Oct 28th
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024
San Francisco, CA
The Latest
Adobe is building on Firefly, its family of generative AI models, with a feature in Photoshop that “expands images beyond their original bounds,” as the company describes it. Aptly called…
Fintech
a16z-backed Eco unveils Beam, a P2P crypto transfer service aiming to be a ‘global Venmo’
6:00 am PDT • July 27, 2023
The crypto payments space is seeing a surge of activity these days as developers strive to make decentralized finance as user-friendly as web2 experiences. Eco Inc., an a16z-backed payments startup…
Climate
Flipturn hauls in $4.5M seed funding to help trucking fleets electrify for less
6:00 am PDT • July 27, 2023
Trucking fleets are facing deadlines to electrify, but new challenges abound. Flipturn wants to help solve them.
Security
US government contractor says MOVEit hackers accessed health data of ‘at least’ 8 million individuals
5:10 am PDT • July 27, 2023
U.S. government services contracting giant Maximus has confirmed that hackers exploiting a vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer accessed the protected health information of as many as 11 million individuals. Virginia-based Maximus…
Startups
GlossGenius raises $28M to expand its bookings and payments platform for beauty businesses
5:00 am PDT • July 27, 2023
GlossGenius, a platform designed to handle bookings and payments for salons and spas, today announced that it raised $28 million in a Series C funding round led by L Catterton…
Government & Policy
Previous governments’ incompetence crippled India’s semiconductor growth, deputy IT minister says
4:50 am PDT • July 27, 2023
In an indictment of past administrations, a senior Indian minister blamed their strategic and political vision and “a big dose of incompetence” as significant contributors to the country’s underdeveloped semiconductor industry.…
Government & Policy
EU opens competition probe of Microsoft bundling Teams with Office 365
4:29 am PDT • July 27, 2023
The European Union has finally announced a formal antitrust investigation of Microsoft’s bundling of Teams with Office 365 and Microsoft 365. The move comes two years after rival workplace comms…
Climate
EV.energy snags $33M Series B to help utilities save billions on grid upgrades
3:35 am PDT • July 27, 2023
Too many EVs charging at once could crush the grid, something EV.energy’s demand management software seeks to avoid.
Upgrade, a provider of personal credit lines and other consumer financial products, today announced that it’s agreed to acquire Uplift, the buy now, pay later (BNPL) vendor, for $100 million…
Featured Article
Patently messy: How a $6B deal may spur more IP lawsuits
A megabucks enterprise acquisition that closed six months ago could lead to thousands of patents landing on the open market. Last August, Canadian enterprise technology giant OpenText announced plans to acquire U.K.-based IT software vendor and consultancy Micro Focus for a chunky $6 billion, a deal that closed on January 31. In our coverage at…
3:00 am PDT • July 27, 2023
Where we’ll be next
Jun 11th
StrictlyVC – Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
May 21st
StrictlyVC – London
London
Apps
Reddit is testing its own verification mark and new accessibility features
2:56 am PDT • July 27, 2023
After Twitter’s (now X) rollout of a new paid plan offering verification, other social media companies like Meta, LinkedIn and Tumblr have tried to implement their own badges. Reddit is…
Startups
Terragon’s $9M raise gives credence to the market maturity in Africa’s cloud and martech space
2:07 am PDT • July 27, 2023
As one of the well-known data and cloud martech companies in Africa, Terragon, via several products, gives its clients (primarily telecommunications and financial services companies) data on the continent’s growing…
Startups
Bloom Money raises £1M to digitize finance for ethnic communities
1:00 am PDT • July 27, 2023
The company seeks to digitize the rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) financial technique often used by ethnic communities.
Enterprise
Samsung extends cut in memory chip production, will focus on high-end AI chips instead
12:49 am PDT • July 27, 2023
Samsung Electronics continues to cut back its memory chip production, including NAND flash used in smartphones and PCs, after reporting a $3.4 billion (4.36 trillion won) operating loss in the…
July 29, 2023, 12:15 PM IST: Twitter updated its iOS app with the new logo, but the app name was still Twitter at the time of writing. According to former…
FarmWorks, a Kenyan agtech that provides farmers with access to farm inputs, and market for their produce, has raised $4.1 million in a pre-Series A round led by Acumen Resilient…
Looking to ride the tracks of increasing demand for longer distance train travel that’s being fuelled by climate-concerned consumers seeking to shrink the environmental impact of their trips, tree-planting search…
AI
AutogenAI, a generative AI tool for writing bids and pitches, secures $22.3M
5:01 pm PDT • July 26, 2023
Business is regularly won and lost on the strength of a proposal. Now, a startup out of London called AutogenAI has built a tool based on generative AI that it…
Facebook has more than 3 billion monthly active users, according to Meta’s latest quarterly report. That’s quite the staggering number. Even though Facebook has declined in popularity among younger people,…
Libro.fm, the audiobook retailer and listening app for local bookshops, launched internationally on Wednesday to give even more bookstores the ability to earn income via audiobook sales. The platform is…
