Author: TechBrunch
Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures (VKAV) plans to back up to 21 growth-stage companies across the continent after closing its first fund for $60 million. The pan-African VC reached the milestone with new support from Nigeria's SCM Capital (formerly Sterling Capital Markets Limited) and its only foreign investor. Other recent investors (limited partners) include Taiyo Holdings and his C2C Global Education Japan. This new capital injection is supported by major Japanese institutions including SBI Holdings, Toyota Tsusho, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, Japan International Cooperation Agency, and Japan ICT Fund, and is the first installment of the fund in 2022 and last year,…
When hackers called the company they claimed their organization had breached, they felt the same frustration most of us feel when calling the front desk. The phone call between a hacker claiming to be a representative of ransomware gang DragonForce and a victim company employee was posted on a dark website by the ransomware gang in an attempt to pressure the company to pay the ransom demand. In reality, this call recording merely shows a rather hilarious and failed attempt to blackmail and intimidate rank-and-file employees of a company. The recording also shows that ransomware gangs are always looking for…
Nearly 20 years after finding success helping startups build products, Canadian interface design company Metalab has launched Metalab Ventures to invest in a number of product-driven startups. Serial entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson founded Metalab in 2006. The company has supported product innovation by companies like Slack, Coinbase, Uber, and Tumblr. Metalab often works with startups, acting as a co-founder and helping get the product off the ground. Metalab was then “freed up” to grow, CEO Luke Des Cotes told TechCrunch. Metalab had a record year in 2023 and was involved in the development of his 40 products that were…
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google's DeepMind AI Institute, said in February that putting large amounts of compute into the types of AI algorithms currently widely used could lead to diminishing returns. I was warned that there would be. Hassabis said that reaching the “next level” of AI, so to speak, will require breakthroughs in basic research that create viable alternatives to today's entrenched approaches. Former Tesla engineer George Morgan agrees. So he founded the startup Symbolica AI to do just that. “Traditional deep learning and generative language models require unimaginable scale, time, and energy to produce useful results,” Morgan told…
Google's Cloud Next 2024 event runs through Thursday in Las Vegas. That means lots of new cloud-focused news from Google's AI-powered chatbot, Gemini, on everything from AI to his DevOps and security. Last year's event was the first in-person Cloud Next since 2019, and Google took to the stage to share its continuation in AI, including Duet AI for Gmail and many other debuts, as well as the expansion of generative AI into its security product line. demonstrated their efforts. From other enterprise updates and debuts. Don't have time to watch the Google Cloud Next livestream? That's okay; we've summarized…
If you think choosing the color of your nail polish or the ingredients in your face cream have nothing to do with blockchain, think again. Kiki World, a beauty startup founded last year, wants consumers to co-develop products and co-own the company with the help of web3 technology. On Tuesday, Los Angeles-based Kiki raised $7 million in a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz Cryptocurrency Fund and Estée Lauder Companies' New Incubation Ventures, as well as backers including Orangedao and 2Punks Capital. announced that it had been procured. Jana Bobosikova, co-founder of Kiki, said she believes being a loyal user of…
In a typical year, one of Google's two major annual developer conferences, Cloud Next and I/O, focuses almost exclusively on managed APIs, closed source, and gated behind-lockdown content. API products and services will be featured. But this year, whether to foster developer goodwill or advance its ecosystem ambitions (or both), Google has launched a number of open source projects primarily aimed at supporting generative AI projects and infrastructure. We debuted the tool. The first, MaxDiffusion, which Google actually quietly released in February, is a collection of reference implementations of various diffusion models (such as those from the image generation tool…
All major vendors are looking at ways to use AI to help their customers develop creative content. On Tuesday, at the Google Cloud Next customer conference in Las Vegas, Google announced a new AI-powered video creation tool called Google Vids. This tool will be part of the Google Workspace productivity suite when released. “We really want to share something completely new. At Google Cloud Next, we're announcing Google Vids, a completely new AI-powered work video creation app,” said Aparna Pappu, VP and General Manager, Google Workspace. said while introducing the tool. The idea is to provide a video creation tool…
AI Panel & Mixer Featuring Venture-Backed Founders & VCs Super Founders & Funders Sponsored by: Supermomos and HBS AI ClubTime: April 22nd, 6pm to 8pmDescription: In honor of TechCrunch week, join us for an intimate evening of founders and funders with the AI Panel & Mixer featuring venture-backed founders and VCs! Founders and VCs who received the award will appear. There will be time for networking and socializing while enjoying drinks and food from home. This event is aimed at founders, VCs, and operators building full-time in the AI ML space, as well as a select group of students from…
Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google's most capable generative AI model, is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google's enterprise AI development platform. The company announced the news at its annual Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas this week. Gemini 1.5 Pro was launched in February and joins Google's Gemini family of generative AI models. Arguably, what makes that headline unique is the amount of context it can handle. From 128,000 tokens up to 1 million tokens. Here, “tokens” refer to subdivided bits of raw data (such as the syllables “fan”, “tas”, “tic”, etc.). (with the word “amazing”). One million…