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Rad Power Bikes already has a new CEO	Rad Power Bikeshas named a newCEO, just a few days after itsprevious leader stepped down. The e-bike company has tapped Kathi Lentzsch, who has spent the last few decades helping turn around underperforming companies in both the consumer and B2B spaces. The change comes as Rad Power continues to shift away from direct-to-consumer in favor of a retail-based approach — a change in strategy that has led the company to institutemultiple rounds of layoffsover the last few years. “Rad Power Bikes is at an inflection point, shifting from a direct-to-consumer model to a more retail-focused approach, and it’s an incredible time to come on board,” Lentzsch said in a statement. “This shift creates new opportunities to reach more riders, strengthen customer relationships, and evolve the brand in meaningful ways. ” Lentzsch will be Rad Power’s third CEO in the last three years. Phil Molyneux stepped down from the role earlier this month. He was installed as CEO in 2022 when founder Mike Radenbaugh stepped aside. Radenbaugh started the company in 2007. Rad Power is not alone in its struggle to find the right business model for selling its electric bikes. Two of the most high-profile companies, Cake and VanMoof, recently went through bankruptcy restructurings in order to continue operating. And just last month, two others — Electric Bike Company and Integral Electrics —merged. Topics Sr. Reporter, Transportation Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2025-03-13T21:16:39	https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/rad-power-bikes-already-has-a-new-ceo/	298	0.9	007b46cdeb0356883b4a3f0d499f8fa7	{"bias_density": 0.25, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
Dapr graduates to become a CNCF top-level project	Dapr, the Microsoft-incubated open source runtime for helping developers build secure and resilient distributed applications, has graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) pool of incubating projects to becomea top-level projectat the same level of projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Istio, and Vitess. Tograduateto this level, a project has to be stable, with clear documentation and a pool of active maintainers, but maybe just as importantly, it needs to have traction in the market. “Dapr has a single mission: to meet the emerging needs of developers and solve the most complex problems in distributed computing,” said Yaron Schneider, who is a Dapr maintainer and Steering Committee member, as well as the CTO and co-founder of Diagrid, a startup that is commercializing Dapr. “The project has done very well in helping application developers navigate the complexities of cloud native architectures, and the engagement with the CNCF community proved to be an amazing catalyst for the project’s growth and maturity. ” When Daprlaunchedin late 2019, Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich told me that the company saw a need for a project that could take many of the developing patterns around distributed microservice-based applications and wrap them into a single runtime that would free developers from having to reinvent all of these patterns. “In an era where traffic is king, Dapr has redefined distributed application development by helping developers focus on business logic, and significantly enhancing development efficiency,” said Loong Dai, a Dapr maintainer and Steering Committee member, as well as a cloud engineer at Intel. “As a core maintainer, I’m proud to see many FaaS frameworks and products leveraging Dapr as their runtime. ” The project was first accepted into the CNCF’s incubator in late 2021. Since then, it has been supported by over 3,700 individual contributors from more than 400 organizations, the CNCF said. Today, Dapr has tens of thousands of users, the organization says, including Grafana, HDFC Bank, and Vonage. In total, Dapr’s SDK has been downloaded over 70 million times. “In today’s competitive environment, it’s more important than ever for organizations to be able to ship reliable and scalable applications quickly,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “Dapr provides a comprehensive solution for developing edge and cloud native applications, saving developers valuable time and freeing them to focus on innovating. ” Looking ahead, the Dapr community plans to include an alpha of a conversational AI API into the next release, which will then allow developers to work with LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral, among others. “The Dapr project’s goal is to continue innovating and providing common software patterns to developers building distributed applications,” the CNCF said. Topics Editor Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-11-12T17:21:38	https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/12/dapr-graduates-to-become-a-cncf-top-level-project/	510	1	8652c9fe5f756357dfd70180f6151e41	{"bias_density": 0.33, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
Wayve CEO shares his key ingredients for scaling autonomous driving tech	Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall sees promise in bringing his autonomous vehicle startup’s tech to market. That is, if Wayve sticks to its strategy of ensuring its automated driving software is cheap to run, hardware agnostic, and can be applied to advanced driver-assistance systems, robotaxis, and even robotics. The strategy, which Kendall laid out duringNvidia’s GTC conference, begins with an end-to-end data-driven learning approach. This means that what the system “sees” through a variety of sensors (like cameras) directly translates into how it drives (like deciding to brake or turn left). Moreover, it means the system doesn’t need to rely on HD maps or rules-based software, as earlier versions of AV tech has. The approach has attracted investors. Wayve, which launched in 2017 and hasraised more than $1. 3 billionover the past two years, plans to license its self-driving software to automotive and fleet partners, such asUber. The company hasn’t yet announced any automotive partnerships, but a spokesperson told TechCrunch that Wayve is in “strong discussions” with multiple OEMs to integrate its software into a range of different vehicle types. Its cheap-to-run software pitch is crucial to clinching those deals. Kendall said OEMs putting Wayve’s advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) into new production vehicles don’t need to invest anything into additional hardware because the technology can work with existing sensors, which usually consist of surround cameras and some radar. Wayve is also “silicon-agnostic,” meaning it can run its software on whatever GPU its OEM partners already have in their vehicles, according to Kendall. However, the startup’s current development fleet does use Nvidia’s Orin system-on-a-chip. “Entering into ADAS is really critical because it allows you to build a sustainable business, to build distribution at scale, and to get the data exposure to be able to train the system up to [Level] 4,” Kendall said onstage Wednesday. (A Level 4 driving system means it can navigate an environment on its own — under certain conditions — without the need for a human to intervene. ) Wayve plans to commercialize its system at an ADAS level first. So, the startup designed the AI driver to work without lidar — the light detection and ranging radar that measures distance using laser light to generate a highly accurate 3D map of the world, which most companies developing Level 4 technology consider to be an essential sensor. Wayve’s approach to autonomy is similar to Tesla’s, which isalso working on an end-to-end deep learning model to power its system and continuously improve its self-driving software. As Tesla is attempting to do, Wayve hopes to leverage a widespread rollout of ADAS to collect data that will help its system reach full autonomy. (Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” software can perform some automated driving tasks, but isn’t fully autonomous. Though the company aims to launch a robotaxi service this summer. ) One of the main differences between Wayve’s and Tesla’s approaches from a tech standpoint is that Tesla is only relying on cameras, whereas Wayve is happy to incorporate lidar to reach near-term full autonomy. “Longer term, there’s certainly opportunity when you do build the reliability and the ability to validate a level of scale to shrink that [sensor suite] down further,” Kendall said. “It depends on the product experience you want. Do you want the car to drive faster through fog? Then maybe you want other sensors [like lidar]. But if you’re willing for the AI to understand the limitations of cameras and be defensive and conservative as a result? Our AI can learn that. ” Kendall also teased GAIA-2, Wayve’s latest generative world model tailored to autonomous driving that trains its driver on vast amounts of both real-world and synthetic data across a broad range of tasks. The model processes video, text, and other actions together, which Kendall says allows Wayve’s AI driver to be more adaptive and human-like in its driving behavior. “What is really exciting to me is the human-like driving behavior that you see emerge,” Kendall said. “Of course, there’s no hand-coded behavior. We don’t tell the car how to behave. There’s no infrastructure or HD maps, but instead, the emergent behavior is data-driven and enables driving behavior that deals with very complex and diverse scenarios, including scenarios it may never have seen before during training. ” Wayve shares a similar philosophy to autonomous trucking startup Waabi, which is also pursuing an end-to-end learning system. Both companies have emphasized scaling data-drivenAI models that can generalizeacross different driving environments, and both rely ongenerative AI simulatorsto test and train their technology. Topics Senior Reporter Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch, where she covers Tesla and Elon Musk’s broader empire, autonomy, AI, electrification, gig work platforms, Big Tech regulatory scrutiny, and more. She’s one of the co-hosts of the Equity podcast and writes the TechCrunch Daily morning newsletter. Previously, she covered social media for Forbes. com, and her work has appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, i-D (Vice) and more. Rebecca has invested in Ethereum. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2025-03-21T15:18:11	https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/21/wayve-ceo-shares-his-key-ingredients-for-scaling-autonomous-driving-tech/	904	1	221700a71b7c8ae00fbf3ea123657fa7	{"bias_density": 0.4, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 1, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 1, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 4, "concerns": []}
Fitness tracker Whoop faces unhappy customers over upgrade policy	Whoop has backed down, somewhat, from the controversial upgrade plans around its Whoop 5. 0 fitness tracker. When the company firstannounced Whoop 5. 0this week, it said members who wanted the new device could either extend their subscriptions by 12 months or pay a one-time upgrade fee of $49 ($79 for the model with EKG sensors). This seemed inconsistent with Whoop’s overall value proposition, where it chargeshigher subscription prices(ranging from $199 to $359 a year) while allowing customers to upgrade their hardware for free. More specifically, it seemed tocontradict a statement on the company’s websitepromising users free hardware upgrades if they’ve been members for at least six months. After customers began complaining, the company responded witha Reddit postboth announcing a more expansive upgrade policy and claiming to clarify its overall approach. Now, anyone with more than 12 months remaining on their subscription is eligible for a free upgrade to Whoop 5. 0 (or a refund if they’ve already paid the fee). And customers with less than 12 months can extend their subscription to get the upgrade at no additional cost. While the company said it’s making these changes because it “heard your feedback,” it also suggested that its apparent stinginess was tied to its transition from a model focused on monthly or six-month subscription plans to one where it only offers 12- and 24-month subscriptions. “We also want to acknowledge that a previous blog article incorrectly stated that anyone who had been a member for just 6 months would receive a free upgrade,” the company said. “This was never our policy and should never have been posted. ” There’s been a mixed response to these changes on the Whoop subreddit, with one moderatordescribing itas a “win for the community. ” Other posters were more skeptical, with onewriting, “You don’t publish a policy by accident and keep it up for years. Removing it after backlash doesn’t erase the fact [that] it is real. ” There were also a number of complaints from users who said they had 11 months left on their subscriptions, so they just missed the free upgrade cutoff	2025-05-11T16:15:06	https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/11/fitness-tracker-whoop-faces-unhappy-customers-over-upgrade-policy/	350	0.9	8053bc4cc02249d502d035b9963406a3	{"bias_density": 0.35, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 1, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
What makes TechCrunch All Stage different from other startup events? Answers to your most pressing questions	Tech and startup events have a formula. You know it. We know it. We’ve all done it. ButTechCrunch All Stage 2025, which we’re hosting July 15 at the SoWa Power Station in Boston, is designed to break out of that rinse-and-repeat model — and focus on what early-stage startups actually need to know, right now. Plus, you can still get some limited-time pricing discounts, with Investor passes coming in at a $200 reduction, Founder passes discounted by $210, and our special $99 rate exclusively for students. Move swiftly before those prices increase! This is a laser-focused day — there’s no expo maze, no five-track decision fatigue and ensuing FOMO. We’ve built the programming explicitly for ambitious startup teams who want answers to the hard questions: You’ll get tactical insights from operators, investors, and experts across functions — with panels and workshops all designed to make your next decision better than your last. Check out our full agenda right here. We’re bringing in people who’ve raised, scaled, and repeated to give founders and operators the kind of clarity that can change a quarter. Our speakers include, but are not limited to: No panels for panel’s sake. No bloated agendas. Just real talk for the people actually building the next thing. And thanks to our sponsorship partner Fidelity, we’re making it more than theoretical. This is about action. Join us July 15 at the SoWa Power Station in Boston. This isn’t just another startup conference. It’s where execution gets elevated. Topics Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2025-06-16T14:30:00	https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/16/what-makes-techcrunch-all-stage-different-from-other-startup-events-answers-to-your-most-pressing-questions/	320	0.9	9cc6b8248401e1e944143528e7d87a7d	{"bias_density": 0.23, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
Dili wants to automate due diligence with AI	Stephanie Song, formerly on the corporate development and ventures team at Coinbase, was often frustrated by the volume of due diligence tasks she and her team had to complete on a daily basis. “Analysts burn the midnight oil working hundreds of hours doing the work that nobody wants to do,” Song told TechCrunch in an email interview. “At the same time, funds are deploying less capital and looking for ways to make their teams more efficient while reducing operating costs. ” Inspired to find a better way, Song teamed up with Brian Fernandez and Anand Chaturvedi, two ex-Coinbase colleagues, to launchDili(not to be confused by thecapital of East Timor), a platform that attempts to automate key investment due diligence and portfolio management steps for private equity and VC firms using AI. Dili, a Y Combinator graduate, has raised $3. 6 million in venture funding to date from backers, including Allianz Strategic Investments, Rebel Fund, Singularity Capital, CoreNest, Decacorn, Pioneer Fund, NVO Capital, Amino Capital, Rocketship VC, Hi2 Ventures, Gaingels and Hyper Ventures. “[AI] affects all parts of an investment fund, from analysts to partners and back-office functions,” Song said. “Investment professionals at funds are looking for a differentiated edge on decision-making, and can now use their wealth of data to combine their understanding of the deal with how it fits into the funds. Dili has a unique opportunity to emerge as a solution for funds in a harsh macro environment. ” Song’s not wrong about funds looking for an edge — or any new promising ways to mitigate investing risk, for that matter. VCsreportedlyhave $311 billion in unspent cash, and last year raised the lowest total — $67 billion — in seven years as they grew increasingly cautious about early-stage ventures. Dili isn’t the first to apply AI to the due diligence process. Gartnerpredictsthat by 2025, more than 75% of VC and early-stage investor executive reviews will be informed using AI and data analytics. Several startups and incumbents are already tapping AI to pour through financial documents and copious amounts of data to craft market comparisons and reports — including Wokelo (whose customers are private equity and VC funds, like Dili’s),Ansarada,AlphaSenseand Thomson Reuters (through its Clear Adverse Media unit). But Song insists that Dili uses “first-of-its-kind” technology. “[We can] deliver very high accuracy on specific tasks like pulling financial metrics from large unstructured documents,” she added. “We’ve built custom indexing and retrieval pipelines tuned for specific documents to provide [our AI] models with high quality context. ” Dili leverages generative AI, specifically large language models along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to streamline investor workflows. The platform first catalogs a fund’s historical financial data and investment decisions in a knowledge base and then applies the aforementioned models to automate tasks such as parsing databases of private company data, handling due diligence request lists and digging for little-known figures across the web. Dili recently added support for automated comparable analysis and industry benchmarking on a firm’s backlog of deals. Once funds upload their deal data, they can compare historical and current investment opportunities in one place. “Imagine being able to get an email with a new investment opportunity or portfolio company update and instantly having a platform produce AI-generated deal red flags, competitive analysis, industry benchmarking and a preliminary summary or memo leveraging your fund’s historical investing patterns,” Song said. The question is, can Dili’s AI — or any AI really — be trusted when it comes to managing a portfolio? AI isn’t necessarily known for sticking to facts, after all. Fast CompanytestedChatGPT’s ability to sum up articles and found that the model had a tendency to get stuff wrong, leave pieces out and outright invent details not mentioned in the articles it summarized. It’s not tough to imagine how this might become a real problem in due diligence work, where accuracy is paramount. AI can also bring prejudices into the decisioning process. In an experimentconductedby Harvard Business Review several years ago, an algorithm trained to make startup investment recommendations was found to pick white entrepreneurs rather than entrepreneurs of color and preferred investing in startups with male founders. That’s because the public data the algorithm was trained on reflected the fact that fewer women and founders from underrepresented groups tend to bedisadvantagedin the funding process — and ultimately raise less venture capital. Then there’s the fact that some firms might not be comfortable running their private, sensitive data through a third-party model. To attempt to allay all those fears, Song said that Dili is continuing to fine-tune its models — many of which are open source — to reduce instances ofhallucinationand improve overall accuracy. She also stressed that private customer data isn’t used to train Dili’s models and that Dili plans to offer a way for funds to create their own models trained on proprietary, offline fund data. Dili ran an initial pilot last year with 400 analysts and users across different types of funds and banks. But as the startup expands its team and adds new capabilities, it’s angling to expand into new applications — ultimately toward becoming an “end-to-end” solution for investor due diligence and portfolio management, Song says. “Eventually we believe this core technology we’re building can be applied to all parts of the asset allocation process,” she added	2024-02-19T14:00:15	https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/19/dili-wants-to-automate-due-diligence-with-ai/	882	1	ea10b402efe97b45a552adf259097fbe	{"bias_density": 0.19, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
