Author: TechBrunch
Fidelity Investments, one of the world's largest asset managers, confirmed that the personal information of 77,000 customers was compromised in an August data breach. The Boston, Massachusetts-based investment firm said in a filing Wednesday with the Maine Attorney General's Office that an anonymous third party “used two recently established customer accounts” between Aug. 17 and Aug. 19. ” and accessed information on the company's systems. “We detected this behavior on August 19th and immediately took steps to terminate access,” Fidelity said in a letter to those affected. It added that access was not included. Fidelity confirmed that a total of…
Eight-year-old Diagram is expanding its startup incubator model into the climate change space. A Montreal-based venture studio that builds startups in-house has raised C$80 million ($58 million) for its fourth studio fund, the Diagram ClimateTech Fund. The company says the vehicle has exceeded its initial target of C$60 million ($43 million) and reached a hard cap, making it the studio's first fund focused on climate change. Amélie Foz-Couture, partner at Diagram and co-director of Diagram's ClimateTechFund, told TechCrunch that Diagram dives deep into various industries, spending months at a time to identify problems with potential solutions. He said he is…
Advances in DNA sequencing and the vast amounts of genomic data generated by next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology are driving a startup to build software to help biologists more easily analyze this big data and take the next leap forward. created an opportunity. This could be useful in the development of new vaccines and cancer treatments. For the past four years, MiLaboratories, a San Francisco-based startup with research and development facilities in Bilbao, Spain, has been building a computational biology platform to make it easier for biologists to process, analyze, and aggregate data. Built-in features such as data visualization and generative…
This story has been updated throughout with updated details as the story unfolds. We will continue to do so as litigation and disputes are ongoing. There is a lot of controversy going on in the world of WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting websites. The central issue is a dispute between WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress. WordPress technology is open source, free, and powers a huge portion of the internet (approximately 40% of websites). Websites can host their own WordPress instance or use a…
The fields of synthetic biology and precision fermentation are hotbeds of entrepreneurial activity today. But it's not every day that you come across a start-up company that uses genetic engineering to produce natural rubber. Natural rubber is a material that is difficult to reproduce in the laboratory due to its long polymers. Paris-based baCta has initiated and is running a proof of concept to produce natural rubber in vitro using engineered bacteria (E. coli). The company claims its method, which relies on renewable raw materials (currently using glucose but aiming to diversify into acetate and carbon), is carbon neutral. The…
The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that digitizes and archives web pages and other materials, was attacked on Wednesday. Several users, including The Verge, faced the following pop-up when visiting the site: It just happened. Meet 31 million people at HIBP!” Data breach notification site Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) later acknowledged the breach and announced that 31 unique email addresses and usernames had been stolen. So does Brewster Carre, a self-proclaimed digital librarian who founded the Internet Archive in 1996. Indeed, after related distributed denial-of-service attacks against the service (one hacktivist group claimed responsibility for, but not the other),…
Health and life insurance providers face rising claims due to chronic disease and aging, but their processes lack scalability. AI automation can help, but it requires more coordination than other types of insurance. For example, automation in property and casualty insurance led to the creation of the publicly traded company Guidewire decades ago, but health insurance is a tougher field. “You can't automate it in a simple way like if your car's windshield breaks,” Paris-based entrepreneur Tariq Dadi told TechCrunch. His startup, Qantev, wants to solve this problem. The company provides software that helps clients such as AXA and Generali…
It's been a great week for thoughtful co-founder Casey Mackrell. First, he got married. After that, he went viral. At a wedding reception, Mackrell needed to quickly give a colleague access to a code that could only be unblocked from his own laptop. His co-founder, Torrey Leonard, captured the moment by snapping a photo of Mackrell putting together a pull request, staring at a computer in a ballroom where friends and family danced in a backdrop filled with flower arrangements and fairy lights. I caught it. Leonard posted a photo of his co-founder on LinkedIn with a respectful caption. Images…
Star Health and Allied Insurance, one of India's largest health insurance companies, has been arrested nearly two weeks after cybercriminals claimed to have posted customers' health records and other sensitive data online. The company admitted that it had been the target of a “malicious cyber attack.” The Chennai-headquartered insurance giant told TechCrunch in a statement on Wednesday that the cyberattack resulted in “unauthorized and illegal access to certain data,” but that its operations were not affected and its services remain unchanged. He said it continued. “A thorough and rigorous forensic investigation led by independent cybersecurity experts is underway, and we…
While X continues to alienate advertisers, recently suing groups over boycotts of the platform, the company has changed its creator pay policies to be less dependent on advertising. Previously, creators were paid a portion of the ad revenue they earned from ads that appeared in their replies. Now, X says it will instead pay creators directly based on engagement with their content from X's premium users. This change means creators will instead benefit from posts that drive engagement. This is a move that could change the type of content that becomes popular on X. Often, once a platform starts rewarding…