Author: TechBrunch

Despite the gloomy talk about the economy, entrepreneurship is actually on the rise in the United States. An average of 430,000 new business applications will be submitted each month in 2024, an increase of 50% from 2019. However, the number of accountants needed by these new businesses to maintain their books, file taxes, and perform related accounting tasks is decreasing. Nearly 75% of CPAs are expected to retire within 10 years, and fewer graduates are choosing accounting simply because it pays less than fields like technology or finance. Serial entrepreneur David Phillips sees an opportunity to fill this growing gap…

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Inflection AI, expressed his expectations for the incoming Trump administration in an op-ed for the Financial Times. Hoffman also seems hopeful that President-elect Donald Trump will be able to pave the way for increased competition and faster innovation in the technology industry, but he also believes that President-elect Donald Trump will be able to pave the way for increased competition and faster innovation in the technology industry. , also expressed concern that it could harm U.S. innovation. Among the people Mr. Hoffman has his hand in some of the tech pies that could come…

A new tool from Bluesky, a fast-growing X competitor, lets you quickly create new feeds for different interests that you can pin to your app's home page. If you're worried about having to rebuild your Twitter/X list in Bluesky's app, use the Pack2List web app to take advantage of curation work already done by other Bluesky users. , you can create your own customized list. While Bluesky and its community of third-party developers currently offer a variety of tools to create feeds, lists, and even starter packs of people you think are worth following, Pack2List offers It is specifically designed…

MatX, a startup that designs chips that support large-scale language models, has raised about $80 million in Series A less than a year after raising $25 million in a seed round, three people said. says a source. The investment was led by Spark Capital, which valued the company at a pre-money valuation in the mid-$200 million range and an after-money valuation in the low $300 million range, people familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. MatX was co-founded two years ago by Mike Gunter, who previously worked at Google designing the tech giant's AI chips, Tensor Process Units (TPUs), and Reiner…

This is not the first time food delivery company Foodinho has come under fire from Italy's privacy watchdog. The on-demand delivery app owned by Glovo was found to have illegally processed the data of more than 35,000 passengers registered on its platform, leading to a 5 million euro ($5.2 million) fine, according to Reuters. He was reportedly fined. Issues identified included the transfer of a passenger's geolocation data to a third party without their knowledge, including when the passenger is not in operation until August 2023. The watchdog has ordered changes related to the app's messaging and GPS features for…

Streaming service and media software maker Plex on Friday focused on discovery, easy access to watchlists, and other personalization features for home media enthusiasts who still use the app to organize their media libraries. Announcing a software redesign. The company has long sought to balance its history as a software maker focused on home media organizations with its future as a streaming service that generates revenue through ad-supported content. After raising $40 million in funding in early 2024, the company said it expects to be close to profitability in late or early 2025. Given that goal, the plex redesign needs…

Embattled Swedish battery maker Northvolt announced Thursday it would file for bankruptcy in the United States, dealing a blow to Europe's ambitions for homegrown lithium-ion batteries. The company reportedly opted for Chapter 11 in an effort to restore its financial health. As a result of the filing, co-founder and CEO Peter Carlson has resigned, but will remain as an advisor and director. “Today marks an important new step for Northvolt and for me personally,” Carlson said in a statement. “Filing for Chapter 11 gives us time to reorganize our company, strengthen our operations while meeting our customer and supplier commitments,…

While Twitter-like social network Bluesky has seen a significant increase in user numbers this month, Meta's X competitor Threads is also rapidly building its platform. On Friday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri announced that Threads would begin testing AI-powered summaries of what people are discussing on the platform in the app's “Trending” section in the U.S. . This new addition seems similar to X's Stories feature, which uses Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok to summarize trending topics in the social network's Explore section. Threads also plans to test an expanded set of trending topics, the company said. Additionally, users will be…

Daricus Releford always wanted to be a founder. He ran a hot dog station in high school, started a chocolate-covered strawberry business in college that generated millions of dollars in sales, and then moved to Silicon Valley to pursue his dreams in technology. I did. Entrepreneurship just runs in his family, he told TechCrunch. “My grandfather was one of the first black hotel owners in America, and my mother was always starting businesses. I think it's in my blood,” he continued. So it's no wonder that no matter what tech job he takes, he always comes back to launching something…

Anthropic, a close rival of OpenAI, has agreed to raise an additional $4 billion from Amazon and make Amazon's cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), its primary location for training its flagship generative AI models. did. Anthropic also said it is working with Annapurna Labs, the chip manufacturing arm of AWS, to develop the next generation of its Trainium accelerator, AWS's custom-built chips for training AI models. “Our engineers will work closely with Annapurna's chip design team to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, which we will use to train our state-of-the-art foundational models,” Anthropic said. I mentioned…