Author: TechBrunch
Indian startup Zypp Electric plans to expand its EV rental service to Southeast Asia early next year, leveraging new investment from Japanese oil and energy conglomerate ENEOS, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The company aims to expand into 15 markets over the next two years. In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, co-founder and CEO Akash Gupta said the company plans to begin piloting in at least one of those markets, a Southeast Asian market, early next year. The latest funding round, led by ENEOS, is $15 million and is part of Zypp Electric's Series C round. Gupta expects the deal to…
Last month, Uncork Capital, one of the Bay Area's most prominent early-stage venture capital firms, celebrated its 20th anniversary with a party in a converted church in San Francisco's SoMa district, where 420 guests gathered to help and celebrate the company, swap advice and share stories of hardship. There's no doubt that the venture industry has changed a lot since Uncork started. When founder Jeff Clavier started the company, he mostly used his savings and wrote six-figure checks to founders. Now Clavier and his colleagues, including Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital and Aydin Senkt at Felicis, collectively manage billions…
Y Combinator president and CEO Garry Tan told an audience at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. this week that artificial intelligence “will likely require regulation.” Tan spoke one-on-one with General Catalyst board member Teresa Carlson about everything from how to get into Y Combinator to AI, saying, “There's never been a better time to be working in technology.” Tan said he “overall supports” the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) efforts to build a GenAI risk mitigation framework, adding that “most of the Biden administration's executive order is probably a step in the right direction.” The NIST framework…
It feels like everything in society is geared towards optimization, whether it's standardized testing or artificial intelligence algorithms: We are taught to know what outcome we want to achieve and then find a path to get there. Kenneth Stanley, a former OpenAI researcher and co-founder of the new social media platform Maven, has argued for years that this mindset is counterproductive and harmful. Instead of prioritizing goals, he says, we should prioritize serendipity. “Sometimes we have to get off the path of purpose and down an interesting path to find a stepping stone that leads to what we care about,”…
To shine a much-deserved and long-overdue spotlight on women researchers and others focused on AI, TechCrunch has been publishing a series of interviews highlighting notable women who have contributed to the AI revolution. As the AI boom continues, we'll be publishing these stories throughout the year to shine a spotlight on important research that often goes unrecognized. Find more profiles here. Miriam Vogel is CEO of EqualAI, a nonprofit founded to reduce unconscious bias in AI and promote responsible AI governance. She also chairs the recently launched National AI Advisory Council, which is mandated by Congress to advise President Joe…
Google has come under fire for some of the inaccurate, ridiculous, and just plain weird answers it serves up through its AI summary for search. AI Overview, the AI-generated search results that Google began rolling out more broadly earlier this month, has had mixed results. Apparently, one user wanting to know how to make cheese stick to pizza was told to add glue (the advice was taken from an old Reddit post), while another was told to “add glue to the pizza.”One small rock a day(From The Onion) Don't be discouraged if you can't find the answer or reproduce it…
In the world of venture-backed startups, some issues are universal, while others depend heavily on the location of the startup and its backers. That's something we discussed this week as TechCrunch hosted its StrictlyVC series, a more intimate, investor-focused event, in London. We sat down with Saul Klein, prominent founder of seed-stage company LocalGlobe, and Raluca Ragab, managing director of growth-stage company Eurazeo, and had an in-depth discussion with them about how similar and different the US venture market is compared to Europe right now. To be sure, European startups and venture capitalists have had a lot to brag about…
Accurate weather forecasts are vital to industries like agriculture, and for preventing and mitigating damage from severe weather and natural disasters. But producing accurate forecasts is incredibly difficult, which is why WeatherXM's founders have spent the last 12 years working to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts. In 2012, Manolis Nikiforakis, Stratos Theodorou and Nikos Tsiligaridis launched an app that allowed community members to provide grassroots-level weather forecasts. They then worked as consultants for corporate clients in weather-dependent industries, such as Athens Airport. Now they are building WeatherXM, a network of community-monitored weather stations that collect and share local weather…
US-made consumer spyware app pcTattletale has been hacked and its internal data published on its own website, according to the hacker who claimed responsibility for the intrusion. Hackers posted a message on pcTattletale's website late Friday, claiming to have hacked the server on which pcTattletale operates. The spyware maker's website briefly linked to files from the company's servers that appeared to contain stolen victim data. TechCrunch is not linking to the site due to the ongoing risk to victims whose personal information has already been exposed by the spyware. pcTattletale founder Brian Fleming did not respond to an email seeking…
Last year, the world of fintech startups, the main players in 2021's venture capital heyday, began to unravel as venture capital funding tightened. Now, as we move into mid-2024, much of the sector is in turmoil, especially the banking-as-a-service sector, which ironically was what experts were talking about as a bright spot last year. The collapse of banking-as-a-service (BaaS) fintech company Synapse is perhaps the most dramatic thing happening right now. It's not the only bad news of course, but it shows how dicey things can get in the often interdependent world of fintech when one of the major players…