Author: TechBrunch

How much of a stake in OpenAI would Microsoft get if it became a commercial company? That's the multibillion-dollar question that both countries are racing to answer before a two-year deadline. This is a problem. The Wall Street Journal reports that both Microsoft and OpenAI have hired investment banks to negotiate Microsoft's stake, which could be worth a significant amount. The tech giant is said to have poured nearly $14 billion into OpenAI. As of October, OpenAI was the second most valuable startup in the US after SpaceX. Among other issues, Microsoft and OpenAI will need to resolve how much…

Social networking startup Bluesky, which reported an increase of 500,000 users in the past day, jumped to the top five apps in the US App Store, moving up from No. 1 in the social networking category. It became the second most popular app. A week ago, the number was 181, according to data from app intelligence company Appfigures. We understand this growth is completely organic, as Appfigures confirmed that the company does not run any App Store search ads. Moreover, growth is not limited to the US market. Compared to last Wednesday, downloads have increased by four digits in many…

Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Devin Coldewey, Margaux MacColl, and Anthony Ha round up this week's startup and venture news, highlighting the $400 million Lightmatter raised and the importance of high-speed networking in fast-growing data centers. It starts with sex. Changes in the industry today, as well as in the coming years, will make this impressive round a little more understandable. This week's sale continues with Paladin's Drone Play for first responders and law enforcement, and Abel, which aims to reduce the substantial backlog of paperwork that police officers encounter in their daily duties. Margaux said Abel founder Daniel Francis…

More than two years after Nebius, formerly known as Yandex and now focused on cloud infrastructure for the use of AI (also known as “AI computing”), was suspended from trading by the Nasdaq due to economic sanctions, The company plans to start trading on the open market again. In response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Netherlands-based company is in a somewhat unique position as it races to become one of Europe's major players in the fast-growing “GPU as a Service” space. Although it's a new business, being a publicly traded company means anyone can invest in it…

Byju Raveendran, founder of embattled edtech group Byju's, said on Thursday afternoon that he had made mistakes, mistimed the market, overestimated growth potential, and once said 220 He admitted that the value of his startup, which was valued at $1 billion, is now effectively “zero.” Raveendran told reporters that the company's aggressive acquisition of more than 20 startups to expand into new markets proved fatal when funding dried up in 2022. Bijouzu plans to go public in early 2022, and said multiple investment bankers have given the company a solid valuation. TechCrunch previously reported that the amount could reach $50…

The New York Times reported Thursday on OpenAI's “fraying” relationship with its investor, partner, and increasingly rival Microsoft, and their five-year romance has been linked to limited computing reported that the ability of OpenAI to cool down due to economic pressure. Microsoft offers OpenAI, but there are disagreements between the two regarding the basic principles. Perhaps most attractively, OpenAI's deal with Microsoft provides that if OpenAI develops so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI), an AI system with capabilities comparable to human thinking, it will be granted access to Microsoft's technology. This is probably a clause reported in OpenAI's contract with Microsoft…

Despite Saudi Arabia's record of human rights abuses, some investors have become more willing to invest in the country's startups. General Catalyst plans to invest in Saudi Arabia-based fintech startup Lean Technology, marking its first investment in a Middle Eastern country, the Information reported. Other Saudi startups recently backed by US-based investors include lending platform Tamara, which received capital from Kochu Management last year. Although not a direct investment, Flow, a co-living startup founded by Adam Newman and backed by a16z, has opened an apartment complex in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Sanabil Investments, the venture arm of Saudi…

On Wednesday, social network X (formerly Twitter) updated its privacy policy to say it will now allow third-party “collaborators” to train AI models on X data unless users opt out. X owner Elon Musk trained xAI's Grok AI chatbot on X user data, leading to an investigation by the EU's chief privacy regulator, but the company said the data could also be used by third parties. had not yet amended the policy to indicate that this could be the case. This addition to the policy suggests that X, like Reddit and various media organizations, is considering licensing data to AI…

WorldCoin, the “identity proof” crypto startup that scans people’s eyeballs co-founded by Sam Altman, announced Thursday that it has dropped “coin” from its name and is now simply “World.” The company also announced its next-generation iris scanning, Orb, and other tools at a live event in San Francisco. World co-founder and CEO Alex Branier said the startup's old name “doesn't work anymore” as the startup looks to expand its identity beyond its initial cryptocurrency mission. suggested that there may be. (Initially, eye scans were seen as a way to access World Coin, but founders say that never happened.) OpenAI CEO…

Microsoft has notified customers that security logs for some of its cloud products have been missing for more than two weeks, leaving network defenders without critical data to detect potential intrusions. According to a notice sent to affected customers, Microsoft announced that between September 2 and September 19, “there was a bug in one of Microsoft's internal monitoring agents that caused it to upload log data to an internal logging platform. At that time, some agents malfunctioned.” The notice states that the logging outage was not caused by a security incident and “only affected the collection of log events.” Business…