Author: TechBrunch

According to Bloomberg, actor and director Olivia Wilde, best known for her roles in “Tron: Legacy'' and “Don't Worry Darlings,'' quietly launched a venture company, Proximity Ventures, late last year. She launched an early and growth stage investment fund with Neel Sahni, formerly of Roc Nation's venture arm Arrival. Jason Mack, former Mack Ventures. Santy White is a musician also known as Santigold. The company plans to invest in companies in the consumer and enterprise sectors. The company has already invested in four companies, including biotech company Pendulum Therapeutics. Proximity plans to make its first transaction next month. TechCrunch has…

Elon Musk's AI company xAI is in talks to raise new funding at a valuation of about $40 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. xAI hopes to raise billions of dollars in this round, on top of the $6 billion in Series B funding the company raised in May. The rumored valuation would be nearly double xAI's current post-money valuation of $24 billion. Musk founded xAI last year. Shortly thereafter, the company, which recently moved into OpenAI's old offices, developed its first model, Grok, which powers various features of Musk's social network X. xAI now offers an enterprise API.…

Generative AI company ElevenLabs has hired the team behind Omnivore, an open source read-later app. Omnivore co-founders Jackson Harper and Hongbu Wu said in a blog post that joining Eleven Labs will give them “an even bigger platform to create accessible and engaging experiences for our passionate readers.” said. “Eleven Labs is committed to our developer community, and the Omnivore codebase remains 100% open source to all users,” Harper and Wu wrote. “This decision ensures that the broader development community can continue to build and improve Omnivore’s technology.” Omnivore users can export their data until November 16th, after which it…

What is the difference between real opportunity and hype? Answering this question correctly can be the difference between success and failure in the technology industry. And it's a much more difficult question than it seems. Once everyone is convinced that a particular technology is the future, founders and even VCs tend to pursue it en masse. But as anyone who's lived through the Valley's boom-and-bust cycles knows, collective excitement, or hype, isn't the best indicator. Watch FBV Ventures Co-Founder and Managing Partner Pega Ebrahimi, Bullish Director Natalie Sportelli, and Mill Co-Founder and President Harry Tannenbaum discuss the difference between opportunity…

U.S. prosecutors have indicted Russian national Maxim Rudmetov for his alleged involvement in the development and distribution of the notorious password-stealing malware Redline. The charges were announced as part of “Operation Magnus”, which was first revealed by the Dutch National Police on Monday. In this multi-year operation, international law enforcement agencies dismantled the infrastructure of Redline and Meta, two prolific malware strains that have been used to steal sensitive information from millions of people. The indictment released Tuesday revealed how a series of operational security (“opsec”) errors led authorities to Rudometov. According to the indictment, Rudmetov used a Yandex email…

Six years ago, Valentina Agudelo discovered the alarming disparity in breast cancer survival rates between Latin America and developed countries while doing research for a university startup competition. In her native Colombia and other parts of the continent, women die at higher rates from cancer later in life. detection. She found that although breast cancer is highly treatable when diagnosed early, many Latin American countries have large rural populations and lack access to mammography and other diagnostic tools. So Agudelo (pictured above) and two of her best friends decided to create a theoretical portable device that could detect breast cancer…

There is no shortage of startups trying to develop enterprise AI assistants. Although less common, there are AI assistants that can actually perform tasks for multiple work apps at the same time. That's the promise of Narada AI, a startup building an AI assistant based on new research from the University of California, Berkeley. Narada has been operating in stealth mode for two years, making its public debut on stage today as part of Startup Battlefield 20 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Two of the co-founders, Kurt Keutzer and Amir Gholami, co-authored a paper earlier this year on the LLM Compiler,…

Join SingleStore to explore live search augmented generation (RAG) applications that combine real-time streaming data with massive amounts of point-in-time data to deliver near-zero latency for AI interactions. Learn how Multi-Agent Search Augmentation and Generation System (MARS) can leverage AWS Bedrock and SingleStore to accelerate the development of effective real-time AI applications. Gain valuable insight into the challenges and opportunities of building enterprise-grade AI, along with a real-world example of a customer support co-pilot that leverages real-time AI to improve the user experience. If you're a developer, architect, or business leader interested in implementing enterprise AI applications using MARS architecture,…

After much hype, Apple Intelligence, the company's suite of AI features, finally shipped to users this week with the iOS 18.1 update. I've been using these features for several months through beta software, and the feature set rolling out this week is more than just helping users plan and brainstorm ideas with ChatGPT or search the web with Perplexity. , I noticed that they focus on improving the user experience. One of my favorite features in this rollout is the ability to type into Siri and have a conversation. This makes it easy to set a timer or request currency…

Luna is a health and wellness app for teenage girls, designed to help teenage girls navigate their teenage years. This app allows adolescents to ask questions about their health and get answers from experts. You can also track your period, mood, and skin condition. The London-based startup presented today on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, detailing its mission to educate and support teenage girls. Luna is the brainchild of best friend duo Jas Schembri-Stothart and Jo Goodall, who came up with the idea for the startup as part of an assignment during their MBA program at Oxford.…