Author: TechBrunch

This week, Dom and Becca are speaking with the co-founders of Alloy Women's Health. The startup just closed a new round of funding to expand its mission to solve menopause care. Alloy founders Monica Molenaar and Anne Fulenwider believe in raising capital in a competitive medical technology environment, choosing to bypass traditional insurance models, and using this funding to scale their telemedicine platform nationally. We talked about how it could help. They also discuss: How the co-CEO model was a natural fit for their leadership style How the company's platform addresses supply and demand issues in specialty care Systematic issues…

Bluesky, a rapidly growing social networking startup that is an alternative to Twitter/X built on open web principles, said in a livestream Monday that its approach to user account authentication is similar to Meta and X. We clarified how it differs from existing services. With a verification payment model, where users pay a fee for the privilege of a blue check to verify their identity, Bluesky envisions a system where there will be multiple verification providers to serve the needs of the broader community. . Currently, the only way to authenticate your account with Bluesky is by adopting a custom…

Vikram Bhaskaran was leading creator partnerships at Pinterest when his father started showing early symptoms of ALS, a rare end-stage neurodegenerative disease. “It turned my world upside down,” Bhaskaran said. He worked during the day and spent his nights Googling about diseases and treatments and joining Facebook groups. However, Bhaskaran found it incredibly difficult to find clear and helpful information about his father's condition. “I was sitting surrounded by some of the brightest minds in engineering and design in Silicon Valley,” he said. “But health-wise, it felt like the dark ages.” So in the midst of the pandemic, Bhaskaran teamed…

Meeting recording is becoming a common service as the number of startups offering speech-to-text services increases. There are many tools that provide AI assistants that can join meetings, capture system audio, and transcribe and summarize meetings. Y Combinator-backed Circleback aims to differentiate itself by offering detailed notes and action items. Additionally, this tool allows you to automatically gain insights based on your transcripts. The company was founded in 2023 by former Stripe engineer Ali Haghani and former Tableau engineer Kevin Jacyna. The two began building a conferencing tool that would serve as a searchable knowledge base. Initially, the tool only…

There are other great reasons to join a defense startup besides patriotism. That means the pay is very good. Thanks to the Federal Funds Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA), we now know how much Anduril, a defense technology startup valued at $14 billion, pays its top employees. The law requires companies to report maximum compensation after receiving at least 80% of their annual gross revenue from federal awards and earning at least $25 million in annual gross revenue from these awards. (Mr. Anduril reportedly told investors that revenue reached $500 million last year.) The data in this report also includes…

There are other great reasons to join a defense startup besides patriotism. That means the pay is very good. Thanks to the Federal Funds Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA), we now know how much Anduril, a defense technology startup valued at $14 billion, pays its top employees. The law requires companies to report maximum compensation after receiving at least 80% of their annual gross revenue from federal awards and earning at least $25 million in annual gross revenue from these awards. (Mr. Anduril reportedly told investors that revenue reached $500 million last year.) The data in this report also includes…

A group appears to have leaked access to Sora, OpenAI's video generator, in protest of duplicity on the part of OpenAI and what it calls “artwashing.” The group published the project on Tuesday on Hugging Face, an AI development platform that appears to be connected to OpenAI's Sora API, which is not yet publicly available. This group created a frontend that allows users to generate videos with Sora, presumably using an authentication token from an early access program. Why I think this is real – It uses the OpenAI Sora API endpoint to generate and download a video with hardcoded…

Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, is looking to get into some kind of hardware. Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of Perplexity, posted on X yesterday that the company is looking to create a “simple and under $50” device to “reliably answer” questions “voice-to-voice.” I posted. He promised that Perplexity would “definitely” sell such a device if the post received more than 5,000 likes. It happened. “Okay. LFG!” Srinivas replied. Are you okay. LFG! https://t.co/hMw3eugb0l — Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) November 26, 2024 Hardware is becoming something of an obsession among high-profile AI startups. Partly because of its fame, but also because…

A ransomware attack on Blue Yonder, one of the world's largest supply chain software providers, continues to disrupt operations at many major stores and retailers in the United States and United Kingdom. Arizona-based Blue Yonder, which was acquired by Panasonic in 2021, said in a statement on its website on Friday that it had experienced a disruption in its managed services hosting environment that was “determined to be the result of a ransomware incident. ” he said. The supply chain giant said it was “working diligently” to recover from the incident, but as of Sunday the company had “no timeline…

Just last year, Inflection AI received the highest profile for a startup, releasing a best-in-class AI model that it claims has the potential to outperform technologies from OpenAI, Meta, and Google. This is a stark contrast from today, as Inflection's new CEO told TechCrunch that his startup is no longer trying to compete in that space. Of course, a lot has changed at Inflection between then and now. Microsoft hired then-CEO Mustafa Suleiman to run its own AI business, hired most of its staff and paid the startup $650 million to license the technology. . A few months ago, Inflection…