Author: TechBrunch

The U.S. government announced on Monday that it had imposed new financial sanctions on five individuals and one company linked to the Intelexa consortium of spyware manufacturers, following sanctions imposed on the company's founders several months ago. In a recent statement, the U.S. Treasury Department said it had imposed sanctions on five individuals, including senior executives and associates of Intellexa, for allegedly selling Intellexa's “Predator” mobile phone spyware to authoritarian regimes. “Predator can be used to hack fully patched mobile phones almost invisibly, giving organizations that deploy it full access to a target's device, including private messages and real-time location…

Typeface, a generative AI startup focused on enterprise use cases, has acquired two companies just over a year after raising $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. Typeface said on Monday that it has acquired Treat, a company that uses AI to create personalized photography products, and Narrato, an AI-powered content creation and management platform. Treat and Narat: [Typeface’s] “We are committed to advancing multimodal capabilities,” the company said in a press release. [its] An end-to-end content lifecycle transformation vision.” “Building on the foundation of our multimodal AI workflows, this acquisition adds leading AI technology and talent to further strengthen…

Earlier this year, former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick launched Lumi, an AI startup. There have been thousands of articles written about Kaepernick and he knows all too well what it feels like to lose control of your own narrative. Now, with Lumi, he's trying to help creators take control of their own narrative, giving them AI tools to write and own their stories. We're thrilled to welcome Kaepernick to the main stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco. We'll hear from him about his clash with the media industry, the challenges facing creators today, and…

Runway, one of several AI startups developing video generation technology, today announced an API that enables developers and organizations to embed the company's generative AI models into third-party platforms, apps, and services. Access is currently limited (there is a waiting list), and the Runway API offers just one model: Gen-3 Alpha Turbo, a faster but less feature-rich version of Runway's flagship Gen-3 Alpha, and two plans: Build (for individuals and teams) and Enterprise. The base price is 1 cent per credit (5 credits per second of video), and Runway says that “trusted strategic partners” such as marketing group Omnicom are…

Jacob Jackson was committed to AI early in his career. While studying computer science at the University of Waterloo, Jackson co-founded Tabnine, an AI coding assistant that raised nearly $60 million in venture capital. After selling Tabnine to Codata in 2019 (during his final exams), Jackson joined OpenAI as an intern, where he worked until 2022. At that point, Jackson felt the urge to start a company again, one focused on supporting common developer workflows. “In the years since we created Tabnine, tools like ChatGPT and Github Copilot have changed the way developers work,” Jackson told TechCrunch. “It's a really…

When Arjun Vora and Tito Goldstein worked on the corporate side of Uber, they noticed that HR software wasn't well-suited to managing hourly workers, many of whom didn't have a way to complete basic self-service tasks like clocking in or changing payment accounts. After interviewing hundreds of Uber drivers, Vora, a former product designer at Salesforce, and Goldstein, a former design lead at Hyperloop, decided to build a platform tailored to their specifications. “Companies are faced with the need to modernize their technology stack,” Vora said. “They need to find, activate and engage their workforce in a similar way to…

Myntra, India's largest fashion e-commerce platform, is piloting a four-hour delivery service in four Indian cities, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, slashing the standard two-to-three day delivery window as a surge in quick commerce changes consumer behavior. The Flipkart Group Inc. company is testing the expedited delivery service in cities including Bangalore and New Delhi, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the information isn't public. The company plans to expand four-hour delivery to more Indian cities by the end of the year. The move into faster delivery comes amid the rise of quick…

According to the Financial Times, Insight Partners is on the verge of deploying more than $10 billion in capital for its 13th fund. The FT reported that two Insight portfolio companies were acquired last week, including threat intelligence company Recorded Future, which was sold to Mastercard for $2.65 billion but was fully owned by Insight Partners, which acquired it for $780 million in 2019. The other, Own, a startup that specializes in tools for backing up data in cloud-based applications, was sold to Salesforce.com Inc. for $1.9 billion in 2021, nearly half of the $3.5 billion valuation investors gave it.…

The Port of Seattle released a statement on Friday acknowledging that it had been targeted in a ransomware attack. The attack occurred on August 24, and the Port Authority, which also runs Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, said in a statement that it “experienced certain systems failures indicating a possible cyber attack.” The Port Authority is now describing this as a “ransomware” attack by a criminal organisation known as Rhysida. (The group is also believed to be behind last year's cyberattack on the British Library.) As the Port Authority has refused to pay the ransom, Rhysida “may retaliate by posting the data…

Platforms that connect apps that don't normally talk to each other have been around for a while (see Zapier), but they haven't always been that easy to use for non-technical people. Generative AI has lowered the barrier to entry somewhat, but you still need some programming knowledge to get the most out of these platforms and fix any issues that arise. Software developers Sam Brashears and Edward Fraser felt the same way: During their internships at major tech companies like Meta and Stripe, they struggled to get automation to work with popular app linking tools. “I'd been working on the…