Author: TechBrunch

SimpliSafe has announced the addition of Active Guard Outdoor Protection to its monthly subscription offering. The new tier adds a layer of 24/7 monitoring to your home security services. Outdoor Protection Pro is available for $50 per month. That price includes the Boston-based company's standard $32 indoor monitoring service. This new product will only be available through new hardware: Outdoor Security Camera Series 2. SimpliSafe says this limitation is due to its predecessor's inability to perform the “AI for the Familiar Face” feature. Cause false alarms in your own home. If the system does not recognize the person based on…

Harry Stebbings, the British podcaster who broke into the tech world with 20-minute interviews with venture capitalists and founders, used his fame to become a VC himself. Now, Stebbings has closed his third investment vehicle, his largest to date. 20VC, the company named after the podcast series, has closed a $400 million fund. As European technology companies continue to lag behind their U.S. counterparts at almost every stage of investment, 20VC's new fund will use Stebbings' media name and connections to attract more attention and help them move forward. Focus on supporting local startups. “I'm really tired of everyone making…

Gladia, a French startup that provides speech recognition application programming interfaces (APIs), has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round. Essentially, Gladia's API allows you to convert any audio file to text with a high level of accuracy and a short turnaround time. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all offer speech-to-text APIs as part of their cloud hosting product suites, but they don't offer the same performance as newer models offered by specialized startups. There has been significant progress in this area over the past few years, especially after the release of Whisper by OpenAI. Gladia competes with other…

Music streaming company Spotify announced today that it is testing music videos for premium users in an additional 85 markets. The company conducted its first video experiment in limited markets in March. Spotify initially rolled out music videos in beta in 11 countries, including the UK, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya. Egypt was added to the list earlier this year. The company did not say whether these 85 new markets include the United States. It's a big market for the streaming giant, but it was excluded from the first set of regions where music…

In a typical organization, finance is one of the most important functions. But teams often get stuck in manual workflows. According to research from HR software provider Paylocity, 38% of finance teams spend more than a quarter of their time on manual tasks such as reviewing invoices. Mathieu Hafemeister, a former fintech investor at Andreessen Horowitz, said he has seen many financial organizations struggle to scale due to manual tasks. “The current state of the finance industry is a myriad of point solutions cobbled together within the finance department,” Hafemeister told TechCrunch. “Excel remains the lowest common denominator, with limited…

Cyber ​​risk is an increasingly important issue for small and medium-sized businesses around the world. While many companies strive to avoid and mitigate cyber risk, they rarely discuss transferring that risk to third parties. That's why Stoïk has launched a cyber insurance product specifically designed for small and medium-sized businesses. The French startup recently raised a Series B round of 25 million euros (approximately $27 million at current exchange rates). In many ways, Stoick follows in the footsteps of the Coalition and At-Bay. However, rather than selling insurance products to US-based companies, Stoik focuses only on European companies. With Stoïk…

Nvidia stock hit a record high on Monday, closing at $138.07, as Wall Street looks forward to earnings updates on AI infrastructure investments from Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon. The stock's rise has been staggering, soaring nearly 180% this year after a rapid rise last year. This also reflects Nvidia's prominent presence in the AI ​​chip market, which is controlled by the company between 70% and 95%, according to Mizuho Securities estimates. In fact, with a market capitalization of $3.4 trillion, Nvidia is currently the second most valuable US company after Apple. At the center of it all is Nvidia…

Microsoft lost an AI expert and OpenAI gained one with the former's vice president of generative AI research Sebastian Bubeck leaving for the latter. The Information first reported the move, and Reuters also confirmed the company's departure from Microsoft. We do know that Bubeck is one of the lead authors of a paper describing Microsoft's Phi model, a set of ultra-small language and vision models aimed at pushing AI applications to edge devices. This type of expertise will become more important in some markets as large-scale, centralized models like OpenAI's GPT-4o give way to on-device models that operate quickly, privately,…

Google today announced it has signed a deal with nuclear power startup Kairos Power to build seven small nuclear reactors to power its data centers. The deal promises to add about 500 megawatts of carbon-free electricity at a time when energy demand for data centers and AI is surging. Google says the new power plant is expected to be operational by the end of 2010. It's unclear whether the reactor will be connected directly to Google's property (a arrangement known as “behind the meter”) or if it will feed into Google's power grid, which claims carbon-free electricity through its agreement…

TechCrunch has lost one of our beloved former colleagues. Steve O'Hear, who wrote for TechCrunch in his hometown of London for more than a decade, has passed away after a short illness. He was 49 years old. It is difficult to explain Steve's extraordinary talent in words. Despite being born with muscular dystrophy, spending his entire life in a wheelchair, and having significant health, mobility, and accessibility issues, he is without a doubt the most productive journalist we have ever worked with. I was one of them. Steve brings the best to this organization every day, making TechCrunch great (and…