Author: TechBrunch

Swedish buy now, pay later (BNPL) startup Klarna is on its way to becoming a public company. The fintech company announced Wednesday that it has confidentially filed a draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The announcement comes after a long period of time, amid a dearth of initial public offerings (IPOs) in the technology sector. Klarna's position in Europe only adds further enthusiasm to today's news. Founded in 2005, Klarna is one of several companies in the BNPL space that allows customers to purchase goods with the promise of interest-free credit. Founded in the US…

Prelude is a relatively new French startup focused on SMS authentication. On Wednesday, it announced new funding from Singular and Seedcamp. The founders met while working at Zenly, a popular location-sharing app with tens of millions of users that was acquired by Snap (and later shut down). You might not think much about these verification codes, but the Zenly team has thought very hard about this topic. It turns out that implementing SMS verification codes that work reliably can be quite tedious. “Originally, when I started looking at this problem at Zenly, there was only one provider. To be honest,…

Netherlands-based Just Eat Takeaway announced today that it will sell Grubhub to Wonder in a deal worth $650 million. The company said it expects the transaction to close by the first quarter of 2025. “The sale of Grubhub to Wonder increases Just Eat Takeaway.com's cash generation capabilities and accelerates our growth. This deal provides a suitable home for Grubhub and its employees. Grubhub I'd like to thank everyone at Grubhub for their contributions to both the company and the broader Just Eat Takeaway.com business,'' Just Eat Takeaway founder Jitse Groen said in a statement. Just Eat Takeaway acquired Grubhub in…

YouTube last year enabled some creators in the US to create AI-generated songs using vocals from artists such as Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, John Legend, Sia, T-Pain and Troye Sivan via prompts. Added the ability to create. The company is currently adding the ability for selected creators to remix tracks by describing how they would like to change the style of the song. The video streaming platform, through its label partners, makes select songs available to creators for new remix experiments. If the creator is a member of the test group, they can select the song, select the…

Swiggy shares rose 7% to Rs 440 on Wednesday as the food delivery and quick commerce startup completed India's second-largest IPO this year. It was a high-profile debut that drew direct comparisons to Indian internet stocks, which analysts had long considered a benchmark. : Zomato. The 10-year-old Bengaluru-headquartered company's listing is a milestone for India's startup ecosystem, with several companies eyeing similarly large initial public offerings in the next 24 months. It will also be a major liquidity event for Swiggy's backers, including Prosus, SoftBank and Accel, whose paper returns have already reached $2 billion. Approximately 5,000 employees could have…

Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, announced it will begin experimenting with ads on its platform starting this week. The ads will first appear in the U.S. in the form of “sponsored follow-up questions.” (Example: “How can I use LinkedIn to enhance my job search?”) Paid media is placed on the answer side and labeled as sponsored. Brand and agency partners participating in Perplexity's advertising program include Indeed, Whole Foods, Universal McCann, and PMG. One of Perplexity's experimental ad formats. Image credit: Perplexity “Advertising programs like these help us generate revenue that we share with our publisher partners,” Perplexity wrote in…

Many feared that the 2024 election would be influenced and perhaps decided by AI-generated disinformation. There were some things I could find, but there were far fewer than I expected. But don't be fooled. The threat of disinformation is real. You just aren't the target. At least that's what Oren Etzioni, a longtime AI researcher whose nonprofit TrueMedia focuses on the disinformation pulse generated, says. “For lack of a better word, deepfakes are diverse,” he told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “Each serves its own purpose, and some we are more aware of than others. Let me say this: for…

Anysphere, creator of AI-powered code editor Cursor, has acquired AI coding assistant Supermaven for an undisclosed amount. Anysphere CEO Michael Truell announced the deal in a post on Cursor's blog. Supermaven will enable Anysphere to launch a new version of the Tab AI model that is “fast, context-aware, and highly intelligent,” especially for long sequences of code, he said. Truell said Supermaven's plugins will continue to be maintained, but Cursor will be the core of the team. “This is pretty much the same as Supermaven's previous plans. The extension API was blocking the next useful thing we wanted to build,…

Is the grass greener next door? I'm not sure, but I'm sure the sky is bluer. It's been two years since Elon Musk bought Twitter (now known as X) and people started setting up shop on alternative platforms. Mastodon, Post, Pebble (two of which are no longer in operation), and Spill have been mentioned as potential replacements, but with the exception of Meta's Threads, few companies have achieved the speed of growth that Bluesky achieved. Bluesky was invite-only for almost a year, but became available to everyone in February 2024, gaining about 800,000 new users in a single day. As…

Google announced Tuesday that it is introducing several new features to Chrome on iOS. Most notably, you can now search using images and text at the same time in Google Chrome on iOS. You could already do this using the Google Lens iOS app, but now you can do it directly within the Chrome app. Additionally, while it was already possible to use images in searches in Chrome on iOS, you can now add text to your queries. Google says this new feature will allow users to perform more complex and specific searches, resulting in better results. For example, you…