Author: TechBrunch

As the EV market stagnates under increasing pressure from Chinese competitors, major U.S. and European automakers are racing to reduce the cost of producing EVs to achieve price and profit margin parity with internal combustion engine vehicles. But to do that, they must find ways to make the design process faster and more efficient. Now, a spinout company from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) has raised $27 million in a Series B funding round to apply AI to solve that very problem. Simply put, Neural Concept enables designers to model how a component will behave before…

The StrictlyVC road trip continues! After sold-out events in London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, we'll be teaming up with Revolution to bring the show to Washington DC for a cozy, VC-packed evening on Tuesday, June 11th at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre. StrictlyVC events are known for providing exclusive insights and fostering meaningful connections among top investors, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders. Attendees can expect inspiring discussions, insightful perspectives, and plenty of opportunities to network while enjoying complimentary drinks and hors d'oeuvres. Featured Speakers at DC Event Lina Khan — Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission Session: Reining in Big TechFTC…

Benjamin Entz's path to becoming an entrepreneur was long and unconventional. Entz worked as an R&D engineer at FX companies Industrial Light & Magic and DreamWorks on films like “Transformers” and “How to Train Your Dragon,” before leaving the film industry in 2012 to join venture capital firm Social Capital as engineer in residence, where he co-founded Choir, an iOS mental health app. A few years later, Entz joined construction productivity software startup PlanGrid as director of engineering, responsible for leading and managing the company's core programming projects. At Plangrid, much of Entz's time was spent on recruiting, Entz said.…

Monzo has published its financial results for 2024, revealing its first full-year pre-tax profit. The company also confirmed that it is in the early stages of expanding into the wider European market through a new base in Ireland. The news comes shortly after the UK-based neobank raised $430 million (£340 million) in March and another $190 million last month, bringing its valuation to $5.2 billion. Most of the funding was raised to spearhead a push into the US market, a market the company has been trying to break into for several years. Last October, it appointed a new CEO for…

Last week, TechCrunch paid a visit to Apple’s Austin, Texas manufacturing facilities. Since 2013, the company has built its Mac Pro desktop about 20 minutes north of downtown. The 400,000 square foot facility sits in a maze of industry parks, a quick trip south from the company’s in-progress corporate campus. In recent years, the capital city has transformed into a hot bed for tech innovation, largely owing to a massive talent pool generated by nearby University of Texas at Austin. Construction on a new $1 billion campus commenced in 2019. Shortly after the first phase was finished in 2022, the…

Early attempts to build specialized hardware to house artificial intelligence brains have been criticized as, well, a bit trash. But now there's an AI gadget in the works that's literally full of trash: Finnish startup Binit is applying the image-processing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to tracking household trash. AI that sorts the stuff we throw away in order to improve recycling efficiency at the municipal and commercial level has been garnering entrepreneurial attention for a while now (see startups like Greyparrot, TrashBot, and Glacier), but Binit founder Borut Grgic believes tracking household waste is unexplored territory. “We're building…

Wesley Chan may often be seen wearing his trademark buffalo hat, but he may be even more famous for his ability to spot unicorns. Throughout his career in venture capital, he has invested in over 20 unicorns, including AngelList, Dialpad, Ring, Rocket Lawyer and Sourcegraph, and five of those companies became decacorns: Canva, Flexport, Guild Education, Plaid and Robinhood. Chan's investments were the first in most of them. He worked as an engineer at Google during its early days before becoming an investor, starting his venture capital career at Google Ventures and then Felicis Ventures, and is currently co-founder and…

Iceland has a population of fewer than 400,000, but is experiencing a greater-than-expected influx of tourists and venture capital — both reasons to keep an eye on what's happening and emerging in this unique island nation. “We need more pillars in our economy,” Iceland's Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir, told TechCrunch recently at Iceland Innovation Week in Reykjavik. Diversification is already underway, with export revenues from IP-driven industries steadily increasing. But innovation in Iceland is not just a pillar in its own right, it is also linked to existing ones: Startups are building technology to…

Some retired CEOs go to space, others move to Hawaii, but David Helgason, co-founder of game engine company Unity, chose a different path after 12 years leading the company that went public in 2020 at a valuation of $13.7 billion. Helgason stepped down as CEO in 2014 but remains a director of the publicly listed company he co-founded in Copenhagen in 2004. But he spends most of his time working on Transition Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm he launched in 2021 to focus on climate issues. The fund is also uniquely called “Transition” rather than “Endgame” or anything like…

So what is AI, anyway? The best way to think of artificial intelligence is as software that approximates human thinking. It’s not the same, nor is it better or worse, but even a rough copy of the way a person thinks can be useful for getting things done. Just don’t mistake it for actual intelligence! AI is also called machine learning, and the terms are largely equivalent — if a little misleading. Can a machine really learn? And can intelligence really be defined, let alone artificially created? The field of AI, it turns out, is as much about the questions…