Author: TechBrunch

Heavy-equipment maker CNH Industrial has a long history of mergers and acquisitions and once oversaw legendary brands like Ferrari, but five years ago, at the height of agtech's boom, the global giant struggled to make inroads in the startup world. The conglomerate turned to one of its longest-tenured executives, Italian businessman Michele Lombardi. Lombardi rose through the ranks in CNH's business development group, where he was part of the “black belt team” that built top-tier corporate partnerships, and when the company approached him for this new role in 2019, he was essentially starting a new chapter “from scratch.” “They were…

Just weeks after a software update caused a global IT meltdown, CrowdStrike isn't shying away from the spotlight — in fact, the company's president, Michael Sentonas, took to the stage at the Pwnie Awards to accept the Most Epic Fail award. The awards ceremony took place at Def Con, right after the Black Hat conference, where CrowdStrike had the largest booth and gave away free T-shirts and action figures. A company spokesperson told TechCrunch that the message to attendees was “thanks and admiration for the Black Hat community.” Video of Sentonas' acceptance speech Share onlineLike conference attendees who seemed ready…

Where there's shadow there's yang, where there's action there's reaction, where there's proprietary software there's an open source alternative, and so on. The issue of “openness” in technology has rarely been more central to the public consciousness than it has been in the past few years. The steady decline of Twitter has led millions of people to seek alternatives, many of which are open source, and last year's OpenAI power struggle has put a spotlight on what “open source” actually means in the context of the burgeoning AI revolution. The consumer software world has long offered “open” alternatives to existing…

Once India's second-highest-valued startup, Oyo's valuation at $10 billion has fallen to $2.4 billion in a new funding round. The Gurugram-headquartered startup has raised $173.5 million in a Series G funding round. InCred Wealth, Patient Capital and J&A Partners invested in the new round. TechCrunch reported in May that Oyo was seeking a funding round that could lower its valuation to below $3 billion. “We deny any rumors, including those about the valuation in the article,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch in May. “At this stage, there are no concrete transactions, let alone any discussions about valuation.” The valuation cut…

Amazon is losing money on its Echo smart speakers. This has been an open secret ever since Alexa was born. It's the product of the kind of money-losing strategy that only a company the size of Amazon could sustain for a decade. Of course, selling hardware at a loss can be an effective strategy: think about printers and razors, which are footholds for companies and allow them to make up their losses on ink cartridges and blades, respectively. From a saturation perspective, Amazon's strategy has been successful: Earlier this year, founder Jeff Bezos claimed that Alexa is now in 100…

Turkey appears to have restored access to the Meta-owned Instagram app after blocking it on August 2. The country's Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, Abdulkadir Ularoglu, Posts It announced that the ban will be lifted at 9:30pm Turkish time today. Cybersecurity Monitor NetBlocks say”Live metrics show that Instagram is gradually being restored on internet providers in #Turkey after authorities and Meta negotiated the removal of terrorist content and the reinstatement of unjustly closed accounts.” The ban came after Turkish officials accused Instagram of censoring condolence posts related to the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Uraloglu wrote today that the…

Elon Musk doesn't want Tesla to just be a car company — he wants it to be an AI company, the company that figures out how to make cars drive themselves. Critical to this mission is Dojo, Tesla's custom-built supercomputer designed to train Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) neural network. FSD is not actually full self-driving; it can perform some self-driving tasks but still requires an attentive human behind the wheel. But with more data, more computing power, and more training, Tesla believes it can cross the boundary from near self-driving to fully self-driving. This is where Dojo comes in. Musk…

When AI companion startup Friend revealed last week that it had spent $1.8 million to buy the www.friend.com domain name, it sparked a debate about exactly how much branding is worth and how startups should spend the money. Founders of other companies, like Loom and Public, also came forward to talk about their own efforts to secure the domain, but the questions kept coming: Did Friend spend too much on the domain? Is it really working? Avi Schiffmann, founder and CEO of Friend, told TechCrunch in an email that the acquisition has already paid for itself. There may be a…

From internet protocols and operating systems to databases and cloud services, some technologies are so ubiquitous that most people don't even know they exist. The same can be said about OpenStreetMap, a community-driven platform that provides geographic data and maps to businesses and software developers, allowing them to be a little less reliant on monopolistic incumbents in the field (yes, mostly Google). OpenStreetMap is the creation of Steve Coast (pictured above), a University College London “dropout” (Coast's own words) who has since worked in a variety of mapping and location roles at Microsoft, TomTom, Telenav and, as of today, the…

Laundry giant CSC Serviceworks recently disclosed a cyberattack dating back to 2023, saying the personal information of tens of thousands of people was stolen from its systems. The New York-based laundry giant has delivered more than 1 million internet-connected laundry machines to homes, hotels and college campuses across North America and Europe. CSC employs more than 3,200 team members, according to its website. In a data breach notice filed late Friday, CSC confirmed that the breach affected at least 35,340 individuals, including more than 100 in Maine. News of the data breach is the latest security issue to plague CSC…