Author: TechBrunch
xAI, Elon Musk's 10-month-old competitor to AI genius OpenAI, has raised $6 billion at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion, according to a reliable source close to the deal. . The deal will give investors a quarter of the company and is expected to close in the coming weeks, unless the terms of the deal change. The trading conditions have already been changed once. As of last weekend, Jared Birchall, head of Musk's family office, told prospective investors that xAI had raised $3 billion at a pre-money valuation of $15 billion. That number was quickly adjusted, given that many investors…
Goldman Sachs said in a report late Thursday that Indian food delivery giant Zomato's quick-commerce arm Brinkit is now worth more than its core food delivery business, according to the bank's aggregate analysis. The investment bank values Brinkit's implied value at INR 119 ($1.43) per share, or about $13 billion, while Zomato's food delivery business is valued at INR 98 per share. It becomes. Goldman previously expected Blinkit's valuation to be $2 billion as of March 2023. Brinkit's soaring valuation is driven by strong growth potential in India's fast-growing quick commerce market. Goldman Sachs forecasts Brinkit's gross order value (GOV)…
The Federal Trade Commission voted 3-2 Tuesday to ban the use of most non-compete agreements. The ruling means companies cannot require employees who are not senior managers to wait a certain period of time before joining a competitor or starting their own company in the same category. The FTC's ruling will have the biggest impact on industries such as financial services and hedge funds, but it could also affect emerging companies because such agreements are prevalent in these industries. In fact, this ban could be positive news for startup founders and recruiters in many ways. For one thing, it could…
Norwest Venture Partners, a 65-year-old firm backed exclusively by Wells Fargo, has raised $3 billion for its 17th fund. This number is notable considering the last time NVP raised a similar amount was in December 2021. It was the peak of the venture boom, and at the time the company announced it had increased its capital pool by 50% (NVP's 2019 fund closed at $2 billion) in a deal that increased round sizes and valuations to unprecedented levels. Because we needed to stay competitive in our environment. However, things have clearly changed since then. Investors are backing fewer companies, and…
Space and defense startup True Anomaly has laid off about 25% of its employees and canceled its summer internship program, TechCrunch has learned. “With our rapid growth over the past two years, we have looked at all aspects of our company to ensure we are focused on our goals and best positioned to execute,” a company spokesperson said. “We identified duplication of roles and functions across the company and therefore reduced headcount. It doesn't affect our mission.” TechCrunch was unable to confirm the total number of employees before these cuts, but True Anomaly told the Denver Business Journal that it…
As part of its Q1 2024 earnings release, Snap revealed that total watch time on TikTok competitor Spotlight increased by more than 125% year-over-year. Snapchat launched a TikTok-like feed in late 2020 as a way to compete with the growing popularity of TikTok. The company is touting the success of its short video feed, a day after President Biden signed legislation that would ban TikTok if its Chinese parent company ByteDance fails to sell it within a year. According to Snap, overall time spent watching content increased year-over-year worldwide, primarily due to an increase in total time spent watching Spotlight…
Meta's move toward the open social web, also known as the Fediverse, is puzzling. Do the owners of Facebook think that open protocols are the future? Just accept the Fediverse, shut it down, send people back to its own platform, and destroy the startups that are building in this space. I wonder? Will that ad empire be brought to the Fediverse, where clients like Mastodon currently don't see ads? One possible answer comes from a conversation between two Meta employees working on Threads and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. Mike McCue's company has joined the Fediverse with support for his ActivityPub,…
US medical conglomerate Kaiser has hit millions of current and former members with a data breach after confirming it shared patient information with third-party advertisers including Google, Microsoft and X (formerly Twitter) reported. In a statement shared with TechCrunch, Kaiser said its investigation revealed that “certain online technologies previously installed on websites and mobile applications may have transmitted personal information to third-party vendors.” He said it was found that. Kaiser said the data shared with advertisers includes a member's name and IP address, as well as whether the member is signed in to a Kaiser Permanente account or service, whether…
Sanctuary AI isn't often talked about in the same breath as humanoid robot companies like Boston Dynamics, Agility, Figure, and 1X, but the Canadian company has been active in this space for some time. In fact, the new robot introduced Thursday is actually the seventh generation of the Phoenix product line. Although recent iterations have introduced legs to the line, Sanctuary is most interested in what's happening from the waist up. Apparently, the new video of the latest robot focuses on the system's torso. The Canadian company emphasizes the system's human-like behavior in sorting products and the speed with which…
As a ban on TikTok approaches reality in the U.S., it may be time to start thinking about other platforms being early adopters in case they end up filling the popular app's void at some point in the future. unknown. President Biden on Wednesday signed legislation that would ban TikTok if its Chinese parent company ByteDance fails to sell the app within a year, moving the possibility of a TikTok ban closer than ever. However, given the one-year timeline, TikTok won't disappear anytime soon. Especially since the company has vowed to fight the bill in court. Since transferring the app's…