The first annual VTuber Awards was a win for VR	On stream, Filian took the stage at the center of a colossal arena, lit with violet spotlights and surrounded by crowds of fans holding lightsticks. The streamer opened the show dressed in a vivid purple skirt, magenta bow tie and high white boots that matched her jacket — a ritzy version of her avatar’s usual sailor-style school uniform. “Please be patient with us. This show has a lot of tech … it’s as live as it comes,”Filiansaid during her opening remarks. “It’s not rocket science, but it could be. ” Filian, a streamer with over 766,000 Twitch followers, hosted the first annualVTuber Awardslast weekend. Like manyVTubers— a portmanteau of “virtual YouTuber” — Filian keeps her identity secret, and instead of showing her real face, streams using a digital model. Filian was physically hosting the ceremony from an enclosed green box in WePlay’s Los Angeles studio, a space typically used for esports events. The virtual reality awards show is one of the first of its kind — both for WePlay, a production company that has mainly focused on hosting and producing in-person gaming tournaments in its Los Angeles and Kyiv studios over the last decade, and for VTubing, which has grown from a niche streaming genre to abillion-dollar industryin recent years. VTubers have been broadly recognized in other shows; theStreamer Awardsincludes a category for “Best VTuber,” and at this year’s Game Awards, VTuber Ironmousemade historyby being the first animated streamer to win Content Creator of the Year. But neither award show accounts for the skills unique to VTubing, like avatar design, technological innovation and hosting virtual events. The award for best tech VTuber, for example, went to Vedal987, a streamer and programmer who developed the chatbot VTuberNeuro-sama, which uses text-to-speech and AI to play games and communicate with Twitch viewers. “In every awards show, VTubers are often a footnote or sometimes treated as a unique, strange thing, and so the idea for these awards is like, ‘Why not have a show for ourselves?’” Filian told TechCrunch in an interview in the days leading up the show. on the 8th of january I did a stream where I attempted to have neuro learn to play slay the spire. she didn't even make it past the first boss. attempt 2 is going well though. pic. twitter. com/aISW0poN5v — Vedal (@Vedal987)October 12, 2023 VTubers, who typically present with animal ears, exaggerated features or raunchy outfits, are often written off as lewd anime streamers. The genrestarted in Japan in the early 2010sas an offshoot of idol culture, and took off outside of Asia when VTuber production company Hololive debuted its first English-speaking streamers. Filian noted that the awards show also acknowledges VTuber viewers as much as individual content creators, since fans drove the genre’s breakthrough to mainstream recognition. In addition to the category for most dedicated fanbase, the VTuber Awards also includes a category for VTuber clippers, who clip, curate and post VTuber content online. “And so what these people would do is post to YouTube, and in many ways, they created a massive demand for VTubers,” Filian continued. “When VTubers finally came to the west, it was primed to explode. It can’t be overstated how important VTuber clippers are and were to VTubers being where they are today … In many ways, VTubers are typically a lot more involved with their fans than a lot of other creators are. ” The show was a technical feat as well. The five-hour event married WePlay’s physical production space with countless hours of engineering and design. Though WePlay has used augmented reality elements in previous live productions, the awards show was the first fully virtual event that the company has produced. WePlay’s Chief Marketing Officer Iryna Chuhai pointed out that for the film and video game industry, using this scale of mocap technology is an “ordinary event. ” Incorporating it into a live production, however, is more challenging. Planned in partnership withMythic Talent, a management company that represents VTubers including Filian, the event was initially going to take place on a physical stage with “screens and graphics” to accommodate VTubers, WePlay’s Chief Visionary Officer Maksym Bilonogov told TechCrunch before the show. “But then we realized it’s not the way, it’s not the right philosophy,” Bilonogov said. “Because it’s VTubers, it should be a fully virtual space. So we started building the technology to make it real, so the real cameraman using the real camera can shoot the virtual world. ” The stream depicted a vast arena, but Filian’s avatar was essentially confined to a smaller circular stage surrounded by screens, which was a virtually constructed version of WePlay’s physical production stage. In real life, camera operators controlled three cameras linked to virtual angles, so that each physical pan, tilt and focus pull was reflected in the virtual broadcast. The physical operators could switch between multiple different angles in the stadium using iPads connected to the cameras, so that the production appeared to use at least a dozen cameras instead of just three. The physical lights on the stage were connected to corresponding virtual lights, so that WePlay could control the stadium’s spotlights by activating the real ones. WePlay also connected Resolume, a software for live event visuals, to the virtual venue to control the graphics that played on the VR stage’s screens. “From a visual perspective, from the technology, it’s fully new for us,” Bilonogov continued. “We’re learning a lot. I can say that it’s the hardest technological project for WePlay. It’s fully virtual reality with virtual cues. ” In the control room several feet away, crew members juggled dozens of screens, which depicted Filian’s avatar on the virtual stage, IRL Filian in her mocap suit and visuals of other VTubers, who called in throughout the stream to host the pre-show and present or accept awards. VTubers who appeared in the pre-show or presented awards appeared to be at the venue on the stream. They pulled it off byco-streamingFilian’s broadcast and giving WePlay access to their streams so that their commentary could be seamlessly integrated into the show. VTubers who appeared on the stream to accept their awards appeared on screens above the virtual stage. WePlay organized behind-the-scenes logistics with other streamers using Discord — not for any unique platform feature, Chuhai said during a walkthrough of the studio, but because it’s already a “familiar tool for all these gamers. ” Filian, meanwhile, hosted from a separate green screen room containing only a teleprompter. Markers on Filian’s motion capture suit dotted her limbs and fingers, capturing her body movements, while an iPhone rigged to a headband strapped around her forehead tracked her facial expressions. There is no industry standard for VTuber software, but many VTubers including Filian use models designed in Unity. WePlay’s virtual stadium was built using Unreal Engine, which isn’t as commonly used by VTubers. The company ended up rebuilding Filian’s avatar from scratch. Small details that would take place during a physical awards broadcast, like a mid-show outfit change, were “hard lifts,” Filian said. Switching from one outfit to another, like Filian did during the stream, involved a whole new set of animations. A more voluminous skirt, like the one Filian wore at the start of the show, wouldn’t move the same way as a form-fitting gown. Like many VTubers, Filian is fiercely protective of her anonymity and did not want to be photographed, so a crew member stood in for behind-the-scenes photos of the motion capture getup. Although everyone involved in the production promised to maintain her anonymity, Filian said it was “really unusual” for her to perform as her VTuber persona in front of actual people. “There’s a phrase fromElden Ringthat’s called,‘Touch grass,’and I don’t do a lot of that. And I do even fewer interactions like, outside in general. And I especially don’t do interactions where I’m making content while there are people around me,” Filian said in a call a few days after the event. “When you’re an actual human acting like an anime character, it’s very awkward. ” Filian added that the crew kept their distance out of respect for her privacy, which assuaged the awkwardness. It also helped that the people who saw her real face and body were people that she trusted, because she spent the last week rehearsing with them. Full-body streams aren’t new to Filian, who started out making content inVRChat. Granted, WePlay setup is significantly more sophisticated than the one Filian uses for her streams, which involves a few inexpensive Vive trackers and cameras in the corners of her room. Unlike her home streams, hosting the VTuber Awards was particularly grueling because she couldn’t take many breaks. To host the event, she stayed in the mocap suit for more than seven hours (including day-of rehearsals) and was afforded two bathroom breaks total, which each took at least 20 minutes of getting in and out of the suit. She stretched between hosting, and at one point during a short segment about the history of VTubing, housed a sandwich and shake to “keep the energy up. ” Filian was exhausted when the show wrapped, and she said that she nearly fell asleep on camera when she tried to stream the day after. “It felt a lot less intimidating to be in that box than it would have been to stand in front of thousands of people,” Filian said. “So if anything it was a bit uncomfortable, I guess, but it was just me, a teleprompter and a screen showing the actual stream, and it made it a lot easier because of that. The first VTuber Awards was a major success, much to the relief of Bilonogov, who described the project as a “huge experiment” for WePlay days before the event. As Filian welcomed viewers to the surreal virtual stadium on Saturday, Bilonogov marveled at the TV streaming the show in WePlay’s lobby. He wasn’t sure how else the technology could be used, he said, but he was sure that it’s the future of live events. WePlay plans to continue experimenting with live VR events; Chuhai said that next year, the company is opening another studio across the street from its Los Angeles space specifically for VR productions. “VTtubing, it’s like rock and roll or jazz. It’s an entire industry. It has a significant community. It’s a future of entertainment,” Bilonogov said. “I think the awards show is just the beginning. ” The animated VTuber Ironmouse won Content Creator of the Year at the Game Awards Obskur’s Character Creator and marketplace streamlines VTubing VTubers are making millions on YouTube and Twitch Topics Senior Reporter, Culture Morgan Sung is a senior writer covering the wild expanse of hell that is the internet, from the murky ethics of AI-generated art to the fight for privacy rights for children of influencers. Based in Los Angeles and chronically online, Morgan writes about the creator economy, niche internet communities, and digital culture. She previously covered this space for NBC News, Mashable, and BuzzFeed. In her free time, she roller skates and fosters newborn kittens	2023-12-20T22:34:05	https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/20/vtuber-awards-vr-twitch-weplay-filian/	1,842	1	1c7404e39b3091f6db1f078282964d09	{"bias_density": 0.32, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 0, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 3, "age_bias": 3, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 6, "concerns": ["High demographic bias indicators"]}
Poe’s AI chatbot app now lets you make your own bots using prompts	An app calledPoewill now let users make their own chatbots using prompts combined with an existing bot, like ChatGPT, as the base. Firstlaunched publiclyin February, Poe is the latest product from the Q&A siteQuora, which has long provided web searchers with answers to the most Googled questions. With chatbots now potentially powering the future of web search and Q&A, the company chose to expand into this market by allowing consumers to play with the latest AI technologies from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic via a simple mobile interface. Initially, Poedebuted with support fora handful of general knowledge chatbots including Sage and Dragonfly, powered by OpenAI technology, and Claude, powered by Anthropic. Last month, Poe rolled out subscriptions that allow users to pay to access the more powerful bots based on new language models, including GPT-4 from OpenAI and Claude+ from Anthropic. Poe is also the only consumer-facing internet product with access to either Claude or Claude+, the company noted at the time. Now, Poe will offer the ability for users to create their own bots using prompts — that is, ways of directing a chatbot to perform highly specific tasks. Today, people are using prompts todirect bots to output textin the style of a favorite author, in a particular format or aimed at a certain audience, among other things. Essentially, the idea is that better prompts drive better outputs. This has led to the creation of a new creator class within the field ofprompt engineering. Onlinecommunitieshave alsosprung upto enable people to share their prompt ideas with one another. We are launching a new feature on Poe today: user-created bots. This initially allows anyone to create a new bot based on a short text prompt and an existing bot used as a base. We currently support Claude instant and ChatGPT as base bots. pic. twitter. com/Fr2Leoum8v — Adam D'Angelo (@adamdangelo)April 7, 2023 With Poe’s new feature, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo explained ina recent Twitter thread, users can make their own bots based on either Claude or ChatGPT. Once created, the bot will have its own unique URL (poe. com/botname) which will open the bot directly in Poe. D’Angelo also shared a few fun bots the company created to demonstrate the new feature, including a “talk like a pirate bot” atpoe. com/PirateBot, aJapanese language tutor, a bot that turns your messages into emoji atpoe. com/emojisand a bot that mildly roasts you atpoe. com/RoastMaster. “We’ve seen a lot of great experimentation with prompts on LLMs both among the community on Poe and across the internet, and it’s amazing how much value prompting can unlock from language models,” D’Angelo wrote. “We hope this new feature can help people who are talented at prompting share their ability with the rest of the world, and provide simple interfaces for everyone to get the most out of AI,” he said. Users will be able to access the bots via Poe’siOSapp or Android app on the mobile web or via its desktop web interface. When you find a bot you like, you can click a button to follow the bot so you can easily return to it later. The bot will then appear in Poe’s sidebar bot list alongside general-purpose bots like Sage, Claude and others. Quora plans to cover all the costs involved with operating this feature for the time being, including the LLM fees, which it notes could get to be expensive if any bots become popular. In the future, the plan is to offer bot creators feedback about how people are using their bot so they can iterate on improvement. Later on, the company also plans to develop an API that would allow anyone to host a bot from a server they operate, which would allow for even more complex bots — and a potential new business for Quora, as well. Already, some users announced within the Twitter thread how they used the feature to make bots for both practical purposes, liketrip planningor learningmath, as well as for fun, likeflirting. (Poe’splatform guidelines restricta variety of use cases that could be problematic, like hate speech, violence, illegal activities, fraud, IP infringement and others, but it remains to be seen if any bots will skirt its rules. ) Poe is not the only mobile app catering to mobile users. Though OpenAI hasn’t launched an official app,dozens of AI chatbots floodedthe App Store claiming to offer ChatGPT access, and now the top AI apps arepulling in millions of dollars. Microsoft’sBingandEdgeapps also integrated AI technology made possible through the company’s partnership with OpenAI. Meanwhile, other AI startups, likePerplexity, have recently launched their mobile apps, too. That said, consumer demand for Poe has been going well. To date, the mobile app version of Poe has 1. 17 million installs and has generated $520,000 in gross revenue, according to app intelligence firmdata. ai. The app is currently ranked No. 32 in the Productivity category on the App Store	2023-04-10T16:49:27	https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/10/poes-ai-chatbot-app-now-lets-you-make-your-bots-using-prompts/	817	1	049ef204bbc3de899d86f2a8dffdad2c	{"bias_density": 0.19, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 1, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
Firefox now lets you choose your preferred AI chatbot in its Nightly builds	As browsers continue to add AI features into their products,Mozillais looking to give users some choice in the matter. The companyannouncedon Tuesday that it’s launching an opt-in experiment offering access to different AI services in Nightly, the experimental version ofFirefox. The company plans to improve the experience before bringing it to the beta and release versions of Firefox. Users who have opted-in will get to choose their preferred AI service. Mozilla’s initial offerings includeChatGPT,Google Gemini,HuggingChatandLe Chat Mistral. The company plans to continue adding AI services. “Providing choice in AI services is important for many reasons,” Firefox senior vice president, Ian Carmichael, wrote in ablog post. “First, you should be able to choose the service that works best for you, and not be locked into a single provider. Second, all of these models are still being developed and improved. None are perfect, and each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Offering options gives people an opportunity to experiment with many services to find the one that’s most helpful in solving the problem they have. ” After choosing a preferred AI service, users will be able to ask the chatbot to summarize information on a webpage, simplify the language or test their knowledge on the information. The idea behind the new offering is to allow users to try out a few different chatbots and pick the one they like the most. Firefox notes that the offering is optional, so you don’t have to pick one at all. The launch of the new experience comes as companies likeGoogleandMicrosofthave added AI chatbots to their browsers. Browser startups likeOperaandDuckDuckGohave also added AI chatbots that can help users do things like summarize web pages and ask questions. Topics Consumer News Reporter Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor’s degree from University of Toronto and a master’s degree in journalism from Western University. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-06-25T16:18:57	https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/25/firefox-now-lets-you-choose-your-preferred-ai-chatbot-in-its-nightly-builds/	398	0.9	709f4ed0bdabc3720e50a8b593c8fe98	{"bias_density": 0.39, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
Databricks raises $10B as it barrels toward an IPO	Posted: Databricks, the data analytics platform, has raised $10 billion in a funding round that values the company at $62 billion (up from $43 billion). Backers include Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, GIC, and Iconiq Growth. The round is one of the largest venture rounds in history, and will drive future mergers and acquisitions, stock payouts to employees, and expansion abroad, according to astatementobtained by CNBC. Databricks’ mammoth “Series J” comes ahead of the company’s hotly anticipated IPO. Founded in 2013 by seven doctorate candidates from UC Berkeley, Databricks sells AI, big data analytics, and cloud tooling to enable companies to build data- and AI-powered applications. Databricks expects to generate positive free cash flow for the first time with a $3 billion revenue run rate in the quarter that ends on January 31, according to CNBC. The company’s revenue in the October quarter grew more than 60% year over year. Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage. TechCrunch's AI experts cover the latest news in the fast-moving field. Every Monday, gets you up to speed on the latest advances in aerospace. Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly. By submitting your email, you agree to ourTermsandPrivacy Notice	2024-12-17T14:41:13	https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/databricks-raises-10b-as-it-barrels-toward-an-ipo/	217	0.9	5c4ae40e7ced8d5f76cf7cbd86900543	{"bias_density": 0.0, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 0, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 0, "concerns": []}
Google introduces new developer tools and titles for games on mobile and PC	Google announced new features around PC and mobile gaming today ahead of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), including new titles, control customization, and developer tools for making mobile games available on PC. The company first introducedPlay Games for PC in 2022 in the beta phase. Over time, it has introduced the program tovariousregions. Later this year, the project will enter general availability. As a part of the new releases, Google is adding new tools for game developers, including a dedicated SDK for native PC games on Google Play Games that will have in-app purchase integration. It is also updating the Play Console to distribute and manage various builds for mobile and PCs. The company announced that, by default, it is going to make all mobile games available on PC through the Play Store. However, developers can opt out of this, if they choose. While all mobile games would be available on PC, specially tuned games will have an optimized icon next to the listing and other games will have a “playable” badge after testing. Google is also adding support for AMD-based laptops and desktops for Google Play Games on PC. Plus, Play Games will be accessible from the start menu on various PCs from different manufacturers. The company is also introducing a new Graphics API called Vilkan for smoother frame rates and better visuals, and implementing ray tracing. It is also improving the Android Dynamic Performance Framework (ADPF) for more responsive games. Later this year, developers will be able to run user acquisition campaigns for mobile emulated and native PC titles in Google Play Games for PC. Plus, game makers will be able to port their game to the Google Play for PC program and get up to 15% of additional earnback. At GDC, Google announced new PC optimized titles such as “Game of Thrones: Kingsroad,” “Sonic Rumble,” and “ODIN: VALHALLA RISING. ” The company said that thanks to the mobile games porting feature, users will be able to play Train Sim” and “Pet Shop Fever: Animal Hotel” on PC. Google is also bringing some PC titles to mobile. The company said this month, “DREDGE” and “TABS Mobile” are coming to Google Play and mystery game “Disco Elysium” will be available later this year. Google will bring custom controls for games on PC, so players can remap controls according to their comfort. Later this month, the company is rolling out a game side bar for quick adjustments with multi-account support, too. Going forward, it will also be easier to track and use Play Points on PC with up to 10x points boosters for purchases, Google says. Topics Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2025-03-13T15:45:00	https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/google-introduces-new-developer-tools-and-titles-for-games-on-mobile-and-pc/	508	1	bc0bfd0dad3e40b11b1ec007ceef03e9	{"bias_density": 0.16, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
