Author: TechBrunch
LMArena, a startup originally launched in 2023 as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, announced Tuesday that it has raised $150 million in Series A at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion. The round was led by Felicis and UC Investment, the university's fund. The startup landed a $100 million seed round in May at a valuation of $600 million, launching it out of the gate as a commercial venture. This new round means the company has raised $250 million in about seven months. LMArena is best known for its crowdsourced AI model performance leaderboards. The company's…
The founder of a U.S.-based spyware company whose surveillance products allowed customers to spy on the phones and computers of unsuspecting victims has pleaded guilty to federal charges related to his company's long-running operations. pcTattletale founder Brian Fleming entered a guilty plea Tuesday in San Diego federal court to charges of computer hacking, selling and promoting surveillance software for illegal use, and conspiracy. The plea comes after a multi-year investigation by investigators from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a division within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. HSI began investigating pcTattletale in mid-2021 as part of a broader investigation into the consumer…
Mario Götze will go down in soccer history as the player who scored the winning goal that made Germany champions of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. But he's also an increasingly skilled angel investor. Götze's personal investment vehicle, Companion M, currently has a portfolio of more than 70 companies, two of which will become unicorns in 2025 – Danish fintech company Flatpay and German AI startup Parloa. But the athletes also learned some lessons about scrutiny opportunities along the way. “We will only agree to invest if the startup and its founders check all the boxes,” he told TechCrunch. Boxes…
Kate Lowry, a former vice president at Insight Partners, is suing the company, alleging disability discrimination, sex discrimination, and wrongful termination, according to a lawsuit filed in San Mateo County, California, on December 30 and reviewed by TechCrunch. Insight Partners did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's request for comment. Lowry told TechCrunch that he filed the lawsuit because he believes “too many powerful and wealthy people in venture companies are breaking the law and acting like it's okay to systematically underpay and abuse their employees.” “This is an oppressive system;[s] A pervasive tendency in society to use fear, intimidation, and…
During a speech at a hacker conference last week, a hacktivist remotely wiped three white supremacist websites on stage, but the sites have not yet come back online. The pseudonymous hacker, who called herself Martha Root, disguised herself as the Pink Ranger from Power Rangers and took down WhiteDate, WhiteChild, and WhiteDeal servers in real time at the end of a talk at the annual Chaos Communication Conference in Hamburg, Germany. Root spoke alongside journalists Eva Hoffmann and Christian Fuchs, who wrote an article about the hacked site in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit in October. At the time…
California is offering residents a new tool to make it easier to limit the storage and sale of personal information by data brokers. Since 2020, state residents have had the right to ask companies to stop collecting and selling their data, but doing so required a cumbersome opt-out process with individual companies. The Deletion Act passed in 2023 was supposed to simplify things, allowing residents to make one request to more than 500 registered data brokers to delete their information. Now, the Removal Request and Opt-Out Platform (DROP) allows residents to actually make that request. Once a DROP user has…
Ilya Lichtenstein appears to have been released early after pleading guilty to money laundering charges related to the large-scale hack of the virtual currency exchange Bitfinex. In a post on the X show Thursday night, Lichtenstein said he was able to leave prison early “thanks to President Trump's First Step Act, the prison reform bill passed during Trump's first term.” “I remain committed to making a positive impact on cybersecurity as quickly as possible,” Lichtenstein said. “To all the supporters, thank you so much. To all the haters, I look forward to proving you wrong.” The Department of Justice arrested…
While iconic founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg famously didn't graduate from college, studies have shown that the vast majority of successful startups have founders with bachelor's or graduate degrees. Despite this data, venture capitalists' enthusiasm for “no-degrees” is far from constant, but the appeal of dropout founders continues. It's a phenomenon that comes and goes, and we're certainly having a moment right now in the midst of the AI boom. This trend is especially evident during Y Combinator Demo Day, where founders increasingly advertise their dropout status in one-minute pitches. “While we do not believe YC…
This week on StrictlyVC Download, we share conversations from an event in Palo Alto. There, TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin spoke with Mina Fahmi, founder and CEO of Sandbar, and Toni Schneider of True Ventures. Mina Fahmi is the CEO and co-founder of Sandbar. Sandbar is a startup building the Stream Ring, an AI wearable designed to capture whispered thoughts. Toni Schneider is a partner at True Ventures, which has backed Fitbit, Peloton, and Ring, and was initially skeptical of AI wearables until she saw the Sandbar demo. And to be clear, Schneider says he's seen a lot of demos. In…
Universities and research institutes have long been the repositories of deep technology in Europe. Academic spinouts are now being consolidated into robust startup funnels worth $398 billion, and VC funding is following suit. According to Dealroom's European Spinout Report 2025, 76 of these deep tech and life sciences companies have reached valuations of $1 billion, revenues of $100 million, or both. These include unicorns such as Iceeye, IQM, Isar Aerospace, Synthesia and Tekever, which are now increasing their funding to support university spin-outs. Just this month, two new funds were launched to provide more funding for talent coming out of…