Author: TechBrunch

After two years of relatively quiet investment activity, VCs appear to be pouring money into startups again at pandemic-era levels. But a closer look reveals that this is not actually the case. Investors poured $74.6 billion into U.S. startups in the fourth quarter of last year, up from an average of $42 billion invested in each of the past nine quarters, according to PitchBook data released Tuesday. . While such funding levels were previously only seen during the peak of the ZIRP era (end of 2020 to 2021), the reality is that this recent increase in venture capital funding has…

Jeff Holling's Insight Partners is to New York venture capitalists what Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia are to Silicon Valley. And this position was solidified with Insight's recent financial results. As expected, Insight Partners announced on Thursday that it had closed another large flagship fund known as Fund XIII and a second opportunity fund, totaling $12.5 billion in new capital. Opportunity funds are typically funds set aside to be reinvested when existing portfolio companies raise new rounds. In September, it was rumored that he was setting up a fund worth more than $10 billion. Insight clearly achieved that goal, and then…

Bench, the accounting startup that went bankrupt during the holidays, filed for bankruptcy in Canada on January 7, disclosing huge debts, according to documents obtained by TechCrunch. The filings (one with Bench and one with 10Sheet, Bench's original name) show that Bench had $2.8 million in cash on hand by the end of its lifespan, but $65.4 million in cash. This indicates that they were in debt. (TechCrunch converted bankruptcy filing data from Canadian dollars to US dollars at a rate of 1 US dollar to 1.44 Canadian dollars.) Founded in 2012, Bench has raised $113 million from investors including…

Apple is suspending AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps after facing backlash for generating inaccurate news alerts. Additionally, the company is making changes to the entire notification summary to increase transparency. In the latest developer preview for iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, Apple has completely disabled notification summaries for all news and entertainment apps, and plans to re-enable them in a future update with improvements. The changes come weeks after the BBC complained to Apple after one of its articles incorrectly said Luigi Mangione, who was charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson,…

Meta's Threads is internally prototyping the ability to add music to posts, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The option to add music to posts is already available on Meta's other social apps, Instagram and Facebook. The company is currently considering bringing this feature to X's competitor Threads. The feature has not yet been publicly tested and was first discovered by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi. He often finds unreleased features in development. The option to add music to your posts is reminiscent of the Myspace days, and will be a welcome addition for anyone looking to add a little more color…

The climate change technology industry may have slumped in 2024, but new data also shows it is a mature sector with larger deal sizes. Venture investment in climate technology fell 7% to $12.9 billion, $1 billion short of the 2023 tally, according to data from a new Pitchbook report. According to the report, round sizes will increase in 2024 and investors appear to be more keen to back companies emerging from seed rounds. For years, investors have favored early-stage companies and poured large sums of money into pre-seed and seed-stage startups. Part of the reason for this was that the…

Nvidia is releasing three new NIM microservices – small, independent services that are part of a larger application – to help enterprises introduce additional controls and safety measures to their AI agents. One of these new NIM services targets content safety and works to prevent AI agents from producing harmful or biased output. Another works to focus conversations only on approved topics, and a third new service helps prevent AI agents from attempting to jailbreak or lift software restrictions. These three new NIM microservices are part of Nvidia NeMo Guardrails, Nvidia's existing open source collection of software tools and microservices…

Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is willing to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky's AT protocol, he shared in a TikTok video posted Wednesday. Users are fleeing to other video platforms, including Chinese app Red Note, in anticipation of a U.S. ban on TikTok that will go into effect on Sunday unless blocked by the Supreme Court. But investors like Cuban see the potential for a more open social web, including an ecosystem of apps that leverage the same technology that currently powers Blue Sky's social network. The AT protocol is a newer open protocol designed for decentralized social…

Instagram Threads is truly integrated with Fediverse, also known as the open social web, allowing users to interact with people on other services like Mastodon, or to move their accounts elsewhere if they decide they no longer like Meta's policies. Will I be able to move around? Even now, the answer remains vague. Meta cannot yet confirm if and when account portability features will be added to the new social network's roadmap and federation plans. Asked for comment on the status of Threads' account portability efforts, a Meta spokesperson said these plans are a “top priority,” but declined to provide…

The deadline for the U.S. ban on TikTok is expected to be extended as it falls over the MLK Day holiday weekend, and President-elect Donald Trump's administration intends to find a way to extend it, Bloomberg reports. Biden officials see the issue as a problem for the incoming Trump administration, as the current administration has no intention of intervening before the ban's January 19 deadline. One of the officials told Bloomberg that users should not expect the social network to shut down on Sunday. President Trump's incoming national security adviser, Michael Walz, told Fox News' Fox & Friends that the…