Author: TechBrunch

Illumen Capital is increasing its support for fund managers and founders from underrepresented communities. As an impact fund of funds, the company has previously supported ways to address racial bias in investing. Yesterday, the firm founded by Darrin Dodson announced it had raised a $32.75 million Catalyst Fund to once again support emerging fund managers and founders, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds. did. This news comes at a difficult time for many diverse funding managers and founders, with less financial support than ever before. Black founders raised less than 1% of venture capital funding last year, according to Crunchbase, and…

Michael Gilroy, former head of fintech investments at Coatue, and Gokul Rajaram, a longtime technology executive and prolific angel investor, are forming an as-yet-unnamed venture. Bloomberg reported that the fund will be launched early next year, with plans to begin fundraising for a debut of $400 million to $500 million. The firm invests in early-stage fintech and software startups based in the United States. While at Coatue, Gilroy invested in fintech companies including Arta Finance, Melio Solution, Pinwheel, and Mercury. Prior to joining the hedge fund in 2019, he was a partner at Canaan for over five years. According to…

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming one of the most-hyped companies in recent memory. And its latest partnership with Apple for its upcoming generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, has given the company another significant bump in the AI race. 2024 also saw the release of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s new flagship omni…

OpenAI funds academic research into algorithms that can predict human moral judgment. OpenAI Inc., the nonprofit organization behind OpenAI, disclosed in an IRS filing that it awarded a grant to researchers at Duke University for a project titled “Research AI Morality.” Asked for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson said the award is part of a larger three-year, $1 million grant to Duke University professors researching “creating moral AI.” He pointed to a press release indicating that. Little has been made public about this “morality” research funded by OpenAI, other than the fact that the grant ends in 2025. The study's principal…

Silicon Valley's dream is to build technology startups with unique ideas that change the world of commerce and make their founders millionaires. Joining Y Combinator, the Valley's most famous startup factory, is often part of that dream. Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe all started there. But when you dig deeper into the data for all the nearly 5,000 companies YC has supported over the years, a surprising truth emerges. That means YC startups don't have to be unique. Far from it. YC typically accepts startups that are building similar or nearly identical products to previous YC alumni. Some of them are…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — a weekly roundup of must-sees from the world of startups. If you would like to receive this newsletter in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. The week before Thanksgiving is usually busy with announcements of all kinds, but this week was especially interesting. Money was flowing to big issues like defense, cybersecurity, and health. This week's most interesting startup stories Image credit: N26 Let's start with the bad news and (temporarily?) dash your hopes. But there's also good news. Running low on batteries: Struggling Swedish unicorn Northvolt has filed for bankruptcy in the US,…

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…