Oct 28th
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024
San Francisco, CA
The Latest
Apps
YouTube debuts new playback controls and creator-focused features
6:00 am PDT • October 17, 2023
YouTube is rolling out a new set of features for better mobile-based playback, song search and creator-friendly tools, including a feature that will highlight the “like and subscribe” buttons when…
Space
K2 Space is building a power-rich future for space exploration based on the premise that bigger is better
6:00 am PDT • October 17, 2023
Los Angeles-based K2 Space is accelerating its path to orbit with fresh venture funding, new defense contracts and a satellite architecture that will be capable of delivering staggering power levels…
Apps
Swsh’s new app helps you maintain your friendships through polls and games
6:00 am PDT • October 17, 2023
Ever since BeReal became popular among Gen Zers, giving them a platform to be their true selves rather than scrolling through heavily edited content, there’s been a rise in social…
AI
AI-generating music app Riffusion turns viral success into $4M in funding
6:00 am PDT • October 17, 2023
Nearly a year ago, developers Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros released a hobby project called Riffusion that could generate music using not audio but images of audio. It sounds counterintuitive…
Transportation
Nirvana nabs $57M to make AI inroads into commercial trucking insurance
5:53 am PDT • October 17, 2023
Nirvana Insurance — an insurance startup taking a new approach to insurance products for commercial fleets using artificial intelligence, telematics, internet-of-things technology and 15 billion miles of trucking data to…
Venture
Hoxton Ventures shoots for the big time, luring Bryan Gartner from Khosla Ventures
5:40 am PDT • October 17, 2023
Everyone more or less agrees that 2023 is going to be effectively written off in VC-land. The feeding frenzy of the last few years has left everyone with more than…
Amazon has quietly rolled out support for passkeys as it becomes the latest tech giant to join the passwordless future. But you still might have to hold onto your Amazon…
Startups
Procurify lands fresh cash to invest in AI-powered tools for procurement
5:00 am PDT • October 17, 2023
Roughly eight years ago, a little-known startup called Procurify raised $4 million for its platform that hosts tools to take some of the pain out of enterprise procurement. The company…
AI
Reality Defender raises $15M to detect text, video and image deepfakes
5:00 am PDT • October 17, 2023
Reality Defender, one of several startups developing tools to attempt to detect deepfakes and other AI-generated content, today announced that it raised $15 million in a Series A funding round…
Fintech
Nova Credit lands $45M to grow its cross-border and alternative data credit products
5:00 am PDT • October 17, 2023
Moving from one country to another is difficult in many ways, not the least of which involves starting over financially. Nova Credit, which started out as a graduate research project…
Where we’ll be next
Jun 11th
StrictlyVC – Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
May 21st
StrictlyVC – London
London
Sometimes, following instructions too precisely can land you in hot water — if you’re a large language model, that is. That’s the conclusion reached by a new, Microsoft-affiliated scientific paper…
Featured Article
Give biotech a chance for the planet’s sake, EU lawmakers urged
European Union lawmakers are being urged to avoid too much risk aversion from holding back the potential of the homegrown biotech sector. Developments in biotech could be transformative in a range of critical sectors. Beyond huge promise in healthcare, innovative, low carbon applications in areas like agriculture and food systems and energy production could help…
3:58 am PDT • October 17, 2023
Investors have an appetite for databases, it seems. Today, ScyllaDB, a startup developing database tech for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, announced that it raised $43 million in a funding round led…
In May of this year, TechCrunch ran a piece titled “Figure’s humanoid robot takes its first steps.” The story was a firsthand account of my visit to the startup’s South…
Conditions appear to be shifting favorably for India’s Swiggy. The food delivery startup — backed by SoftBank, Prosus and Accel — saw its paper valuation slashed by more than half…
Developer community site Stack Overflow has laid off 28% of its staff, the Prosus-owned company announced Monday. In a blog post, Stack Overflow’s CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar indicated that the company…
Fintech
Ambani’s Jio Financial launches lending and insurance businesses
12:26 am PDT • October 17, 2023
Jio Financial Services, the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries-backed financial services firm, has started its lending and insurance businesses and plans to rapidly broaden its offerings as billionaire Mukesh Ambani expands…
Featured Article
Ray-Ban Meta sunglasses have ‘influencer’ written all over them
Somewhere between the Ray-Ban Meta and Meta Quest 3 sits an ideal mixed-reality headset. It’s slim, light, offers hand tracking and passthrough and livestreams video when the moment calls for it. It’s designed to be worn inconspicuously outdoors, until the time comes for content capture. The Meta Quest Ray-Ban is a fantasy at the moment…
12:01 am PDT • October 17, 2023
Snapchat has relied on people consuming content on its own app. But now the social network is allowing websites to embed public content, including Lenses, Spotlight videos, Public Stories, and…
Sam Bankman-Fried and other FTX executives spent $8 billion worth of customer funds on real estate, venture capital investments, campaign donations, endorsement deals and even a sports stadium, according to…
