Author: TechBrunch

There is a shady industry for those who want to monitor and spy on their families. Several app makers sell software (sometimes called stalkerware) to jealous partners who can use these apps to remotely access victims' phones. But despite how sensitive this data is, the number of these companies is on the rise in massive decline. According to TechCrunch's Tally, counting the latest data breaches for Spyx, there have been at least 25 Stalkerware companies since 2017 that have been known to have been hacked or leaked customer and victim data online. That's not a typo. At least 25 Stalkerware…

TechCrunch learned that consumer-grade spyware operations, called Spyx, were hit by a data breach last year. The violation reveals that Spyx and two other related mobile apps have records of around 2 million people at the time of the violation, including thousands of Apple users. The data breach dates back to June 2024, but has not been reported previously, and there is no indication that Spyx operators have notified customers or Spyware subjects. The SPYX family of mobile spyware is now known to have exposed or exposed victim or user data in the 25th mobile surveillance operation or other ways…

Sequoia will close some of its Washington, D.C., offices and policy teams at the end of March, TechCrunch confirmed. The news is a bit contrasting, along with other prominent Silicon Valley VC companies strengthening their ties between Capitol Hill and the new Trump administration. For example, Andreessen Horowitz is leaning towards the policy team as some of his partner roles in the White House. For example, I recently hired former Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry as my advisor. Sequoia opened the Washington Office five years ago, supporting companies with regulatory issues and deepening relationships with policymakers. In a statement to TechCrunch,…

Sequoia will not only close its DC office at the end of March, but will also close some of its policy teams there, TechCrunch confirmed. The news is a bit contrasting, along with other prominent Silicon Valley VC companies strengthening their ties between Capitol Hill and the new Trump administration. For example, Andreessen Horowitz is leaning towards the policy team as some of his partner roles in the White House. For example, I recently hired former Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry as an advisor. Sequoia opened its DC office five years ago, supporting businesses with regulatory issues and deepening relationships with…

Nvidia reportedly acquired Gretel, a San Diego-based startup, and has developed a platform for generating synthetic AI training data. The terms of the acquisition are unknown. According to Wired, the price is said to be a nine-digit figure, exceeding Gretel's recent $320 million valuation. Gretel and a team of about 80 employees will be folded into Nvidia, and the technology will be deployed as part of the former generation AI service lawsuit for developers, Wired reported. Gretel was founded in 2019 by Alex Watson, Lazrobok, John Myers and Aligorchan. The startup's fine tunes model adds its own technology on top…

Raj Aggarwal left AWS almost three years later, according to LinkedIn Post Aggarwal, which was released on Wednesday. “We are proud of the pioneering work our team has done with generative AI since the earliest times,” Aggarwal told his post. “We built what could be the world's first large-scale generation AI product. It was launched by tens of thousands of sellers, used it hundreds of thousands of times, and increased the pipeline's generation by 4.9%.” Aggarwal played a prominent role in AWS' recent push to generate AI. On LinkedIn Post, he mentioned AWS' AI Foundation model, the Bedrock AI development…

Substack's open source competitor, Newsletter Platform Ghost, is connected to Fediverse, also known as the open social web. Federated Apps runs on ActivityPub, a protocol that drives apps such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, Threads, Flipboard, and other apps, allowing posts published in one app to be viewed and engaged on other federated platforms. Ghost said last year it was working on integration with ActivityPub. This allows publishers to share their blog posts with the broader open social web. The company was hoping the merger would be made public last year. However, this week Ghost has announced the release of its social…

TechCrunch has learned that senior research scientists at Deepmind, who worked on Robotics and AI, has left Google to create their own robotic startup called Generalist AI, and has already gained investment from Nvidia. Pete Florence was listed as Generalist AI co-founder and CEO at a panel at NVIDIA's GTC conference in San Jose yesterday. The panel was aimed at Nvidia's VC ARM and Nventures portfolio companies. Since Nvidia enjoyed surgent economic success in this new era of AI, Nventures has become a particularly active venture capital firm. “We're mostly stealth,” Florence told TechCrunch, explaining that the startup's mission is…

Telegram founder Pavel Durov said today that the service has over 1 billion active users. This number is up from the reported 950 million monthly active users last year. Durov also said the company registered a profit of $547 million last year. He announced the company's profitability in December, but at the time it offered nothing. The founder, who recently returned to Dubai after a clearance from France, took a jab on meta-owned rival WhatsApp, calling it a cheap imitation. “WhatsApp is posted before us. It's a copy of a cheap, watering telegram. For years, they tried desperately to copy…

According to a new report from the Financial Times, social media site X has returned to $44 billion. Elon Musk purchased the platform, previously known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022. However, a Bloomberg report states that X has valued about $32 billion from investors and raised nearly $1 billion from investors. Musk took part in his own pay raise, the report said. Despite two different ratings, it is clear that X took a sharp turnaround in terms of finances, given that X estimated its rating was under $10 billion last September. Although the platform's revenues have declined since…