Author: TechBrunch

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…

Google's next big hardware event is scheduled for August 13 at 10am PST, roughly two months earlier than its usual mid-fall Made By Google event, and it's notable that the company will unveil its latest flagship device, the Pixel 9, ahead of the iPhone 16. Apple's latest products are due to be unveiled in September. Google hasn't offered a justification for the change — perhaps things are too noisy now, less than a month before the strangest presidential election in modern U.S. history — but the company certainly has a lot to discuss with Gemini, too, and the new device…

WazirX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in India, has “temporarily” suspended all trading activity on its platform, days after a security breach caused it to lose roughly $230 million, nearly half of its reserves. The Mumbai-based exchange said in a tweet on Sunday evening that the cyberattack had significantly impaired its ability to maintain the crucial 1:1 collateral ratio with its assets, raising further concerns about the adequacy of WazirX's reserves and its ability to repay customers in full. WazirX suspended customer withdrawals earlier this week after an attacker gained access to one of the exchange's multi-signature wallets, which…

When is a startup not a startup? When it's a publicly traded company with 1,300 employees and $2.5 billion in capital. If that statement doesn't bring a smile to your face, it's because we're not kidding. It's the reality for Nebius, an emerging AI infrastructure company born from the ashes of Yandex, the multi-billion dollar behemoth that was once billed as “Russia's Google.” “We're starting a business, so it's like a startup, but it's unusually big,” Yandex co-founder and former CEO Arkady Volozh told TechCrunch in an interview this week. “But what we're trying to build is actually going to…

Google parent Alphabet is in advanced talks to buy cybersecurity startup Wizz for $23 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, with TechCrunch sources saying they had heard the same story, adding that deal talks could continue into next week. If the deal goes through, it would be Alphabet's largest acquisition to date. It would also be a massive exit for the startup at a time when exits, especially M&A, haven't picked up as many had expected heading into 2024. If the deal goes through, it could impact venture firms and startups in a variety of ways, some more obvious,…

The recent CrowdStrike outage affected approximately 8.5 million devices – less than 1% of Windows machines worldwide – according to a blog post by David Weston, Microsoft's vice president of enterprise and operating system security. These are the first hard numbers released by Microsoft and CrowdStrike about the scale of yesterday's outage, which was caused by an update to CrowdStrike's cybersecurity software that crashed Windows machines (Mac and Linux devices were not affected). Although the number of affected devices was relatively small, the disruptions were widespread and global, affecting banks, retailers, brokerages, rail networks, and more. Airlines grounded flights worldwide.…

There comes a time in every startup’s life when the leaders and stakeholders have to seriously start thinking about the endgame: What to do when you’ve raised $150 million in VC cash over 15 years en route to building a 100 million-plus community? And how do you go about executing that next step to ensure that you not only survive, but also thrive? This is the predicament that Strava, the social fitness app and community, finds itself in. At a crossroads, of sorts, where it has reached meaningful scale driven by the grit typical of many founder-led businesses, but where…

It's been an eventful week for Silicon Valley heavyweights who have pledged their support for Donald Trump's reelection bid. Given where tech and Trump are headed, when Leda Health founder Madison Campbell asked me if I could buy her another ticket to the Republican National Convention, I agreed. During the four days I attended the event in Milwaukee, Silicon Valley’s presence was palpable everywhere. Jacob Helberg, husband of venture capitalist Keith Rabois and evangelist for former President Donald Trump, watched the Republican National Convention from a private box overlooking the floor, wearing a red yarmulke with “Trump” emblazoned on the…