Author: TechBrunch

Like many great startups, Harbor began with disappointment: Kevin Lavelle, co-founder and CEO of innovative clothing company Mizzen and Main, couldn't find a baby monitor that suited his needs. He and his wife, Jen, turned to Nanit, a popular product known for its AI smarts and breath detection. “We developed Harbor because we were frustrated with products that over-promised and under-delivered when it came to safety and ease of use,” Lavelle says, citing one instance in particular when Nanit's app crashed, after which he woke up the next morning to find that his monitor hadn't worked all night. Lovell founded…

Used by businesses ranging from breweries and food processing companies to chemical manufacturers and paper mills, industrial heat is one of the last bastions of fossil fuels. After all, if you need to heat something, nothing beats a flame. But recently, a number of startups have begun exploring ways to use electricity to create heat. Companies like Rondo, Antora, and Fourth Power are using cheap wind and solar power to heat special bricks to thousands of degrees, then storing the thermal energy for later use. Companies like Skyven Technologies are developing industrial-scale heat pumps that use a series of compressors…

Ever since the dawn of programming, there have been many ways to ensure that code works as intended. Recently, the whole testing process has rapidly evolved. As security breaches have become more sophisticated, software validation has become a more urgent and much more complex task. “Everyone has a different, evolving approach,” said Alter Memmis, CEO of Picus Security. “The ultimate goal is to create a connection between them.” Even if figuring out what the Holy Grail looks like is half the challenge of finding it, Picus believes he is well on his way to eternal happiness. The startup's platform runs…

With an explosion of weather and climate data that previous generations of tools can't process, is AI the future of prediction? Research certainly suggests that this is the case, and a newly funded startup called Brightband is taking on the challenge of turning machine learning predictive models into both a business and open source standard. Today's weather forecasting and climate monitoring technology is based on statistical and numerical models that are decades old. That doesn't mean they're bad or wrong, just that they're not particularly efficient. These physics-based models are the kind that take weeks to create on a supercomputer.…

The final report of the UN's High Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence makes for surreal reading at times. Titled “AI Governance for Humanity”, the document highlights the paradoxical challenges of anchoring any control over a technology that is developing rapidly, being heavily invested in and being heavily promoted. On the one hand, the report points out a “lack of global governance on AI,” which is quite correct. On the other hand, the UN advisory body has “considered hundreds of [AI] “Guides, frameworks and principles are being adopted by governments, companies, consortia, regional and international organizations.” The report adds another…

When it comes to climate change, there are no “excuses,” but there may be a cheaper alternative: direct air capture. The technology, more like a community service than a pardon, promises to suck vast amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, making up for more than a century of illegal burning of fossil fuels. A scientifically sound idea, but commercially not. Currently, it costs about $600 to $1,000 to capture a tonne of carbon dioxide, far more than anyone would consider commercially viable, which has led to countless startups racing to reduce costs and capture a tonne of carbon…

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark told the WSJ that he plans to donate $100 million to further strengthen U.S. cybersecurity in response to what he sees as growing threats from foreign governments. Half of the money will be focused on protecting the power grid and other infrastructure from cyberattacks, while the other half will be allocated to educating people about so-called cybersecurity hygiene. Newmark, 71, has donated or pledged more than $400 million since he began his philanthropic endeavors in 2015, and cybersecurity has long been at the top of his cause list. (He told Fortune magazine last year that threats…

Ashraf Hebera, head of startup banking at JPMorgan, may run startup finance these days, but he's once sat in the founder's chair. His experience in both worlds — as a founder and a decades-long career in finance, including 13 years at Silicon Valley Bank — has shaped his insights today. Hebera appeared on the Equity Podcast to discuss the recent Startup Insights report, specifically taking a closer look at data that illuminates the latest early-stage investment trends, emerging sectors, and startup hubs outside of the Bay Area (Austin and Miami being two of those.) Taken as a whole, Hebera explained,…

Bluesky, a social networking startup that is building a decentralized alternative to X (formerly Twitter), provided an update on Wednesday about how it is addressing various reliability and safety concerns on its platform. The company is in various stages of developing and piloting various initiatives focused on addressing bad actors, harassment, spam, fake accounts, video safety, and more. To combat malicious users and those harassing others, Bluesky says it is developing new tools that can detect if multiple new accounts are created and controlled by the same person, potentially reducing the number of different personas bad actors can create to…

Fal.ai, a platform focused on developing AI-generated audio, video, and imagery, today revealed that it has raised $23 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Black Forest Labs co-founder Robin Rombach, and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. This is a two-round deal: $14 million of Fal's total funding came from a Series A tranche led by Kindred Ventures. The remaining $9 million came from a previously unannounced seed round led by a16z. Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven co-founded Fal (short for “Features and labels”) in 2021. Gur previously worked as a software developer at Amazon, while Yurtseven, a former…