Author: TechBrunch

Lance Riedel and Nigel Daly, who have both spent decades in search discovery, began to understand how search engines could create personalized search for online shopping when they worked at Pinterest and launched Pinterest Shopping. When most people shop online, they type in keywords and expect search engines like Google to work their magic and return ranked results. But the big magic they learned at Pinterest was how to flip the script using large-scale language models and image recognition AI to customize results to a person's past behavior, not just keywords, Riedel told TechCrunch. The more times a user uses…

GetWhy, a consumer research technology company that helps businesses conduct market research and derive insights from video-based interviews using AI, has raised $34.5 million in a Series A funding round from California-based venture capital firm PeakSpan Capital. The big Series A highlights investor enthusiasm for backing the next big thing in AI, especially companies that already have connections to big name customers — in GetWhy's case, the Danish company claims a host of big name clients, including Nestle, McDonald's, Nike and L'Oreal. GetWhy's platform allows customers to describe what they want to do — for example, get initial responses to…

Sword Health, an AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup, has raised $30 million to allow employees to sell $100 million worth of stock to new and existing investors, including Khosla Ventures. The round values ​​the nine-year-old company at $3 billion, up 50% from the $2 billion it raised in its Series D in November 2021. Sword CEO and founder Virgílio Bento told TechCrunch that the company had initially planned to only raise a $100 million second round in which employees and early investors could sell shares, but after the second round proved oversubscribed, the company decided to also raise a $30…

WndrCo, a holding company and technology investment firm founded by founding partners Sujay Jaswa and Jeffrey Katzenberg, has raised its first venture capital fund, closing on more than $450 million in capital commitments. Katzenberg is best known as the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of DreamWorks SKG, while Jaswa was a principal at New Enterprise Associates before joining Dropbox as one of its early employees. In 2022, we profiled the eight-year-old company after noticing WndrCo's name popping up multiple times in venture capital deals in a short space of time. “The common thread in all of them…

If content is king, today's focus is on how the king is expanding his empire. Print and traditional media were first powered by websites, and now websites are powered by a rapidly expanding array of apps, social media platforms, and content created by artificial intelligence. Now a company building toward that content horizon has raised a major round of funding to expand its operations. Storyblok, a Linz, Austria-based startup offering a content management system (CMS) for organizations built on a “headless” concept, has raised $80 million in a Series C round. The startup targets the middle ground between platforms that…

Connor Galloway and Alexander Varis have been following developments in nuclear fusion research since they were roommates at MIT nearly 20 years ago. For much of that time, nuclear fusion wasn't a particularly exciting hobby. Breakthroughs were few and far between, and commercial fusion always seemed elusive, still 20 years away from providing cheap, inexhaustible, pollution-free electricity. But in August 2021, the pair saw news that suggested fusion power might finally be within reach: Scientists working on a particular type of fusion at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) had doubled their previous best results. Though it got little attention in…

Sékr, a startup that provides a mobile app for outdoor enthusiasts and campers, is releasing a new AI tool for planning road trips. The new tool, called Copilot, is available on the startup's updated website and app, which are used by more than 100,000 users. Sékr was founded in 2016 with the aim of helping the “vanlife” community find campsites that meet their needs, such as shower facilities, toilets, overnight van parking, free Wi-Fi, etc. The app also allows users to connect with fellow travelers who want to join in outdoor activities like rock climbing and skiing. The startup is…

OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT has been down for several users around the world for the past few hours, with many users posting about the issue on X and Threads. OpenAI claims that ChatGPT has more than 100 million weekly users. OpenAI flagged the incident as a major outage on its service status site and said the company had identified the bug and was working on a fix. The company began working on resolving the issue on June 4 at 12:21 a.m. PDT, according to the status tracker. Over the past 30 days, ChatGPT users have experienced several partial outages, the most…

Solar energy has been gaining attention in Europe since the shock of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While electricity prices have risen, the investment needed to put solar panels on a roof has fallen. This is thanks to new subsidies, better technology, and several European startups working to streamline the installation process. One startup driving the energy transition for southern European homes is Samara, a Spanish company that just raised a Series A funding round of €9 million ($9.8 million at today's exchange rates) just two years after being founded. “We have supported more than 1,700 families in their…

The Great Rollback is here. The phrase refers to big tech companies starting to cut back on some of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that were put in place shortly after the murder of George Floyd. Most recently, Zoom announced it had fired its DEI team. Google and Meta have cut funding for DEI programs, and funding for Black founders continues to decline. Lawsuits have been filed targeting DEI programs, forcing companies to hide their efforts at inclusion, while billionaires debate whether DEI efforts at X are discriminatory. This year will clearly be a turning point for DEI…