Author: TechBrunch

Balderton Capital, one of Europe's oldest and largest venture capital firms known for its investments in Revolt and Wayve, has raised a total of $1.3 billion in new funding across two funds: $615 million for its Early Stage Fund IX and $685 million for its Growth Fund II. VCs who spoke to TechCrunch reacted to the news with cautious optimism. It's also a further sign that European VC is recovering after several years of weakness following ZIRP and the COVID-19 bull market of 2021 and 2022. Indeed, London-based Balderton pointed to research, based on data from Invest Europe and Cambridge…

TikTok appears to be trying to take on popular messaging services like Meta's WhatsApp and Apple's Messages after the company announced on Monday that it's adding group chats to its platform, allowing up to 32 people to create group chats to chat together and share content. People often share TikTok videos with each other in group chats on messaging apps, but TikTok now lets users do this within its own platform: Users can now watch, comment, and react to videos together on TikTok. This latest addition shows that TikTok is interested in making its platform more social and a place…

Today, John Herman posted an interesting article on NYMag about one of the big uses of AI: content summarization. We all need summarization, right? We're all too busy and overloaded with information. At least, that's what all the tech companies working on AI seem to be settling on. The problem is that AI-generated summaries aren't always very useful. Digital hiking guide AllTrails' AI summary of an Everest climb was later removed because it became too gamified, but it has obvious humorous uses. Gmail's email summaries often omit important information like birthday party dates, and Apple Intelligence's summaries of text messages…

If you're looking to buy or sell a used Peloton bike, a startup called Trade My Spin might be your solution. In theory, you don't need an entirely separate marketplace to do this — and certainly, it's already possible to buy and sell bikes on Facebook and Craigslist — but Trade My Spin CEO Ari Kimmelfeld told TechCrunch that when he tried to buy a used Peloton bike himself, he found the process deeply inconvenient, since it meant paying a lot for a product he might not get to try. Plus, you might not have a vehicle that can accommodate…

Apple has threatened to remove crowdfunding app Patreon from the App Store if creators continue to use unsupported third-party billing options or disable transactions on iOS instead of using Apple's own in-app purchasing system. In a blog post and email to Patreon creators about the upcoming changes to its iOS app memberships, the company said it has begun a 16-month transition process to move all creators to Apple's subscription billing by November 2025. Patreon also notified creators that it will switch to subscription billing starting in November 2024, but creators can decide whether to set a higher membership fee to…

Increase your brand's presence at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco by hosting a custom side event during Disrupt Week, which runs from October 26th to November 1st. Engage directly with 10,000+ Disrupt 2024 attendees, network, and connect with the Bay Area's dynamic tech community. Host industry meetups, VC office hours, workshops, fun runs, cocktail parties, happy hours, or whatever activity resonates with your brand. The event possibilities are endless. Don't miss your chance to boost your brand awareness at one of the most iconic tech events of the year. Applications close on September 6th. How do you support side…

Meta and Universal Music Group (UMG) on Monday announced an expanded multi-year music licensing agreement that will allow users to share songs from UMG's music library across Meta's platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Horizon, Threads and WhatsApp) without infringing copyright. The most notable aspect of the new agreement is that the two companies specify that they are addressing “unlicensed AI-generated content,” which often refers to songs that have been scraped by AI systems without the consent of the original creators. Artists and songwriters have increasingly been plagued by AI fakes and works that AI companies are using to train their models. “We…

Polymarket, a prediction marketplace that allows users to bet on real-world events, has partnered with AI-powered search engine Perplexity to surface news summaries of events. When users click on an event in Polymarket, they are now shown a summary of news related to the event based on Perplexity's search results, with a search box to ask further questions. Polymarket is also using Perplexity's Pages feature (which allows users to create shareable pages from search results) to create columns that will appear on Perplexity's Discover page, and Perplexity said it will explore partnerships with more third parties to feature content in…

This week, thousands of hackers, researchers, and security professionals gathered in Las Vegas for the security conferences Black Hat and Def Con, annual pilgrimages aimed at sharing the latest research, hacks, and knowledge across the security community. TechCrunch was on-site to report on the back-to-back shows and bring you some of the latest research. CrowdStrike got the attention and the “big fail” award it didn't want, but the company addressed the scandal and admitted it screwed up just weeks after releasing a buggy software update that caused a global IT outage. Hackers and security researchers may not forget easily, but…

Elon Musk's social media platform X has been the target of a series of privacy complaints after it used European Union users' data to train AI models without their consent. Late last month, eagle-eyed social media users discovered settings that indicated X had begun covertly processing local user-submitted data to train its Grok AI chatbot. The revelation prompted the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), the watchdog that oversees X's compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), to express “consternation.” GDPR allows for fines of up to 4% of annual global turnover if a violation is found, but stipulates…