Author: TechBrunch

According to the Financial Times, the FBI is currently investigating Horn Capital, a nine-year-old Palo Alto, California-based venture backed by Chinese private equity firms, to see whether some of the company's capital came from the Chinese government and whether it shared sensitive startup data with Beijing. Horn, which was originally founded with $115 million in funding from China's CSC Group, has since acquired stakes in more than 360 U.S. startups, including investment platform AngelList, payments giant Stripe and supersonic flight company Boom. The survey comes amid ongoing tensions between the U.S. and China, which have seen U.S. companies withdraw from…

Salesforce is on an acquisition spree. After acquiring data management company Own earlier this month, Salesforce today announced plans to acquire enterprise knowledge platform Zoomin, which we've covered a few times before, and which will consolidate a company's documentation, including product user guides and tutorials, into a single portal. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Salesforce expects the transaction to close in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 (Jan. 31), subject to customary closing conditions. Founded in 2019 by Gal Oron, Hanan Saltzman, and Joe Gelb, Zoomin leverages AI and big data to help businesses build self-service document search…

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming one of the most-hyped companies in recent memory. And its latest partnership with Apple for its upcoming generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, has given the company another significant bump in the AI race. 2024 also saw the release of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s new flagship omni…

Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of FTX affiliate Alameda Research, was sentenced to two years in prison on Tuesday. Although Ellison pleaded guilty to conspiring with FTX's Sam Bankman Freed to steal $8 billion worth of client funds, she was a highly cooperative witness and helped law enforcement investigate the massive fraud scheme. Her two-year sentence stands in stark contrast to Bankman Freed's 25-year sentence. Bankman Freed is currently in prison but continues to appeal his sentence. Unlike Ellison, the former FTX founder maintains his innocence. Two other former FTX executives, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh, are awaiting sentencing. Source…

It's the season for M&A right now. Publicly traded data protection and management software company Commvault announced Tuesday its intention to acquire data backup and recovery provider Clumio for an undisclosed amount. The transaction is expected to close in early October. CommVault said the transaction will not have a material impact on earnings and will be funded with cash on hand. Headquartered in Santa Clara, Clumio was founded by Poojan Kumar, Kaustubh Patil and Woon Ho Jung in 2017. The company is primarily focused on protecting AWS workloads, but in 2020 also introduced support for Microsoft 365. As of February,…

While some tech companies have lofty goals like transforming drug discovery or mining metals from asteroids through AI, others aim to solve some of the most infuriating everyday problems faced by ordinary people. Tennibot falls into the latter category, and wants to pick up tennis balls for you. Haisam Eletravi, co-founder and CEO of Tenibot, said in a recent episode of TechCrunch's podcast “Found” that he's been involved in tennis his whole life. As a child, his parents wanted his sister to become a tennis star, so they tasked Eletravi with practicing with her. A few years later, while earning…

Getting healthy is big business these days, and now a startup with a unique approach to using technology to help people get more active is announcing a major funding round and ramping up its growth. Munich-based EGYM, a maker of connected fitness equipment and personalized training technology that is also building a fitness marketplace between gyms and corporate wellness programs, has closed a $200 million-plus Series G round from L Catterton and Meritech, new backers of the startup. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO and founder Philippe Roche-Schlander confirmed that the company is valued at more than $1.2 billion after…

When Lux Capital investor Deena Shakir struggled to explain to her three young children what her job was all about, she initially tried to buy them a Chia Pet, a doll that lets kids plant chia seeds on it and watch the seeds grow into something amazing. Shakir, who is an investor in health technology companies including fertility startup ALife Health and women's health company Maven Clinic, said she particularly liked that the doll was a unicorn. “They didn't get the joke, but I thought it was really funny,” she said. In 2020, in the midst of quarantine boredom, Shakir…

When is $14 billion in funding not enough? For a battery startup. Northvolt, which is seeking to create a European rival to Asia's battery giants, said on Monday it was halting construction of a factory expansion and laying off 1,600 employees, about 20 percent of its workforce. The company had planned to expand its Ett plant in northern Sweden, boosting annual production to 30 gigawatt hours. The expansion would have supplied cathode active material (CAM), a key component needed to make finished cells. The company also closed another CAM production site in Sweden on September 9. Without those plants, Northvolt…

OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it is rolling out Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) to a select number of its paid ChatGPT customers. The voice feature, which makes conversations on ChatGPT more natural, will first be rolled out to ChatGPT's Plus and Teams tier customers. Enterprise and Edu customers will have access to it starting next week. As part of the rollout, AVM will have a new design: The feature is now represented by a blue animated sphere rather than the black animated dot that OpenAI unveiled at a showcase of the technology in May. Once AVM is available, a pop-up…