Author: TechBrunch

This time last year, Alfonzo Terrell uncorked a bottle of fancy champagne to celebrate the one-year anniversary of being fired from Twitter. He had a lot to celebrate back then. His social media platform, Spill, just raised a $2 million seed expansion and has grown to around 200,000 users. As Spill approaches its second anniversary, Twitter's former global editorial director has something else to celebrate. That's why Emmy Award-winning actress Kerry Washington invested in his app. However, Washington is more than just a member of the cap table. She is active within the Spill community, hosting Tea Parties (the name…

If you've ever tried to use ChatGPT as a calculator, you've almost certainly noticed its computational problems. Chatbots aren't good at math. In this respect, it is not unique among AIs. Claude from Anthropic can't solve basic word problems. Gemini cannot understand quadratic equations. And meta llamas have trouble with simple addition. So why are these bots able to write monologues but still stumble on elementary-level math? Tokenization has something to do with it. Tokenization, the process of dividing data into chunks (for example, splitting the word “fantastic” into the syllables “fan,” “tas,” and “tic”), helps AI densely encode information.…

Lawmakers who support California's recently vetoed AI bill, SB 1047, are losing power. For months, Silicon Valley debated whether SB 1047 would have a chilling effect on California's AI boom or protect it from catastrophic damage caused by advanced AI systems. The answer has not been clear since California Governor Gavin Newsom decided this was the wrong approach and vetoed the bill on Sunday before it became law. Now, California Sen. Scott Wiener tells TechCrunch that some Silicon Valley institutions spread an unprecedented level of “misinformation” about SB 1047 in the months leading up to the veto. Ta. (People outside…

Two years ago, Xiaodi Hou was ousted as CEO of TuSimple, the self-driving trucking startup he co-founded, which subsequently ceased operations in the United States and was delisted from stock exchanges. In a strange turn of events, the company pivoted in the following direction. Chinese AI animation and games. Now, Hou is back at a Houston-based self-driving truck startup called Bot Auto. The startup recently made its public debut armed with $20 million in pre-Series A funding. In a sense, Hou is trying to reunite the AV band. Most of his 40-person team is made up of former TuSimple engineers…

Juno, the popular app that brought YouTube videos to Apple's Vision Pro, is shutting down, its developer announced Tuesday. YouTube had not released its own app for Vision Pro, so Juno allows users to watch videos in an immersive environment and use gestures to interact with the player to resize windows, scrub videos, and more. By making it executable, we filled an important hole in the app ecosystem. . Built by Christian Selig, an indie developer known for the now-shuttered Apollo app for Reddit, Juno was released shortly after Vision Pro arrived in February 2024. The app helped Selig familiarize…

The offices of plant-based protein startup Heura are tucked away down a narrow street a short distance from one of Barcelona’s main tourist draws. But the team of entrepreneurs and food scientists won’t be remixing their protein cocktails in close proximity to La Sagrada Família for much longer — they’re moving to new, larger digs in Poblenou, a district where industrial-scale office space is a lot easier to come by. As we’re shown around the “Heura House :)”, as the startup’s HQ is named (complete with beaming smilie), you can see why they want a bit more room to cook…

Traditional retailers have a pressing problem. Fast-moving companies like Shein and Tem rely on dedicated end-to-end supply chains to eat their lunch. Meanwhile, incumbent retailers remain stuck with traditional platforms, grappling with myriad data sets and struggling to respond to the demanding speed of the market. One London-based startup thinks it has a solution to this problem. Ameba claims it can harness unstructured data within retailers' supply chain systems and sprinkle it with generative AI to make the whole thing more efficient. The startup has now raised $7.1 million in a seed round led by London-based VC firm Hedosophia. Hedosophia…

Pererel, a women's health company, announced Wednesday that it has acquired LOOM, a women's education and health platform, for an undisclosed sum. LOOM founder Erica Chidi will join Pererel as a strategic advisor. Chidi co-founded LOOM in 2017 as an in-person experience to provide women with educational content about reproductive and sexual health. By 2020, we expanded to an online subscription digital platform, providing courses, content, and community support to women. The company has raised a total of $6.5 million from investors including Slow Ventures and Founders Fund, as well as celebrities including actress Tessa Thompson and Goop founder Gwyneth…

On Tuesday night local time, Paris-based early-stage technology investment firm Motier Ventures announced a startup hub called La Maison. This relatively new investor in the French tech ecosystem is the family office of the Houze family, owners of luxury fashion retailer Galeries Lafayette Group. Since Galeries Lafayette's main assets are brick-and-mortar stores, they believe having physical space will give startups an advantage over other technology investment firms. Founders of early-stage startups based in Paris have more options than ever when it comes to raising a seed round. Many unicorn founders become angel investors on the side. Family offices are diversifying…

Peak XV, the largest venture firm focused on India and Southeast Asia, is reducing the size of some of its funds and lowering fees as it seeks “closer collaboration” with its limited partners. The company, which has secured capital commitments totaling $2.85 billion in mid-2022, told backers on Tuesday night that they would receive $465 million from the 2022 Vintage Fund, according to a letter to investors seen by TechCrunch. It announced that the dollar debt would be waived. The region's largest venture group has not only scaled back its growth and multistage funds (it closed five of them in…