Author: TechBrunch

Google's $32 billion acquisition of cloud security company Wiz is one step closer to the finish line. Wiz CEO Assaf Rapaport said at a Wall Street Journal event on Tuesday that the acquisition had cleared antitrust review by the U.S. Department of Justice, Reuters reported. Rappaport added that while the deal is a milestone, there is still a way to go before it is officially completed. TechCrunch reached out to Wiz for more information on the timeline for closure. Google initially offered to acquire Wiz in 2024 for $23 billion. Wiz declined the offer, and Rappaport said at the time…

Cybersecurity is a huge field, but startups in this space are more likely to be acquired than to go public. Even Wiz, which once held the title of fastest-growing startup, abandoned its IPO ambitions when it agreed to sell to Google earlier this year. In recent years, there have been very few major cybersecurity companies going public. SentinelOne went public in 2021, Rubrik went public last year, and Netscope went public in September. Armis, a nine-year-old cybersecurity startup based in San Francisco, plans to follow in the footsteps of these companies. The company announced Wednesday that it has raised $435…

NVIDIA and Qualcomm Ventures join a growing coalition of US and Indian investors backing deep tech startups in India. The group launched in September with more than $1 billion in funding, timed to coincide with India's new 1 trillion rupee (about $12 billion) research and development initiative. NVIDIA joined the coalition as a strategic technology advisor without funding, while Qualcomm Ventures joined along with six Indian venture companies and provided additional capital totaling more than $850 million. India is home to over 180,000 startups and over 120 unicorns. In the early years, much of the ecosystem closely mirrored Western business…

Just over three years after taking over Sequoia Capital's top leadership position, Roelof Botha is stepping down from his senior management role at the storied venture capital firm. The company announced Tuesday that partners Alfred Lin and Pat Grady will replace him as co-stewards. Lin joined the storied company in 2010 and has led major investments in category-defining companies such as Airbnb, DoorDash, and Kalshi. Meanwhile, Pat Grady has been a partner for nearly 19 years and has led Sequoia's growth-stage investments since 2015, supporting iconic companies such as ServiceNow, OpenAI, and legal AI platform Harvey. Botha assumed the role…

Journalists in Europe have found it “easy” to spy on senior European Union officials using commercially obtained location histories sold by data brokers, despite the continent having some of the strongest data protection laws in the world. Netzpolitik reports that EU officials are “concerned” about the trade in cell phone location data of citizens and officials and have issued new guidance to staff to combat tracking. Reporters obtained the data set provided as a free sample by a data broker. The dataset includes 278 million location data points from millions of mobile phones across Belgium. Much of the location data…

Andreessen Horowitz is suspending its Talent x Opportunity (TxO) fund and program, according to four sources familiar with the matter, including several of the program's founders. In 2020, the company announced TxO to support founders who don't have access to traditional venture networks. Many of TxO's participants are women and minorities, and overall they receive very little venture capital funding. The fund's announcement comes amid a wave of support that underrepresented founders received after the killing of George Floyd in 2020. TechCrunch previously reported that the fund was launched with an initial contribution of $2.2 million, with a16z co-founder Ben…

Elad Gil, a prominent individual investor, said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt that AI is one of the most unpredictable technology booms he's ever seen. Gill has been on the cap tables of virtually every hit company of the past decade, including many of today's leading AI companies. Still, he believes that over the past year, certain AI markets appear to have been largely filled by market leaders. Even beyond these areas, the vast scope of AI still applies to everyone. “I started investing in generative AI in 2021, and at the time there weren’t that many people paying that…

Lawmakers have asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate license plate scanning camera operator Flock Safety for allegedly failing to implement cybersecurity protections that exposed the company's camera network to hackers and spies. In a letter sent by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) on Wednesday, the lawmakers are asking FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson to investigate why Flock is not enforcing the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA), a security protection that prevents malicious access by someone who knows an account owner's password. According to the letter, Wyden and Krishnamoorthi said that while the company offers its law…

Peter Williams, former general manager of Trenchent, a division of defense contractor L3Harris that develops surveillance and hacking tools for Western governments, pleaded guilty last week to stealing and selling some of those tools to Russian brokers. Court documents filed in the case, exclusive reporting by TechCrunch, and interviews with Williams' former colleagues explain how Williams was able to steal highly valuable and sensitive exploits from Trentint. Williams, a 39-year-old Australian national known within the company as “Doogie,” admitted to prosecutors that he stole and sold eight exploits, or “zero days.” A zero-day is a security flaw in software from…

U.S. prosecutors have charged two rogue employees of a cybersecurity firm that specializes in negotiating ransom payments to hackers on behalf of victims with carrying out ransomware attacks themselves. Last month, the Department of Justice indicted Kevin Tyler Martin, who worked as a ransomware negotiator at Digital Mint, and another unnamed employee on charges of computer hacking and extortion in connection with a series of attempted ransomware attacks against at least five U.S.-based companies. Prosecutors also charged a third person, Ryan Clifford Goldberg, a former incident response manager at cybersecurity giant Signia, as part of the scheme. The three are…