Author: TechBrunch
Private equity firm Thoma Bravo has closed its first European fund for 1.8 billion euros ($1.9 billion). Europe does not have a shortage of its own venture capital (VC) funds. While Atomico and Cherry Venture have shut down their growth-stage funds early in recent months, North American investment companies are slowly retreating from Europe. The renowned Silicon Valley VC company Andreessen Horowitz recently closed its UK offices, while Omers Ventures and Coatue have also closed the area's offices for the past 18 months. This leaves a hole that private equity companies seeking negotiations can meet. Thoma Bravo has formalized the…
WordPress.com owner Automattic last year acquired the multiservice messaging app Beeper for $125 million and said it would merge with Texts.com, a previous acquisition in the same category. Currently, Beeper has released its first redesign app and beta desktop set for iOS and desktops since the merger. In a blog post, Beeper said he built a desktop app using the basics of the Texts.com app and the iOS app from scratch. The company added that the new set of apps is faster and the battery is hungry. On X, Texts.com founder Kishan Bagaria said that while users can still use…
Do you sometimes refer to X on Twitter with an old name? it's okay. Even Elon Musk, the man who changed his Twitter name to X, sometimes mentions the social media platforms he runs as Twitter. “Twitter has added far more features,” Musk said in a post on X on Monday. The X owners call it Twitter. Image credit: Screenshot: x The X owners were responding to another account that praised Doge, the government's efficiency advisory body led by Musk, for their efforts to cut the federal workforce. This weekend, Musk told federal employees to detail their job results and…
App Store Leading Executive Phil Schiller originally raised concerns about the 27% fee that the iPhone manufacturer planned to buy app developers outside the App Store, according to the company on Monday. He testified in court. In addition to being a potential compliance risk, he suggests that the fees create a “hostile relationship” between Apple and the developer, and Apple Money is a source of transactions made outdoors. It appeared to require the audit rights to verify whether they were owed or not. App Store. Apple typically charges a 30% fee for in-app purchases, but the 27% discounted fee was…
Over the weekend, Elon Musk looked into his followers on X. This is the platform that was spent on purchasing $44 billion. Federal employees asked if they should send an email to their team with a list of five things they accomplished this week. Yes votes totaled over 70%, followed by masks. Federal employees received an email from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) this weekend, requesting a weekly performance list by 11:59pm on Monday. It matches with ” [President Donald Trump’s] Instructions, all federal employees will receive an email promptly requesting a request to understand what they did…
The tech layoff wave continued through 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, 2024 saw more than 150,000 job cuts across 542 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Large companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap, and Microsoft conducted sizable layoffs in 2024, while smaller-sized startups also experienced cuts, and in some cases, shut down operations altogether. We’re continuing to track the industry’s layoffs into 2025 so you can see the trajectory of the cutbacks. Later this year, we will break out our 2024 and 2025 lists in order to make the trends easier to parse. By…
Music Streamer SoundCloud has announced a partnership with Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster and Universe, allowing artists to list events in their profiles in a customized way. The company said it would work with Ticketmaster through a new promotional program to create more promotional opportunities for artists in the future, but did not provide further details. Artists with SoundCloud's Top Tier Pro Plan can list events on their profile pages using the self-service ticketing platform universe without leaving SundCloud. You can add or modify events to the page depending on the event you want to promote. SoundCloud pulls artist event data from…
Khosla Ventures, a company known for its early investments in Openai, is raising $3.5 billion with three funds, the Wall Street Journal reports. Its target is 17% greater than the company's previous 2023 fund's $3 billion fund. Approximately half of the new capital will be allocated to the 9th core venture fund. The remaining funds will be split into a $1.1 billion growth fund for late startups and a $650 million seed stage focused on the $650 million seed stage. Khosla Ventures declined to comment on the new funding. Founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, the…
Last year, after launching an auto-generated video caption, Google Drive has launched a searchable video transcript. Starting Monday, Google announced that drive users can view and search video transcripts. This new feature removes the need to upload video audio to transcription services like Otter. The transcript appears in the sidebar next to the video player and highlights the text you are currently speaking when the video is played. According to Google, the new update is designed to allow users to search for transcripts and easily find specific moments in the video. Additionally, it's easier for users to follow along with…
Xai, the AI company of Elon Musk, released its long-awaited flagship AI model, the Grok 3 last week. Grok 3 enhances the Grok Chatbot app for mobile and web, as well as the Grok experience on Musk-owned social network X. Given the huge amount of competition in the AI chatbot space these days, it was not a natural conclusion that the Grok 3 would have a lot of impact. Openai's ChatGpt alone has grown to 400 million active users per week. However, preliminary data suggests that new models have actually started to download and try Grok on people. The week…