Author: TechBrunch

Melissa Fakkina of Siddhi Capital became fascinated with how to be an efficient operator after starting work in her family's juice manufacturing business at a young age. As she grew up, she saw how the food system was changing: more people began demanding transparency in the supply chain and caring about higher quality ingredients and products. “Big CPG (consumer packaged goods) couldn't solve that problem, so I brought the family business into the big CPG space in the form of manufacturing,” Facchina said. She left the corporate world in the early 2010s to start an outsourced operations consultancy called Siddhi…

Perplexity AI will start sharing advertising revenue with news publishers when its chatbot responds to user questions and displays their content, a move likely intended to appease critics who have accused the startup of plagiarism and unethical web scraping. Perplexity's VP of business Dmitry Shevelenko told TechCrunch that the company had actually been considering the program back in January, before publishers began making accusations. The business rationale for the publisher program was self-protection: For Perplexity to continue providing accurate answers to users' questions, it needs journalists to keep producing new facts about the world. “How do we work with publishers,”…

Women's health tech, which leverages innovations in AI, smartphones and connected wearables to give women deeper insights into their reproductive and menstrual health, continues to gain traction among users — and investors are following suit. Flow Health, a London-based fertility-focused menstrual-cycle-tracking app, announced Tuesday that it had raised $200 million in Series C funding from General Atlantic. The funding gives the startup a post-funding valuation of more than $1 billion, making it the first “purely digital” women's health app to become a unicorn, according to the company. It's a tricky distinction, since there aren't any obvious “purely digital” unicorns in…

Meta announced on Monday that it is rolling out its AI Studio to all creators in the U.S., allowing them to create personalized, AI-powered chatbots. The company first announced AI Studio last year and began testing it with select creators in June of this year. Meta has now opened up the tool to all creators, allowing them to build chatbots using their own prompts and recommended templates. Users can build bots that write captions, format posts, generate memes, and more. They can keep the chatbots for themselves or share them with anyone. These chatbots work across Meta properties including Instagram,…

Since government experiments in 2022 proved that nuclear fusion is not as unrealistic as once thought, physicists, engineers and investors have become increasingly optimistic that fusion technology has the ability to deliver on its long-held (and often postponed) promise of providing nearly unlimited, emissions-free electricity. No company is more reflective of that enthusiasm than Type One Energy, which today announced a new round of funding of $53.5 million. The company had raised $29 million in 2023, and the extension brings its total to about $82.5 million. The extension was led by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, with participation from Australia-based…

UK antitrust regulators have said they are conducting an early-stage investigation into Google's relationship with Anthropik after the Alphabet subsidiary made multiple investments in the US AI rival. While it is not yet at the formal investigation stage, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is inviting comments from interested parties and other “stakeholders” ahead of a final decision on whether the deal “results in the creation of a relevant merger situation” and whether this would lead to a “substantial lessening of competition” in the UK. Founded in San Francisco in 2021, Anthropic develops AI systems with a focus on safety,…

London-based nutrition company Zoe has raised $15 million in a Series B extension to expand its U.S. presence. Here's how it works: Zoe sends customers take-home testing materials and draws their blood or stool samples to test blood fats, blood sugar levels, and the health of their gut microbiome. Based on the results, the company assigns a score (on a scale of 0 to 100) to every food item, which can help people make better dietary choices. Zoe's nutrition tracking program includes blood glucose monitoring. (Image courtesy of Zoe)Image courtesy of Zoe / Along the way, Zoe teaches users how…

Users are getting their first taste of Apple Intelligence as Apple begins making some features of its AI suite available in the iOS 18.1 developer beta released on Monday. The company announced Apple Intelligence at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, but the first developer and public beta versions didn't include any of Apple Intelligence's features. Usage restrictions The rollout in iOS 18.1 is also limited. Apple's June news release stated that iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPad, and M1-powered Mac users would be able to try out the Apple Intelligence beta feature at a later date…

Canva has acquired generative AI content and research startup Leonardo.ai as it looks to bolster its investment in its AI tech stack. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams said it was a combination of cash and stock. All 120 Leonardo.ai employees will join Canva, including the company's management team. “Leonardo will continue to operate independently from Canva and will focus on rapid innovation, research and development backed by Canva's resources,” Adams told TechCrunch. “All of Leonardo's existing tools and solutions will continue to be available. This acquisition is intended…

The U.S. Department of Commerce today released a report supporting “open-weighted” generative AI models like Meta's Llama 3.1, but recommending that the government develop “new capabilities” to monitor these models for potential risks. The report, written by the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), argues that open-weighted models would broaden the scope of generative AI available to small businesses, researchers, nonprofits, and individual developers. For these reasons, the report suggests, governments should not restrict access to open models, at least not before studying whether such restrictions would have a negative impact on the market. This sentiment echoes recent…