Author: TechBrunch

Figma CEO Dylan Field said the company would temporarily disable its AI feature “Make Design” after it allegedly plagiarized the design of Apple's weather app. The issue was first discovered by Andy Allen, founder of NotBoring Software, which makes a suite of apps including a popular skinnable weather app and other utilities. After testing Figma's tool, Allen found that it repeatedly replicated Apple's weather app when used as a design aid. Allen accused Figma of “extensively” training its tools on existing apps, a charge Field now denies. The Make Design feature is available within Figma's software and generates UI (user…

Advanced spacecraft often run on computing systems that are shockingly outdated: the Perseverance rover, for example, runs on a PowerPC 750, a processor famously found in iMacs in the late 1990s. San Francisco-based Aethero is looking to bring more powerful computing systems into orbit, with its first payload launching this month on SpaceX's Transporter-11 rideshare mission. The computer, a small, stackable MVP called AetherNxN built around Nvidia Orin processors, will get the added protection of a new radiation-shielding material that could help usher in a new era of computing in space, according to the product's developer, Cosmic Shielding Corporation (CSC).…

Advanced spacecraft often run on computing systems that are shockingly outdated: the Perseverance rover, for example, runs on a PowerPC 750, a processor famously found in iMacs in the late 1990s. San Francisco-based Aethero is looking to bring more powerful computing systems into orbit, with its first payload launching this month on SpaceX's Transporter-11 rideshare mission. The computer, a small, stackable MVP called AetherNxN built around Nvidia Orin processors, will get the added protection of a new radiation-shielding material that could help usher in a new era of computing in space, according to the product's developer, Cosmic Shielding Corporation (CSC).…

AI is driving a surge in electricity demand. In a May 2024 report, Goldman Sachs predicted that data centers will use 8% of the U.S.'s total electricity supply as cloud service providers expand to meet AI infrastructure demands, up from 3% in 2022. Assuming current trends continue, U.S. utilities will need to invest roughly $50 billion in generating capacity to support all those upgraded (and new) AI-powered data centers. There could be serious negative externalities. In Kansas, where Meta recently broke ground on a major new server facility, utility Evergy announced it was postponing the retirement of coal-fired power plants…

The trends in venture funding for 2024 are pretty clear at this point: large, established VC firms continue to raise capital from limited partners, while smaller, newer funds are finding it harder to raise capital. But Industry Ventures' latest funding should provide a bit of good news for emerging managers. On Tuesday, the 24-year-old firm said it had raised a $900 million early-stage hybrid fund to invest in emerging managers and directly back fast-growth companies alongside those managers. The fund will also buy secondary interests in emerging managers from other limited partners. This is Industry Ventures' seventh hybrid fund and…

Samir Rein and his wife, Ayanna Alexander Rein, founded Freedom Trail Capital in 2023 and aim to raise a $50 million fund. Both are former Olympians, having competed in the triple jump for Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago, respectively, and now they're putting their grit and determination to work for founders looking to launch and scale consumer brands. “I love people and I love connecting with people,” Alexander Laing told TechCrunch. “We know how to combine talent and business, and we know that athletes excel in these areas. But they also have the stamina to conquer things and organizations outside…

The construction industry generates more than one-third of all waste produced annually in the European Union. In the United States, the construction industry generates more than twice as much waste each year as households. Sensorita wants to help reduce waste in the construction industry by addressing what Sensorita co-founder and CEO Ulrikke Lien sees as the root of the problem: a lack of reliable data in the industry. Lien told TechCrunch that many waste management companies collect waste from so many construction sites that they often don't know where the bins are, how many there are, or when they need…

Ever wanted a personalized makeup dispenser? Karin Layton, co-founder and CTO of Boldhue, has created just that: a device that aims to be the “Keurig for makeup.” Baldhue's device essentially scans your face and then applies a customized foundation formula that matches your skin tone. The beauty tech startup announced Tuesday that it had raised $3.37 million in funding led by Lucas Venture Group and with participation from Mark Cuban and others. The idea came to Leighton, a former aerospace engineer for Raytheon, when she was getting ready for work one day and noticed that a bottle of a new,…

Indian education technology giant Unacademy is laying off around 250 employees, the latest in a series of job cuts the company is making after the pandemic lockdown was eased and schools across the country reopened. The Bengaluru-based startup, which was valued at $3.4 billion in its last round of funding in 2021, plans to lay off 100 people across marketing, business and product departments and about 150 in sales, according to sources familiar with the matter. The cuts will bring Unacademy's total job cuts to about 2,000 from the second half of 2022 onwards. A UAcademy spokesman confirmed the cuts…

Apple unveiled iOS 18 at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) last month. Since then, the company has released two developer betas in the past few weeks, expanding support for several new languages ​​across iOS 18's lock screen, Siri, keyboard, and search. With the new update, you can now customise your lock screen to display time in different numerals with support for 12 languages ​​- Arabic, Arabic Indic, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Meitei, Odia, Ol Chiki and Telugu. Image credit: Apple The iOS keyboard has received a number of updates, including system-wide support for predictive typing in three languages.…