The Latest
Venture
Fika Ventures co-founder Eva Ho will step back from the firm after its current fund is deployed
23 hours ago
Eva Ho plans to step away from her position as general partner at Fika Ventures, the Los Angeles-based seed firm she co-founded in 2016. Fika told LPs of Ho’s intention…
In a post on Werner Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open-source app he built to transcribe and summarize conference calls.
AI
TechCrunch Minute: OpenAI will soon ask to use your content as training data
9:00 AM PDT • May 9, 2024
The intersection of AI and copyright-protected material is a fraught place. There you can find lawsuits, deals, acrimony, and even various flavors of the personal-political…
Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source large language models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation,…
You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware.
Dating apps and other social friend-finders are being put on notice: Dating app giant Bumble is looking to make more acquisitions.
Startups
Blackboard founder transforms Zoom add-on designed for teachers into business tool
1 day ago
When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a buddy came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organizational tool. His original company was acquired for…
Groww, an Indian investment app, has become one of the first startups from the country to shift its domicile back home.
Technology giant Dell notified customers on Thursday that it experienced a data breach involving customers’ names and physical addresses. In an email seen by TechCrunch and shared by several people…
Featured Article
Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses
The Israeli startup has raised $5.5M for its platform that uses “statistical AI” to generate synthetic data that it says is as good as the real thing.
1 day ago
Where we’ll be next
Oct 28th
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024
San Francisco, CA
Jun 11th
StrictlyVC – Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
May 21st
StrictlyVC – London
London
Hardware
Rowing startup Hydrow acquires a majority stake in Speede Fitness as their CEO steps down
1 day ago
Hydrow, the at-home rowing machine maker, announced Thursday that it has acquired a majority stake in Speede Fitness, the company behind the AI-enabled strength training machine. The rowing startup also…
Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global…
Apps
TikTok will automatically label AI-generated content created on platforms like DALL·E 3
1 day ago
TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that…
India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI (unified payments interface) payments rail by one to two years, sources…
Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025.
Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…
The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…
Security
Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist
2 days ago
As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…
Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…
Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…
