Author: TechBrunch

Paris-based venture capital firm Briga has watched Africa's tech ecosystem mature over the years, with venture capital funding rising from less than $1 billion per year to a record $6 billion and the number of fast-growing companies on the rise, from one unicorn to seven in the space of three years. Now the venture capital firm wants to put some of its own money towards a $75 million fund to invest in early-stage startups in Africa, and told TechCrunch it had secured roughly 70% of the capital commitments by the first deadline. Since entering the venture capital industry in 2015,…

Malicious hacks are becoming more sophisticated, creating a very clear trend in security technology: security itself must continue to grow in complexity in order to keep people and organizations safe. Security startup PQShield is an early player in the concept, focusing on “post-quantum” encryption — a future-proof software and hardware solution that would theoretically be able to withstand hacks performed using the most powerful quantum machines of the future. Now the company has announced $37 million in funding to meet industry demand for building hardware and related systems based on its research. Addition, Lee Fixel's investment firm, led the Series…

Hero, a new Paris-based fintech startup, has announced an all-equity funding round of €11.3 million ($12.2 million at today's exchange rates) led by Valar Ventures. Over the past few years, the company has been quietly building an ambitious banking product for small and medium-sized businesses that can essentially replace all the functions you'd expect from a traditional bank, from managing your cash to receiving payments to getting lines of credit. If you are setting up a company in France, it is now very easy to register your company and open a bank account in your company’s name. At the same…

Wordsmith, an emerging Scottish legal tech startup that has managed to secure backing from two well-known venture capital firms, offers an AI platform aimed at in-house legal teams and law firms that can be set up to assist other employees within the company, allowing anyone in the company to ask for help with legal tasks such as reviewing contracts or answering specific questions about documents. Founded in October last year, the Edinburgh-based company is the brainchild of former TravelPerk senior executives Ross McNairn (CEO) and Robbie Falkenthal (COO), and CTO Volodymyr Giginiak, who held various engineering roles at Microsoft, Facebook…

Silicon Valley-based venture capital group General Catalyst is expanding its presence in India by partnering with local venture firm Venture Highway to allocate $500 million to $1 billion for investments in the country. Venture Highway's investments include social commerce startup Meesho and B2B industrial marketplace Moglix. TechCrunch reported in January that the two venture firms were in talks for a deal. With the deal, the combined company will develop a multi-stage investment strategy for General Catalyst in India targeting early- to growth-stage startups across industries, Venture Highway founder Neeraj Arora and general partner Priya Mohan told TechCrunch in an interview.…

Love it or hate it, artificial intelligence, and generative AI in particular, is the tech story of 2024. OpenAI may have monopolized most of the attention and funding so far, thanks to its viral services like ChatGPT and its billions of dollars in funding, but a new report from analysts at top VC firms Accel and Dealroom says there's a wave of up-and-coming companies in Europe and Israel looking to make a name for themselves right now. Europe and Israel combined typically account for around 45% of all venture funding annually, but when you scope this out to the specific…

C12 recently announced a funding round of €18 million ($19.4 million at today's exchange rates). The company was originally founded in 2020 as a spinoff from the École Normale Supérieure's physics laboratory and has been working on a proprietary process for creating quantum computers based on carbon nanotubes. The concept of quantum computing is not new, but it is still in development. Many scientific teams are working on the subject from different angles. The goal is to create large quantum computers that can perform calculations with fewer errors. But wait, why do we need quantum computers in the first place?…

Ilya Sutskever, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, has founded a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), just one month after officially leaving OpenAI. Sutskever, the longtime chief scientist at OpenAI, founded SSI with former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross and former OpenAI engineer Daniel Levy. At OpenAI, Sutskever was integral to the company's efforts to improve AI safety with the rise of “super-intelligent” AI systems, an area in which he worked alongside Jan Rijke, who co-led OpenAI's Superalignment team. But after clashing with OpenAI's leadership over how to approach AI safety, both Sutskever and Rijke dramatically left the company…

Hey everyone, welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, generative AI has begun spamming academic publications, a disturbing new development in the field of disinformation. In a post for Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks recent retractions of academic research, assistant professors of philosophy Tomasz Juraczyk and Leszek Wronski wrote about three journals published by Addleton Academic Publishers that appear to be composed entirely of AI-generated papers. The journals publish papers that follow the same template, chock-full of buzzwords like “blockchain,” “metaverse,” “internet of things,” “deep learning,” etc., list the same editorial boards (ten of whom are…

Vendors would like you to believe that we are in the midst of an AI revolution, changing the very nature of how we work. But some recent studies suggest the truth is much more nuanced than that. Enterprises are excited about generative AI as vendors tout the potential benefits, but turning that desire into a proof-of-concept and working product is proving to be much more difficult. Whether it's due to technical debt from an old technology stack or simply a lack of talent with the right skills, companies are faced with the technical complexities of implementation. In fact, a recent…