Author: TechBrunch

In a world where technology trends often spark investment frenzy, the temptation to follow the crowd can be overwhelming. But trend business is a dangerous game. When everyone jumps headfirst into the latest “next big thing,” without true understanding, the risk of falling off a cliff increases exponentially. We welcome Pegah Ebrahimi, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of FPV Ventures. Harry Tannenbaum, co-founder and president of Mill; They take to the Builders Stage to explore how founders and investors can discern real opportunity from hype and avoid the fate of blindly following the crowd. Disrupt 2024, taking place from October 28th…

The tech industry did a huge double take this year when a security startup called Wiz, founded in Israel just four years ago, became the subject of a record-breaking $23 billion takeover bid by Google. The start-up company boldly declined the offer, but… Really? Yes, really. We spoke with Assaf Rappaport, CEO and co-founder of Wiz, on the Disrupt stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, taking place October 28-30 at Moscone West in San Francisco, and asked him the big questions. We plan to ask all of these questions. :Why did Rapaport pull out of the deal? What's next for Wiz?…

StrictlyVC is hosting its first event within TechCrunch, and investors looking to connect with their peers won't want to miss this opportunity. The StrictlyVC series, which brings headline-grabbing people and stories directly to an audience of primarily VCs, LPs, founders, and executives, will be hosting Disrupt 2024 at San Francisco's Moscone Center on Tuesday, October 29th at 3 p.m. will appear at the center of From noon to 6pm This event marks the first time StrictlyVC is coordinating a boutique event within parent company TechCrunch's larger Disrupt show. It will also be the first time a StrictlyVC event will be…

The global pet food market is highly competitive and continues to grow, with a market share estimated at $103.3 billion in 2023. This growth has led many companies to target pet owners who are willing to invest in high-quality food to enhance the health and longevity of their pets. Ollie, the “human-grade” pet food subscription service, is moving into new territory with AI-powered pet diagnostics to differentiate itself in a crowded market. The company announced Thursday that it has acquired DIG Labs, a pet health technology startup touting its unique dog stool image scanning and analysis capabilities, for an undisclosed…

Hackers are exploiting yet another vulnerability in one of Ivanti's widely used enterprise products, the U.S. government's cybersecurity agency CISA warned in a new alert this week. Ivanti Endpoint Manager (EPM) is a tool that helps organizations manage and secure fleets of employee devices, and the remote code execution flaw was first revealed by Trend Micro's zero-day initiative in April and by Ivanti the following month. The patch has been applied. This bug allows an unauthenticated attacker to remotely execute malicious code on affected Ivanti customers' servers. In Wednesday's advisory, CISA said hackers are currently actively exploiting this vulnerability (tracked…

AI-powered video editing app Captions is rolling out new tools for websites to manage video content publishing schedules and generate videos for that date based on topics related to the site. The tool first scans your site, extracts your site's content, keywords, offerings, and key selling points to create a content plan. At the moment, their social media strategy is primarily focused on video formats Instagram Reels and TikTok, which is not surprising given that Captions specializes in video creation and editing. The company said it would consider other formats in the future. The company believes the tool could be…

Generative AI and large-scale language models (LLM) have been all the rage in recent years, upending traditional online search with the likes of ChatGPT while improving customer support, content generation, translation, and more. Now, a fledgling startup is using LLM to build an AI assistant that can answer complex questions from developers, software end users, and employees, among other things. It is similar to ChatGPT, but targeted towards technical products. Founded last February, Kapa.ai is an alumnus of Y Combinator's (YC) Summer 2023 program and already has a pretty impressive roster of customers, including ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Docker, Reddit, Monday.com,…

Black Forest Labs, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that develops the image generation component of xAI's Grok assistant, has launched a beta version of its API and released a new model. The new API provides Flux, Black Forest Labs' family of image generation models, in a managed package. It allows developers to choose which Flux models to include in their app or service. The add-on includes a content moderation layer and image resolution limits. Black Forest Labs also today announced its latest image generation model, Flux1.1 Pro. It claims to deliver 6x faster generation than the previous generation Flux.1 Pro. This…

These days, individual investors have a wide range of options for investing in startups without actually having to deal with them. This ecosystem more or less started with AngelList, but now there are a number of options that startups can use to raise capital and investors can deploy to manage their deals, including Carta, Allocations, Vauban, and Odin. . A new player in this space, Quorum, founded by two Ukrainians, is poised to expand its own approach to the scheme. The startup, which helps startups raise both equity and debt, has acquired Investory.io, a smaller Vienna-based company in the sector.…

AI tends to make things up. This is unattractive to almost everyone who uses it regularly, but it is especially attractive to businesses where erroneous results can negatively impact their bottom line. Half of employees responding to a recent Salesforce survey said they were concerned about inaccurate answers from their company's AI-powered generation systems. There are no techniques that can cure these “hallucinations,” but there are things that can help. For example, search augmentation generation (RAG) combines an AI model with a knowledge base to provide supplementary information before the model responds, acting as a type of fact-checking mechanism. Entire…