Author: TechBrunch

This week on StrictlyVC Download, we share a conversation with Chi-Hua Chien, founder of Goodwater Capital, and Elizabeth Weil, founder of Scribble Ventures. They discuss why consumer AI hasn't yet lived up to the hype and what's next. Beyond ChatGPT and Gemini, the world of consumer AI feels sparse. In this conversation, we explore why we're still in the “command line era” of AI, how form factors open up new use cases, and what it means to build AI-native products versus retrofitting existing platforms. We also dive into trust barriers, changing user behavior, and why the next generation of founders…

Founded in 2023 as the first venture capital firm focused on biodiversity, Superorganism aims to play the role of conservationist on the cap table for nature-friendly startups. Now, the company has closed its first fund and secured $25.9 million in capital commitments from the Cisco Foundation, AMB Holdings, Builders Vision, among others, as well as individuals like Andreessen Horowitz partner Jeff Jordan. Superorganism supports companies across three categories: technologies that slow or reverse extinction, startups operating at the intersection of climate and biodiversity, and tools that enable conservationists to do their jobs more effectively. The company writes checks of $250,000…

Automated investment platform Betterment admitted last week that hackers broke into some of its systems and accessed non-public personal information of many of its customers. In an email sent Monday and seen by TechCrunch, Betterment said hackers gained access to some company systems on Jan. 9 through a social engineering attack that involved a “third-party platform” the company uses for marketing and operations. The company said its customers' names, email and addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth were compromised in the attack. As reported by The Verge, this access allowed the hackers to send fraudulent notifications to users claiming…

Five years after starting his edtech company, 22-year-old Nathan Nwachukwu realized that Africa was at a crossroads. The continent is undergoing rapid industrialization, he told TechCrunch. There's money, opportunity, and young, motivated people. He soon thought that the continent was on the “edge of an industrial revolution.” “At the same time,” he said, he felt the continent was still struggling to address one of its biggest Achilles heels. “Terrorism and security instability.” Nwachukwu said Africa has more terrorism-related deaths than any other region in the world, and this problem could slow or stop the region's growth altogether. He teamed up…

Instagram says some users have received suspicious password reset requests, but that it has not been compromised. This seemingly contradicts a post by Friday Bluesky of antivirus software company Malwarebytes, who shared a screenshot of an email from Instagram notifying users of a password reset request. The post claims that “cybercriminals stole sensitive information from 17.5 million Instagram accounts, including usernames, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and more.” Malwarebytes added that this data “is being sold on the dark web and could be exploited by cybercriminals.” However, Instagram later posted (on X, not Instagram or Threads) that it had “fixed…

Andreessen Horowitz just announced that his company has raised just over $15 billion in new funding. The funding represents more than 18% of all venture capital allocated in the U.S. in 2025, according to company co-founder Ben Horowitz, but what's even more impressive is that the organization has more than $90 billion in assets under management, putting it on par with Sequoia Capital, one of the world's largest venture firms. This is fitting since a16z appears to be very friendly with real sovereign wealth funds, at least including Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. The company employs approximately several hundred people…

NSO Group, one of the most famous and controversial makers of government spyware, released a new transparency report on Wednesday as the company enters a “new phase of accountability.” But the report, unlike NSO's previous annual disclosures, lacks details about how many customers the company has rejected, investigated, suspended or fired for human rights violations involving its surveillance tools. The report includes promises to respect human rights and put controls in place to require customers to do the same, but provides no concrete evidence to support either. Experts and commentators who have been tracking NSO and the spyware market for…

Internet connectivity collapsed across Iran on Thursday amid nationwide protests, according to a web monitoring company. “I think we are almost completely cut off from the outside world right now,” Amir Rashidi, an Iranian cybersecurity researcher at the nonprofit Mian Group, told TechCrunch. Doug Madry, director of internet analytics at Kentik, a company that monitors internet traffic around the world, agreed, telling TechCrunch that Iran's internet has been in a “nearly complete blackout” since around 11:30 a.m. Thursday on the U.S. East Coast, or 8 p.m. local time in Tehran. A graph showing how internet traffic dropped in Iran around…

The Illinois Department of Health has confirmed that years of security lapses have compromised the personal information of more than 700,000 state residents. The Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) announced in a statement on January 2 that an internal mapping website containing residents' personal information that the agency used to help allocate state resources was inadvertently made available to the public from April 2021, when a security flaw was discovered, to September 2025. Officials said the leaked data included personal information about 672,616 Medicaid and Medicare Savings Program beneficiaries. The data included addresses, case numbers, and demographic data, but…

Investment in consumer technology startups has been stagnant since 2022 as turbulent macroeconomic conditions and rising inflation have made VCs wary of consumer purchasing power. Over the past few years, most AI investments have focused on acquiring enterprise customers that offer fat checks, multi-year contracts, and rapid scale-up paths. But one venture capital firm believes the consumer sector is gearing up for a comeback in 2026. “This is going to be the year of the consumer,” Vanessa Larco, a partner at venture firm Premise and a former partner at NEA, said on this week's episode of the Equity podcast. Even…