Author: TechBrunch

Raising a Series A round of funding in today's competitive market is a daunting task. To provide seed-stage founders with the insights and strategies they need to succeed, TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 will host a key session on the Builders Stage titled “What It Takes to Raise a Series A Today,” in which some of the industry's most experienced investors will come together to share what they and their companies are looking for in their next Series A deal. Attendees in this session will gain unparalleled insight from industry veterans to learn what investors are looking for today and how they…

Snapchat is introducing new ways for users to personalize their accounts, the company announced on Tuesday. The new update, available primarily to Snapchat+ subscribers, lets users design their own homes on the Snap Map, share super-quick snaps, edit their Bitmoji, and more. As social media companies continue to rip off each other's features, Snapchat is introducing new ways for users to personalize their experience on the app in a bid to differentiate itself from other platforms and entice more people to sign up for its subscription service, which currently has 9 million users. Image credit: Snap Snapchat+ subscribers can design…

Meta plans to bring more generative AI technology to games, particularly VR, AR and mixed reality games, in a bid to reinvigorate its flagging metaverse strategy. According to the job posting, Meta aims to research and prototype “new consumer experiences” with new types of gameplay that leverage generative AI, such as games that “change every time you play” or follow “non-deterministic” paths. At the same time, the company aims to build generative AI-powered tools or partner with third-party creators and vendors that could “improve workflow and time to market” for games. The focus will be on Horizon, the Meta family…

In the age of generative AI, where chatbots can provide detailed answers to questions based on content retrieved from the internet, the lines between fair use and plagiarism, between routine web scraping and unethical summarization, are very blurred. Perplexity AI is a startup that combines a search engine with a large-scale language model to generate answers that include detailed responses rather than just links. Unlike OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity does not train its own underlying AI model, but rather uses open or commercially available models to take information it collects from the internet and turn it into answers.…

Figma CEO Dylan Field said the company would temporarily disable its AI feature “Make Design” after it allegedly plagiarized the design of Apple's weather app. The issue was first discovered by Andy Allen, founder of NotBoring Software, which makes a suite of apps including a popular skinnable weather app and other utilities. After testing Figma's tool, Allen found that it repeatedly replicated Apple's weather app when used as a design aid. Allen accused Figma of “extensively” training its tools on existing apps, a charge Field now denies. The Make Design feature is available within Figma's software and generates UI (user…

Advanced spacecraft often run on computing systems that are shockingly outdated: the Perseverance rover, for example, runs on a PowerPC 750, a processor famously found in iMacs in the late 1990s. San Francisco-based Aethero is looking to bring more powerful computing systems into orbit, with its first payload launching this month on SpaceX's Transporter-11 rideshare mission. The computer, a small, stackable MVP called AetherNxN built around Nvidia Orin processors, will get the added protection of a new radiation-shielding material that could help usher in a new era of computing in space, according to the product's developer, Cosmic Shielding Corporation (CSC).…

Advanced spacecraft often run on computing systems that are shockingly outdated: the Perseverance rover, for example, runs on a PowerPC 750, a processor famously found in iMacs in the late 1990s. San Francisco-based Aethero is looking to bring more powerful computing systems into orbit, with its first payload launching this month on SpaceX's Transporter-11 rideshare mission. The computer, a small, stackable MVP called AetherNxN built around Nvidia Orin processors, will get the added protection of a new radiation-shielding material that could help usher in a new era of computing in space, according to the product's developer, Cosmic Shielding Corporation (CSC).…

The construction industry generates more than one-third of all waste produced annually in the European Union. In the United States, the construction industry generates more than twice as much waste each year as households. Sensorita wants to help reduce waste in the construction industry by addressing what Sensorita co-founder and CEO Ulrikke Lien sees as the root of the problem: a lack of reliable data in the industry. Lien told TechCrunch that many waste management companies collect waste from so many construction sites that they often don't know where the bins are, how many there are, or when they need…

Samir Rein and his wife, Ayanna Alexander Rein, founded Freedom Trail Capital in 2023 and aim to raise a $50 million fund. Both are former Olympians, having competed in the triple jump for Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago, respectively, and now they're putting their grit and determination to work for founders looking to launch and scale consumer brands. “I love people and I love connecting with people,” Alexander Laing told TechCrunch. “We know how to combine talent and business, and we know that athletes excel in these areas. But they also have the stamina to conquer things and organizations outside…

The trends in venture funding for 2024 are pretty clear at this point: large, established VC firms continue to raise capital from limited partners, while smaller, newer funds are finding it harder to raise capital. But Industry Ventures' latest funding should provide a bit of good news for emerging managers. On Tuesday, the 24-year-old firm said it had raised a $900 million early-stage hybrid fund to invest in emerging managers and directly back fast-growth companies alongside those managers. The fund will also buy secondary interests in emerging managers from other limited partners. This is Industry Ventures' seventh hybrid fund and…