcing some funding and an M&A move to cement its
It isn’t easy getting a new plane certified and flying — let alone an autonomous one, and electric at that. But Pyka has done just that, clearly impressing the powers that be enough to raise a $37 million A round and get to work on a new cargo-carrying variant of the Pelican aircraft. The company
Collectively, as we mature as a digital society, many of us are getting more aware, and more wary, of how our profiles and information exist and are used (and misused) online. A similar theme has also been playing out in the enterprise world, where organizations have also grown their security and data protection profiles to
French startup Eden AI has raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round (€1.5 million) to build a programming interface that lets you access AI engines from multiple vendors. The company unifies those APIs and offers a simple way to try them out, and mix and match. Over the past few years, small and large cloud vendors
We already suspected that the controversy surrounding the Joe Rogan podcast on Spotify was doing little to actually prompt users to leave the streaming service, based on app store data. Now, Spotify’s first-quarter earnings have confirmed it. Despite losing 1.5 million users in Russia, Spotify’s premium subscribers grew 15% year-over-year in the first quarter to
Shared micromobility company Voi is deploying e-scooters in Oslo, Norway with Drover AI’s computer vision tech that can identify whether a scooter is on the pavement, road or cycle lane in order to help prevent sidewalk riding. As the micromobility industry consolidates around a few key players and cities become more discerning about which operators
This year’s global deceleration of the venture capital market is broad, impacting most startup ecosystems, sectors and stages. If you are building a company in 2022, you should not expect to see the same frenetic interest in your project that you might have enjoyed last year. Things have changed. One element of market evolution in
Instagram is exploring a new feature that lets users pin specific posts to their profile above their photo grid, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The new feature is currently in the testing phase and is showing up for select users on the platform. Users who have access to the feature are seeing a “Pin to
Don’t call it a pivot, exactly — but it’s a fascinating journey, nonetheless. Umaro Foods, which is set to release a seaweed-based bacon replacement, entered the world as Trophic. The firm, which is now technically a subsidiary of the former, was formed to compete for the $100 million Carbon Removal XPrize. The organization managed to
This week at the 2022 NAB Show Streaming Summit, Google launched in general availability Media CDN, a platform for delivering content using the same infrastructure that powers YouTube. With a presence in over 1,300 cities across 200 countries, Google says that Media CDN is designed to — in the company’s words — “automate all facets”
Since the (relatively speaking) easing of the pandemic, pharmacies have come under increasing strain as people clamor for their drugs. This is particularly an issue in he UK where traditional mom-and-pop pharmacies have started to close and larger chains haven’t kept pace with demand. The problems are even leading to incidences of abuse by customers.
The founders of OwnID, Dor Shany and Rooly Eliezerov, previously founded Gigya, a startup that wanted to make it easier to help identify customers. They sold that startup to SAP for $350 million in 2017, but the idea of making it easy to log into websites without friction was always in the back of their
Leslie Feinzaig Contributor More posts by this contributor Three ways VC firms can construct sustainably diverse portfolios If you follow mainstream tech media, you could be forgiven for thinking that venture capital is a founders’ market today after two years of record round sizes and outcomes. There is some truth to this: VC had its
Most founders are not experienced entrepreneurs, which means they tend to repeat the same mistakes as they try to overcome universal challenges. According to Klaviyo co-founder and chief product Ed Hallen, luck was a contributing factor to his marketing automation company’s success. “But it’s also clear that if we had known more upfront, we wouldn’t