Author: TechBrunch
Fast-growing payroll services provider Deal is making its third major acquisition this year. Deal announced on Thursday that it had acquired Hofy, a London-based company that helps deliver and manage office equipment for remote employees. Financial terms were not disclosed, but a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that the deal was worth more than $100 million. Alex Bouaziz, co-founder and CEO of Deel, said the acquisition will allow Deel, which already has a partnership with Hofy, to achieve “tighter integration” with Hofy's services. In the long term, it will lay the foundation for Deel's new IT-focused product, “Deel…
It's not everyday that OpenAI founder Sam Altman teaches a class at Stanford University, but Lawrence Lynn Murata, co-founder and CEO of Slope, displayed just that entrepreneurial spirit when founding the B2B payments company with Alice Deng. “We met in 2016 when he was teaching a class called 'How to Start a Startup,'” Lynn Murata told TechCrunch. “He was doing some talks and we started to keep in touch.” After Lynn Murata and Deng launched Slope in 2021, that relationship blossomed and eventually turned into a vote of confidence from the famous startup investor: After raising a seed round in…
After years of dominance of a form of AI called Transformers, the search for new architectures has begun. Transformers are the foundation of OpenAI's video generation model Sora, and are at the core of text generation models such as Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and GPT-4o. But Transformers are starting to run into technical hurdles, particularly those related to computation. Transformers, at least when running on commodity hardware, are not particularly efficient at processing and analyzing vast amounts of data, which is why as companies build and expand infrastructure to accommodate the requirements of transformers, electricity demand is growing exponentially, perhaps…
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on Wednesday warned against choosing a candidate solely on whether they claim to be “pro-crypto.” In a blog post, Buterin said it’s more important to scrutinize a candidate’s broader policies to ensure they support fundamental crypto goals, like internationalism and protecting private communications. “If politicians are pro-crypto, a key question to ask is: are they pro-crypto for the right reasons?,” Buterin wrote. “Do they share your vision for what 21st century technology, politics, and economics should look like?” While Buterin did not name any politicians or crypto investors, his comments came a day after Marc Andreessen…
Adtech startup InMobi is seeking a valuation of around $10 billion in its planned initial public offering next year, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The company is planning to list in India, the people said, asking not to be identified as the discussions are private. InMobi is profitable and plans to relocate its headquarters to India from Singapore in the coming months, the people added. If the IPO goes ahead in India at a $10 billion valuation, it would be one of the largest listings by a domestic software startup. Most startups to go public in India…
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…
Microsoft announced on Wednesday that its AI-powered Designer app is officially out of preview and available to all iOS and Android users. The Canva-like app uses text prompts to generate images and designs to create stickers, greeting cards, invitations, collages, and more. Designer is currently accessible in over 80 languages on the web, as a free mobile app, and as a Windows app. The app features “prompt templates” designed to jump-start the creative process. Templates include styles and instructions that you can experiment with and customize, and you can share templates with others so you can build on each other's…
When Jacqueline Rice Nelson and Noah Gale launched AI talent and services company Tribe AI in 2019, the duo had to convince companies of the importance of having an AI strategy. Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, which sparked an AI boom, the startup has seen a “massive boom” in demand, Gale told TechCrunch. Tribe CEO Reiss Nelson told TechCrunch that he saw an early sign when he was working as VP of growth at Alphabet's growth fund CapitalG, when companies it backed (from Stripe to Airbnb) were looking to Google for help with machine learning and data science.…
Spotify's AI DJ feature, an AI guide that presents personalized music selections, is now available in native languages other than English. On Tuesday, Spotify announced the launch of a Spanish-speaking AI DJ, confirming TechCrunch's previous coverage of the in-development feature. While the original AI DJ “X” voice was modeled after a current Spotify employee (Xavier “X” Jernigan), the Spanish voice is also modeled after a real person — in this case, Olivia “Livi” Quiroz Roa, a senior music editor at Spotify who lives in Mexico City. Spotify's AI DJ, first released last year, aims to act as a smart audio…
If you play Wordle every day and also enjoy playing chess, we have great news for you. Echo Chess, a game developed by a company called Echo Chunk, is trying to be the Wordle of chess. Instead of playing Wordle, you just guess words like “QUEEN” and “CHECK.” Echo Chess is a daily puzzle where you have to capture all the pieces on the board. The company just raised $1.4 million from investors including a16z early stage games accelerator and angel investors in the games industry. Why would a chess website need money? Because it wants to create more puzzles…