Author: TechBrunch

Historically, passive income has been associated with investing in real estate, such as rental properties. FranShares is a Chicago-based startup that wants to offer investors another form of passive income: the opportunity to invest in franchises with as little as $500. For those unfamiliar, a franchisor is the party that owns and licenses a franchise business model, such as McDonald's. A franchisee is the party, often a local businessman, who purchases the license and operates one or more franchised locations. Many people dream of becoming a franchisee, but being able to pay or borrow sufficient cash is a major barrier…

The fundraising environment has been tough for emerging managers, defined as venture capital firms raising capital for the first to third time. But Katie Jacobs Stanton, the former Twitter media chief who founded Moxie Ventures in 2019, said raising a third round of funding was much easier than she expected. Moxxie, which invests in pre-seed and seed-stage startups, announced Tuesday that it has closed its third fund on $95 million, beating its target of $85 million. When the company began raising funds, Stanton and general partner Alex Rotter, a former senior vice president of engineering at Twitter, told limited partners…

Maximize your brand's exposure at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, one of the tech industry's most anticipated events. From October 26th to November 1st, you'll have the perfect opportunity to host side events to network with top tech innovators and showcase your brand to a wider audience. Don't miss out: Applications close in September. What are side events? Side events will provide brands with a unique opportunity to engage with over 10,000 Disrupt attendees, their own networks and the Bay Area tech community. Host a variety of in-person activities: industry meetups, VC office hours, workshops, fun runs, happy hours, and more. The…

HealthEquity is notifying 4.3 million people following a March data breach affecting personal and protected health information. In a data breach notification filed with the Maine Attorney General, the Utah-based health benefits management company said that while the exposed data varies by individual, most of it is account registration information and information about benefits managed by the company. HealthEquity said the data could include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, information about their employers and dependents (if they have any), and some payment card information. HealthEquity provides employees of companies across the U.S. with access to workplace benefits…

ClickHouse, the open-source real-time analytics database startup that spun out of Yandex in 2021, announced on Tuesday that it has acquired PeerDB, a company focused on cost-efficient Postgres replication and change data capture. Since its release, and even before that, when it was an open source project backed by Yandex, ClickHouse has made a name for itself as a real-time data warehouse for large enterprises. Its customers include Deutsche Bank, eBay, Fastly, GitLab, HubSpot, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Spotify. ClickHouse already offered a Postgres connector to help enterprises migrate data from popular relational databases to their own analytical databases, but PeerDB…

The European Union has launched a consultation on rules that would apply to general-purpose AI model (GPAI) providers such as Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI under the EU AI Act, a risk-based framework for regulating the application of artificial intelligence. Lawmakers hope that a code of conduct would help ensure “trustworthy” GPAI by providing developers with guidance on complying with legal obligations. The EU AI law was adopted earlier this year and is due to come into force soon, on August 1. However, compliance deadlines will be phased in, with the Code of Conduct due to apply nine months later,…

Melissa Fakkina of Siddhi Capital became fascinated with how to be an efficient operator after starting work in her family's juice manufacturing business at a young age. As she grew up, she saw how the food system was changing: more people began demanding transparency in the supply chain and caring about higher quality ingredients and products. “Big CPG (consumer packaged goods) couldn't solve that problem, so I brought the family business into the big CPG space in the form of manufacturing,” Facchina said. She left the corporate world in the early 2010s to start an outsourced operations consultancy called Siddhi…

Perplexity AI will start sharing advertising revenue with news publishers when its chatbot responds to user questions and displays their content, a move likely intended to appease critics who have accused the startup of plagiarism and unethical web scraping. Perplexity's VP of business Dmitry Shevelenko told TechCrunch that the company had actually been considering the program back in January, before publishers began making accusations. The business rationale for the publisher program was self-protection: For Perplexity to continue providing accurate answers to users' questions, it needs journalists to keep producing new facts about the world. “How do we work with publishers,”…

Women's health tech, which leverages innovations in AI, smartphones and connected wearables to give women deeper insights into their reproductive and menstrual health, continues to gain traction among users — and investors are following suit. Flow Health, a London-based fertility-focused menstrual-cycle-tracking app, announced Tuesday that it had raised $200 million in Series C funding from General Atlantic. The funding gives the startup a post-funding valuation of more than $1 billion, making it the first “purely digital” women's health app to become a unicorn, according to the company. It's a tricky distinction, since there aren't any obvious “purely digital” unicorns in…

Meta announced on Monday that it is rolling out its AI Studio to all creators in the U.S., allowing them to create personalized, AI-powered chatbots. The company first announced AI Studio last year and began testing it with select creators in June of this year. Meta has now opened up the tool to all creators, allowing them to build chatbots using their own prompts and recommended templates. Users can build bots that write captions, format posts, generate memes, and more. They can keep the chatbots for themselves or share them with anyone. These chatbots work across Meta properties including Instagram,…