Author: TechBrunch

CoinSwitch, a major Indian cryptocurrency exchange, has filed a lawsuit against rival platform WazirX seeking the recovery of trapped funds, revealing the extent of the damage caused by a cyberattack on the platform that led to the theft of $230 million worth of digital assets. The move comes more than a month after WazirX, one of India's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, reported a security breach and proposed a controversial “socialized loss” strategy aimed at distributing losses across its users. Exchange aggregator CoinSwitch said WazirX has around 810 million rupees ($9.65 million) worth of assets parked on its platform, including 124 million…

Web browser and search startup Brave has laid off 27 employees across various departments, according to information obtained by TechCrunch. The company confirmed the layoffs but did not provide details on the total number of employees fired or the reasons for the firings. The employees who were fired represent a significant portion of the company's workforce, with PitchBook estimating Brave has about 191 employees. The new job cuts come about 10 months after the company laid off 9% of its workforce in October 2023. At the time, the company said the cuts were part of “cost management in a challenging…

VerSe Innovation, the Indian content tech unicorn that owns local language news aggregator Dailyhunt, digital newsstand platform Magzter and short video app Josh, has acquired digital marketing company Valueleaf Group in a cash and stock deal. Valueleaf will help VerSe expand its presence in the Indian digital advertising space and build a significant retargeting platform to take on local competitors like Google and InMobi, which are backing the startup. In India, digital ad spending is increasing as consumption on online platforms expands in the world's most populous country. India is also the world's second largest smartphone market after China, with…

In Latin American countries like Brazil and Chile, messaging platform WhatsApp is one of the most used apps for buying goods online. It has also been the region's preferred e-commerce platform during the pandemic. But WhatsApp was designed as a messaging platform, not an e-commerce site. Startup Mercately is building back-end software to help brands sell more effectively through WhatsApp. Mercately is a B2B software that builds the infrastructure needed for brands to sell directly on WhatsApp. The company integrates with platforms like Stripe and HubSpot and uses AI agents to enable brands to communicate with customers, check inventory, take…

How many times does the letter “R” appear in the word “strawberry”? According to leading AI products like GPT-4o and Claude, the answer is 2 times. Massive language models can write an essay or solve an equation in seconds, synthesizing terabytes of data faster than a human can open a book. But these seemingly omnipotent AIs sometimes screw up spectacularly and turn their mistakes into viral memes, leaving us to rejoice with relief that we might still have time before we succumb to our new AI overlords. The inability of large-scale language models to understand the concepts of letters and…

The SEC raised the threshold for a fund to be considered a “qualified venture fund” from $10 million to $12 million. A qualified venture fund is a subset of venture funds that can raise capital from up to 250 accredited investors and is not required to register with the SEC as an investment company and is exempt from the financial burdens of being an investment company (though it must adhere to the core regulations as a VC fund). The only way a private fund does not have to register with the SEC as an investment company is if it has…

As tensions rise across the Middle East, the US military is running ads across Lebanon warning people not to attack the US or its allies, and some of these ads have appeared in an unlikely place: the dating app Tinder. Freelance journalist Seames Malekafzali posted a screenshot of an advert that appeared on the Tinder app to X, warning Lebanese residents not to “take up arms.” Written in Arabic, the ad stated that the US will “protect our partners in the face of threats from the Iranian regime and its proxies,” which operate across the region and are a reference…

Eric Li has had an impressive resume, beginning as an engineering intern at IBM and 20 years later co-founding LinkedIn and serving as its first CTO, before going on to start a number of companies, including his latest, KarmaCheck, which uses AI-driven technology to make background checks easier. Ly sat down with Becca and Dom at Found to talk about how they came to start KarmaCheck and how much technology has changed since they launched decades ago. For example, background checks were traditionally a manual process involving people filling out forms and bringing in physical records. Today, the process is…

As part of its efforts to beef up its security measures, Lyft on Tuesday announced a new passenger verification pilot program to allow drivers to verify the identity of passengers to ensure they are really who they say they are. Starting today, Lyft's new program is rolling out to nine markets: Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Jacksonville, Miami, Phoenix and Seattle. The company didn't say when it would launch in other cities. A verification badge will now appear next to riders' profiles to indicate that Lyft has verified that they are using their real name. To verify that riders are…

Some see open source AI as a way out of the familiar quagmire of proprietary software that the technology inevitably finds itself mired in. Irene Solaiman of Hugging Face and Ali Farhadi of AI2 will discuss this complex issue during a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, taking place in San Francisco from October 28-30. AI may be a very new technology in some ways, but in other ways it's stuck in the past, with a few decades-old companies pulling the strings and upfront funding. But unlike a desktop OS or office suite, the resource requirements of AI models make open…