Author: TechBrunch

As Satya Nadella's cloud giant continues its aggressive efforts to attract top talent, Microsoft has announced that Mustafa Suleiman and Karen Simonian, co-founders of high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, will , and several of their colleagues. Suleiman is also the co-founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014 to strengthen its AI efforts, and will run Microsoft's newly created division, Microsoft AI. Mr. Simonian will join the company as chief scientist in the same new group. Mustafa, whose official title at Microsoft is EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI, will report directly to CEO Nadella. (Inflection AI is no stranger…

The founders of Backpack are building a cryptocurrency exchange and wallet that has seen strong growth since its launch in 2022. However, the path was not easy. FTX co-led Backpack's $20 million strategic investment round in September 2022. Less than two months later, in November 2022, FTX went bankrupt. “We lost 80% of our working capital on FTX. We spent all our time building this protocol and it was just like a knockout on the ground. [we] Armani Ferrante, co-founder of the backpack and NFT collection Mad Lads, told TechCrunch. And not only did they lose investment capital and partners,…

Fintech has exploded in popularity over the past five years. Startups in this category raised more than $350 million in VC funding from 2019 to 2023, according to CB Insights data. Despite all this growth, Ramp co-founder and CEO Eric Gilman believes the industry and companies like his have only scratched the surface. Griman recently told TechCrunch Found's podcast that despite how much his unicorn card and expense startup has grown so far, it's only tapped into 1% of its potential market share. Ta. “Although we have grown rapidly, we still have more than 99% of the market in our…

Remember when you used to “poke” your friends on Facebook to get their attention, embarrass them, or just start a poke war? Now, Facebook has added some small improvements to the poking feature. We're trying to bring back that experience with updates. The company announced Tuesday that it has recently improved the platform's suggestions for who to poke, making it easier to find poking pages through search. Additionally, Facebook has added the ability to poke your friends when you search for them on the social network. Facebook says these small changes have led to a 13x spike in poking over…

Payments company Nara pivoted to providing remittance services in 2021, tapping Africa's growing remittance market and demand for reliable and affordable services. Nala founder Benjamin Fernandez said he intended to build the product on this premise from the beginning. Over the past two years, Tanzanian fintechs have enabled consumers in the diaspora, including the EU, UK and US, to send money to their loved ones through 249 banks and 26 mobile money services across 11 African markets through consumer fintech apps. I've been doing this. In markets like Kenya, it has been integrated with mobile money service M-Pesa, allowing users…

Link-in-bio startup Linktree today introduced new features including featured layouts to better highlight your links, the ability to get the latest posts from Instagram, and support for more prominent profile photos. The company said the new featured layout is perfect for highlighting specific links. When you select Featured Layout for your links, content previews for links from YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and Instagram will automatically expand. Featured links look like this Image credit: Linktree In January, Linktree introduced the ability to automatically pull the latest posts from YouTube and TikTok. The company is now expanding its support for Instagram to support…

Is the grass greener next door? I'm not sure, but I'm sure the sky is bluer. It's been more than a year since Elon Musk bought Twitter (now known as X) and people started setting up shop on alternative platforms. Mastodon, Post, Pebble (now defunct), and Spill have been mentioned as possible replacements, but apart from Meta's Threads, few companies have achieved the speed of growth that Bluesky achieved. Bluesky has been invite-only for almost a year, but is now open to anyone who wants to join. Bluesky expects to gain about 800,000 new users within one day, and the…

Cross-border transactions typically occur in fintech, where companies send money to another country. But David Yee and Simon Singh are applying that concept to the world of venture capital. Yi and Xin founded Ethos Fund two years ago to bridge opportunities and startup communities between Vietnam and the United States. Yee said the five-person firm is one of the few, if not the only, fund focused solely on strengthening opportunities between the two countries. They are backed by a $12 million capital commitment from Elite Education Group, i-Scream Edu, Orions Bridge Capital, Strong Ventures, and a group of limited partners…

TigerEye CEO Tracy Young and her husband, CTO Ralph Gootee, built their former startup PlanGrid into a $100 million ARR business before selling it to Autodesk for $850 million in 2018. But despite their success, they always felt like the business remained done. Not included in the table because changes in the business cannot be accurately predicted. After leaving PlanGrid in 2020, the couple kept coming back to this business forecasting problem as they considered what to do next. They decided to start a company and build the product they wanted back in the PlanGrid days, and the result is…

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