Author: TechBrunch

The promise of AI and large language models (LLMs) is the ability to understand an increasingly broader range of contexts and make sense of that information easily, so it's no surprise that many companies are working on wearable hardware to help people use AI in their daily lives. The latest entrant in this space is Bee AI, which raised $7 million in a round led by Exor to develop a wearable AI assistant that listens to users, learns about them, takes notes, gives contextual reminders, and creates lists. The company also offers a companion app for the Apple Watch. The…

The Great Rollback is here. The phrase refers to big tech companies starting to cut back on some of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that were put in place shortly after the killing of George Floyd. Most recently, Zoom announced it had fired its DEI team. Google and Meta have cut funding to DEI programs, and funding for Black founders continues to decline. Lawsuits have been filed targeting DEI programs, forcing companies to hide their efforts at inclusion, while billionaires debate whether DEI efforts at X are discriminatory. With states continuing to ban affirmative action and a presidential…

Welcome to a recap of Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. In today's episode, we're talking M&A, how one YouTuber made it in the creator economy, why Twitch is still in the red, and a self-driving car company making a comeback. First, senior reporter Rebecca Beran covered fintech giant Stripe's acquisition of four-year-old competitor Lemon Squeegee. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said the acquisition will strengthen Stripe's ability to calculate and pay global sales tax for its customers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Lemon Squeegee famously turned down other investments, including a $50 million Series A.…

Government websites aren't known for being cutting edge. Ben Cohen, co-founder and CTO of GovWell, noticed this while helping his father, a contractor, apply for building permits. Cohen worked as a full-stack engineer at Uber by day and faxed building permit documents by night. The difference in technology was stark. A few years later, the experience inspired him to start GovWell. New York-based GovWell is a workflow system for small and medium-sized governments that helps automate and streamline a variety of tasks, from building permits and regulations to zoning and fire safety inspections. GovWell co-founder and CEO Troy LeCaire told…

A federal district court in New York has ruled that U.S. border patrol agents must obtain a warrant before searching the electronic devices of Americans and international travelers crossing the U.S. border. The July 24 ruling is the latest court opinion to overturn the U.S. government's long-held legal argument that federal border patrol agents should be allowed to access travelers' devices at points of entry, such as airports, ports and land borders, without a court-approved warrant. Human rights groups supported the sentence and praised it. “This decision makes clear that Border Patrol agents need a warrant to access what the…

The first time I saw Google's latest commercial, I thought, “Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of off-putting?” By the fourth or fifth time, I no longer wondered. It starts off with the father talking about how much his daughter loves Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (she's “probably the biggest Sydney fan in the world”), and then it turns out the daughter wants to write a fan letter to the Olympic gold medalist and needs her dad's help. And things just take a turn from there. Yes, this is a commercial for Google's Gemini AI, so the dad urges…

The California Department of Transportation this week gave Nuro approval to test its third-generation R3 self-driving delivery vehicles in four Bay Area cities, a positive boost for the self-driving startup that has faced several setbacks and financial difficulties. The approval allows Nuro to test its driverless delivery vehicles in Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos, and Menlo Park. Nuro's vehicles, which have no seats, windows, steering wheels, or pedals, are designed to transport packages, not passengers. Despite operating on public roads, they look like large sidewalk delivery robots, complete with climate-controlled storage units for storing food. The upgraded geographic area…

Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX on Saturday announced controversial plans to “share” the $230 million loss from a recent security breach with all of its customers, a move that has sent shock waves through the local crypto community. The Mumbai-based company suspended all trading activity on its platform last week following a cyber attack that compromised nearly half of its reserves, but has outlined a strategy to resume operations within a week or so while implementing a “fair and transparent loss socialization strategy” to “equitablely” distribute the impact among its user base. WazirX will “rebalance” customer portfolios on its platform, returning…

Venture capital funding has never been abundant for women, Black founders, or founders of color. In partnership with Crunchbase, we've been tracking funding levels to pinpoint moments of progress and setbacks for marginalized entrepreneurs. For example, Black founders had a strong year in 2021 and raised record amounts of funding, but those amounts dropped significantly as the market cooled and many DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) measures were rolled back. Meanwhile, women have been consistently raising funds over the past few years, hovering around 2%. However, funding for mixed-gender teams has been steadily increasing, suggesting that female founders can receive…

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a U.S. Department of Commerce agency that develops and tests technologies for the U.S. government, business, and the general public, has re-released a testbed designed to measure the extent to which malicious attacks, specifically those that “pollut” training data for AI models, can degrade the performance of AI systems. First released in 2022, a modular, open-source, web-based tool called Dioptra (named after a classic astronomical and surveying instrument) aims to enable companies that train AI models and those who use them to assess, analyze, and track AI risks. NIST said Dioptra can…