Author: TechBrunch

Carlo Corby and Scott Smith believed so strongly in the need for a debit card product designed specifically for Gen Z that they dropped out of Harvard and Cornell University in 2021, aged 19 and 21, respectively, to found a startup called Fizz. The duo wanted to go beyond creating debit cards for younger generations, to empower them to use the cards to build credit, improve their general financial knowledge, and ultimately achieve financial independence. They decided the best way to do this was to offer a gamified financial literacy course delivered in a “fun, interactive, quiz format,” with an…

Two years ago, Prolific Machines unveiled a proprietary manufacturing technique for growing cells for industries like cultured meat. Today, the Emeryville, California-based company announced it is ready to bring to market the bioreactors that make that possible. Deniz Kent, Max Huisman and Declan Jones founded the company in 2020 to focus on making food and medicines more efficiently and sustainably, which involves growing and controlling cells without the need for expensive recombinant proteins for cell production. Today, cell biology processes are used to produce everything from antibodies for immunotherapy to nutritional proteins in infant formula. But molecular methods are expensive…

Climate change may be the most significant environmental disaster facing humanity, but it is not the only one. In fact, humanity is already facing five of the nine total end-of-life scenarios. Every time we cross a threshold, we put the Earth's ability to self-regulate at risk. This concept of planetary limits is useful for scientists, but not so much for the rest of us. Understanding one existential crisis at a time is hard enough, but dealing with six others, from biodiversity loss to microplastics? Maybe it's best to just give up. There's no need to rush, Christophe Girardier told TechCrunch,…

Transportation accounts for around 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions, of which 72% is inland transport, and of that, 69% is from road vehicles. Given that an empty or unloaded truck produces more emissions than all international flights combined, increasing efficiency in an industry still dominated by manual labor could help reduce many of those emissions. That's part of the reason Belgium-based startup Qargo has raised £11 million ($14 million) in a Series A round led by Balderton Capital. The logistics industry is facing rising operational costs, pressure to decarbonise, soaring fuel prices and cyber attacks, making it a difficult…

Not all generative AI models are created equal, especially when it comes to how they handle controversial subjects. In a recent study presented at the 2024 ACM Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) Conference, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Amsterdam, and AI startup Hugging Face tested several open text analytics models, including Meta's Llama 3, to see how they responded to questions about LGBTQ+ rights, social welfare, surrogacy, and more. The researchers found that the models tended to answer questions inconsistently, which they say reflects biases embedded in the data used to train the models. “Through our experiments,…

More and more businesses are adopting data models – abstract models that organize elements of data and standardize how they relate to each other. But as the boom in data analytics and AI increases organizations' demands on data models, many of the old paradigms are proving to be difficult to manage and highly fragile. At least that's how engineers and entrepreneurs Artyom Kaydunov and Pavel Tyunov felt in their work. During their time at Starsbot, the data analytics startup they co-founded in 2016, Kaydunov and Tyunov frequently consulted with organizations struggling to outfit their so-called “data houses.” Cube started as…

When we look at how generative AI is being implemented across developer tools, it's mostly focused on generating code, like Github Copilot. Greptile, an early-stage startup launched by a group of Georgia Tech alumni, decided to take a different approach, using AI to help developers understand their codebase. And rather than just using a chat interface, as most vendors do, the startup has added another unique twist by building an API that allows developers to connect to its codebase and build custom apps based on AI-driven queries. On Thursday, the company announced a $4 million seed round. Daksh Gupta, CEO…

Stock trading platform Robinhood is moving deeper into the cryptocurrency space with the acquisition of cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp. Robinhood said it expects the transaction to close in the first half of 2025 and that it expects the final transaction value to be around $200 million. Robinhood is best known for its stock trading services, allowing consumers to invest in the world's largest publicly traded companies, but it has also expanded further into the cryptocurrency space by supporting many of the most popular cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, although it limited some of the cryptocurrencies it supports last year due to scrutiny from…

Fintechs are often on par with banks when it comes to using technology to improve customer experience. Commercial credit card and expense management provider Torpago is no exception, with one caveat: It builds its technology for banks, specifically community banks. True, Trupago is often lumped in with companies like Brex, Mercury, and Lampe, all well-known card and spend management platforms that “have done a great job,” according to Trupago founder and CEO Brent Jackson. But they're still competing for the same corporate customers, he adds. Instead, Jackson sees Trupago's competitors as companies like Fiserv and Finastra, which provide software to…

More than half of Americans wear corrective glasses or contact lenses, and while there are plenty of low-cost and premium frames available online and in stores, consumers need an up-to-date eyeglass prescription before they can make a purchase. That means before you can get a prescription, you have to get an eye exam by an optometrist — but because of a national shortage of ophthalmologists, it can take weeks to get an appointment, especially in rural areas. Eyebot, a startup that launched in secret on Thursday, aims to cut the time it takes to get an eye test without the…