Author: TechBrunch

After Employer.com acquired the accounting startup bench that went bankrupt with firefighting sales late last year, CEO Jesse Tinsley has pledged to honor past customer payments on LinkedIn and others. “We respect all prepaid bench services despite not being able to earn directly from it,” Tinsley said in an interview with founder and investor Julian Weiser. However, some bench customers say they are being charged to get books and tax returns they paid previously. The lawsuit filed Tuesday by bench customer Qorum alleges that the bench will have to pay to obtain its 2023 tax return, despite already paying for…

Swedish Fintech Klarna took the next step with the highly anticipated US IPO when it published its F-1 prospectus on Friday. We are now sifting through the documents. Klarna hopes to raise at least $1 billion at the IPO last week at a $15 billion valuation. The public documents have yet to disclose the number of shares or price ranges to be sold, so it is not clear whether the IPO meets funding aspirations. It usually takes a month, sometimes longer, after the prospectus document is published to bite. However, this IPO has been anticipated for years, so perhaps the…

Google will replace its Android phone Google Assistant with Gemini later this year, the company announced Friday. In a blog post, Google said it will upgrade more users from Google Assistant to Gemini “over the next few months.” Later this year, assistants will be available to most mobile devices and app stores. “In addition, we will upgrade tablets, cars and devices that connect to mobile phones such as headphones and watches to Gemini,” the company added. “We bring new experiences with Gemini to our home devices, such as speakers, displays, and televisions.” Google said it will share details with users…

Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein has become a whistleblower who exposed mass surveillance by the US government, but died at the age of 79. Klein was released in 2006 and revealed that the NSA is using the secret room at San Francisco's AT&T hub to use the internet backbone. Behind the doors of the now-now-famous Room 641A, optical splitting eavesdropped on the same copy of raw internet traffic and returned to the NSA. Klein's disclosure used powers granted by Congress in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to confirm that the US government has access to internet…

When the GPS got malfunctioning and missed the exit on the highway, we all went through that moment of frustration. The Tern AI team, building a low-cost GPS alternative, says it's because current technology is limited by its reliance on satellite positioning. Tern AI says it found a way to find the vehicle's location using only map information and existing sensor data from the vehicle. The company's pitch: It's a cheap system that doesn't require any additional expensive sensors. At SXSW, Austin-based startups have demonstrated that they can “derive positions from Nothing” exclusively for TechCrunch. “There's no triangulation, satellites, wi-fi,…

China appears to believe its AI startup Deepseek could become a prominent technological success story for the country. According to the information, the company is currently operating under new government-influenced restrictions after suddenly gaining fame in January with the release of R1, a public “inference” model of the open “inference” model. According to the information, some of the company's employees are freely blocked from traveling abroad, and the Chinese government is currently playing a role in screening potential investors. Deepseek implements travel restrictions by keeping the passports of certain staff members, the parent company, HighFlyer, a quantitative hedge fund. The…

Welcome to Startups Weekly – Summary every week everything you need to miss from the startup world. Want to put it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week we showed more optimism among startups than any other corner of the world. The entrepreneurs were so confident they bought other companies, raised fresh funds, and even said no to money. The most interesting startup story of the week Image credit: Hinge Health It's not four weddings and funerals, but most of them. Hinge: Hinge Health, a virtual physiotherapy startup that helps treat chronic musculoskeletal conditions using technology, is…

Tiktok, owned by Chinese company Bytedance, has been at the heart of US controversy for four years due to concerns about user data that the Chinese government may access. Just last month, the app experienced a temporary suspension in the US, leaving millions of users suspenseful before it was quickly restored. Tiktok returned to the App Store and Google Play Store in February. Nevertheless, Tiktok's future remains uncertain, with many investors competing for the opportunity to buy the app. As Angelo Zino, senior vice president at CFRA Research, estimates the platform's US business could raise its valuation to more than…

This week, Openai signed a five-year, $11.9 billion deal with GPU-heavy cloud provider CoreWeave, protecting its own AI computing pipeline and its $350 million stake. With CoreWeave's pending IPO and its deep connection with Microsoft, Openai's deal marks a major change in AI Cloud Wars. Today, TechCrunch's equity podcast is hosted by Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff, Anthony HA, and Rebecca Bellan. Listen and listen to the entire episode: What Kirsten and Rebecca are watching on Austin on the ground, and what are they moving towards the Y Combinator's latest demo day, and why the founder is making less of a…

The 51-year-old dual Russian and Israeli national Rostislav Panev have been accused of being a key developer of the infamous Lockbit Ransomware gang, and has been handed over from Israel to the US, the Justice Department announced Thursday. Panev was arrested in Israel in December 2024 and became a third party arrested for his role in Rockbit. Since then, Panev has been waiting for Israel to be handed over. Prosecutors claim that PANEV is a developer working for the Lockbit Ransomware Group, working from the beginning of 2019 until February 2024. Panev and other Lockbit developers design gang malware, design…