Author: TechBrunch
Orion, a Texas-based carbon black company, announced to investors that it fell victim to a criminal scheme that led to “multiple fraudulent transfers to accounts controlled by unknown third parties,” resulting in losses of $60 million. Details are scarce, but these schemes typically involve fraudsters tricking company employees, often with access to the finance department or the executive suite, into transferring company funds to a bank account they control. These schemes might involve hacking into email accounts used by executives to send fraudulent instructions to staff on their behalf, or using deepfakes to trick unsuspecting employees into transferring funds. According…
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a constantly evolving industry. We'll talk to the industry's brightest minds and leaders: executives from early- and late-stage SaaS companies, leaders of the infrastructure companies that drive the industry, and the venture capitalists who fund them. Join us on the SaaS stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 to explore and have fun. TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 SaaS Stage Agenda From Salesforce to Sierra: Brett Taylor's Innovation Journey Brett Taylor (Sierra) Bret Taylor, former co-CEO of Salesforce and recent co-founder of Sierra, a startup building customer experience AI agents, joins us to discuss why he believes AI…
What's the right way to build a software business? Many startup advisers say B2B software should start by solving one problem, get customers, and then add features as the company grows. Serial founder Parker Conrad, founder and CEO of Rippling, an HR software startup that was valued at $13.5 billion in April, thinks that's the wrong way to go. Speaking on a recent episode of TechCrunch's podcast “Found,” Conrad said he believes the advice given to software founders over the last 20 years was wrong. “I think the traditional way of thinking about how to build business software is to…
EliseAI, a developer of AI-powered property management tools for property owners, has raised $75 million in a Series D round, bringing the company's valuation to $1 billion. EliseAI is the brainchild of co-founder and CEO Minna Song, who met the company's second co-founder, Tony Stoyanov, while they were undergraduates at Cambridge University. After graduating, Song moved to New York City and worked as an administrative assistant for a residential real estate company. At the company, Song said he found that inefficiencies in the rental and leasing industry, particularly when it came to messaging to current and prospective tenants, were leading…
What specific risks should individuals, businesses, and governments consider when using AI systems or writing the rules that govern their use? This is not an easy question to answer. AI that controls critical infrastructure clearly poses risks to human safety. But what about AI designed to grade exams, organize resumes, or check travel documents at border crossings? Each of these carries its own unique set of risks that, while just as serious, are entirely different categories of risk. In crafting AI regulatory laws like the EU AI Act and California's SB 1047, policymakers have struggled to reach consensus on which…
The cybersecurity industry's newest unicorn and big funding round headlined is Kiteworks, a company that makes tools to secure email communications, file shares and sensitive data situations, which has raised $456 million from Insight Partners and Sixth Street Growth, an investment that values the company at more than $1 billion. It's a notable development for the San Mateo-based startup, formerly known as Accellion, which suffered a major data breach in 2021. The incident, which involved legacy services, affected at least 300 organizations, including Morgan Stanley, the University of California, Kroger and Shell. Today, Kiteworks is thriving: the company has been…
After much back and forth earlier this year, Spotify announced on Wednesday that it had received approval from Apple to display pricing information in its iOS app for EU users. The company is taking advantage of new antitrust guidelines that the EU imposed specifically on music streaming apps, rather than agreeing to Apple's new business rules under the EU's Digital Markets Act. In March, Apple was fined 1.84 billion euros ($2 billion) by European regulators for antitrust violations in the market. Spotify and Apple are also in talks over an app update that would allow the music streaming service to…
India's Supreme Court has set aside a court ruling that stayed Bijoux's bankruptcy proceedings, a victory for U.S. creditors seeking to recover $1 billion from the once-proud education technology startup. The Supreme Court of India on Wednesday ordered a stay on the decision of the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal that had recently approved a settlement plan with the Board of Control of Cricket in India (BCCI), which had suspended its insolvency proceedings. The apex court's order means that the proceedings will resume. Wednesday's ruling is the latest in a series of crises for cash-strapped Bijoux, once India's most valuable…
Elon Musk's xAI's Grok AI model can now generate images on the X social network. Access to Grok is currently limited to X's Premium and Premium+ users. The text below the sample image prompts indicates that Grok is using Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1 to create these images. Early user-generated images suggest that Grok's image-generating feature has no guardrails when it comes to generating images of politicians, but with the US presidential election approaching, the company may impose some restrictions on the feature to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Grok 2.0 features political illustrations and real people, which ChatGPT rejects.This instantly makes Grok…
Google's annual Made by Google hardware event got underway early Tuesday morning, but the company announced so many things that a lot got lost in the shuffle. We've rounded up some of the more interesting AI-related announcements that got under the radar, including Pixel Studio for generating images and Pixel Screenshots for saving and organizing information in your screenshots. Call notes summarize the conversation For people like me who have short-term memory problems, call notes can be a useful feature. Call notes, available on Pixel 9 series devices, saves a summary of your conversation after a call. Details and a…