Author: TechBrunch
A huge thank you to all the early-stage founders who missed the application period for TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield 200 (SB 200). We have some great news just for you! For all you procrastinators, be in luck: we're giving you (a little) more time to put your application together. Pro tip: Applying and participating in SB 200 is completely free. You have nothing to lose. Startup Battlefield 200 Deadline Extended Don't put this task off any longer: there's only one week left to apply for Startup Battlefield 200. Stop what you're doing and get it done by June 17th at…
The founders of six-month-old RetailReady, graduates of YC's Winter 2024 cohort, say they discovered an overlooked area of the warehousing/delivery industry, which costs retail brands roughly $40 billion a year. They're developing a tablet app to replace paper warehouse manuals with packing instructions. Co-founders Elle Smyth and Sarah Hamer came up with the idea while working together at Stord, a supply chain unicorn startup. “We met and bonded over our love of the supply chain industry,” Smith told TechCrunch. “We call it an engineer's playground. There's no shortage of problems to solve.” Smith and Hammer left Stord and began working…
Over the past few years, venture capital has become increasingly difficult to obtain, even for companies with strong track records. That's been the experience of Foresight Capital: Despite having done 47 IPOs, 28 M&A deals and 58 FDA-approved drugs, it took the 13-year-old multi-stage healthcare and life sciences firm two years to raise its sixth fund. “Almost all of our LPs from Fund 5 have renewed for Fund 6. They just renewed with 30% less capital,” Foresight CEO and founder Jim Tananbaum told TechCrunch. “We needed to fill a little hole.” The San Francisco-based firm was determined to ensure its…
A year ago, Databricks acquired MosaicML for $1.3 billion. Now rebranded as Mosaic AI, the platform has become an integral part of Databricks' AI solutions. Today, at the company's Data + AI Summit, the company is announcing several new features for the service. Ahead of the announcement, I spoke with Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi and CTO Matei Zaharia. At the conference, Databricks will be announcing five new Mosaic AI tools: Mosaic AI Agent Framework, Mosaic AI Agent Evaluation, Mosaic AI Tools Catalog, Mosaic AI Model Training, and Mosaic AI Gateway. “This year has been great. There's been great…
When one of the co-creators of the popular open-source stream processing framework Apache Flink launches a new startup, it's worth keeping an eye on. Stephan Ewen joined the founding team of the open-source project in 2010 and later became CTO of Data Artisans, which aimed to monetize Flink before Alibaba acquired the company in 2019 and rebranded it as Ververica. After the requisite three years there, Ewen launched workflow-as-code startup Restate with Flink committers and former Data Artisan/Ververica colleagues Igal Shilman and Till Rohrmann. Restate, whose overall mission is to make distributed application development easier, today announced that it has…
Residential solar is an industry that's been around for about 20 years, but it's still pretty confusing. Some of this is due to regulatory changes — as happened in California last year, when policy changes gave homeowners more time to recoup their investments — but other effects stem from the peculiarities of the industry itself: it's a highly fragmented, labor-intensive business that's resistant to automation. The largest installer, publicly traded Sunrun, has just 13% market share. “This is a solar coaster. It's crazier than a lot of other service industries,” Lee Keshesian, founder and CEO of Civic Renewables, told TechCrunch.…
Small venture capital firms require deep trust, mutual support and long-term commitment between partners – relationships that are in many ways like family. Collin Anderson (former CFO of Palantir and former VP of research at Peter Thiel's Clarium Capital) and John Fogelson (son of IVP co-founder Norm Fogelson) didn't need to develop a family relationship before founding a venture: There was already a family connection between the two investors: Anderson is married to Fogelson's sister. When the two brothers-in-law first met in 2007, they shared a passion for venture capital and eventually ended up investing together with their own personal…
Gorilla, a Belgian company that provides the energy sector with real-time data and analytics for pricing and forecasting, has raised 23 million euros ($25 million) in a Series B round led by U.S. venture capital firm Headline. Founded in 2018, Antwerp-based Gorilla works with energy providers across Europe, the US and Australia, including British Gas parent company Centrica, Shell Energy and Atlanta, Georgia-based Gas South. These companies can use Gorilla's cloud-based platform to crunch vast amounts of energy data and derive insights into consumption patterns and more to forecast future energy needs and identify areas for improvement. Gorilla has raised…
South Korea's fabless AI chip industry has seen a flurry of fundraising events in recent years as demand for hardware to run AI applications surged, and consolidation in the sector already appears to be underway. Two of South Korea's leading fabless AI chip startups, Rebellions and Sapeon, announced on Wednesday that they have agreed to merge. The merger is a strategic move by Rebellions and Sapeon as they aim to lead South Korea's fabless AI chip market and take on global rivals like Nvidia. The combined company could go public within the next two to three years, said two industry…
Apple has been on a hot streak lately, announcing a ton of new features for a range of devices at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) earlier this week. But many of these features were already available to some degree on Apple devices through third-party apps, so as in years past, we'll examine the ideas Apple has “Sherlocked” in this year's updates. But what does it mean for Apple to “Sherlock-ify” something? In the late 90s, Apple released a search app called Sherlock for macOS 8, which could be used to search the web and files on the local system. Today,…