Author: TechBrunch

The Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped its lawsuit against cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, founded by twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The Winklevoss twins were donors to Donald Trump's reelection campaign and also supported his family's business ventures. In a joint filing Friday, the SEC and Gemini asked the court to dismiss a lawsuit centered on the collapse of an investment product called Gemini Earn, which left some investors without access to their funds for 18 months. New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Gemini in 2023, accusing the company of defrauding investors. Justifying the SEC's dismissal of the case, the…

A failed December effort to take down parts of Poland's energy grid was the work of Russian government hackers known for causing energy disruptions in the past, according to a security research firm that investigated the incident. Poland's Energy Minister Milos Motyka told reporters last week that hackers targeted two thermal power plants in attempted cyberattacks on December 29 and 30, attempting to disrupt communication links between renewable energy facilities such as wind turbines and electricity distribution companies. Motyka called the incident “the strongest attack” on Poland's energy infrastructure in years, and the Polish government blamed Moscow for the attempt.…

Microsoft provided the FBI with recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drives of three laptops as part of a federal investigation, Forbes reported on Friday. Many modern Windows computers rely on full disk encryption called BitLocker, which is enabled by default. This type of technology requires that when the computer is locked and powered off, no one other than the device owner can access the data. But by default, BitLocker recovery keys are uploaded to Microsoft's cloud, allowing the tech giant and even law enforcement to access them and use them to decrypt BitLocker-encrypted drives, as in…

Time flies and these savings pay off as well. The lowest ticket prices for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 and the 50% off +1 pass exclusive to the first 500 registrants are almost gone. If you're wondering which technology conferences to include in your calendar this year, now's your chance. Register now to save up to $680 on passes and get 50% off your second ticket. This offer ends next week, January 30th, or as soon as the first 500 tickets are acquired, whichever comes first. Why is it confusing? From October 13th to 15th, San Francisco's Moscone West will become a…

Kais Khimji has spent most of his professional career as a venture investor, including six years as a partner at the prominent VC firm Sequoia Capital. But like several other former Sequoia partners, including David Vélez, who founded Brazilian digital bank Nubank, Kimji (pictured left) always wanted to be a startup founder. He announced Thursday that he has revived an idea he started working on as a student at Harvard University nearly a decade ago and reborn as Blockit, an AI calendar scheduling company. In a major vote of confidence, Kimji's former employer Sequoia led the company's $5 million seed…

LiveKit, which develops infrastructure software for real-time AI voice and video applications, announced $100 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation. The round, which comes 10 months after LiveKit's previous funding, was led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investors including Altimeter Capital Management, hanabi Capital, and Redpoint Ventures. LiveKit powers OpenAI's ChatGPT voice mode. The startup's other customers include xAI, Salesforce, and Tesla, as well as 911 emergency service operators and mental health providers. The company was founded in 2021 by Russ d'Sa and David Zhao as an open source software project to build an app that…

The creators of the open source project vLLM have announced that they are moving the popular tool to VC-backed startup Inferact, which has raised $150 million in seed funding at a valuation of $800 million. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, confirming TechCrunch's previous report that vLLM raised funding from a16z. Inferact's debut reflects the recent commercialization of the SGLang project as RadixArk, which, as we reported on Wednesday, has secured capital led by Accel at a valuation of $400 million, according to sources. As the focus of AI shifts from training models to deployment…

Microsoft's ongoing outage leaves business customers unable to access their email inboxes, files, meetings, and other Microsoft cloud services. The tech giant said in a post on X around 2:30 p.m. ET that the outage was caused by “parts of our service infrastructure in North America that are not handling traffic as expected.” Microsoft did not provide specific details about the cause of the outage, but said it was “working to restore our infrastructure to a healthy state for recovery.” Microsoft said on its status page that the outage will affect its Exchange Online email service, searching for files in…

Going forward, it will be even more difficult to fake or manipulate Ring camera video footage. On Thursday, the Amazon-owned device maker introduced Ring Verify, a new video authenticity feature that allows anyone to determine if a video has been altered in any way. The company says this could be useful when it comes across shared videos, such as videos sent by neighbors or videos purporting to show some type of incident. While you might not be able to immediately tell if some part of your TikTok video was generated by AI (like a rabbit jumping on a trampoline), you'll…

Jenny Liu, former CEO of Dogpound, a luxury gym frequented by celebrities, said she wanted to start her own venture fund for two reasons. As an example, she surrounded herself with wellness founders who love testing new products and building communities at local gyms. Second, Liu also found that many of these founders, especially women and minorities, struggle to get their ideas funded due to limited access to founder networks. To fill this gap, she launched Crush It Ventures, an early stage fund focused on wellness. The company wants to help businesses across the wellness space, including mental health, fitness…