Author: TechBrunch
Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer refuses to sit on the sidelines of the generative AI revolution. After running his photo-sharing and contact management startup Sunshine for the past six years with little success, the celebrated technology leader has shut down the company and launched Dazzle, a new startup focused on building the next generation of AI personal assistants. Mayer hasn't yet shared details about Dazzle's capabilities, but he did reveal that the company has raised an $8 million seed round at a $35 million valuation. The round was led by Forerunner's Kirsten Green with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Greycroft, Offline…
France's state-run postal and bakery service company La Poste was taken offline on Monday due to a suspected distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the company said. The Postal Service called the attack a “major network incident” that disrupted “all information systems.” La Poste's online email and banking services, website and mobile app are among the services that will be temporarily unavailable, but customers can continue to make direct banking and postal transactions, according to a machine translation of the announcement. The La Banque Postale bank branch also issued an announcement regarding the cyberattack, saying that “customers were temporarily unable…
Across Uzbekistan, a network of about 100 high-definition roadside cameras continuously scan vehicle license plates and occupants, sometimes thousands a day, looking for potential traffic violations. A car running a red light. Drivers not wearing seat belts. Some examples include unauthorized vehicles driving at night. The driver of one of the most monitored vehicles in the system was tracked for six months, traveling from the eastern city of Chirchik through the capital Tashkent and between the nearby settlements of Eshhonguzal, often multiple times a week. We know this because the country's sprawling license plate tracking and surveillance system remains exposed…
OpenAI is working to harden its Atlas AI browser against cyberattacks and acknowledges that prompt injection is a type of attack that manipulates an AI agent to follow malicious instructions hidden in web pages or emails. This is a risk that isn't going away anytime soon, raising questions about how securely AI agents can operate on the open web. “As with fraud and social engineering on the web, instant attacks are unlikely to be fully 'solved',” OpenAI said in a blog post on Monday, detailing how the company is hardening Atlas' defenses to counter the constant attacks. The company acknowledged…
Years ago, when venture capitalist John Medved became interested in supporting various health tech startups, he never imagined that he would one day need them to improve his own quality of life. Israel's close-knit startup community was dealt a blow in October when one of its best-known VCs, Medved, announced he was retiring with immediate effect. He was forced to resign from the company he founded, OurCloud, after being diagnosed with the debilitating disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. “This happened pretty suddenly,” he told TechCrunch in what was likely his last interview, his voice…
Sean Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, is once again drawing unwanted attention to his high-profile venture firm after falsely accusing a Palestinian student of involvement in the Dec. 13 Brown University shooting and subsequent killing of an MIT professor. In a since-deleted post to X, Maguire noted that Brown was “actively erasing his online presence” and speculated that it “seems very likely” that the student was the perpetrator. In fact, authorities identified the gunman as 48-year-old Portuguese Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who was later found dead in a storage facility in New Hampshire. Brown officials said they removed the…
Resolve AI, a startup developing Autonomous Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), a tool to automatically maintain software systems, has raised a Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to three people familiar with the deal. The maximum valuation for the new round is $1 billion, the people said. However, the company's actual blend valuation was lower due to the multiple transient structure. In this setup, investors bought some shares at a $1 billion valuation, but acquired the rest (possibly a larger percentage of the round) at a lower price. This novel investment approach is popular with some of the hottest…
TechCrunch Disrupt's investors didn't hesitate to say they were primarily interested in one thing. That is artificial intelligence. Index's Nina Achadjian, Greylock's Jerry Chen, and Felicis' Peter Deng all spoke about the latest obsessions in venture capital and how startups can stand out in a rapidly crowded market. Achajan told the audience that the environment is changing rapidly and companies are experiencing unprecedented growth. “We spend a tremendous amount of time really evaluating entrepreneurs and how resilient they can be in this moment where things are changing so quickly,” Achajan said. Now, more than ever, founders need to focus on…
Cisco said Wednesday that a group of hackers backed by the Chinese government is exploiting vulnerabilities to target enterprise customers using its most popular products. Cisco has not said how many customers have already been hacked or may be running vulnerable systems. Security researchers now say there are hundreds of Cisco customers who could be hacked. Piotr Kijevsky, CEO of the Shadow Server Foundation, a nonprofit organization that scans and monitors the internet for hacking activity, told TechCrunch that the scale of the exposure “looks like it's in the hundreds, not thousands or tens of thousands.” Kijewski said the foundation…
Krafton, the South Korean gaming company behind hit titles such as PUBG and Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), has launched an India-focused growth investment fund to strengthen its reach into the world's largest internet user base. The investment vehicle, called the Unicorn Growth Fund, is a collaboration between Crafton, South Korean internet conglomerate Naver, and investor Mirae Asset. Crafton confirmed to TechCrunch that the company aims to deploy up to 60 billion pounds (about $669.3 million) over four years. The fund, managed by Mirae Asset Venture India, was launched in January and is expected to begin operations with an initial size…