Author: TechBrunch
Last month, Amazon announced the introduction of a new AI-powered chatbot, Rufus, within the Amazon Shopping app for Android and iOS. After weeks of delays, the company today began rolling out Rufus to early testers, including us at TechCrunch, to help them find and compare products and provide recommendations on what to buy. So, naturally, I put the ringtone on. You can invoke Rufus in one of two ways on mobile. While browsing Amazon's catalog, swipe up from the bottom of the screen or tap the search bar and tap one of the blue bubble suggestions under the new Ask…
Harness Wealth started in 2018 primarily providing financial advice to startup founders and employees, but has expanded into the tax advisory space, with $17 million in extension funding in a Series A round. , bringing the total amount raised to $32 million. The company says it is delivering a new tax advisory platform that powers leading tax advisory practices and enables integrated services to solve financial complexities for consumer clients. Harness's two other components of the product serve as a marketplace for discovering advisors, services, and consumer financial insight tools. Harness claims to have grown its customer base 10x and…
Venture capital is sometimes called It's a sales job for industry insiders, as investors must pitch to LPs to raise their own capital, and then pitch to founders to choose the check over other offered term sheets. Founders may feel the same way when considering how long it takes to raise money for their business.Hell, raising capital is often called This is a full-time job for founders looking for new support. Therefore, making the funding process painless is important to both parties at the venture table. Underscore VC's Lily Lyman will be at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 in Boston to…
There was nothing else like Digit on the ProMat floor last year. Manufacturing supply chain events have gradually transformed into technology shows in recent years. Many of the biggest names in the space were in attendance, showcasing autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), bin picking arms, and automated storage and retrieval systems. But all anyone could talk about was Agility's small army of bipedal robots. A year later, the conversation has changed. The concept of humanoid robots working in factories is no longer a distant dream. Certainly, last week's $675 million raise by competitor Figure has validation. Interest in humanoid robots is…
No, Apple's new controversial “core technology fee” won't be abolished for EU app developers who opted for the iPhone maker's new trading terms designed to comply with the region's digital market laws. However, Apple today announced some small concessions based on feedback from the app developer community, the company said. Specifically, the company no longer requires legal entities to sign up to new DMA terms with all subaccounts, and no longer requires standby letters of credit. Additionally, the move to opt-in to DMA terms is no longer a one-way switch. Alternatively, under certain circumstances the developer has the option of…
In an unexpected move, Myles Grimshaw announced today that he is rejoining Thrive Capital after spending the past three years as a general partner at Benchmark. Grimshaw first joined Thrive, the New York-based venture firm founded by Joshua Kushner, in 2013 and will return as general partner. Grimshaw wrote in a post on I'm looking forward to it,” he said. Image credit: Thrive Capital Kushner too Shared the news on Xnoted that during his last time at Thrive, Grimshaw led investments in companies such as Airtable, Monzo (which raised another $430 million today), Lattice, and Benchling. He also wrote, “As…
Google today took aim at the SEO industry, which is gaming search rankings to destroy the value of Google search results. Often when consumers search the web for product recommendations, reviews, sales, discounts, etc., they rank highly but do not provide the promised expert reviews or useful promotions. It returns low quality or spammy websites. The company says that's about to change with its latest search update. Google on Tuesday announced a search quality update specifically focused on improving the search quality rankings of websites and will update its Google Search spam policy. In the latter case, Google's new policy…
The NFT sector has yet to return to its heyday glory in 2022, but that doesn't stop the technology from evolving. For example, OpenSea partnered with music and arts festival conglomerate Coachella to release three NFT collections that offer both virtual and tangible reality VIP experiences and merchandise. The partnership will ultimately create three collections offering different perks and different tiers of exclusivity (and cost). The first one was called “VIP Pass + Oasis Lounge Souvenir” and was released on Tuesday for $1,499 each, with a cap of 1,000 NFTs. This tier includes a 2024 VIP festival pass and access…
Numbers Station, a startup using large-scale language models (LLMs) to power its data analytics platform, today launches its first cloud-based product, the aptly named Numbers Station Cloud. Early access is now open. This service allows virtually anyone in your company to analyze internal data using Numbers Station's chat interface. Several similar tools focus on converting natural language queries into database languages such as SQL. However, the Numbers Station team argues that this approach has its limitations. One reason for this is that a general-purpose LLM does not understand how a specific company operates, how its data is structured, or how…
Discord is back online after an outage this morning, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The outage occurred this morning when Meta's Instagram, Facebook, and Threads all went down. YouTube also confirmed this morning that the service was experiencing issues and was working on a fix. The Discord status page says, “This incident has been resolved.” “We are reviewing updated rate limits that caused early session start issues and internal service scaling goals that limited guild loading during initial recovery.” Discord said it is monitoring the recovery of multiple systems. According to third-party monitoring website DownDetector, the issue began around 10:50…