Author: TechBrunch

Eric Chu started building Aviat, a platform for analyzing private market data, in a pretty typical place for an entrepreneur: a high school bathroom in Carmel, Indiana. Now the 17-year-old's startup is coming out of stealth with $2.3 million in venture funding. Aviato tracks funding rounds and employee numbers, just like competitors like Crunchbase and PitchBook, but also tracks data points like companies' credit card revenue data, employee vesting schedules, where their top engineers currently work, and other metrics. If it sounds a bit like what SignalFire built for its internal database, that's intentional. Zhu said Aviato's goal is to…

Choosing from New York City's nearly 25,000 restaurants can be a daunting task, especially when you're trying to impress a first date (or investor) or entertain family visiting from out of town. This weekend, a new app was released that aims to address that exact problem. The Scene, an iOS-only “pocket concierge service,” uses machine learning to match users with places to eat and dance in New York City. Scene pulls recommendations for users based on a variety of factors, including the type of event they're planning (dinner, brunch, drinks, etc.), the type of outing (date, birthday, anniversary, other special…

On today's episode of Equity, Rebecca Beran provided an in-depth analysis of the CrowdStrike outage that affected approximately 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide and caused disruption to air travel, banks, hospitals, media, federal government agencies, and businesses of all kinds. The outage began when cloud security giant CrowdStrike sent out a flawed software update. CrowdStrike quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, but the impacts continued over the weekend and will likely continue into this week, especially in the travel industry. United, American, and Delta airlines collectively canceled or delayed thousands of flights, with the impacts likely to continue…

A global technology outage hit everything from airports to banking to healthcare last weekend, halting flights across the United States. So what actually happened? The source of all these issues appears to be well-known cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and its flagship software product, Falcon Sensor. A “fault” in an update for Falcon Sensor was apparently causing all Windows computers with the software installed to crash. Reports of the IT issues began in Australia late Thursday night and into the early hours of Friday morning, then became more widespread as people around the world started working. Most consumers don't use CrowdStrike's software,…

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco is fast approaching and we're looking for highly motivated volunteers to support our events team. For anyone dreaming of becoming a startup founder, marketer, or event coordinator, this experience will provide a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a top tech startup conference. Volunteer duties Volunteers will help with a variety of fun tasks, including: Registration check-in. Queue/traffic control. Wayfinding/customer support. Expo set-up support. General event set-up. Volunteer Benefits Free pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Complete a volunteer shift and receive a free general admission ticket, valued at up to $1,500, for three…

Cohere, a generative AI startup co-founded by former Google researchers, has raised $500 million in new funding from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu. The round, which also included participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada's export credit agency EDC, values ​​Toronto-based Cohere at $5.5 billion, according to Bloomberg. That's more than double the startup's valuation in June 2023 when it secured $270 million from Innovia Capital and others, and brings Cohere's total funding to $970 million. Josh Gartner, Cohere's head of communications, told TechCrunch that the funding will allow Cohere to “accelerate its growth.”[W]”We continue to…

Indian food delivery and quick commerce startup Swiggy is pivoting one of its small businesses: Swiggy Minis, a Shopify alternative for small businesses, is turning into a linkedinbio service that will now also cater to service providers such as nutritionists and fitness trainers. In its new avatar, Swiggy Minis will act as landing pages where merchants can drive target customers from their social media pages.The company said it will soon add integration with Google Calendar to enable service providers to use the booking module. Swiggy launched Minis as an experiment in 2022 to provide small merchants with a no-code alternative…

Ask any engineer tasked with tracking customer balances what their experience is like and you'll likely hear a deep sigh that ledger management is the bane of their existence. Fragment is a startup that offers a ledger API that gives engineers access to real-time double-entry bookkeeping without having to learn an entirely new accounting jargon. Founders CEO Thomas Neckel and CTO Omi Chowdhury founded Fragment in 2021. The software targets engineers building software to track customer balances. This is the co-founders' third startup together. They previously launched an identity management company called Scuid, which competed with Okta and was acquired…

Identity management has been one of the most common fulcrums of security breaches in recent years, and it's a nightmare for organizations to track, which is one of the main reasons it remains a constant threat to malicious hackers. Linx, a security startup founded in Tel Aviv, has been quietly building technology using AI and analytics to address this problem, but today, after acquiring customers in stealth mode, it has emerged publicly with $33 million in funding to tackle the identity management challenge more aggressively. Linx's funding was announced in one lump sum, but more specifically in two separate rounds,…

As part of TechCrunch's ongoing “Women in AI” series, which aims to shine a well-deserved and long-overdue spotlight on female academics and others focused on AI, TechCrunch interviewed Lakshmi Raman, Director of AI at the CIA. We spoke about her journey to the position, the CIA's use of AI, and the balance that needs to be struck in embracing new technologies while deploying them responsibly. Raman is a longtime intelligence professional, having earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master's in computer science from the University of Chicago before joining the CIA as a…