Author: TechBrunch

Snapchat on Tuesday announced a series of new safety features, including an updated account blocking feature and enhanced friend-add protections, that will make it harder for strangers to contact users on the platform. The new moves come amid concerns about predators exploiting teens on the social media app, which often leads to more serious cases such as sextortion. One of the latest updates to address these issues is an improvement to Snapchat's existing user blocking tool, which blocks new friend requests from bad actors who have already been blocked by a user, sent using other accounts created on the same…

Yelp is rolling out updates to its app, including adding an accessibility identifier for businesses, improving the screen reader experience, and adding AI-powered alt text for images. The company says searches for “wheelchair accessible” locations are growing by an average of 40% between 2020 and 2023. In a new update, the company is adding eight additional attributes across mobility, hearing and vision to show how accessible a business is. Yelp partnered with Disability:IN, the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), Open to All and The Arc to define these attributes. Mobility The company defines handicapped parking near entrances according…

Rocketlane, a SaaS startup that provides an automation platform to professional services teams in the US, India, Europe, and other countries, has raised $24 million in new funding as it plans to employ AI to help businesses better understand customer feedback. Enterprise professional services teams are tasked with delivering projects to customers on time and on budget. However, for such a critical task, these teams lack an integrated solution and often juggle multiple tools to get the job done. This leads to delayed project delivery and customer anxiety. Recently, a category of professional services automation (PSA) for service teams has…

Pennylane, Qonto, Agicap, Pleo, and Mollie all have one thing in common: they all use Chift in some way to manage their integrations with other services. The relatively young, Belgium-based startup just raised a seed round of 2.3 million euros ($2.5 million at today's exchange rates). Many fintech startups rely on integrations to align their products with their customers' financial stack. They often end up building a myriad of connectors and partner integrations to keep financial information consistent across multiple products. As their integration ecosystem grows, they may also rely on iPaaS providers (integration platform as a service). Chift essentially…

Days after The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple and Meta were in talks to integrate Meta's AI models, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said that Apple has no plans for such a move. According to Bloomberg, Apple briefly held talks with Meta about a potential partnership in March, when the company was in talks with several companies about integrating their models into its devices. However, Bloomberg reports that the company has shelved plans to include Meta's AI models in iPhones due to privacy concerns, and the article also notes that Cupertino-based Apple has continually criticized Meta's privacy practices, and that a…

As layoffs continue to rock the technology world, the need for technical talent in organizations is only increasing, putting a premium on how to manage in-house talent. TechWolf, a startup based in Ghent, Belgium, has taken a unique approach to addressing this need: The company built an AI engine that ingests data from internal workflows and learns about the people performing those tasks. This data is then transformed into information that helps managers and internal recruiters better assess the interests and skills of different employees, connect them to different projects, and ultimately provide better training and more. The company has…

Zyod, an Indian startup that provides a technology platform to global fashion brands to help them with the entire design-to-delivery process, has raised $18 million in a new funding round to expand its operations to more than 40 countries worldwide. The Gurugram-based startup partners with Indian factories to help make fashion wear for global brands. It provides what it calls the “brain of manufacturing,” ERP (enterprise resource planning) software that tells factories what, how and when to make products so they can utilise their full capacity. Zyod co-founder Ankit Jaipuria told TechCrunch that over 80,000 small and medium-sized factories in…

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized startups have also seen a fair amount of cuts, and in some cases, have shut down operations altogether. By tracking these layoffs, we’re able to understand the impact on innovation across companies large and small. We’re also able to see the potential impact of businesses…

Over the weekend, a clip from a recent interview with Telegram founder Pavel Durov went semi-viral on X (formerly Twitter), in which Durov told right-winger Tucker Carlson that he is the only product manager at the company and that it only employs “around 30 engineers.” Security experts say Durov boasted that his Dubai-based company was “highly efficient,” but his comments were actually a red flag for users. “Without end-to-end encryption, you have a ton of vulnerable targets and the servers are going to be located in the UAE? That would be a security nightmare,” Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at…

Another generative AI startup has raised a significant amount of funding, and like the others before it, this one has high hopes. Emergence, whose co-founders include Satya Nitta, the former head of global AI solutions at IBM's research division, emerged from stealth on Monday with $97.2 million in funding from Learn Capital and a credit line totaling more than $100 million.Emergence claims to be building “agent-based” systems that can perform many of the tasks typically handled by knowledge workers, in part by routing those tasks to first- and third-party generative AI models like OpenAI's GPT-4o. “At Emergence, we are working…