Author: TechBrunch

The promise that blockchain would change the world has not materialized: the technology has primarily enabled people to speculate on a new asset class. A major hurdle to realizing blockchain's full potential, Web3 advocates argue, is that decentralized services are extremely difficult to build. Tomasz Tunguz, best known for his popular startup blog and successful SaaS investments at Redpoint Ventures, believes he's found a company that significantly lowers the bar for building blockchain apps. The company is Initia, which recently closed a $14 million Series A round, about 90% of which was funded by Tunguz's Theory Ventures, according to information…

Anyone who works at a computer for more than eight hours a day knows the amount of tool and “context switching” required to stay productive: “Where did I put that file?”, “How do I manage all my Bluetooth devices?”, “How quickly can I switch from my to-do list to GitHub to a web search?” Of course, this isn't rocket science, but Raycast aims to make that task easier by providing integrated and quick access to applications, files, commands, and workflows through a keyboard-based interface. Essentially, it's about bringing a little order to chaos with so-called “shortcuts to everything.” This could…

Supabase, an open-source developer platform and Postgres database service that started as an alternative to Google's Firebase, announced Wednesday that it has raised $80 million in a Series C funding round led by Peak XV and Craft Ventures. This brings Supabase's total funding to $196 million, including its Series B round (also $80 million) in 2022. Supabase co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone didn't disclose the new valuation in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch ahead of Wednesday's announcement, but emphasized that it's an upround. He also said the company only recently began drawing down its Series B reserves. Like many database…

Digital transformation — upgrading companies' legacy apps and processes with new technology — has long been a hot, high-margin business, but the pandemic has caused the market to boom. Lockdowns and the widespread shift to working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic have led brands to turn to older technologies to modernize their organizations. According to Statista, global spending on digital transformation will reach $1.85 trillion in 2022, up more than 16% year-on-year. WhatFix is ​​one digital transformation company benefiting greatly from this boom: The San Jose-based company, which provides a platform for demonstrating how to use third-party software,…

Reddit is rolling out machine learning-powered translation to more than 35 new regions across Europe, Asia and Latin America as it aims to open up the primarily English-language social network to more users. The service launches about five months after Reddit first introduced site-wide translations for French speakers, though the company has previously allowed users to translate individual posts into multiple languages. It also comes seven months after Reddit went public, and while the company says its user base and advertising revenue continue to grow, the most obvious way to attract more users is to make content available in more…

India's second-largest telecom operator, Bharti Airtel, on Wednesday vowed to curb the rise of spam calls and messages in the world's most populous country, announcing the rollout of an AI-powered spam-detection solution to all its customers. The Google-backed company also announced the launch of what it claims to be India's first network-based, AI-powered spam detection system. The feature will alert Airtel customers in real time to suspected spam calls and text messages and will be enabled automatically for all users at no extra cost. Airtel has about 387 million wireless subscribers in India. Indians have long been plagued by relentless…

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…