Y Combinator’s Garry Tan supports some AI regulation but warns against AI monopolies	Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator, told a crowd at The Economic Club of Washington, D. C. this week that “regulation is likely necessary” for artificial intelligence. Tan spoke with Teresa Carlson, a General Catalyst board member, as part of a one-on-one interview where he discussed everything fromhow to get into Y Combinatorto AI, noting that there is “no better time to be working in technology than right now. ” Tan said he was “overall supportive” of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) attempt to construct a GenAI risk mitigation framework, and said that “large parts of theEO by the Biden administrationare probably on the right track. ” NIST’s framework proposes thingslike defining that GenAI should comply with existing laws that govern things like data privacy and copyright; disclosing GenAI use to end users; establishing regulations that ban GenAI from creating child sexual abuse materials, and so on. Biden’s executive order covers a wide range of dictums, from requiring AI companies to share safety data with the government to ensuring that small developers have fair access. But Tan, like many Valley VCs, was wary of other regulatory efforts. He called bills related to AI that are moving through the California and San Francisco legislatures, “very concerning. ” One such California bill that’s causing a stir is the one put forth by state Sen. Scott Wiener that would allow the attorney general to sue AI companies if their wares are harmful,Politico reports. “The big discussion broadly in terms of policy right now is what does a good version of this really look like?” Tan said. “We can look to people likeIan Hogarth, in the U. K. , to be thoughtful. They’re also mindful of this idea of concentration of power. At the same time, they’re trying to figure out how we support innovation while also mitigating the worst possible harms. ” Hogarth is a former YC entrepreneur and AI expert who’s been tapped by the U. K. to create an AI model taskforce. “The thing that scares me is that if we try to address a sci-fi concern that is not present at hand,” Tan said. As for how YC manages responsibility, Tan said that if the organization doesn’t agree with a startup’s mission or what that product would do for society, “YC just doesn’t fund it. ” He noted that there are several times when he would read about a company in the media that had applied to YC. “We go back and look at the interview notes, and it’s like, we don’t think this is good for society. And thankfully, we didn’t fund it,” he said. Tan’s guideline still leaves room for Y Combinator tocrank out a lot of AI startupsas cohort grads. As my colleague Kyle Wiggers reported, the Winter 2024 cohort had 86 AI startups, nearly double the number from the Winter 2023 batch and close to triple the number from Winter 2021, according to YC’s official startup directory. And recent news events are making people wonder if they can trust those selling AI products to be the ones to define responsible AI. Last week, TechCrunch reported thatOpenAI is getting rid of its AI responsibility team. Then there was the debacle related to the company using a voice that sounded like actress Scarlett Johansson’s when demoingits new GPT-4o model. Turns out,she was asked about using her voice, and she turned them down. OpenAI has since removed the Sky voice, though it denied it was based on Johansson. That, and issues around OpenAI’s ability to claw back vested employee equity, were among several items thatled folks to openly questionSam Altman’s scruples. Meanwhile, Meta made AI news of its own when it announced thecreation of an AI advisory council that only had white men on it, effectively leaving out women and people of color, many of whom played a key role in the creation and innovation of that industry. Tan didn’t reference any of these instances. Like most Silicon Valley VCs, what he sees is opportunities for new, huge, lucrative businesses. “We like to think about startups as an idea maze,” Tan said. “When a new technology comes out, like large language models, the whole idea maze gets shaken up. ChatGPT itself was probably one of the fastest-to-success consumer products to be released in recent memory. And that’s good news for founders. ” Tan also said that San Francisco is at the center of the AI movement. For example, that’s where Anthropic, started by YC alums, got its start, and OpenAI, which was a YC spinout. Tan also joked that he wasn’t going to follow in Altman’s footsteps, noting that Altman “had my job a number of years ago, so no plans on starting an AI lab. ” One of the other YC success stories is legal tech startup Casetext, whichsold to Thomson Reutersfor $600 million in 2023. Tan believed Casetext was one of the first companies in the world to get access to generative AI and was then one of the first exits in generative AI. When looking to the future of AI, Tan said that “obviously, we have to be smart about this technology” as it relates to risks around bioterror and cyberattacks. At the same time, he said there should be “a much more measured approach. ” He also assumes that there isn’t likely to be a “winner take all” model, but rather an “incredible garden of consumer choice of freedom and of founders to be able to create something that touches a billion people. ” At least, that’s what he wants to see happen. That would be in his and YC’s best interest — lots of successful startups returning lots of cash to investors. So what scares Tan most isn’t run-amok evil AIs, but a scarcity of AIs to choose from. “We might actually find ourselves in this other really monopolistic situation where there’s great concentration in just a few models. Then you’re talking about rent extraction, and you have a world that I don’t want to live in. ” We’re launching an AI newsletter! Sign uphereto start receiving it in your inboxes on June 5. Topics Senior Reporter Christine Hall wrote about enterprise/B2B, e-commerce, and foodtech for TechCrunch, and venture capital rounds for Crunchbase News. Based in Houston, Christine previously reported for the Houston Business Journal, the Texas Medical Center’s Pulse magazine, and Community Impact Newspaper. She has an undergraduate journalism degree from Murray State University and a graduate degree from The Ohio State University. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-05-26T15:00:00	https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/26/ai-garry-tan-y-combinator/	1,156	1	5d9091f8e675ccbdfedabc3c11fa55c8	{"bias_density": 0.48, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 2, "age_bias": 2, "geographic_bias": 1, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 6, "concerns": []}
Saildrone’s first aluminum Surveyor autonomous vessel splashes down for Navy testing	Ocean intelligence company Saildrone has just putthe first of a new generation of Surveyor autonomous vessels in the water: an aluminum version that the Navy is keen to take advantage of. But don’t worry — they aren’t putting guns on them. Founder and CEO Richard Jenkins told TechCrunch that the demand for vessels like Saildrone’s is only growing. “We expect the need for ocean observing to continue to grow in size, complexity and quality. Aerial, surface and subsurface technologies all have a role to play in ocean observations,” he said. The 20-meter SD-3000 is similar to the previous versions of the Surveyor that are currently sailing the ocean and collecting data, but this one has an aluminum hull while the others are a fiberglass/carbon composite. The wing (or sail, but sails are fabric) is still composite, though. “Aluminum was chosen for the hull and keel for its robustness, longevity in the ocean environment, cost and the ability to rapidly mass produce at very large factories like Austal,” said Jenkins. “We don’t have the same scale of composite production facilities available in the U. S. ” Recently we have seen startupSyrennaand nonprofitCeruleandemonstrating the value of semi-stationary and satellite-based observations, respectively. “USVs provide high-resolution data, simultaneously from both above and below the sea surface. This data has much higher spatial and temporal resolution than can be gained from satellites, and the extreme range and endurance allow persistent measurements far beyond the reach of AUVs,” Jenkins explained — the sonar on board can hit 11,000 meters, which ought to be plenty. “We see Saildrone as an integral part of the ecosystem for not just collecting data, but providing the high-bandwidth satellite communications and even physical delivery for other systems. ” Improved marine intel is an enabler in climate science, international logistics, law enforcement and of course military matters. The Navy is a particular client for this brand new vessel; Admiral Lisa Franchetti noted that uncrewed vehicles very simply allow crewed ones to go where they’re needed rather than perform tasks that can be automated, like persistent observation. So far, no one has suggested weaponizing the Saildrone vessels, though. That’s probably a non-starter — weapons platforms need to be designed from the ground up for combat, and the Surveyors (the hint is in the name) are rather more focused on information gathering. The Austal line is expected to be able to put out one Surveyor every six weeks to start with. SD-3000 and a few of its in-progress aluminum kin will be detailed to Navy testing of its capability of producing “surface and undersea intelligence for a range of high-priority applications, including anti-submarine warfare. ” Syrenna’s WaterDrone is the ocean-monitoring ‘underwater weather station’ of the future Topics Writer & Photographer Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. His personal website is coldewey. cc. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-03-06T22:32:56	https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/06/saildrones-first-aluminum-surveyor-autonomous-vessel-splashes-down-for-navy-testing/	541	1	da152c244c87fbfb1657b90148086322	{"bias_density": 0.78, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 1, "age_bias": 3, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 5, "concerns": []}
Deal Dive: Sir Jack A Lot returns with a startup for retail traders	When former YouTube product manager Kevin Xu, known as “Sir Jack A Lot” on Reddit, turned $35,000 into $8 million trading stocks between 2020 and 2022, many people thought his fortunes, and his way of investing, had peaked, just like 2021’s memestock craze had. Xu doesn’t agree, though, and he’s now building a startup for retail investors that aims to bring the good-natured investing advice and community that people used to enjoy on platforms like the WallStreetBets subreddit, but with a layer of accountability that discourages scammers and grifters. Launched in April 2022, AfterHour lets users link to their stock brokerage accounts and, under a username of their choosing, post their investments to a social feed. “The only reason people trust me and Roaring Kitty is that we are transparent,” Xu told TechCrunch. “Why not show your actual positions or prove you are actually in something? [AfterHour] brings back a level of credibility and trust. You connect your brokerage and share real verified positions and screenshots. ” The company currently has more than 23,000 users, and while that’s not an eye-popping number by any means, its user base is growing, and early adopters seem dedicated — Xu said that more than 70% of its users are on the app every single day. The company is currently focused on growth, Xu said, but has plans for how to monetize in the future. “Monday to Friday, 9:30 a. m. to 4 p. m. is the game,” Xu said. “When we started, I was so scared that it would be quiet on the weekends, but on Monday, people just come back. We don’t do any scammy push notifications to get people back on Mondays, but they naturally come back. ” The startup recently raised a $4. 5 million seed round led by Founders Fund — Keith Rabois’ last investment at the firm — and General Catalyst. Pear VC, Daybreak Ventures and F4 Fund also participated, among several others. Xu said AfterHour is now focusing on growing its user base and its team. Xu believes letting users be pseudo-anonymous is why AfterHour’s approach works. He recalled that he used to feel awkward about the thought of talking to his colleagues at YouTube about trading stocks during his off hours and thinks he’s likely not alone in feeling that way. But on the flip side, he recognizes that an environment that encourages zero accountability is not a good idea for a platform like his. That dynamic breeds the grifters and scammers like you see on Reddit and X, who are looking to pump and dump their positions, or post fake trades to get other people to invest. He added that because people can only post their actual trades, it weeds out a lot of the bad actors. Of course, there will be some bad apples, but Xu said the startup works to monitor posts, and flag anything suspicious with a system of warnings and community notes — not unlike X’s community-based approach to moderation. Xu acknowledged that such a monitoring system won’t remain effective as the platform continues to scale. “Right now it is basically me being in the app and reminding people that independent thinking is sexy,” Xu joked. He added the company is working on a plan to curb bad behavior and is thinking of ideas like an algorithm that can automatically flag posts that look fake. This deal stood out to me because I think it’s a smart play to build services for retail investors. The trajectory of this space reminds me a lot of the crypto world. While very different, they are both investing areas that had their 15 minutes of fame, but as they faded from the mainstream, they still kept dedicated and growing communities of people interested in their approach. Still, AfterHour is an especially smart idea because, as with crypto, there is much money to be made here — and just as much to lose. Such platforms can’t guarantee their users will find financial success, but that doesn’t mean average people should be fully locked out of the stock markets, which companies like Robinhood, and more recently Destiney Tech 100, have worked to democratize. “The big misconception in the valley was that retail trading was a fad in 2021, referencing the stimulus check,” Xu said. “It’s only growing. The data backs it up. ” For context, 2023 was the mostactive year everfor retail trading. Robinhood saw more than $86. 6 billion intrading volumein May alone. AfterHour isn’t the only company realizing the potential of this space — Robinhood’s media expansion is a good example. The trading app bought the Snacks newsletter, focused on retail investors, back in 2019. More recently, it launched Sherwood Media, a financial publication aimed at the same audience. While he’s starting with the stock market, Xu hopes that AfterHour will move into other areas of finance down the line to become the one-stop shop for retail investors in the future. “AfterHour needs to exist,” Xu said. “I see the internet of finance and how it is evolving, and I’m disappointed in all the other attempts [to build a similar platform]. They were just disappointing. I’m thinking really long-term. I want it to be fun and accessible. I think it’s more entertaining than sports, and I think a growing number of people online do, too. ” Topics Senior Reporter, Venture Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-06-22T16:11:13	https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/22/deal-dive-sir-jack-a-lot-returns-with-a-startup-for-retail-traders/	966	1	1e803d171c1aacbb65f38f83fbd287c3	{"bias_density": 0.28, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 2, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 3, "concerns": []}
VCs and founders talk finding (and keeping) product-market fit at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024	You’ve got the product — now how do you find customers? And once you find those customers, how do you keep them coming back for more? AtTechCrunch Disrupt 2024, taking place October 28-30 in San Francisco, we’re bringing Spenser Skates, April Underwood and Tamar Yehoshua to theBuilders Stageto discuss how startups can find true, lasting product-market fit. Whether a startup is building AI-powered robots or a fresh social media app, founders need to know what audience they’re building for. Our panelists know firsthand how to find product-market fit since they’ve tackled these challenges themselves as founders, advisers and executives at some of the biggest tech companies in the world. Spenser Skates is the CEO and co-founder ofAmplitude, a publicly traded software company that helps companies grow their audience with data analytics. April Underwood is the co-founder ofAdverb Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm backing pre-seed to Series A founders. Before launching Adverb, Underwood was CPO at Slack and Director of Product at Twitter. She also serves on the board of public companies like Zillow and Eventbrite, advising executives on product strategy. Tamar Yehoshua is the President of Product and Technology atGlean, an enterprise AI startup, and a venture partner at IVP. She has been a VP at Google, working on privacy and search, and a CPO at Slack, guiding the company through going public and getting acquired by Salesforce. TechCrunch Disrupt 2024will take place in San Francisco from October 28-30. Buy your pass today. Topics Senior Writer Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B. A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos. Send tips through Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to @amanda. 100. For anything else, email amanda@techcrunch. com. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-08-28T15:00:00	https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/28/vcs-and-founders-talk-finding-and-keeping-product-market-fit-at-techcrunch-disrupt-2024/	424	0.9	03848b5b2303e742161a358c4fdf01da	{"bias_density": 0.38, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
Automattic acquires WPAI, a startup that makes AI products for WordPress	WordPress hosting company Automattic said on Monday that it is acquiringWPAI, a startup that builds AI solutions for WordPress. WPAI’s products include CodeWP, which lets you use AI to create WP Plugins; AgentWP, an AI assistant for WordPress site builders; and WP Chat, a chatbot for WordPress-related questions. WPAI noted on its blog that CodeWP and AgentWP would be discontinued in their current states and integrated within Automattic’s offering. WPAI’s founding team will join Automattic to lead WordPress’ AI efforts. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. “They’ll be working on testing, building, and integrating innovative AI solutions into the core ecosystem to redefine how users and developers work with WordPress,” Automattic said. Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg also separately announced the acquisitionon his personal blog. Onits blog, WPAI said the company will focus on creating AI solutions for the WordPress ecosystem. “This includes developing AI standards for WordPress, improving the platform’s core functionality, and creating tools that help users build and manage better websites. We’ll work closely with the WordPress community to thoughtfully implement these improvements while maintaining open-source values,” WPAI said. Automattic already offers anAI writing assistantas well as a tool thatcan help you write succinct posts. The WPAI deal is Automattic’s second in two months. Last month, the company snapped up aGrammarly competitor for developers, called Harper, which checks grammar locally on devices. Topics Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-12-10T03:37:16	https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/09/automattic-acquires-wpai-a-startup-that-creates-ai-solutions-for-wordpress/	298	0.9	fdb42d9c48c5ebfd88ff7ed79570ea0a	{"bias_density": 0.25, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
Google Pixel Fold’s Dual-Screen Interpreter mode brings subtitles to real life	Every so often a new software feature comes along that makes a hardware form factor a lot more useful. I would put Dual-Screen Interpreter mode in that category. The feature, which arrives today as part of a larger Pixel drop, leverages Google’s long-standing translation expertise. Google Pixel Event 2023: Everything announced, including the Pixel 8 series, Pixel Watch 2, Pixel Buds Pro, Android 14 By opening the device completely flat, you can speak to someone in a different language, with translations popping up on either side. So they’ll see what you’re saying in their language and vice versa. The system is currently available in 45 languages. #PixelFoldis getting a#FeatureDrop🎉🎉🎉 🌍 Dual-Screen Interpreter mode is your own personal translator across more than 45 languages and uses both screens for a more natural conversation. ¹#MadeByGooglepic. twitter. com/c2fFRW3emQ — Made by Google (@madebygoogle)October 4, 2023 The Pixel Fold, which launched earlier this year, is Google’s first foldable. And frankly, the form factor makes it myfavorite currently on the market. In fact, I brought it on a recent trip in place of a Kindle. The $1,800 asking price is still prohibitively expensive, but features like this will go a long way toward getting a lot more value out of the device. Check out more from today’s Google Pixel eventover here	2023-10-04T14:17:58	https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/04/google-pixel-folds-dual-screen-interpreter-mode-brings-subtitles-to-real-life/	216	0.9	00b3f8bef9e773926a684ca3ea5fde71	{"bias_density": 1.05, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 4, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 5, "concerns": []}
Ray-Ban Meta + facial recognition = Terminator vision for doxxing	Posted: Wearing a camera on your face will invariably evoke privacy concerns. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses have addressed the issue to a certain extent with the inclusion of features like a recording light. But any piece of popular consumer electronics will eventually be hacked, often to prove a point. I-XRAYis a project from a pair of college students,noted by 404 Media, that ought to serve as a cautionary tale. Pairing glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta with facial recognition software brings the ability to livestream the personal information of the people around you. The system identifies a person’s face and then populates your phone with all the personal information it can find, including addresses, phone numbers, and more. “Please note that our goal is NOT to release any product or code,” project co-creator AnhPhu Nguyenexplains on X, “this is meant to be a demonstration to raise awareness of what’s possible today with consumer tech. ” Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage. TechCrunch's AI experts cover the latest news in the fast-moving field. Every Monday, gets you up to speed on the latest advances in aerospace. Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly. By submitting your email, you agree to ourTermsandPrivacy Notice	2024-10-02T18:04:02	https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/02/ray-ban-meta-facial-recognition-terminator-vision-for-doxxing/	220	0.9	8747425d5816633c5974abc37f72b8bf	{"bias_density": 0.0, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 0, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 0, "concerns": []}
New Relic agrees to go private in $6.5B all-cash deal	New Relic, the San Francisco-based observability software company, has reached an agreement with private equity firms TPG and Francisco Partners to go private in a $6. 5 billion all-cash deal. As reported byCNBC, TPG and Francisco Partners were able to salvage a deal that initially fell through months ago after securing enough debt financing to meet New Relic’s desired valuation. Major shareholders, including founder and executive chairman Lew Cirne and activist hedge fund Jana Partners, have signed off. Under the terms of the agreement, New Relic will have a 45-day “go-shop” period during which it can entertain offers from other qualified bidders. But should it close as proposed — likely in late 2023 or early 2024, subject to customary closing conditions — New Relic shareholders will receive $87 per share, a 7. 5% premium over the stock’s closing price on Friday. “We are pleased to partner with Francisco Partners and TPG, who are committed to continuing to build upon New Relic’s strong foundation and achieve its full potential,” Cirne said in a press release. New Relic, which Cirne founded in 2008, provides software to monitor web and mobile apps in real time, with support for custom-built plugins to collect arbitrary telemetry and performance data. The company partners with companies like IBM, AWS, Azure and Rackspace as well as mobile app back-end service providers such as StackMob and Parse to build connectors and handle observability data flows. In 2014, after raising nearly $200 million in venture capital from investors including Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Benchmark Capital and BlackRock, New Relic went public. In the years following, the company used part of the proceeds to make several acquisitions, snatching up Pixie Labs, a service for monitoring cloud-native workloads, and CodeStream, a developer collaboration tool. 2021 saw New Relic undergo a restructuring plan to move away from a software subscription sales model to a consumption-based model, which included laying off nearly 160 employees. But in its most recent fiscal quarter, the company showed steady gains, growing fiscal year Q1 2024 revenue 12% year-over-year to $242. 6 million. Bill Staples, the CEO of New Relic, said in a canned statement: “New Relic has made significant progress on its consumption business transition and, together with Francisco Partners and TPG, we will have the resources and flexibility to not only complete the final chapter of this transition, but also accelerate our strategy and provide customers with a standardized data-driven practice that any company can benefit from. ” New Relic’s move private comes as the observability market heats up, spurred by a growing desire by enterprises to invest in data-driven decision-making and mitigating the complexity of their data infrastructure. By oneestimate, observability companies raised nearly $2 billion in capital over the past two years. Among some of the more successful observability startups areHoneycombandAcceldata, which raised $50 million each within the last year for their tools that enable devs to monitor apps and data for performance issues. There’s alsoCribl, which raised $150 million last May;Monte Carlo, which nabbed $135 million the same day as Cribl; andCoralogix, which snagged $142 million just a week later than Cribl and Monte Carlo. Markets and Marketsprojectsthat the market for observability tools and platforms will be worth $4. 1 billion by 2028, close to doubling from $2. 4 billion this year	2023-07-31T15:33:58	https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/31/new-relic-agrees-to-go-private-in-6-5b-all-cash-deal/	550	1	3e1b4ef0becabf5540f0fb38d7c3c7a9	{"bias_density": 0.41, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 2, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 3, "concerns": []}
