Author: TechBrunch
Atlassian first showed off Rovo six months ago. Rovo is what the company calls “AI Teammate,” which combines smarter search and chat-based AI tools with agents that allow users to automate parts of their workflows in tools like Jira and Confluence. At the Team '24 Europe event in Barcelona, the company announced the general availability of Rovo. Additionally, Atlassian also announced a number of additional new AI capabilities that, like Rovo, are part of the company's Atlassian Intelligence platform. At the core of Rovo, Rovo Search not only combines data from Atlassian's core tools such as Jira and Confluence, but…
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…
Last year, Sound Ventures, a nine-year-old Beverly Hills, Calif.-based venture led by general partners Ashton Kutcher, Guy O'Seary and Effie Epstein, launched a new Announced $65 million AI fund. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face. In fact, the plan was to invest in just six companies. It was a gamble that could pay off big, albeit with risks to the team's future vision. A small number and large number of companies will be the biggest winners in the AI space due to the necessary technical talent and the capital needed to cover computing costs. Sound has since raised even…
Cloud providers are chasing AI unicorns, the latest being Fei-Fei Li's World Labs. The startup just hired Google Cloud as its primary compute provider for training its AI models, a deal that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But Lee's tenure as chief AI scientist at Google Cloud was not a factor, the company said. At the Google Cloud Startup Summit on Tuesday, the companies announced that World Labs will use the majority of the funding to license GPU servers on Google Cloud Platform and eventually train “spatially intelligent” AI models. A small number of well-funded startups building…
LoanSnap, an AI-powered mortgage startup, has had its license to operate in the state revoked, according to the state's banking commissioner. This occurred after LoanSnap violated a consent order it signed with the Ministry of Banking in May. The department said Tuesday that its Consumer Credit Division began an investigation that found multiple violations of state law following a prior consent order. As a result, the Department and LoanSnap entered into a new consent order on October 2, which resulted in the revocation of LoanSnap's license. The reversal comes four months after TechCrunch's exclusive report on how LoanSnap was inundated…
Even a hot category like robotics is not immune to macroeconomic trends. The North American robot market declined in both sales and revenue in the first half of 2024, according to statistics from automation advocacy group A3. The number of orders for industrial robots in the first half of the year was 15,705 units, down 7.5% from the same period last year. Total sales for the second quarter decreased 6.8% to $982.83 million. The association puts the blame on broader economic headwinds among manufacturers. Sorting things into categories will give you different results. The auto industry, the largest employer of…
Meta's take on Twitter/X rival Instagram Threads steps further into competitor territory, perhaps with the development of community features that will allow users to better organize discussions on the platform by topic. There is a possibility. At least, the references in the app's code seem to imply that. The code mentions a new feature called Loops that Threads early adopter and veteran technologist Chris Messina discovered on Monday. The new strings he discovered were introduced in the latest app update and mention fields for joining and leaving the Loop community, community name, profile, and other elements. (Additionally, the reference “BCN”…
Unify, an AI-powered startup that uses data to reach potential buyers, has raised $12 million in Series A led by existing investors Emergence Capital and Thrive Capital. OpenAI Startup Fund, Neo, Abstract, 20Sales, and AltCap also participated in this round. The 20-month-old company took advantage of OpenAI's Converge I accelerator last year and secured a nearly $7 million seed round from the same group of investors following that program. Unify was co-founded by Austin Hughes. He has led Ramp's sales outbound program for several years. While working at Ramp, Hughes noticed that cold email outreach was not as successful as…
When talking to chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, the response is almost linear. You often need to ask follow-up questions to get more information. For example, if you're planning a trip, start by asking the chatbot questions about the location, followed by questions about meal plans, activities, travel tips, packing list, and more. A team of former Google Maps engineers is building an infinite board interface called Cove. This design helps generate multiple responses based on one question or prompt to the AI bot. The startup, founded by Stephen Chau, Andy Szybalski, and Mike Chu, has raised a $6…
The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has more than 130,000 job cuts across 457 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized startups have also seen a fair amount of cuts, and in some cases, have shut down operations altogether. By tracking these layoffs, we’re able to understand the impact on innovation across companies large and small. We’re also able to see the potential impact of businesses…