Author: TechBrunch
When one of the co-creators of the popular open-source stream processing framework Apache Flink launches a new startup, it's worth keeping an eye on. Stephan Ewen joined the founding team of the open-source project in 2010 and later became CTO of Data Artisans, which aimed to monetize Flink before Alibaba acquired the company in 2019 and rebranded it as Ververica. After the requisite three years there, Ewen launched workflow-as-code startup Restate with Flink committers and former Data Artisan/Ververica colleagues Igal Shilman and Till Rohrmann. Restate, whose overall mission is to make distributed application development easier, today announced that it has…
Residential solar is an industry that's been around for about 20 years, but it's still pretty confusing. Some of this is due to regulatory changes — as happened in California last year, when policy changes gave homeowners more time to recoup their investments — but other effects stem from the peculiarities of the industry itself: it's a highly fragmented, labor-intensive business that's resistant to automation. The largest installer, publicly traded Sunrun, has just 13% market share. “This is a solar coaster. It's crazier than a lot of other service industries,” Lee Keshesian, founder and CEO of Civic Renewables, told TechCrunch.…
Small venture capital firms require deep trust, mutual support and long-term commitment between partners – relationships that are in many ways like family. Collin Anderson (former CFO of Palantir and former VP of research at Peter Thiel's Clarium Capital) and John Fogelson (son of IVP co-founder Norm Fogelson) didn't need to develop a family relationship before founding a venture: There was already a family connection between the two investors: Anderson is married to Fogelson's sister. When the two brothers-in-law first met in 2007, they shared a passion for venture capital and eventually ended up investing together with their own personal…
Gorilla, a Belgian company that provides the energy sector with real-time data and analytics for pricing and forecasting, has raised 23 million euros ($25 million) in a Series B round led by U.S. venture capital firm Headline. Founded in 2018, Antwerp-based Gorilla works with energy providers across Europe, the US and Australia, including British Gas parent company Centrica, Shell Energy and Atlanta, Georgia-based Gas South. These companies can use Gorilla's cloud-based platform to crunch vast amounts of energy data and derive insights into consumption patterns and more to forecast future energy needs and identify areas for improvement. Gorilla has raised…
South Korea's fabless AI chip industry has seen a flurry of fundraising events in recent years as demand for hardware to run AI applications surged, and consolidation in the sector already appears to be underway. Two of South Korea's leading fabless AI chip startups, Rebellions and Sapeon, announced on Wednesday that they have agreed to merge. The merger is a strategic move by Rebellions and Sapeon as they aim to lead South Korea's fabless AI chip market and take on global rivals like Nvidia. The combined company could go public within the next two to three years, said two industry…
Apple has been on a hot streak lately, announcing a ton of new features for a range of devices at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) earlier this week. But many of these features were already available to some degree on Apple devices through third-party apps, so as in years past, we'll examine the ideas Apple has “Sherlocked” in this year's updates. But what does it mean for Apple to “Sherlock-ify” something? In the late 90s, Apple released a search app called Sherlock for macOS 8, which could be used to search the web and files on the local system. Today,…
It's not a sexy topic, but someone needs to talk about it: The CFO tech stack (the software used by the world's chief financial officers) is on the verge of disruption. That's the word of Jonathan Sanders, CEO and co-founder of Light, a Danish startup that emerged from stealth on Wednesday after raising $13 million in a seed round led by European venture capital giant Atomico. The Copenhagen-based startup is reinventing general ledger software from the ground up, using AI to cleanse transactional data, helping finance teams ask questions in plain English and get understandable answers from their data. Wright…
Washington, DC, may be the epicenter of laws and regulations that affect startups, but many in the city know nothing about Y Combinator, one of the most well-known accelerators fueling the startup industry. Speaking at TechCrunch Strictly VC event on Tuesday night, Luther Lowe, YC's head of public policy, said the startup incubator is looking to raise its profile in DC. Rowe, who joined the accelerator last fall from Yelp, where he served as svp of public policy, described his role at YC as like “YC 101” for DC folks. “A lot of people in Washington don't actually know what…
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will investigate all aspects of the rise of AI technology, FTC Chair Lina Khan said at TechCrunch's Strictly VC event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. But Khan said the commission's goal is not to crush startups trying to compete in the space with increased regulation. “We want to make sure that the arteries of commerce are open, the avenues of commerce are open, and that if you have a good idea and you can commercialize it — if there's interest in the market — you have a fair chance to compete,” Khan told the…
It's always interesting to see what gets people excited about a keynote. There's always one big, big name item that makes the biggest headlines — at WWDC 2024 this week, that award went to Apple Intelligence — but often it's the little things that presenters sling around that really get people excited. The arrival of Calculator for iPad was the biggest pre-AI attraction at the event; even the mention of the app got the crowd excited before the company showed off its impressive equation-solving capabilities. Sometimes, some deferred gratification is all you need. As surprising as it is to admit,…