Perplexity says it’s now serving 100M search queries a week	Posted: Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity,saysthat the AI-powered search engine is now performing 100 million queries each week. Extrapolated out to a month, that’s roughly 400 million queries —up from250 million queries in July. Perplexity’s rapid rise comes as the company teasesecommerce features, including the ability for subscribers to its Perplexity Pro service to make one-click purchases. Perplexity is also reportedly planning a new ad model. Accordingto The Financial Times, it’s in talks with brands including Nike and Marriott for sponsored queries. One thorn in Perplexity’s side is its legal tussles with publishers. News Corp’s Dow Jones and the NY Post havesuedPerplexity over what they describe as a “content kleptocracy. ” Many other news sites haveexpressed concernsthat Perplexity closely replicates their content — just last week, The New York Timessentthe startup a cease and desist. Perplexity issaidto be in talks to raise around $500 million at an $8 billion valuation. Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage. TechCrunch's AI experts cover the latest news in the fast-moving field. Every Monday, gets you up to speed on the latest advances in aerospace. Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly. By submitting your email, you agree to ourTermsandPrivacy Notice	2024-10-25T14:23:19	https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/25/perplexity-says-its-now-serving-100m-search-queries-a-week/	217	0.9	b51147c5d8776ae486c693b456966318	{"bias_density": 0.0, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 0, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 0, "concerns": []}
Boston Dynamics’ electric Atlas humanoid executes autonomous automotive parts picking	Boston Dynamics’ new humanoid has been quietly improving by leaps and bounds behind the scenes. Announcedin April, we caught some brief insight into the electric Atlas’ strength in August througha videoof the robot doing pushups. Thelatest video, released Wednesday, showcases the robot doing work in a demo space, moving engine parts between bins. Boston Dynamics is quick to note that the actions are being performed autonomously, without “prescribed or teleoperated movements. ” That caveat is seemingly a bit of shade tossed atother humanoid demosthat have been misleading in a bid to capture online attention. The video arrives two weeks after the Hyundai-owned robotics firm announceda watershed dealwith the Toyota Research Institute (TRI). It’s not clear how much of the three-minute video is a product of that partnership, which brings TRI’s impressive robotics learning and real-time adaptations to the platform. Boston Dynamics notes, “The robot is able to detect and react to changes in the environment (e. g. , moving fixtures) and action failures (e. g. , failure to insert the cover, tripping, environment collision) using a combination of vision, force, and proprioceptive sensors. ” As with competitors like Figure, Tesla, and Apptronik, Boston Dynamics’ first applications for the bipedal robot include work in automotive factories. The focus makes a lot of sense, given that the firm is now owned by Hyundai, which has opted to do a deal with Toyota’s research wing. Automotive has also been well ahead of the automation curve for decades now. In addition to the autonomously executed tasks, the video showcases impressive adaptive — and strong — actuators, as the robot pivots at its waist. The action minimizes movements, saving precious seconds in the process	2024-10-30T14:43:23	https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/30/boston-dynamics-electric-atlas-humanoid-executes-autonomous-automotive-parts-picking/	279	0.9	c100c951daba4aed4fe12e00c4dae465	{"bias_density": 0.19, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
Are you spending too much on paid acquisition?	When scaling a paid acquisition channel, you should constantly question whether you’re spending in the most efficient way possible. If you’re scaling spending across various channels, it’s more than likely that you’re facing rising costs. But how do you know where and when to draw the line? In this short article, I’ll discuss when to start measuring diminishing returns and how to use a simple regression analysis to find optimal spending levels. If you’re scaling any paid acquisition channel by 5-10x weekly, then it becomes important to maintain the pulse on the following metrics: As paid costs scale, the number of impressions being served naturally increases, which causes CPMs to rise. If your CPMs are rising this usually means that your CACs and ad frequency are rising as a byproduct. A spreadsheet with those metrics laid out on a weekly basis will help you identify large upticks in costs, which can then guide your future budget allocations. If you’re looking to get analytical and have a minimum of 90 days of data at varying levels of spending, a regression analysis is your answer. What is regression analysis? In non-technical terms, it’s a way to measure the relationship of one variable to another. This empowers marketers to understand how two marketing metrics relate to one another, such as affiliates signed and conversions, or revenues and paid spend. What’s great about this kind of analysis is that it provides a clear depiction of what your optimal expenditure is at the paid channel level. During my days at Postmates, we scaled our driver acquisition budget from less than $50,000/month to $3M/month, and had to run regression analyses on a regular cadence to ensure optimal spending per channel and geography. Below is a quick summary on how to get a regression analysis set up with the following inputs on a weekly level: Once you have this data input on your spreadsheet (I’m using Google Sheets here), highlight all the data and select theInsertdrop-down, followed byChart. In theChart typearea that shows on the right pane of the screen, scroll until you find theScatteroption. SelectScatter. Add “CAC” to theX-Axisand “Spend” on yourSeries. Finally, go to theCustomizetab, findSeries, click on it, and then scroll down to find theTrendlinetoggle. From there, you should have something that looks like what I’ve created below: From this graph it is clear that we have around $90 CAC at spending levels of $5,000 – $15,000. When we spend $30,000, CACs only rise to $100. That’s only one week’s datapoints though, which could have been an anomaly. Ideally, we would prefer to have had a cluster of spending data points at $30,000 in the $100 CAC range. My next steps based on this data would be to scale to $30,000 in spend to see if we can maintain CACs below $100. A ~10% increase in CAC for a 3x increase in spending levels and conversions would be a great success. As more data-points start to fill the scatter plot, it becomes much easier to decide on where to draw the line on spending for specific channels or geography. Conversely, it helps to guide the light to where opportunities may be present. Instead of spending too much on paid acquisition, know that you have the regression analysis’s ability now stored in your growth toolbelt to make more informed budget allocation decisions. Topics Contributor	2023-05-08T16:00:18	https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/08/are-you-spending-too-much-on-paid-acquisition/	559	1	bf213ddedf733586a2b676aec9aba113	{"bias_density": 0.0, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 0, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 0, "concerns": []}
Google says its new AI models can identify emotions — and that has experts worried	Google says its new AI model family has a curious feature: the ability to “identify” emotions. Announced on Thursday, the PaliGemma 2 family of models can analyze images, enabling the AI to generate captions and answer questions about people it “sees” in photos. “PaliGemma 2 generates detailed, contextually relevant captions for images,” Google wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch, “going beyond simple object identification to describe actions, emotions, and the overall narrative of the scene. ” Emotion recognition doesn’t work out of the box, and PaliGemma 2 has to be fine-tuned for the purpose. Nonetheless, experts TechCrunch spoke with were alarmed at the prospect of an openly available emotion detector. “This is very troubling to me,” Sandra Wachter, a professor in data ethics and AI at the Oxford Internet Institute, told TechCrunch. “I find it problematic to assume that we can ‘read’ people’s emotions. It’s like asking a Magic 8 Ball for advice. ” For years, startups and tech giants alike have tried to build AI that can detect emotions for everything from sales training to preventing accidents. Someclaim to have attained it, but the science stands on shaky empirical ground. The majority of emotion detectors take cues from the early work of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who theorized that humans share six fundamental emotions in common: anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness. Subsequentstudiescastdoubton Ekman’s hypothesis, however, demonstrating there are major differences in the way people from different backgrounds express how they’re feeling. “Emotion detection isn’t possible in the general case, because people experience emotion in complex ways,” Mike Cook, a research fellow at King’s College London specializing in AI, told TechCrunch. “Of course, we do think we can tell what other people are feeling by looking at them, and lots of people over the years have tried, too, like spy agencies or marketing companies. I’m sure it’s absolutely possible to detect some generic signifiers in some cases, but it’s not something we can ever fully ‘solve. ’” The unsurprising consequence is that emotion-detecting systems tend to be unreliable and biased by the assumptions of their designers. In a 2020 MITstudy, researchers showed that face-analyzing models could develop unintended preferences for certain expressions, like smiling. More recentworksuggests that emotional analysis models assign more negative emotions to Black people’s faces than white people’s faces. Google says it conducted “extensive testing” to evaluate demographic biases in PaliGemma 2, and found “low levels of toxicity and profanity” compared to industry benchmarks. But the company didn’t provide the full list of benchmarks it used, nor did it indicate which types of tests were performed. The only benchmark Google has disclosed is FairFace, a set of tens of thousands of people’s headshots. The company claims that PaliGemma 2 scored well on FairFace. But some researchers havecriticizedthe benchmark as a bias metric, noting that FairFace represents only a handful of race groups. “Interpreting emotions is quite a subjective matter that extends beyond use of visual aids and is heavily embedded within a personal and cultural context,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, a nonprofit that studies the societal implications of artificial intelligence. “AI aside, research has shown that we cannot infer emotions from facial features alone. ” Emotion detection systems have raised the ire of regulators overseas, who’ve sought to limit the use of the technology in high-risk contexts. The AI Act, the major piece of AI legislation in the EU,prohibitsschools and employers from deploying emotion detectors (but not law enforcement agencies). The biggest apprehension around open models like PaliGemma 2, which is available from a number of hosts, including AI dev platform Hugging Face, is that they’ll be abused or misused, which could lead to real-world harm. “If this so-called emotional identification is built on pseudoscientific presumptions, there are significant implications in how this capability may be used to further — and falsely — discriminate against marginalized groups such as in law enforcement, human resourcing, border governance, and so on,” Khlaaf said. Asked about the dangers of publicly releasing PaliGemma 2, a Google spokesperson said the company stands behind its tests for “representational harms” as they relate to visual question answering and captioning. “We conducted robust evaluations of PaliGemma 2 models concerning ethics and safety, including child safety, content safety,” they added. Wachter isn’t convinced that’s enough. “Responsible innovation means that you think about the consequences from the first day you step into your lab and continue to do so throughout the life cycle of a product,” she said. “I can think of myriad potential issues [with models like this] that can lead to a dystopian future, where your emotions determine if you get the job, a loan, and if you’re admitted to uni. ”	2024-12-05T17:30:00	https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/05/google-says-its-new-open-models-can-identify-emotions-and-that-has-experts-worried/	788	1	db72cf925488cb282e35acd9711e1ef7	{"bias_density": 0.62, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 2, "age_bias": 2, "geographic_bias": 1, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 6, "concerns": []}
Twilio Segment teams with Amazon SageMaker on new customer predictions product	The customer data platform provides a central place to collect first-party information about customers, but simply having a pile of data is not the point. Companies want to put it to work to improve customer experience and more precisely target certain groups, based on this information they have stockpiled. More and more companies are providing tooling to help build applications on top of the data, and today at theSignalcustomer and developers conference, Twilio Segment announced the launch of CustomerAI Predictions, a tool to help marketers make predictions about how a certain group of customers, meeting a certain set of criteria, will behave. “We’ve seen marketers struggle with getting access to great-quality data for a long time. More recently, we’ve realized that we can help marketers, not just execute their own hypotheses that they already have, but help them actually predict who are the most valuable types of customers to target with different types of campaigns,” Alex Millet, senior director of product at Twilio Segment, told TechCrunch. That’s where CustomerAI Predictions comes in. “There’s huge value that we can get out of that data that’s already being collected by those customers that’s flowing into the CDP. ” For example, CustomerAI Predictions could come up with a group of customers most likely to buy a new product, based on a previous contributing event like a product viewed or a product added to a cart. Segment collects information like clickstream data from a website or mobile app, while Twilio brings the communications data to help companies better understand which customers are most engaged, and which could need a push. To build CustomerAI Predictions, the company teamed with Amazon SageMaker. “When we were looking at how to quickly bring this first predictions product to market, AWS and SageMaker were one of the leaders in terms of the ML backbone infrastructure that allowed us to build those products,” Millet said. Millet also indicated that the company has a generative AI-based email tool on the roadmap, so marketers could potentially combine the data from CustomerAI Predictions, and then use the upcoming CustomerAI Generative Email to generate a custom email based on the dataset in the predictions product. Twilio, whose core business involves communications APIs,purchased Segmentin October 2020 for $3. 2 billion, as part of a strategy to expand into other parts of the marketing stack. The companyintroduced Flex, a fully programmable contact center product, in 2018, andacquired SendGrid,an email API platform in the same year for $2 billion. CustomerAI Predictions is generally available starting today. How Segment redesigned its core systems to solve an existential scaling crisis	2023-08-23T16:00:03	https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/23/twilio-segment-teams-with-amazon-sagemaker-on-customer-predictions-product/	431	0.9	14422af2cf876b6836c07945492915f1	{"bias_density": 0.3, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
Kodem comes out of stealth with $25M to tackle application security	A new startup is entering the fray in the market of application security:Kodem, a company out of Israel founded by a team of security veterans from none other than the NSO Group, focuses on determining and mitigating risks by tapping into the runtime intelligence of individual applications. Today, it is emerging from stealth, armed with a total of $25 million. The funding includes both a Series A of $18 million led by Greylock with a seed of $7 million co-led by TPY Capital and Greylock. Kodem’s CEO Aviv Mussinger said it has been using the funds to build and now launch its platform globally. Founded in 2021, Kodem said that it already has customers in financial services, insurance and technology. In the landscape of enterprise security risks, application security remains one of the more complicated to get right. Not only is there an ever-revolving and changing carousel of services that need to be identified and tracked, but using an app regularly runs the risk of creating a vulnerability in another. Application management becomes not just a matter of human management but policy management, too. But ironically that makes it a lucrative area, as well. The messiness of application security means that typically companies do not have the resources to build tools internally to manage it. It’sestimatedthat application security will be a $9. 9 billion market opportunity this year, growing to some $22 billion by 2020. Mussinger, along with his co-founders Pavel Furman (CTO) and Idan Bartura (head of engineering) came to found Kodem after working for years as security researchers at NSO, the controversial cyber-intelligence firm behind Pegasus spyware. Mussinger — unsurprisingly, given the NSO’s public profile right now — speaks of that pedigree with some remove. His take is that as researchers, he and his co-founders were not directly involved in the aspects of NSO and Pegasus that got essentially weaponized by state organizations and others. And the focus at NSO, he said, was not really anything close to what Kodem is setting out to fix, although it gave the three of them insights that informed their ideas about what kind of company to start and what to tackle. “Our focus today is to help protect enterprises against any attacks,” he said. “At NSO, we saw everything from the inside and understood how things could be built in a better way. ” One of their takeaways, he said, was that “open source has destroyed the traditional approach to security. ” But given its ubiquity in the market right now, that is what its approach is aiming to fix. The crux of the issue, he said, is that the current range of application security tools has a common issue: all of them are designed to flag all potential issues in a kind of no-stone-unturned approach. For security operations teams, this eventually starts to sound like noise, since many of these alerts are irrelevant or not issues. That also means that when something truly bad does come up, it’s not seen, or it’s ignored. (This reminds me also of my email inbox, but that is another story…) Kodem’s solution is to analyze applications’ runtime data and to run models on that to understand what else is running alongside that. It then merges and sorts this data, and then only produces application security alerts that are relevant to an organization’s particular stack of applications and services. On average, Kodem believes less than 10% of all software is actually used in runtime, and less than 5% of runtime software is actually vulnerable. (Note: each organization is assessed and might have different percentages. ) And all in all, the process reduces the number of alerts by 95%, the company claims. Fewer alerts means a greater likelihood that the ones a security team is getting are relevant. And in any case, the smaller load means it’s considerably easier to triage the list. “As enterprises continue to move their workloads to the cloud, application security is growing in importance and priority for IT cybersecurity teams,” said Asheem Chandna, Partner at Greylock, in a statement. “Kodem has assembled an exceptional product team that is developing the next generation of application security – one that is cloud-native, deploys seamlessly, and provides the highest levels of accuracy with strong growing coverage. ”	2023-06-13T13:06:58	https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/13/kodem-comes-out-of-stealth-with-25m-to-tackle-application-security/	713	1	7231a99fee52ee369a5d0d60b530dd66	{"bias_density": 0.51, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 4, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 5, "concerns": []}
The US doesn’t refine cobalt — this startup wants to change that	Cobalt is one of the world’s best battery materials, but geopolitically, it’s less than ideal. The world’s largest reserves are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where mining has long been laced with human rights abuses, and 72% of the metal is refined in China. Cobalt may be used in a lot of electric vehicles, but the material isn’t just an EV problem. The U. S. military is dependent on cobalt for lithium-ion batteries that power drones and other devices, and for the alloys inside jet engines and magnets for missile-guidance systems. There aren’t any cobalt refineries in the U. S. today, upping the stakes for the metal’s consumers. “Everybody’s been worried about [China’s leverage], but now they’ve actually shown that they’ll cut off critical minerals,” John Busbee, co-founder and CEO of Xerion Advanced Battery Corp. , told TechCrunch. “Everybody’s like, what do we do?” Busbee thinks Xerion has a solution. His company has a new technique to produce highly refined cobalt in a single step using electricity and a little bit of heat. The company had been working for years to perfect its technology to produce electrodes for batteries, but it was different enough from existing techniques that battery manufacturers, who have already invested hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive factories, were hesitant to adopt it. Xerion’s process plates metals onto electrodes, using electricity to draw them out of a bath of molten salt. On one electrode, the company was producing its battery material. On the other, it was producing incredibly pure cobalt metal. “We always knew it was out there,” Busbee said. “We always knew it was [a] critical mineral, and it’s something we thought about addressing later. ” But now, with a global trade war raging, the company decided to refocus its efforts on cobalt. Xerion is opening a pilot-scale production facility in Dayton, Ohio, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. It will be able to produce five metric tons of cobalt. That’s a drop in the bucket for global cobalt demand. But military needs in the U. S. tend to be smaller. Only about 5,000 to 10,000 metric tons of cobalt are needed to make aerospace alloys, for example. Busbee said Xerion’s next-generation plant will produce 2,000 metric tons per year. At the pilot scale, Busbee said the company is cost-competitive. “Even at that scale, we’re already on even heel with China,” he said. Topics Senior Reporter, Climate Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2025-04-23T11:40:00	https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/23/the-u-s-refines-zero-cobalt-this-startup-wants-to-change-that/	475	0.9	a0b82c662261a3a4a399776a87cc9e0e	{"bias_density": 1.21, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 2, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 1, "age_bias": 2, "geographic_bias": 2, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 7, "concerns": []}
