Author: TechBrunch

Apple is introducing new accessibility features to iPad and iPhone designed to meet the needs of diverse users. These include features like controlling your device with eye-tracking technology, creating custom shortcuts using your voice, and experiencing music with a haptic engine. The company made the announcement ahead of Thursday's Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Apple already supports eye tracking in iOS and iPadOS, but required the use of an additional eye tracking device. This is the first time Apple has introduced the ability to control iPads and iPhones without the need for additional hardware or accessories. A new built-in eye tracking…

TechCrunch Disrupt, our flagship startup event held annually in San Francisco, returns October 28-30. We expect it to be crowded with thousands of startup enthusiasts. Exciting news! We are pleased to announce the near-complete agenda for the Builders Stage, the culmination of several months of hard work. This is just one of six stages featured at this year's event, with more announcements to come. PS Early bird ticket sales end on May 31st. Book your pass now and save up to $800! About Builders Stage Builders Stage serves as a hub for dozens of panels and interviews dedicated to the…

Mike Krieger, one of the co-founders of Instagram and most recently co-founder of personalized news app Artifact (recently acquired by TechCrunch's parent company Yahoo), will join Anthropic as the company's first chief product officer. will be joining. As CPO, Mr. Krieger will oversee Anthropic's product engineering, management and design efforts, helping the company expand its suite of AI apps and bring Claude, its generative AI technology, to more users, Anthropic said. It is working. In addition to consumer-focused projects like the recently released Claude app for mobile, Krieger is also responsible for Anthropic's enterprise services, subscriptions, and software. “I have…

Seven ventures and organizations focused on diversity within technology have announced the Diversity Data Alliance, an effort to standardize the way data is collected and shared. Data transparency remains a pressing issue within venture firms for those who want to better track where and to whom their funds are being allocated. Many companies already compile background information about their founders privately, but without insight into how the data was collected, that data can be distorted when shared publicly. . The alliance hopes to simplify this process by creating a framework that companies can use to collect information about their founders…

Nicholas Johnson founded the company after losing a bet. Johnson was having dinner with several investors in Light, the congestion management company he co-founded. As the dinner conversation meandered, we settled on a conversation about EV charging and the best way to bring it into apartment complexes. Apartment dwellers who own EVs are often left with two less-than-ideal choices: use a public charger or plug the vehicle into a regular 120-volt outlet. This adds about 3 to 5 miles per hour of mileage. Johnson wasn't interested in the issue, so one of the people at the dinner table made him…

Embedded finance is something brands and non-financial companies often hear about when they want to offer financial products and services such as banking, insurance, lending, and payments to provide a better user experience for their customers. Layer focuses on a better user experience, but includes accounting functionality. Its customers are companies like Square and Toast that work with small and medium-sized businesses to provide accounting and bookkeeping functionality within their products. These large companies will embed Layer's tools into their platforms for use by small and medium-sized businesses. Small businesses now have access to the bookkeeping and accounting tools within…

While more companies are investing in AI, many are struggling to put AI-powered projects into production, let alone achieve meaningful ROI. There are many challenges. But one thing that often repeats is data management. The data that enterprises need to train, run, and fine-tune their AI models is unorganized, siled, and unoptimized. In a 2022 survey by Great Expectations, an open source data benchmarking platform, 77% of organizations said they were concerned about data quality. Startups promising to solve these data problems are raising money. On Wednesday, Weka, a platform for building data pipelines that handle a variety of data…

PayHOA is a Kentucky-based, self-founded startup that provides software for self-managed homeowners associations (HOAs) and is an example of how real-world problems can turn into opportunities. is. The company just raised a $27.5 million Series A round in an environment where Series A rounds of nearly $30 million are no longer common. PayHOA founder and CEO Mike Bollinger is putting his finance degree to good use. The entrepreneur has two other companies: LegFi.com, a startup focused on financial management for fraternities and sororities, and File990.org, which serves the tax compliance needs of nonprofits. He started his PayHOA in 2018 after…

The U.S. restaurant industry is expected to surpass $1 trillion in sales for the first time this year, despite further economic pressures on consumers. Now Restaurant365, a startup building technology to manage these businesses, has raised his hefty $175 million in funding to capitalize on that growth. The funding was led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from the company's existing backers KKR and L Catterton. Restaurant365 did not disclose the valuation it received for this round, but co-founder and CEO Tony Smith confirmed to TechCrunch that it was an uplifting round. “We're excited about it [the business] We continue to…

It seems like just yesterday (or 7 years ago!) that I was focusing on the rapidly developing Portugal's growing startup and investment scene. I updated the article in 2021 and noticed an explosion of new companies and investors. Today, further evidence has emerged that Portugal is spreading its wings as one of Europe's freshest and most voracious tech ecosystems. Venture firm Schilling has launched a €50 million fund to support growth-stage startups in its portfolio and, crucially, to invest in startups everywhere. other than that. Shilling, the VC arm of Portuguese private equity firm Draycott SCR, is best known as…