Author: TechBrunch

Cohere, a generative AI startup co-founded by former Google researchers, has raised $500 million in new funding from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu. The round, which also included participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada's export credit agency EDC, values ​​Toronto-based Cohere at $5.5 billion, according to Bloomberg. That's more than double the startup's valuation in June 2023 when it secured $270 million from Innovia Capital and others, and brings Cohere's total funding to $970 million. Josh Gartner, Cohere's head of communications, told TechCrunch that the funding will allow Cohere to “accelerate its growth.”[W]”We continue to…

Indian food delivery and quick commerce startup Swiggy is pivoting one of its small businesses: Swiggy Minis, a Shopify alternative for small businesses, is turning into a linkedinbio service that will now also cater to service providers such as nutritionists and fitness trainers. In its new avatar, Swiggy Minis will act as landing pages where merchants can drive target customers from their social media pages.The company said it will soon add integration with Google Calendar to enable service providers to use the booking module. Swiggy launched Minis as an experiment in 2022 to provide small merchants with a no-code alternative…

Ask any engineer tasked with tracking customer balances what their experience is like and you'll likely hear a deep sigh that ledger management is the bane of their existence. Fragment is a startup that offers a ledger API that gives engineers access to real-time double-entry bookkeeping without having to learn an entirely new accounting jargon. Founders CEO Thomas Neckel and CTO Omi Chowdhury founded Fragment in 2021. The software targets engineers building software to track customer balances. This is the co-founders' third startup together. They previously launched an identity management company called Scuid, which competed with Okta and was acquired…

Identity management has been one of the most common fulcrums of security breaches in recent years, and it's a nightmare for organizations to track, which is one of the main reasons it remains a constant threat to malicious hackers. Linx, a security startup founded in Tel Aviv, has been quietly building technology using AI and analytics to address this problem, but today, after acquiring customers in stealth mode, it has emerged publicly with $33 million in funding to tackle the identity management challenge more aggressively. Linx's funding was announced in one lump sum, but more specifically in two separate rounds,…

As part of TechCrunch's ongoing “Women in AI” series, which aims to shine a well-deserved and long-overdue spotlight on female academics and others focused on AI, TechCrunch interviewed Lakshmi Raman, Director of AI at the CIA. We spoke about her journey to the position, the CIA's use of AI, and the balance that needs to be struck in embracing new technologies while deploying them responsibly. Raman is a longtime intelligence professional, having earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master's in computer science from the University of Chicago before joining the CIA as a…

Google's next big hardware event is scheduled for August 13 at 10am PST, roughly two months earlier than its usual mid-fall Made By Google event, and it's notable that the company will unveil its latest flagship device, the Pixel 9, ahead of the iPhone 16. Apple's latest products are due to be unveiled in September. Google hasn't offered a justification for the change — perhaps things are too noisy now, less than a month before the strangest presidential election in modern U.S. history — but the company certainly has a lot to discuss with Gemini, too, and the new device…

WazirX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in India, has “temporarily” suspended all trading activity on its platform, days after a security breach caused it to lose roughly $230 million, nearly half of its reserves. The Mumbai-based exchange said in a tweet on Sunday evening that the cyberattack had significantly impaired its ability to maintain the crucial 1:1 collateral ratio with its assets, raising further concerns about the adequacy of WazirX's reserves and its ability to repay customers in full. WazirX suspended customer withdrawals earlier this week after an attacker gained access to one of the exchange's multi-signature wallets, which…

When is a startup not a startup? When it's a publicly traded company with 1,300 employees and $2.5 billion in capital. If that statement doesn't bring a smile to your face, it's because we're not kidding. It's the reality for Nebius, an emerging AI infrastructure company born from the ashes of Yandex, the multi-billion dollar behemoth that was once billed as “Russia's Google.” “We're starting a business, so it's like a startup, but it's unusually big,” Yandex co-founder and former CEO Arkady Volozh told TechCrunch in an interview this week. “But what we're trying to build is actually going to…

Google parent Alphabet is in advanced talks to buy cybersecurity startup Wizz for $23 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, with TechCrunch sources saying they had heard the same story, adding that deal talks could continue into next week. If the deal goes through, it would be Alphabet's largest acquisition to date. It would also be a massive exit for the startup at a time when exits, especially M&A, haven't picked up as many had expected heading into 2024. If the deal goes through, it could impact venture firms and startups in a variety of ways, some more obvious,…

The recent CrowdStrike outage affected approximately 8.5 million devices – less than 1% of Windows machines worldwide – according to a blog post by David Weston, Microsoft's vice president of enterprise and operating system security. These are the first hard numbers released by Microsoft and CrowdStrike about the scale of yesterday's outage, which was caused by an update to CrowdStrike's cybersecurity software that crashed Windows machines (Mac and Linux devices were not affected). Although the number of affected devices was relatively small, the disruptions were widespread and global, affecting banks, retailers, brokerages, rail networks, and more. Airlines grounded flights worldwide.…