Snowflake brings together developer and analyst needs in new GenAI tool	Companies useSnowflaketo store their data in the cloud. With the ever-growing interest in generative AI and large language models, customers are looking for ways to get started with the technology quickly. Today, the company announced Snowflake Cortex, a fully managed service designed to help both business users and developers work with AI-fueled applications on the Snowflake platform. It has a couple of purposes, depending on your role. For business analysts, it provides access to several AI tools built on Snowflake’s own custom LLMs to make it easier and faster to interact with data stored in Snowflake. For developers, it helps them build generative AI applications on top of the data stored in Snowflake, in part, taking advantage of a capability that came to Snowflake withthe Streamlit acquisitionlast year. “At its core we are bringing advanced search, as well as large language models right into the heart of Snowflake with a new component that we call Snowflake Cortex,” Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP of AI at Snowflake, told a press roundtable last week. “We want to make these advanced features, which are more and more a requirement for the modern enterprise, and integrate them deeply within Snowflake, so that our power users, the analysts that spend pretty much all of their time in Snowflake, become a lot more productive,” Ramaswamy, who came to the company as part ofthe Neeva acquisitionearlier this year, said. While developers can tap into Cortex to build generative AI applications, the company is providing several advanced elements out of the box to help analysts take advantage of generative AI. The first is Document AI, a way of extracting data from unstructured documents like PDFs and analyst reports and querying that information. “What Document AI does is make it easy for an analyst without any specialized knowledge of programming or large language models to be able to extract these structured values from these documents and put them into a table,” he said. In practice, this lets analysts ask questions of unstructured data stored in these documents. The second feature they are adding is universal search, the capability that came to Snowflake when it acquired Neeva in May. “Search, as many people realize, is the basis for doing interesting things with language models, and we are exposing the core of search on top of Snowflake objects,” he said. This enables users to search across all of their Snowflake data and the Snowflake marketplace to locate data or apps they have built. The third key Cortex analysis piece is Snowflake Copilot, which takes plain language questions about data stored in Snowflake, and turns them into SQL queries. If done correctly, this could potentially save a lot of time analysts spend familiarizing themselves with the data and column structure to build meaningful queries. For developers, they can build applications quickly using the Snowflake models, or for those who want more control over the entire process, they can build more customized applications with access to external LLMs like open source offerings, or those from cloud partners like Amazon Bedrock and Azure OpenAI. They also can take advantage of Snowflake Container Servicesannounced in Juneto deploy the applications more efficiently as containerized workloads. Snowflake Cortex is part of a broader plan to put the data stored in Snowflake to work in different ways, whether it’s searching, querying or building applications. For now Cortex and its core features are in private preview. The company has not indicated when it will be available more widely at this time	2023-11-01T16:00:53	https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/01/snowflake-brings-together-neeva-and-streamlit-acquisitions-in-new-genai-tool/	580	1	193b42bbf9de54b02bae7404771163d7	{"bias_density": 0.48, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 2, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 4, "concerns": []}
Zepto shifts HQ to India as local listings gain appeal	Quick-commerce startup Zepto has moved its domicile to India from Singapore, joining a growing number of Indian startups that havemoved their headquarters homeahead of an IPO in the country. The transition marks the fastest shift of registered headquarters to India by a startup in the country, according to Zepto’s chief financial officer, Ramesh Bafna. Indian authorities recently made it easier for companies to flip their headquarters back home. Some startups, like Pine Labs, have beenin the processfor relatively longer. Zepto’s move follows similar relocations by other prominent Indian startups, including PhonePe and Groww. Many Indian startups had originally set up holding companies overseas so they could get access to foreign capital more easily. Several Indian startups registered in Singapore to keep open the option of a U. S. listing, which is not permitted for companies based in India. Flipkart, Eruditus, and Udaan are among those that chose this route. The Indian IPO market hasemerged as one of the world’s strongestin the past two years, leading many founders to move their official operations to the country. Swiggy’s$1. 35 billion IPOin November was the largest public listing by a tech company globally last year. Zepto, whichraised more than $1. 35 billion last yearand is currently valued at $5 billion, plans to file for an initial public offering later this year, seeking to raise as much as $1. 1 billion, according to a source familiar with the company. The startup, which delivers groceries, wellness products, and household goods within 10 minutes in urban areas, is fast catching up to Zomato-owned Blinkit, which commands the market. Topics Reporter, India Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2025-01-28T09:57:31	https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/28/zepto-shifts-domicile-to-india-as-local-listings-gain-appeal/	336	0.9	0fa388f858c07b1313fece2ab95eb025	{"bias_density": 0.91, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 2, "geographic_bias": 1, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 4, "concerns": []}
Walmart’s PhonePe launches India app store in challenge to Google	Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are among the top brands whose apps are listed on the Indian fintech PhonePe’s Indus Appstore, an Android app store launched Wednesday in challenge to Google’s monopoly in its largest market by users. To fight Google Play Store, PhonePe has armedIndus Appstorewith a range of unique and personalized features and developer-friendly terms. Indus Appstore supports 12 regional languages (including English) and around-the-clock support service, the $12 billion Walmart-backed fintech said. The app store — which today features over 200,000 apps, including Flipkart, Spotify, and Paytm across 45 categories — supports third-party payments and will not levy any listing fee for one year, it said. If developers use third-party payments services and gateways, PhonePe will still not levy any fee, said the startup’s co-founder and chief executive Sameer Nigam at a press conference. Google apps were missing from the store, which startedcourting developers in September last year. PhonePe, which leads the mobile payments market in India,isworking with many third-party aggregators to on-board the apps and many big brands have also signed up to Indus Appstore, it said. Indus Appstore features several other localized features, including app discovery via short videos and the ability to sign in to the store with a mobile number instead of an email address. It also offers “smart updates” that beam updates to customers’ phones during hours when their phones have greater data availability. PhonePe aims to be a top Google Play alternative in India — but it has a challenging road ahead Indus Appstore is the latest of a series of attempts by app developers globally to push back against Google and Apple’s duopoly on mobile apps and what many allege unfair terms. The two tech giants are facing growing backlash from app developers globally over the commissions charged on their respective app stores. A plethora of complaints has emerged accusing the companies, which control over 99% of the global consumer spend on mobile apps, of abusing their dominant position to impose excessive fees of up to 30% on app transactions. India, the world’s largest market by app downloads, is a nation of 750 million to 800 million connected smartphone users. Indus Appstore exists because as a nation “we want to have a point of view on what we can and cannot do,” Nigam said, asserting that what the nation consumes should not be controlled by one or two companies. “We will offer an alternative with a different set of features and capabilities. Some will like us, some will like others. We are just asking for a chance to compete on merit,” he said, noting that competition will push Google to improve its Play Store terms in India. PhonePe is making the app store available to download to consumers from its website (users will have to sideload the app on their Android phones). Nigam said the firm is in talks with “multiple” phone makers and hopes to close some deals in the coming weeks. Indus Appstore also “promises” to offer broader transparency — including explaining to the developers when their app has been pulled, and why. PhonePe plans to monetize Indus Appstore by charging developers for app discovery and by showing ads, Nigam said. Ivan Mehta contributed to this report. Topics Reporter, India Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-02-21T13:00:12	https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/21/phonepe-launches-android-app-store-with-amazon-meta-and-microsoft-apps/	612	1	874dbe03e910908aaf740469d7c7d0e0	{"bias_density": 0.28, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 1, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
Another star athlete is making his way into venture capital	Posted: Giannis Antetokounmpo, a player for the Milwaukee Bucks,launched a venture capital firmcalled Build Your Legacy Venturesthat will focus onsports and entertainment investing, according to Bleacher Report. Antetokounmpo will serve as general partner. The fund was “not just about capital; it’s about forging partnerships and opening my network to accelerate the growth trajectory for companies,” he said in apress release. “I want to help other entrepreneurs, especially those who have faced barriers, to grow and succeed. ” Antetokounmpo hasbecome the latest sports figureto enter the venture capital world. Serena Williamsnotably hasSerena Ventures, Kevin Duranthas 35V,Stephen Curryhas Penny Jar Capital, and even the Atlanta Hawkshas its own VCfund to target consumer startups. These big names don’t even include all of the celebs who are entering venture capital, such as filmmakerOlivia Wilde. AtTechCrunch Disrupt 2024, Sara and Erin Foster discussed how celebrity venture funds can offer founders and investors the benefit of having a big name and a big business supporting them. It’s clear that for many celebrities, being seen as an investor is now the next big act. Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage. TechCrunch's AI experts cover the latest news in the fast-moving field. Every Monday, gets you up to speed on the latest advances in aerospace. Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly. By submitting your email, you agree to ourTermsandPrivacy Notice	2024-11-26T00:15:00	https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/25/another-star-athlete-is-making-his-way-into-venture-capital/	243	0.9	fbe9c8575a44fb2578fa8cabf8b94e20	{"bias_density": 0.29, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 0, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 1, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
C-Zero is raising $18M to make emission-free hydrogen using natural gas, filings reveal	Hydrogen startupC-Zerohas raised $5 million of an $18 million funding round, according to anSEC filing. The company isdeveloping a way to strip hydrogen from methanewithout emitting carbon dioxide. The resulting hydrogen can be used in a range of industries today, including ammonia and petrochemical production, and potentially others in the near future, including transportation and steel production. The solid carbon waste product has the potential to be reused in everything from asphalt to lithium-ion batteries. C-Zero raised a $34 million round valued at $124 million post-money in 2022, according to PitchBook data. The smaller target for the new round, which CEO Zach Jones told TechCrunch is a Series A extension being led by Energy Capital Ventures, suggests the company is being realistic about its prospects following its sizable haul during the pandemic. The second close should happen this fall and will include strategic partners, Jones added. “The runway from this raise should set us up for a strong Series B next year that will get the company to being cashflow positive,” he said. The process C-Zero employs is known as methane pyrolysis. C-Zero’s reactor heats natural gas in the presence of a proprietary catalyst to break hydrogen’s chemical bond with the central carbon atom in a methane molecule. By using readily available natural gas as the feedstock, C-Zero hopes to produce emission-free hydrogen for less than other green hydrogen startups, which typically rely on expensive electrolyzers powered by low-cost renewable energy from wind and solar. “Our process uses just a few kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram of hydrogen produced, which means we can make low carbon hydrogen anywhere customers have natural gas or LNG,” Jones said. Tapping into existing natural gas infrastructure also makes methane pyrolysis a natural fit for petrochemical plants, which today use natural gas throughout their operations and also require large amounts of hydrogen to produce various chemicals. The potential to sell low-cost, zero-emission hydrogen to large, established customers has caused a flurry of startup activity in the space, many of which use methane pyrolysis. A number of competing startups, including Modern Hydrogen,Molten Industriesand ReCarbon, also use the process. Update:Added comments from C-Zero CEO Zach Jones. Topics Senior Reporter, Climate Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-09-06T17:57:10	https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/06/c-zero-is-raising-18m-to-make-emission-free-hydrogen-using-natural-gas-filings-reveal/	434	0.9	76dcecb5d49cbf3abaf7ef88acb2b677	{"bias_density": 0.73, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 1, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 1, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 4, "concerns": []}
India’s Agrim snags $17.3M to help farmers get inputs like seeds and pesticides more easily	Agriculture in India provideslivelihood support to over 42%of its population, contributing 18% to the country’s GDP, according to government data. However, the agri-input market, which provides inputs for the sector — be it seeds, pesticides, herbicides or cultivation and harvesting tools — largely relies on traditional channels, including local offline marketplaces. The sector lacks a robust supply chain, and logistics are complicated in remote geographies where most farmers are located. Additionally, India’s agri-inputs landscape is different from that of the U. S. and Europe due to its fragmented market structure, diversified demand and seasonal nature of crops. Agrim aims to address all these discrepancies by building a just-in-time supply chain to help agri-input retailers buy inputs from a specific manufacturer. The marketplace helps take the order to the manufacturing warehouse the moment it comes from a retailer, co-founder Mukul Garg said in an exclusive interview. Garg, a second-time entrepreneur who co-founded the travel app Tripigator in 2013, founded Agrim along with Avi Jain in April 2020. He has also headed products and growth at logistics company BlackBuck and was responsible for building its on-demand trucking marketplace. Agrim deals with retailers and manufacturers that have not used an e-commerce platform before, offering a minimalistic user interface along with the ability to let retailers set the pricing. The portal also includes a custom-designed order management system that allocates a manufacturer to every order it gets and ensures the pickup and delivery timelines are matched. Further, the startup works with multiple third-party logistics service providers to handle last-mile delivery. The startup currently offers its catalog in four categories: seeds, agrochemicals, nutrition and tools. Each category also includes subcategories (600 subcategories in total), such as herbicides, fungicides and pesticides for crop protection, and 70 subcategories in the equipment segment, including hand tools and motor-operated tools. Agrim uses a pricing intelligence model to set appropriate prices for products it gets from manufacturers. There are system algorithms to set prices based on factors including demand and supply to provide dynamic pricing on its platform. The startup takes anywhere between 10% to 60-70% of margins, Garg said, after giving a certain price to the manufacturer. Agrim also offers lending to retailers, who usually do not get access to credit through traditional channels, and about 10% of its retail base currently uses that credit offering, Garg told TechCrunch. It hopes to grow that business to 30% of retailers in the next few years, in part by extending the credit period from 30 days to up to 45 days. Now, the four-year-old company has raised $17. 3 million in a new funding round led by Asia Impact. It plans to use its fresh funding to expand its catalog of agri-inputs from over 30,000 items to 150,000 in the next three years, and to expand to southern and western parts of India, including Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and some parts of Maharashtra, Garg told TechCrunch. Similarly, the startup plans to expand its catalog by adding two new categories: animal feed covering cattle, fish and shrimp feed and testing out irrigation equipment. Agrim also seeks to enter into the market of private-label agri-inputs within the next six months in order to help farmers get inputs at retail prices instead of paying a premium. “We are trying to democratize as a platform,” said Garg. “We are seeing a lot of demand and supply mismatches. So with private labels, we want to solve for unmet demand or supply. ” Agrim claims a base of 1,200 manufacturers and 25,000 retailers serving 15 million farmers. The startup generated more than $36 million in the last financial year and is on the annual revenue run rate of nearly $60 million. The all-equity Series B round also included participation from existing investors Accion Venture Lab, India Quotient, Kalaari and Omnivore. Topics Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-08-30T04:00:00	https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/29/indias-agrim-snags-17-3m-to-help-farmers-get-inputs-like-seeds-and-pesticides-more-easily/	706	1	51a97b5d67bad2fc438b92df47c295e5	{"bias_density": 0.61, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 2, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 3, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 5, "concerns": []}
The makers of pro photography app Halide venture into video with Kino, due this February	Lux, the startup and makers of the popular pro photography appHalideandothers, is venturing into video. The team today announced its plans to debut a new app,Kino, arriving in roughly two months’ time, that will allow iPhone users to work with video in a more professional capacity. The news follows advances in iPhone video capture thathave allowed Apple to film its own press eventsusing an iPhone 15 Pro Max alongside other professional equipment. Recording artist Olivia Rodrigoalso released a music video for her track “Get Him Back!” using an iPhone 15 Pro. The Lux team additionally confirms that last fall’s launch ofLog video support, which Lux co-founderBen Sandofskysays is to “videomakers as RAW is to photographers,” inspired the team to build the new app for video. “Since we launched Halide in 2017, one of our top questions from users has been ‘When are you going to add video capture?’” says Sandofsky in an announcement video. The company’s well-received Halide app had originally capitalized on the iPhone’s support for RAW photography to win an Apple Design Award and gain it many fans, who have now been clamoring for video support in Halide. “I’m really excited to today announce: never. Halide is never going to be able to capture video,” Sandofsky teases. Instead, the company is developing a new app for this purpose called Kino. The reason to build this as a separate app, beyond being able to monetize the feature as an additional product, has to do with the use cases for the two products. Halide is focused on the pro photography market while Kino will focus on pro videography, so presumably will have a host of additional features that could lead to clutter if included in the Halide app. Sandofsky says the team has a deadline of February to ship it, as he will soon be a father. So, he explains, “We thought it would be fun this time to take you along this insane journey. ” That means, instead of building in secret followed by a splashy launch, the team at Lux will take users behind the scenes of app building as they weigh things like engineering problems and design considerations that go into developing Kino. Much more isn’t yet known about what Kino will include or when, exactly, it will arrive, but it’s likely to be another well-built app, considering the startup’s track record for iPhone photography	2023-12-04T18:46:08	https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/04/the-makers-of-pro-photography-app-halide-venture-into-video-with-kino-due-this-february/	398	0.9	723b186a3a8cb5835dfdcf81c87ff174	{"bias_density": 0.32, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 1, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}
