Author: TechBrunch

The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice are suing TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which requires digital platforms to provide parental notice and obtain consent before collecting and using personal data from children under the age of 13. In a press release issued Friday, the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection said that TikTok and ByteDance “allegedly knew” about the need to comply with COPPA but knowingly allowed millions of children under the age of 13 on their platforms “for years.” The FTC alleges that TikTok did so even after…

Welcome to Startups Weekly, your weekly roundup of must-see stories from the startup world. This week we cover small startup acquisitions, two new unicorns, a wearable AI device, and the venture capital backing Kamala Harris. This week's most interesting startup stories Image credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images With the IPO market all but dead, we can't help but track the other types of exits: mergers and acquisitions. While it's not necessarily the outcome founders and investors expected, we're sure to hear of more startups selling themselves. Canva Taps into Leonardo: Graphic design platform Canva has acquired Leonardo.ai, a generative AI-powered…

Noam Shazier, co-founder and CEO of Character.AI, is returning to Google in a big move after leaving the company in October 2021 to found an a16z-backed startup. In his previous role, Shazier led the team of researchers that developed LaMDA (Language Model for Conversational Applications), a language model used in conversational AI tools. Character.AI co-founder Daniel de Freitas will also join Google, along with other employees from the startup. Character.AI's general counsel Dominic Perera will serve as the startup's interim CEO. The company said the majority of its staff will remain with Character.AI. Google has also signed a non-exclusive deal…

Steam condensation on your bathroom mirror may not seem like a big deal, but it can be a major headache for architects and builders. “Moisture control is a huge pain point,” says Derek Stein, founder and CEO of Adept Materials. “Just Google the name of your favorite homebuilder and then type in 'lawsuits' and you'll find tons of stories.” Homes and offices once “breathed” through cracks and gaps overlooked during construction, but in the quest for greater energy efficiency, builders are becoming more airtight. Airtight buildings help maintain a consistent indoor temperature, but they can also trap moisture. “Essentially, buildings…

On July 19, Yelp notified some indie developers that they would need to switch to paid accounts due to heavy API usage, giving developers four days to make the change, a move reminiscent of recent communication blunders on Reddit and Twitter. After the developer responded to the July 19 email, Yelp sent a deck with a pricing structure with a base price starting at $229 per month with a limit of 1,000 API calls per day. But Yelp did not reveal other options, including a la carte packages that cost between $8 and $15 per 1,000 calls. This lack of…

The cloud infrastructure market has had another big quarter, firmly overcoming the downturn in 2023. Revenues continue to grow at a rapid pace, driven by interest in AI: Synergy Research reported quarterly revenues totaled $79 billion, up $14.1 billion, or 22%, from the prior year. Synergy said this marks its third consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth of more than 20%, with AI driving a big part of that growth. The bottom line is that the cloud shows few signs of slowing down, despite its troubles last year. Despite some elements of political and economic uncertainty, Synergy principal analyst John Dinsdale…

As has been widely reported, Wizz recently turned down a $23 billion acquisition offer from Google, which would have made it Google's largest acquisition ever. Perhaps the Google team balked during due diligence, or there were concerns that a deal of this magnitude would be challenged by regulators, but all reports, including TechCrunch's, suggest that the decision to pull the plug came from Wiz, not Google. CEO Assaf Rapaport said this in an email sent to Wizz's 1,200 employees, without going into details about the acquisition proposal, saying he was “honored” and that while he was honored, the company “has…

According to a TechCrunch investigation, Cencora has so far notified more than 1 million people across the US that their personal and protected health information was exposed in a data breach that occurred earlier this year. The pharmaceutical giant said in May that patient data had been exposed in the February incident. Sencora obtained the data through pharmaceutical companies it partners with in connection with its patient assistance programs, including AbbVie, Bayer, Pfizer and Regeneron. Sencora, which was known as AmerisourceBergen until 2023, said in its data breach notice that the exposed data included patients' names, addresses and dates of…

Self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation is aiming to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding as it pushes ahead with commercializing self-driving cars by the end of 2024. Aurora is pursuing a driver-as-a-service model, with carriers purchasing trucks equipped with Aurora Driver technology and then servicing shippers through those trucks, but it plans to enter the market as a carrier, offering up to 20 packers and Volvo self-driving trucks to shippers by the end of the year. Aurora is poised to sell up to $420 million worth of Class A common stock to underwriters Goldman Sachs, Allen &…

AI hardware has taken a new form with the $99 Friend necklace, a pendant that gives you an AI friend you can talk to, but that's it. Friend's pitch is that the wearable helps fight loneliness, but other AI hardware products that have recently hit the market, such as Humane's Ai Pin and Rabbit's r1, have failed to live up to expectations. Even OpenAI, a leader in the field, released its ultra-realistic AI assistant later than expected and only today to a small “alpha group” of users, making it difficult to evaluate the product's capabilities. But there's one AI buddy…