Author: TechBrunch

Cancer treatment platform startup Jasper Health has laid off a significant portion of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned. Departments affected by the cuts include engineering and product design, according to LinkedIn posts from affected employees. TechCrunch was unable to independently verify the exact number of cuts, but industry sources with knowledge of those affected believe the cuts amount to about half of Jasper Health's small team. Prior to the cuts, Jasper Health had about 48 employees, according to PitchBook data. The company's co-founder and CEO, Adam Pellegrini, did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment. Attempts by TechCrunch to reach…

Entertainment giant Live Nation has confirmed that its ticket sales subsidiary Ticketmaster was hacked. Live Nation acknowledged the data breach in a filing with government regulators late after the market closed on Friday. Live Nation said in a statement that the breach occurred on May 20, when cybercriminals “sold what they said were Live Nation user data via the dark web.” The company did not say who owned the personal information, but it is believed to belong to its customers. It is unclear why it took the company more than a week to disclose the breach. Live Nation said in…

Late Friday afternoon, a time typically reserved for unwelcome corporate disclosures, AI startup Hugging Face announced that earlier this week its security team detected “unauthorized access” to Spaces, its platform for creating, sharing, and hosting AI models and resources. Hugging Face said in a blog post that the intrusion related to Spaces secrets – personal information that serves as keys to unlock protected resources like accounts, tools and development environments – and that it “suspects” that some secrets may have been accessed without authorization by third parties. As a precautionary measure, Hugging Face has invalidated some of the tokens in…

Last week, unknown hackers broke into the servers of US-based stalkerware maker pcTattletale, after which they stole and leaked the company's internal data, and also defaced pcTattletale's official website in an attempt to embarrass the company. “This took a total of 15 minutes to complete after reading the TechCrunch article,” the hackers wrote in the defacement, referring to a recent TechCrunch article that reported that pcTattletale was being used to monitor several front desk check-in computers at Wyndham hotels across the United States. As a result of this hack, leak, and humiliation campaign, pcTattletale founder Brian Fleming announced he was…

Google has also been embarrassed by its AI profiles. After a week of criticism and memes decrying the poor quality and outright misinformation that stemmed from the tech giant's unfinished AI-powered search feature, the company issued an apology of sorts on Thursday. Google, a company whose name is synonymous with web search and a brand focused on “organizing the world's information” and putting it at users' reach, actually wrote in a blog post that it “certainly saw some strange, inaccurate, or unhelpful AI profiles.” That's an understatement. This admission of failure, written by Liz Reid, Google's vice president and head…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje's weekly roundup of must-reads from the startup world. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox every Friday. In a development that will surprise no one but excite arsonists who love to watch money burn, Elon Musk's latest venture, xAI, has raised $6 billion in funding. Valor, a16z, and Sequoia are piling money into an xAI-shaped roulette table, with Musk spinning the wheel. Ivan thinks Musk's latest market foray will eventually result in AI so advanced that, thanks to his other outlandish projects, our puny human brains will become even more obsolete. I…

The RAW Dating App aims to shake up the dating scheme by shedding the fake, TikTok-ified, heavily filtered photos and replacing them with a more genuine, unvarnished experience. The app targets young professionals and students, particularly women aged 21 to 27, who seek genuine interactions. The company’s team claims it raised a $3 million friends and family round. I haven’t been able to independently verify that; most of the company’s media coverage appears to be written by the founder herself, in outlets like Forbes and Entrepreneur or as press releases that got syndicated across the web. Still, the deck was…

Yes, we're calling it “ThreadsDeck” now. At least, that's the tag many are using to describe the new user interface of Instagram's X rival Threads, which resembles the column-based format of Twitter's old app TweetDeck (now X Pro). Two weeks after Threads first tested a feature that let users pin columns to their desktop web app home screens, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced Thursday that the alternative view was starting to roll out globally, just in time for everyone to discuss the hottest political news of the year: Trump's verdict. The new user interface options position Threads as a stronger…

Japanese cryptocurrency exchange DMM Bitcoin confirmed on Friday that it had been hacked, resulting in the theft of 4,502.9 bitcoin (roughly $305 million). According to cryptocurrency security firm Elliptic, this is the eighth largest cryptocurrency theft in history. DMM Bitcoin announced on Friday that it had detected “an unauthorized leakage of Bitcoin (BTC) from our wallet,” that it was still investigating, and that it had taken steps to prevent further theft. According to a machine-translated version of the company's official blog post written in Japanese, the cryptocurrency exchange also said it had “restricted the use of some services to ensure…

Launched earlier this week, Meme Depot is a startup that aims to create a new category of content called “meme tech.” More specifically, founder Alex Taub says Meme Depot's goal is to create a comprehensive archive of every meme in existence. Taub said Meme Depot is different from Cheeseburger and Know Your Meme, which he calls media companies. Know Your Meme is the place you go if you want an explanation for a meme, for example. Meme Depot is more about organizing and discovering memes. For example, you can go to a page where you can see all of Kim…