DoorDash begins piloting drone deliveries in the US	DoorDash is expanding its partnership with Alphabet’s Wing to bring its drone delivery pilot to the U. S. , the companyannouncedon Thursday. Select users in Christiansburg, Virginia will be able to order eligible menu items from their local Wendy’s. DoorDash first launched its drone delivery pilot program in Australia in 2022, where it is now operating drone deliveries with more than 60 merchants. DoorDash users who are near the Wendy’s located at 2355 N. Franklin Street will see the new delivery option on the checkout page. Once they select the drone option, their order will be prepared and delivered via a Wing drone within 30 minutes. The company told TechCrunch that for a delivery to be placed via drone, an address must have a small clearing on the property, around two-meters in diameter, in order for the delivery to be set down. DoorDash notes that a driveway free of obstacles, like trees or protrusive objects, will make for a perfect delivery landing pad. Most of Wendy’s items will qualify for drone delivery, but certain items may not be eligible if they exceed volume and weight restrictions. If the order contains more than what one drone can carry, DoorDash will deploy up to three drones to deliver the order. If the order requires more than that, it will be delivered traditionally by a delivery person. The launch of the pilot in the U. S. comes as Alphabet has been operating small-scale deliveriesin Christiansburgsince 2019. DoorDash plans to bring the pilot to other cities in the U. S. later this year. “We’re optimistic about the value drone delivery will bring to our platform as we work to offer more efficient, sustainable, and convenient delivery options for consumers,” said Harrison Shih, senior director of DoorDash Labs, in a press release. Wing has partnerships with other companies in the U. S. , includingWalmartandWalgreens. The company has made more than 350,000 deliveries across three countries. Topics Consumer News Reporter Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor’s degree from University of Toronto and a master’s degree in journalism from Western University. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-03-21T13:49:28	https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/21/doordash-is-bringing-its-drone-delivery-pilot-to-the-u-s/	436	0.9	799582f771c59c159de69b0cfd6986f6	{"bias_density": 0.56, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 2, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 3, "concerns": []}
The ‘US Cyber Trust Mark’ finally gives device makers a reason to spend big on security	The Internet of Things (IoT) is in hacker crosshairs. Last year, more than110 million IoT malware attackstook place — an 87% increase from the previous 12 months. And as connected devices take on more critical roles in the modern home and office, tens of billions more endpoints are coming online. In this precarious landscape, both individual consumers and enterprises embracing IoT have made cybersecurity a top priority. Now the government is following suit. In July, the White House announced the launch of a “U. S. Cyber Trust Mark” as part of itsvoluntary labeling program for smart devices. The mark is a quality seal to help Americans more easily and securely select these products. It comes in the wake of similar proposed regulations like theEU’s Cyber Resilience Act. Finally, device producers will have minimum cybersecurity standards to meet. Consumers are far more likely to seek out and commit to IoT devices that have a seal like the U. S. Cyber Trust Mark, giving device makers a long-overdue incentive to get up to code. Here’s why, for the first time, device makers will begin to see cybersecurity as an investment rather than an expense. For years, IoT device makers have catered to customers that wanted cheap products and services, often at the cost of robust security. Manufacturers haven’t been driven to spend money on better protection — until the announcement of these coming changes on either side of the Atlantic. Complying with the likes of the U. S. Cyber Trust Mark makes financial sense because it ultimately saves device makers time and money down the line. While the White House label program is currently voluntary, there’s a strong possibility that it will become mandatory in a few years. Device makers that don’t join now risk fines or expensive retrofitting of whole device fleets. Just look at the EU cybersecurity plan — once in practice,national authorities could impose finesof up to €10 million for IoT device makers, or up to 2% of their worldwide annual turnover. In my opinion, cybersecurity labeling leads to stronger and longer-lasting devices, which can reduce the amount of material waste from manufacturers. Such a decrease aligns with sustainability efforts and emerging legislation in the electronic sphere and lowers the risk of manufacturers being penalized for excessive waste. Things like default passwords, always-on cloud features, and minimal product support are concerningly normal in IoT. To earn the government check mark, however, device makers must adhere to basic principles that foster a safe, efficient IoT space. This includes unique and strong passwords, data protection, automatic software updates, and incident detection capabilities. The intention is to create a security baseline and help close gaps in and among device makers. Cybersecurity is only ever as strong as its weakest link, and a cybersecurity certification forms a community of manufacturers that have a united shield against attackers. Tech giants like Amazon, Best Buy, Google, LG Electronics, Logitech, and Samsung Electronics have already pledged their support for the U. S. Cyber Trust Mark, which will appear on approved products as a distinct shield logo. This will no doubt encourage other device makers of all sizes to do the same. With more players involved, there will be more awareness around cybersecurity issues, greater innovation, and a savvier ecosystem. The certification could additionally be a springboard for more complex guidelines that develop in response to new cybersecurity challenges in the coming years. The U. S. Cyber Trust Mark and its subsequent cybersecurity reevaluation will go a long way to repairing trust in the sector. Areport from McKinseyreveals that only 30% of IoT providers believe trust is essential in their solutions; meanwhile, 60% of customers consider it crucial. This trust gap suggests that device makers haven’t been fully meeting consumer needs and aren’t building long-term relationships — which translates to lost profits. By demonstrating that they are dedicated to security and trustworthy experiences via a certification, device makers can improve user retention and loyalty. We already know that consumers gravitate to products that have a tick of approval — just look at the Energy Star label. This government-backed symbol identifies appliances that are energy efficient, and consumersexplicitly saythat the certification positively influences their decision to buy a product with this label. Users see these marks as a prevetting service, where they know that the goods have been assessed beforehand and achieved government-defined requirements. IoT device makers can expect the same bottom-line benefits. The U. S. Cyber Trust Mark is the beginning of a more formalized cybersecurity structure in IoT. It will fuel a shift in device making, where manufacturers spend more on cybersecurity but equally reap more valuable returns. And, device makers that invest sooner will not only be better positioned with their audiences, but they’ll also be poised to smoothly navigate an inevitably more complex digital landscape. Topics Contributor Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2023-08-23T12:00:32	https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/23/the-us-cyber-trust-mark-finally-gives-device-makers-a-reason-to-spend-big-on-security/	874	1	c514e608473550733cdb7e765ce6962b	{"bias_density": 0.1, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
There was just one fintech unicorn minted in the first quarter	Global fintech funding totaled $15 billion in the first quarter of this year, growing 55% from the fourth quarter, according to CB Insights’ latest State of Fintechreport. While this generally may seem like a win, it’s important to note a few things. First, 2020 and 2021 were unique years where investment in fintech broke records. By comparison, fintech fundingamounted to$75. 2 billion in all of 2022, down 46% compared with a staggering$131. 5 billion raised in 2021. From the numbers for the first quarter, it’s clear that the market is working on a correction. Second, of the $15 billion raised during the first quarter of this year,$6. 5 billion of that was all Stripe. Without that raise, CB Insights said funding would have amounted to $8. 5 billion, or a 12% drop in funding from the fourth quarter of 2022. And third, if we remove Stripe’s round and stick with the $8. 5 billion, when comparing this quarter to first quarters of previous years, funding is the lowest it has been since 2019. Meanwhile, the number of deals is also down. There were 983 deals made in the first quarter, a decrease from 1,007 in the fourth quarter of 2022 and 1,629 in the first quarter of 2022. A bright spot in the market was “megarounds,” which are deals valued at $100 million or more. These deals accounted for 61% of total funding in the first quarter, a whopping 179% increase quarter over quarter across 16 deals and a total of $9. 2 billion, CB Insights reported. Following Stripe’s deal wasRippling, which raised $500 millionin mid-March as Silicon Valley Bank was melting down. Notably, deal count was down, dropping 24% quarter over quarter. Early-stage funding continued to dominate in fintech, however; for the first quarter, it hit a new high, accounting for 72% of deal share in the three-month period, CB Insights reported. Since 2019, that number has been around 65% and rising to 69% in the first quarter of 2022. Though the United States led across all stages during the quarter, it’s worth noting that six of the top 10 fintech seed and angel rounds were invested outside of the U. S. United Kingdom–based Carbonplace, a carbon credit settlement startup, raised a whopping $45 million seed round during the quarter. Speaking of the U. S. , the region grabbed $10. 5 billion in overall funding for the first quarter, which is triple the amount of funding from the fourth quarter of 2022, which was $3. 5 billion, and coincidentally a five-year low. The number of deals also rebounded from the fourth quarter, up 23% to 434. CB Insights notes that excluding Stripe’s round (recall it was $6. 5 billion), funding in the U. S. was $4 billion and would have still eclipsed the fourth quarter. Drilling down into deal stage, early-stage deal share in the U. S. increased to 68%, which is a five-year high, according to CB Insights. Meanwhile, following a steady decrease in funding dollars going into the payments sector, Stripe’s megaround helped turn this around to the tune of a 200% jump to $8. 1 billion in the first quarter compared to $2. 7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022. Looking quarter to quarter, it is slightly down from the first quarter of 2022’s $8. 3 billion. Meanwhile, the number of deals continued its decline, falling to 161, down from 195 in the fourth quarter. That marked the ninth straight decrease in deal volume, according to CB Insights. The increase in investment dollars was seen most prominently in early-stage deals, which accounted for 74% of the overall deals and a five-year high, up from 66% in 2022. Other highlights of the report include: Image Credits:CB Insights Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign uphere. Got a news tip or inside information about a topic we covered? We’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at maryann@techcrunch. com. Or you can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch. com. Happy to respect anonymity requests. Topics Senior Reporter Christine Hall wrote about enterprise/B2B, e-commerce, and foodtech for TechCrunch, and venture capital rounds for Crunchbase News. Based in Houston, Christine previously reported for the Houston Business Journal, the Texas Medical Center’s Pulse magazine, and Community Impact Newspaper. She has an undergraduate journalism degree from Murray State University and a graduate degree from The Ohio State University. Sr. Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2023-04-18T22:39:30	https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/18/there-was-just-one-fintech-unicorn-birth-in-the-first-quarter/	803	1	ff1d52b2d46185d6010ea5acdfa94cdd	{"bias_density": 0.11, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
Singaporean e-commerce firm Qoo10’s Korean units face probe due to payment delays to merchants	The e-commerce market in South Korea ranks as one of the largest in the world, but it’s also proving to be a precarious one. On Thursday, South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission announced that it had launched an investigation into two major South Korean e-commerce platforms owned byQoo10— Ticket Monster (TMON) andWeMakePrice— for failing to pay out funds to merchants. South Korean officials said that some 60,000 merchants are collectively owed $123 million (170 billion KRW). Both companies have cash liquidity problems, so to shore up operations, they have also stopped issuing refunds to consumers. Meanwhile, South Korean banks have also temporarily halted loan services to TMON and WeMakePrice, due to payment delays, according to local media reports. The situation underscores the delicate and competitive state of the market in the country. Naver, Coupang, and SSG currently are the largest players in the country’s e-commerce market, but together as of 2022, they accounted for a market share of only 45%. In a business where profitability is highly dependent on economies of scale, there are many others duking it out for even smaller market shares, and many of these have been struggling and making losses. The ecosystem effect has been swift forQoo10. InterPark Triple, which sells travel products on the platforms, said it would cease to do so if not paid by today, July 25. Yanolja, InterPark Triple’s parent, said in an emailed statement that it has stopped selling on both platforms already. Qoo10, TMON and WeMakePrice did not immediately respond to a TechCrunch request for comment. Local media are pointing the finger at Qoo10 — specifically at a series of acquisitions that the parent company made over the last few years, often of underperforming e-commerce platforms. In addition toacquiring WeMakePrice in April 2023, andTMON in August 2022, it picked up Korean online shopping platformInterPark Commerce (not the same as InterPark Triple) in March 2023and Hong Kong-based Korchina Logisticsvia its logistics unit Qxpress. Earlier this year, Qoo10 also acquiredWish, the U. S. -based e-commerce platform, andAK Mall, an e-commerce company in South Korea. These acquisitions were part of Qoo10’s expansion strategy, aiming to strengthen its market presence and prepare for an initial public offering on Nasdaq in the U. S. However, they also brought about financial burdens and operational challenges, leading to the current liquidity crisis. Founded in 2010, Qoo10 is a Singapore-headquartered joint venture firm formed by the U. S. e-commerce company eBay and Gmarket founder Young-bae Ku, a storied e-commerce mogul in South Korea. It’s currently backed by KKR, among others. Ku founded Gmarket in 2000 in South Korea and expanded its business into Japan in 2007 and Singapore in 2008. After Ku sold Gmarket’s South Korean unit to eBay in 2009, Gmarket rebranded as Qoo10 in 2012 and penetrated other Asian markets, including Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, andIndia. (Gmarket listed in the U. S. via American Depositary Sharesin 2006. ) In 2018,eBay acquired Giosis’business, including Qoo10’s Japanese unit,for $573 million. Topics Reporter, Asia Kate Park is a reporter at TechCrunch, with a focus on technology, startups and venture capital in Asia. She previously was a financial journalist at Mergermarket covering M&A, private equity and venture capital. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-07-25T12:58:50	https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/25/singaporean-e-commerce-firm-qoo10s-korean-units-face-probe-due-to-payment-delays-to-merchants/	601	1	7c58e7d06c7155e5028b32419e82d671	{"bias_density": 0.42, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 2, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 3, "concerns": []}
AuthMind raises seed funding for its identity SecOps platform	AuthMind, a Maryland-based startup that aims to help businesses protect themselves from identity-related cyberattacks, today announced that it has raised an $8. 5 million seed round led by Ballistic Ventures, with strategic participation from IBM Ventures. The company was co-founded by CEOShlomi Yanaiand CTOAnkur Panchbudhe. Both previously founded (and sold) a number of security startups before teaming up to launch AuthMind in 2020. With AuthMind, they are looking to make their mark in the booming identity security space. As Yanai told me, the co-founders talked to a lot of security professionals in the run-up to building AuthMind. “AuthMind started from ongoing discussions with identity and cyber leaders,” he said. “The environment changed a lot and there are a lot of identity solutions out there — and they invest a lot in identity security solutions. Most of these help them define the identity surface and make sure they enable employee access. But the key problem that they kept complaining about is: We’ve made all those investments, but at the end of the day, hackers don’t hack in, they log in. ” AuthMind promises to help these companies secure their identity surface and identify attacks and vulnerabilities in real time. It’s doing so by, among other things, analyzing a company’s network flow. Yanai argued that when a company integrates AuthMind, without knowing anything about that company’s identities, assets and directories, the service can quickly build a holistic view of all of their cloud, on-prem, SaaS apps, password managers and more. “We do that by actually looking at the flow activity — because everything is there,” he said. “But what was missing was the identity context. We really understand the way identity is conducting the operation all the time on the flow activity level. ” With this, the company can bring the identity context to almost everything that happens within a company’s cybersecurity infrastructure and network. That, Yanai noted, is especially helpful during post-incident investigations. Ballistic Ventures co-founder and general partnerJake Seid, who also previously invested in the likes of Brex, Data Robot, Carta, Drata and Zipline while at Stone Bridge Ventures, noted that he believes that the security perimeter has extended from the network to identify. “We think the next generation of big new companies will not just be reinventing identity but then protecting identity. And Shlomi’s vision of identity SecOps was really the most holistic that we’ve seen,” he said. “It’s not just about starting with protection through posture management and understanding misconfigurations, but then post-breach detection and response and doing it in a way that changes the model of security from ‘ticket and fix it’ to guardrails in production. We think that’s a really profound model because it enables businesses to both be more secure and to move faster for engineering teams and business teams. ” IBM Venture’s George Mina offered a similar assessment. “We continue to see an expanding attack surface across the identity infrastructure and beyond. AuthMind’s ability to leverage AI to ingest and correlate network flows with event logs enables security teams to detect threats as they happen and visualize attack paths across hybrid environments,” he said. The founders started working on AuthMind in 2020 and then worked with design partners to get the solution right. Yanai noted that all of those original design partners later became paying customers. Today, AuthMind has a number of customers that manage tens — and sometimes more than 100,000 — identities across their networks. Many of these, he said, are in the insurance, manufacturing and retail industries, though as of now, they all want to remain anonymous. Looking ahead the AuthMind team plans to focus on expanding its go-to-market capabilities. In the long run, the team also plans to look at other security-related areas its service can cover, including helping its customer with their security audits for various certifications. In the meantime, though, the company also plans to improve its core technologies, of course. Topics Editor Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2023-09-12T11:00:09	https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/12/authmind-raises-seed-funding-for-its-identity-secops-platform/	726	1	097642c8d4adfe6a734f550177d836fd	{"bias_density": 0.97, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 5, "age_bias": 2, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 8, "concerns": ["High demographic bias indicators"]}
Stop doomscrolling and watch the ‘Great Moose Migration’ livestream	You could say that TikTok is ruining our attention spans, and yet, viewers around the world are tuning in to watch a monotonous livestream from a Swedish TV station that they’ve probably never heard of. It’s time forthe Great Moose Migration. For thousands of years, moose have crossed the Ångerman River each spring, trekking to a warmer summer habitat. But since 2019, the whole world can watch along for three weeks as Sweden’s SVT broadcaster airs its livestream of the migration online, using over 30 cameras to catch all of the painstakingly slow action. For the most part, the livestream shows tranquil scenes of forests and rivers, and if you’re lucky, you just might glimpse a passing moose, blissfully unaware of its international superstardom. It’s just a moose, trudging along without a care in the world. Most of the time, the stream is nearly silent. Other times, you’ll hear the wind gust and the birds chirp. It’s nice, even if you forget you left the livestream tab open on your computer and get jumpscared by a flock of creatures thousands of miles away. As one Swedish studenttold the AP: “I feel relaxed, but at the same time I’m like, ‘Oh, there’s a moose. Oh, what if there’s a moose? I can’t go to the toilet!’” Even overnight, the stream continues. Lack of sunlight, be damned — night vision cameras will make sure we see every last bit of moose content. However, the stark black and white image evokes “The Blair Witch Project” more than National Geographic. But a spooky moose sighting is still a moose sighting. Last year,9 million viewerstuned into SVT’s moose stream. By comparison, the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week saw more than22 million viewersin 2023. Considering that SVT is just streaming live feeds of nature with a 15-person staff, that’s a pretty impressive comparison. What makes this kind of livestream so compelling is that it’s so drastically different from what we’re normally exposed to on the internet. Your TikTok feed shows you bite-sized videos so specifically tailored to your interests that it’s hard to look away. YouTubers meticulously edit their videos to keep us engaged for as long as possible. But the moose don’t want anything from us. They don’t even know we’re here, cheering them on. Topics Senior Writer Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B. A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos. Send tips through Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to @amanda. 100. For anything else, email amanda@techcrunch. com. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2025-04-15T20:08:21	https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/15/stop-doomscrolling-and-watch-the-great-moose-migration-livestream/	559	1	ea1c2754c1b045e530b4425bdbd84d52	{"bias_density": 0.45, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 2, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 3, "concerns": []}
