Author: TechBrunch

By now we know a lot about computer cybersecurity, but what happens when a robotic arm on a production line is hacked and instructed to kill its human coworkers? This “device security” is a thorny problem that Rome-based startup Exein is tackling. The IoT cybersecurity company has raised €15 million in a Series B round led by 33N, a venture capital firm specializing in cybersecurity and infrastructure software. The funds will be used to expand operations in Europe, the US and Asia. Exein's IoT security solution seeks to build security measures directly into device software to “protect” devices from attacks,…

WhatsApp is now allowing businesses to send authentication and login codes to users in India through its API, and the company confirmed that it has enabled the feature in India from July 1. Meta introduced the ability for retailers to authenticate users from other regions last year, but in June it began allowing these types of messages from organisations in Malaysia and in July from organisations in India. Last month, the company began applying international authentication rates to activities such as sending login codes to users across borders. “As we discussed onstage at Conversations last month, we want to empower…

Defense AI startup Helsing has raised €450 million ($487 million) in a Series C funding round led by General Catalyst. The company now plans to expand into European countries that border Russia. The announcement comes as NATO holds its annual summit in Washington, D.C., where Russia's invasion of Ukraine is high on the agenda. As part of the plan, Helsing will set up a new company in Estonia and spend €70 million on defense projects in the Baltic states over the next three years. The Germany-based company also has offices in Munich, London and Paris, and the new funding will…

When Aizada Marat moved to California from New York with her husband, KODIF co-founder and CEO Chingiz Jumanazarov, in 2018, she needed to sort out her immigration status. That's when things started to go wrong. A Kyrgyz-born, Harvard-educated lawyer, she came to the United States at age 17 for a one-year exchange program through the U.S. State Department-sponsored Future Leaders Exchange Program (FLEX). After graduating from Harvard University, Marat moved to London due to immigration issues, and then came to California with Jumanazarov, who had enrolled in Stanford Business School, to take a job offer from the major law firm…

WhatsApp Business is changing its per-conversation pricing for businesses. A conversation is a 24-hour thread between a merchant and a user. The company is lowering the rates for utility messages and increasing the rates for marketing messages. Meta charges businesses through four categories of messages: marketing (offers, new products), utility (order updates, account balances), authentication (one-time passwords) and service (customer inquiries). The new utility rates will come into effect from August 4 this year, while the new marketing conversation rates will come into effect from October 4 this year. This is the first update to conversation rates since WhatsApp started…

Generative AI has already shown great potential in robotics, where applications include natural language interaction, robot learning, no-code programming, and even design. This week, Google's DeepMind Robotics team is showcasing another potential sweet spot between the two: navigation. In a paper titled “Mobility VLA: Multimodal Directed Navigation with Long-Context VLM and Topological Graphs,” the team demonstrates how they implemented Google Gemini 1.5 Pro to teach the robot how to respond to commands and navigate around an office. Naturally, DeepMind used parts of Every Day Robots that were left over since Google shut down the project last year in a massive…

HerculesAI (formerly Zero Systems) has been working on automating professional services since 2017, initially focusing on the legal industry. As part of that, the company has been building large language models for years, long before the idea became public knowledge. So when ChatGPT came along in late 2022 and suddenly everyone was talking about LLMs, the company was in the right place at the right time. The company today announced a $26 million Series B investment to build on its recent momentum. The company's CEO and co-founder, Alex Babin, said the company had been working since around 2020 on developing…

Formlabs announced the acquisition of 3D printing company Micronics on Thursday. The Wisconsin-based startup is a bold move with just two employees. Co-founders Henry Chan and Luke Boppart are joining the more established company as Formlabs works to bring Micronics' easy-to-use SLS method to 3D printing. There are many similarities between the two: Formlabs was founded as an MIT spinout to significantly lower the barrier of entry to SLA printing, something that was previously only feasible on large, prohibitively priced industrial systems; Micronics, founded in 2021, was created by recent grads committed to the problem of democratizing access to industrial…

Medal, a startup best known for its video game clipping products, announced that it has raised $13 million at a valuation of $333 million from multiple investors, including Horizons Ventures, OMERS Ventures, peak6 and Arcadia Investment Partners. The company also announced Highlight, a new cross-platform desktop app that acts as a contextual AI assistant for users, capturing on-screen content and allowing them to ask questions to large-scale language models (LLMs) based on that context. Henry Gladwin, a partner at OMERS Ventures, said in a conference call with TechCrunch that the venture sees an opportunity to take Medal's core technology and…

When Bulent Altan, an early SpaceX engineer, and Yoram Volklein, a longtime investor, surveyed Europe's space industry in the late 2010s, they were surprised at how similar it was to the beginnings of America's New Space in the early 2000s, when SpaceX and other companies were just getting started. The two decided to make a personal investment in German launch startup Isar Aerospace, but also considered making a larger investment to more fully capture the huge opportunity to help grow the space sector in both the U.S. and Europe. To do that, they founded Alpine Space Ventures in Munich, Germany,…