Author: TechBrunch

Lerer Hippeau, a New York A-list venture capital seed fund, announced on Wednesday it had closed its $9 million fund. It said it was a step up from the eighth fund, closing at $140 million. The new fund will manage $1.4 billion in assets at Lerer Hippeau. Since its founding in 2010, Lerer Hippeau has supported a range of well-known startups that have been published or acquired. The list includes Allbirds, Axios, Birchbox, Brit+Co, Casper, i.e. Zipline, Warby Parker. The company also became an incident in a family where Andrea Hippo works as a partner. She is the daughter of…

Democrat Sen. Ron Wyden has put on hold Sean Plankey's nomination for the Trump administration to lead the federal government's top cybersecurity agency, citing “multi-year cover-ups” of security flaws at US telecoms. In a statement seen in TechCrunch and confirmed by a senator's spokesman, Wyden said he would block Planky's nomination until he agreed to release an uncategorized report for 2022, commissioning detailed security weaknesses commissioning uncategorized reports throughout the US telecom network. Senate rules allow senators to maintain their federal nominations unilaterally and indefinitely. As Reuters noted that first reported holds on Planky's nomination, lawmakers often use nomination holds…

Samsung has updated SmartThings, an app that lets users control the company's IoT devices. The new home automation feature is an obvious bid to cross-sell more smart home devices and appliances to existing customers. In addition to automation features, users will get new integrations to support more devices through Samsung Health App, Intercom features and Matter 1.4 Smart Home Connectivity Standard. Like Apple's shortcuts and IFTTT, the app's “routines” functionality is a basic no-code conditional programming interface that allows you to trigger tasks. Image credit: Samsung Users can now set up routines that are repeated weekly, monthly or annually, and…

Instagram appears to be quietly testing locked reels that viewers need to unlock with codes and tips provided. While this feature is an easy way to increase your creator's engagement with content, it also offers creators and celebrities a way to share exclusive reels with the most dedicated fans who are likely to know the answers to their tips. For example, creators can lock the reel with tips “My Birthday” or “My Dog Name” to share exclusive content with their loyal followers. It has been found that meta owned social networks test the functionality of their design accounts. There, they…

Although it has been several years since the day's event focused on the last topic, AI has not missed the opportunity to shape the future of AI as it transforms its tech landscape, delves deeper into 1,200 founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors and what's next. On June 5th, at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, California, TechCrunch Session: AI lands at the intersection of startups and the rapidly evolving AI boom. If you're building with high tech and want to be smart about where the industry stands and where it's heading, then this is the room you can enter. Book today's Early Bird…

Reddit Answers, Platform's conversational AI search tool, gets an upgrade through integration with Google Gemini. This has been more than a year since Reddit expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to access the Vertex AI platform and build AI agents. Google and Reddit announced an update Wednesday, explaining that by incorporating Gemini into Vertex AI, it will help improve search relevance and provide users with simple answers. Reddit Answers has been in beta since December 2024, allowing users to ask questions and receive curated summary of related comments and existing posts. This feature is designed to keep users on the…

The government coalition has published a list of legitimately-looking Android apps that are actually spyware, and is used to target civil society that may oppose the interests of the Chinese state. On Tuesday, the NCSC, part of the UK's National Cybersecurity Centre, or Intelligence Reporting Agency GCHQ, released separate recommendations on two families of spyware, known as Badbazaar and Moonshine, along with government agencies in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the US. These two spyware are hidden within legitimately-looking Android apps, essentially act as “Trojan horse” malware and have surveillance features such as the ability to access mobile phone…

Instagram head Adam Mosseri says the company is trying to improve the search capabilities of its app, acknowledging that this is an area where Instagram can do more to compete. This comment, made in a recent episode of the “Build Your Tribe” podcast, comes when younger Gen Z users often want answers from social apps like Tiktok instead of using traditional search engines. Of course, Instagram is in that mix, but I know it could be stronger. “We're starting to invest more in searching on Instagram because we have a lot of amazing content,” he said. “And frankly, what we…

A new app designed to organize the Open Social Web, Tapestry adds valuable features to help people keep up with multiple social networks. This will remove duplicate posts from your feed. This means that if you follow the same person across social networking services like Bluesky or Mastodon, and if you share it in multiple locations, you don't need to see their posts appear twice in your feed. A new feature called Crosstalk is rolling out in the Tapestry 1.1 iOS update on Tuesday. This is a substantial update following the February 2025 release. Tapestry was built by the same…

On Monday, Google released an update for Android. This fixed two zero-day flaws “may be under restricted, targeted exploitation.” This means that Google is aware that hackers are using bugs to compromise Android devices in real-world scenarios. One of the two zero-days tracked as CVE-2024-53197 was identified by Amnesty International in collaboration with Benoît Sevens, a security team at Google's Threat Analysis Group, a government-sponsored cyberattacks tracking. In February, Amnesty said it discovered Cellebrite, a company that unlocks its phone and sells its devices to law enforcement, was using three 0-day chains of vulnerabilities to hack it into Android phones.…