Shaquille O’Neal talks investing in edtech and startups that are going to ‘change people’s lives’	Shaquille O’Neal, 15-time NBA All-Star, four-time NBA champion and three-time NBA Finals MVP, took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about his passion for investing in edtech and backing projects that aim to change people’s lives. He discussed how he got into investing, the road to developing his strategy and his belief in the importance of education. O’Neal is the lead investor inEdsoma, an AI-powered reading, education and communication platform for children. The NBA star was joined onstage with Edsoma CEO Kyle Wallgren, who says the startup’s goal is to teach a million kids to read. O’Neal touched on how he developed his investing strategy after hearing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos say that if you invest in things, you are going to change people’s lives. “I went to a conference in ‘97 or ‘98 and I heard a beautiful bald-headed man by the name of Jeff Bezos say if you invest in things, it’s going to change people’s lives,” O’Neal said. “So when Kyle came into the office and he started talking about children, about education and his love for children, I knew it was going to be a great fit. And when I heard Jeff Bezos say that, I started investing in things that’s gonna change people’s lives. Andthat’sbeengreatforme, andIdon’tliketositupherelikeI’manexpert,butthathasalwaysbeenmystyle. ” The app helps children learn correct pronunciation as they read aloud, and it also lets parents read with their children from any location, which is helpful for parents who live separately or travel for work. Wallgren shared that during Edsoma’s first month of launching, the company boarded 300 students. The company has now onboarded 9,000 students and eventually wants to change a million lives. Wallgren said that he and O’Neal want to ensure that children from every type of environment have access to education. The pair also wanted to make sure that if another pandemic were to happen, children who were are unable to afford tutors would still be able to have access to education. O’Neal believes that although he doesn’t have a specific formula when it comes to the VC world, having a sense of humor and being nice has given him a lot of opportunities. O’Neal, who brought that belief with him on stage as he invited a fan on-stage to sit next to him, said that he doesn’t want to be known for his fame, but for being nice. “Mebeingnicehasgottenmealotofopportunity,” O’Neal said. “I wish it was a formula to how I get all my deal flows, but it’s just me being me and me having a sense of humor being nice and I’ve been very, very lucky. When [Wallgren] was building Edsoma, he told me that he thought of me because he knows the relationship that I have with children. ” O’Neal, who earned his MBA in 2005, says he believes that education is important to him largely because his parents pushed him into education. Reflecting on his journey on getting his Master’s degree, he says he did it for the children who look up to him to help them understand the importance of education. “I did it for my children, and I did it for the children that follow me [because I] just wanted them to know that education is very, very important,” he said. “I’m rich and famous and got a lot of followers, but I wanted to show them that there’s more to that. ” O’Neal believes that literacy can drive positive change, not only for children, but also for people who are incarcerated. “There’s actually a study that shows that if you can teach somebody that’s in prison how to read and increase to grade levels, they go from an 87% chance of reoccurring down to an 18% chance,” Wallgren said. “So literacy can drive economies that can change everything. ” Wallgren added that when Edsoma came to be, the focus wasn’t on making money, as the team was intent on making a difference when it comes to education, which aligned with O’Neal’s investing strategy. “Whenyoulookateducation,there’sstudiesthatshowthattheyactuallydesignorselecthowmanyprisoncellsaregoingtobeneededbasedoffthird–gradeliteracylevels 10 year out,” Wallgren said. “Soyouneedtobeabletotellthatstoryandhaveitreallyresonatewiththepeoplethatareinvestinginit,thenwecanactuallychangethewaytheentirecountryoperatesjustbyteachingkidshowtoread. And[O’Neal]reallygotthat. ” When asked about how he weeds through the hundreds of companies that approach him every week, O’Neal says he goes with his gut feeling, and then passes it over to his panel. He says it’s not quick process, especially because of his strategy to only invest in startups that are going to change lives. Regarding the recent AI boom, O’Neal said if he does invest in an AI startup, it’s going to be one that’s changing lives. O’Neal, who has invested in several notable companies likeGoogle,Appleand Ring, also reflected on his early investments. “I was at Four Seasons, I was eating lunch and there were four distinguished gentleman sitting there playing with their kids and the kids recognize me and they’re playing with me,” he said. “Basically, I’m doing a babysitting job and one gentleman says ‘I want to talk about this company called Google’ and just talking about search engines and ‘you’ll be able to type in anything,’ and I was like, ‘That sounds good. ’ We had a meeting with them and it looked good and I put some money in and I forgot about it. And then the newspaper told me how much I made and I couldn’t believe how much I made. ” After his investment in Google went well, he said he might as well try again. O’Neal admits that although he has made a couple of mistakes trying to get rich quick, he now has a strategy that he believes works. Topics Consumer News Reporter Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor’s degree from University of Toronto and a master’s degree in journalism from Western University. Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2023-09-19T22:47:54	https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/shaquille-oneal-investing-edtech-and-things-that-are-going-to-change-peoples-lives/	1,037	1	26d758d07706c591aa37d73f5e24f6e0	{"bias_density": 0.7, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 3, "age_bias": 3, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 1}, "total_bias_indicators": 8, "concerns": ["High demographic bias indicators"]}
Kalshi CEO admits enlisting influencers to dis Polymarket in a now-deleted podcast segment	KalshiCEO Tarek Mansour confirmed on a podcast interview that his employees asked social media influencers to promote memes about the FBI’s raid on the home of his archrival, the CEO of Polymarket. Both companies offer competing events-betting markets, a new kind of betting industry where people wager about the outcomes of events ranging from elections to popular culture. TheFBI raided the home of Polymarket CEOShayne Coplan last month, and it turns out Kalshi tried to capitalize on its rival’s misfortunes by asking influencers to post memes about it, Mansour said. “Some of our team got pretty heated. They didn’t pay anyone; they just asked some of our longstanding affiliates to post some of the memes,” Mansourtold Nichole Wischoffon this week’s episode of her show First Money In. Pirate Wires, a media outlet founded by Mike Solana,reportedthat Kalshi employees were paying influencers to post content suggesting that Polymarket and its CEO Shayne Coplan were engaging in illegal activities. The Pirate Wires article, however, also acknowledged its own apparent conflicts of interest with this report. Solana is a chief marketing officer for Founders Fund, one of Polymarket’s key investors, and Polymarket is an advertiser for Pirate Wires. The podcast segment discussing Kalshi’s response to the raid and the rivalry with Polymarket was deleted shortly after it initially aired. TechCrunch, however, has obtained and listened to the deleted portion. On the podcast, Mansour accused Polymarket of engaging in similar social media tactics against Kalshi, too. “Both companies have been doing this,” he said, adding that his team believed Polymarket was behind some social media posts suggesting that “we also got raided by the FBI. That did not happen,” he said. “We did not get raided by the FBI. ” TechCrunch couldn’t confirm these allegations. Neither Polymarket nor Kalshi responded to our requests for comment. But the CEO did say on the podcast that he let the social media wars “go too far” by members of his company, adding, “I don’t think there’s a point going tit for tat. ” While Kalshi didn’t fire the involved employees, Mansour said the individuals “understand that it was a mistake, and they shouldn’t do this again. ” Polymarket alleged the reasons for the raid had to do with political motivations surrounding wagers on the U. S. presidential election, although both markets were making bets on its outcome. According to Bloomberg, theDepartment of Justice is investigating Polymarketfor allegedly allowing U. S. users to engage in restricted trades. Following a 2022 settlement with the Commodity and Exchange Commission,Polymarket is barredfrom allowing U. S. traders to place bets on its platform, Bloomberg also reported. Kalshi, unlike Polymarket, has been legally permitted to accept trades from U. S. residents since 2021. In September the company alsowon a lawsuitthat permitted it to accept bets on election outcomes. Kalshi, whose backers include Sequoia and Y Combinator, iscurrently raising a funding roundof as much or more than $50 million, TechCrunch reported. Topics Reporter, Venture Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-12-13T22:51:34	https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/13/kalshi-ceo-admits-enlisting-influencers-to-dis-polymarket-in-a-now-deleted-podcast-segment/	561	1	f992fff2df2fc4b101040395e8358031	{"bias_density": 0.6, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 2, "age_bias": 1, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 4, "concerns": []}
Meta lets businesses create ad-embedded chatbots	At theMeta Connect 2024 developer conferencein Menlo Park on Wednesday, Meta announced that it’s expanding its AI-powered business chatbots to brands on WhatsApp and Messenger using click-to-message ads. Now businesses can set up ad-embedded chatbots that talk to customers, offer support, and facilitate orders, Meta says. “From answering common customer questions to discussing products and finalizing a purchase, these business AIs can help businesses engage with more customers and increase sales,” the company wrote in a blog post provided to TechCrunch. Meta continues to inject more of its ad products and tools with AI. In May,the company began letting advertisers create full new ad images with AIand insert AI-generated alternate versions of ad headlines. And in June, Meta began testing AI-powered customer support for businesses using WhatsApp, which automatically answers customer queries related to frequently asked questions. Meta claims that more than a million advertisers are using its AI ad tools and that 15 million ads were created with the tools last month. AI ads boost click-through rates, Meta says. But there’s evidence to suggest customers may not like ads with chatbots. Onesurvey commissionedearlier this year by customer experience platform Callvu found that the majority of people would rather wait at least a minute to speak with a live customer agent than chat instantly with an AI	2024-09-25T17:28:13	https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/25/meta-lets-businesses-create-ad-embedded-chatbots/	217	0.9	8e11d3a24835c050c99311358b56c3a5	{"bias_density": 0.0, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 0, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 0, "concerns": []}
Zeno emerges from stealth to crib Tesla’s master plan for Africa and beyond	When Elon Musk published Tesla’s first“master plan”in 2006, it seemed a bit far-fetched that batteries would end up changing the automotive industry, much less global power production and consumption. Today, as electric vehicles continue to gain market share and massive batteries displace smoke-spewing power plants from the electrical grid, that notion seems less improbable. This year in the U. S. alone, developers are planning to add15 gigawattsof grid-scale battery capacity. Yet Michael Spencer thinks that the shift that’s occurring in places like the U. S. , Europe, and China is just the beginning. “The Tesla master plan has more legs and more room to run with lower hurdles in emerging markets,” he told TechCrunch. To prove the point, Spencer, a Tesla alumnus, foundedZenoin 2022. The startup, which until now has operated in stealth, has been methodically exploring how batteries might transform life in emerging markets, beginning in East Africa. The company has attracted considerable talent, including Swaroop Bhushan, who helped design Lucid’s powertrain; Rob Newberry, who helped oversee development of Apple’s AirPort and Apple TV; and others from Gogoro, Tesla and more. Zeno’s first product is a motorbike with a swappable battery. But in Spencer’s vision, that’s just the start. Swappable batteries won’t just be powering motorbikes in Africa, but other parts of people’s lives as well. Motorbike taxis, known asbodaboda, are ubiquitous in East African cities, helping people navigate choking gridlock for far less money than a taxi or personal car. For drivers, though, the costs can be astronomical. Motorbike taxi drivers spend a disproportionate amount of their income on fuel, about 50% compared with afew percentfor commuters in California, Spencer points out. Taking a cue from Taiwanese-startupGogoro, which helped pioneer the battery swap concept in scooters, entrepreneurs throughout Africa put their own spin on it. The bikes are sold with holes in their chassis where drivers plug in rented batteries. When the packs are near empty, drivers can find a nearby location to exchange it for a fully charged one. As a result, swap stations from startups like Ampersand Solar, Arc Ride,Roam, Spiro, andZembohave sprouted like grass after a monsoon rain. Zeno is the latest entrant to the field. The company started by testing around 40 Chinese-made electric motorbikes in various models in Kenya to see how they’d fare. It only took a couple months before the bikes were trashed — they simply weren’t designed for taxi duty on East Africa’s harsh roads — but Spencer said the experience validated his thesis. It also turned up something else. “There were lots of questions around, like, ‘Why can’t I use this battery for other things?’” Spencer recalled. “We saw some people trying to hack batteries when the power went out, to try to run the lights or to run the flour mill in their shop. ” The Zeno team knew they’d need more durable, heavier bikes that could carry a driver, a passenger or two, and possibly some cargo. It’s working with a manufacturer in India to produce bikes to its specifications, and soon after that model launches, additional manufacturers will release their own two-, three-, and light four-wheel vehicles that will be compatible with the startup’s batteries, Spencer said. Bigger bikes demand more power, which means they need bigger batteries. Zeno’s lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) battery packs store 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity, and its motorbike will accept two packs. With one midday swap, that will give the bike slightly more range than most taxi drivers need in a day, Spencer said. The extra capacity “opens up all these other doors. ” Spencer and his colleagues started building docks so people could use the motorbikes’ spare power to charge phones and run various appliances. “We prototyped an induction cook stove that ran off of our swappable motorcycle battery and got a pretty cool little microcosm,” Spencer said. Motorbike taxi drivers could drive home after a day of work, hook their batteries up to the stove to cook dinner and then breakfast the next morning. At that point they would have 10 to 15% charge left, which is enough to drive back to town to swap for a full battery at a self-service station. Every part of the system will have internet connectivity so the company can monitor the batteries, anticipate demand, and facilitate financing. The bikes use a Type 6 connector so that drivers can plug into public chargers during a lunch break, for example, or charge overnight at home if the need arises. The company is also building a charging network that will be available to non-Zeno drivers. Zeno’s first motorbikes will hit roads in East Africa and India in early 2025. Customers will have to buy or lease the vehicle, which will cost less than a new gasoline-powered model when configured without a battery. The startup will lease the batteries under a subscription model (though people can also buy the battery outright if they choose). Customers can add energy to the subscription bundle or buy it separately on a pay-per-use model. Zeno’s goal is to undercut gas-powered bikes with the upfront cost of a bike and initial battery subscription. And because the power costs of electric motorbikes are about half that of a gas model’s fuel bill, Spencer said the savings improve over time. Shortly after the bike launches, the company plans to release its home battery dock with an available solar panel, which Spencer hopes will open new markets. “If you don’t have grid connectivity, you can bring your batteries home from a swap station, and you can use them to power your home. If you want to put solar on your house, that home docking station works as a solar inverter to charge those batteries. So you can be a Zeno battery subscriber for a decade and never swap batteries. ” To fund its launch and expansion, the company recently raised an oversubscribed $9. 5 million seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital and Toyota Ventures with participation from 4DX Ventures, Active Impact, Advantedge, MCJ, and RedBlue. Zeno’s playbook certainly has echoes of Tesla’s, offering customers electrified transportation with a lower cost of ownership. But by focusing on a portable battery, Zeno is selling the ability to use energy whenever, something more akin to how people use fossil fuels today. The motorbike is a central part of the sales pitch, but the battery might be the real selling point. Topics Senior Reporter, Climate Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-09-19T13:30:00	https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/19/zeno-emerges-from-stealth-to-crib-teslas-master-plan-for-africa-and-beyond/	1,136	1	f018ec8feda75db656d5d065ef0bfbf0	{"bias_density": 0.48, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 2, "geographic_bias": 3, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 6, "concerns": []}
Reddit is bringing AI-powered, automatic translation to dozens of new countries	Reddit isbringingmachine learning-powered translations to more than 35 new locales in Europe, Asia, and Latin America in a move designed to open the largely English-centric social network to more users. The service comes nearly five months after Reddit first introducedsite-wide translation for French speakers, though the company hadpreviously enabledusers to translate individual posts across several languages. Reddit already allows users to stipulate their preferred content language for post recommendations, as well as set their display language, which translates the Reddit interface itself. Today’s announcement follows seven months afterReddit went public, and although the company has said its user base and ad revenuecontinue to grow, the most obvious conduit for attracting a larger base is to makeallits content available in more languages. The big selling point of Reddit’s new translation feature is that users can configure both posts and the corresponding comments to auto-translate from a community’s original language to the user’s own language according to their Reddit settings. This means that a conversation can flow in a given subreddit between two different languages, and users won’t have to manually translate every response. You can post in whatever language you want, and as long as Reddit supports it, it will automatically be translated into the community’s pre-set language. To do this, users in supported locales will see a new translate icon in their menu that will let them view content in their preferred language. Posts that have been translated by Reddit will be labeled as such, and users will be able to choose to view posts in the original language if they wish. Similar to what it did with translating posts in French earlier this year, Reddit said that the content will be indexed in the supported languages for search engines, meaning people Googling for answers to questions in their own tongue will see results from Reddit, too. Reddit doesn’t outline all the new languages it will support, but the translation service is already available in Brazil and Spain as of today, so one can assume that Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish are now supported — though presumably only in those countries. Reddit added that it plans to expand AI-powered translations to Germany, Italy, the Philippines, and markets across Latin America “in the coming weeks. ” Topics Senior Reporter Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’ Slate Auto drops ‘under $20,000’ pricing after Trump administration ends federal EV tax credit Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can’t stop hiring? Google rolls out its new Veo 3 video-generation model globally	2024-09-25T09:24:22	https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/25/reddit-is-bringing-ai-powered-automatic-translation-to-dozens-of-new-countries/	448	0.9	d998b8045411a0e3c05f70fea9da7b47	{"bias_density": 0.18, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 1, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 0, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 1, "concerns": []}
In just 3 months, Ramp’s valuation jumped to $16B, up from $13B	Posted: Spend management startup Rampannouncedon Tuesday that it raised a $200 million Series E led by its largest investor, Founders Fund, at a post-money valuation of $16 billion. This is a jaw-dropping $3 billion increase over the$13 billion valuation Ramp announcedjust a few months ago in March, after a $150 million secondary share sale. Its current valuation is also more than doublethe $7. 65 billion post-money valuation Ramp hit a little over a year agowhen it raised $150 million. CEO Eric Glyman is remaining mum about revenue figures, although in March he said revenue had experienced “incredible growth” over the previous figures it released. In the summer of 2023, he said Ramp had passed $300 million in annualized revenue. Other VCs, largely existing investors, who participated in the Series E round include Thrive Capital, D1 Capital Partners, General Catalyst, GIC, ICONIQ Growth, Khosla Ventures, Sands Capital, 8VC, Lux Capital, Stripes, 137 Ventures, Avenir Growth, and Definition Capital. Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage. TechCrunch's AI experts cover the latest news in the fast-moving field. Every Monday, gets you up to speed on the latest advances in aerospace. Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly. By submitting your email, you agree to ourTermsandPrivacy Notice	2025-06-17T17:10:57	https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/in-just-3-months-ramps-valuation-jumped-to-16b-up-from-13b/	223	0.9	60a71e365e4c19a365eaf4fc4c6c8013	{"bias_density": 0.6, "is_balanced": true, "bias_scores": {"political_left": 0, "political_right": 0, "gender_bias": 2, "age_bias": 0, "geographic_bias": 0, "economic_bias": 0}, "total_bias_indicators": 2, "concerns": []}

End of preview. Expand in Data Studio

TechCrunch News Articles Dataset

📊 Dataset Overview

This dataset contains 10,265 high-quality news articles scraped from TechCrunch, one of the leading technology news websites. The dataset includes comprehensive article content, metadata, and quality assessments suitable for various NLP tasks including text classification, sentiment analysis, summarization, and content generation.

🎯 Key Features

10,265 articles with full text content
High-quality filtering with quality scores (avg: 0.96)
Content cleaned and optimized for ML applications
Rich metadata including publish date, bias analysis, and quality metrics
Comprehensive bias analysis for ethical AI development
Ready for NLP tasks including classification, summarization, and generation
HuggingFace optimized format for seamless integration

📈 Dataset Statistics

Metric	Value
Total Articles	10,265
Average Content Length	4,263 characters
Average Word Count	686 words
Average Quality Score	0.957
Date Range	2023-04-10 to 2025-07-09
File Size (JSON)	51.8 MB
File Size (Parquet)	26.3 MB

🏗️ Data Structure

The dataset contains the following columns:

title: Article headline
content: Full article text content (cleaned)
publish_date: Publication timestamp
url: Original article URL
word_count: Number of words in content
quality_score: Automated quality assessment (0-1)
content_hash: MD5 hash for deduplication
bias_analysis: JSON string containing comprehensive bias assessment

🔍 Quality Assurance

This dataset implements multiple quality control measures:

Content Filtering: Minimum 16 words per article
Content Cleaning: Navigation elements and website artifacts removed
Quality Scoring: Automated assessment based on content length, structure, and readability
Deduplication: Content hash-based duplicate removal
Bias Analysis: Comprehensive bias detection and scoring
Manual Review: Sample validation for quality assurance

Quality Score Distribution

Minimum: 0.600
Average: 0.957
Maximum: 1.000

🚀 Getting Started

Loading the Dataset

# Using datasets library (recommended)
from datasets import load_dataset
dataset = load_dataset('abhilash88/techcrunch-articles')

# Using pandas for Parquet format
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_parquet('path/to/techcrunch_articles.parquet')

# Access the training split
df = dataset['train'].to_pandas()

Basic Analysis

# Dataset overview
print(f"Total articles: {len(dataset['train']):,}")
print(f"Features: {dataset['train'].features}")

# Convert to pandas for analysis
df = dataset['train'].to_pandas()
print(f"Average word count: {df['word_count'].mean():.0f}")
print(f"Date range: {df['publish_date'].min()} to {df['publish_date'].max()}")

# Quality distribution
print(f"Quality score distribution:")
print(df['quality_score'].describe())

📜 Legal and Attribution

Data Source

Original Source: TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
Scraping Method: Respectful automated collection with rate limiting
Usage Rights: Educational and research purposes
Attribution: Please cite this dataset in academic work

Recommended Citation

@dataset{techcrunch_articles_2025,
  title={TechCrunch News Articles Dataset},
  author={Abhilash Sahoo},
  year={2025},
  publisher={Hugging Face},
  url={https://huggingface.co/datasets/abhilash88/techcrunch-articles},
  note={10,265 high-quality technology news articles with bias analysis}
}

📞 Contact

Creator: Abhilash Sahoo
Hugging Face: @abhilash88
Issues: Please use the dataset discussion section

🚀 Ready to build amazing NLP applications with high-quality technology news content!

Downloads last month: 118

Size of downloaded dataset files:

27.6 MB

Size of the auto-converted Parquet files:

27.6 MB

Number of rows:

10,265