Author: TechBrunch

It's not every day that you get to hone your skills with Elon Musk as your boss. It was while sourcing manufacturing equipment for Tesla's factory that Will Drery drew inspiration for Diagon, a startup that helps manufacturers source equipment. “The large-scale projects that companies are building today (such as battery manufacturing) require very specific types of process equipment and automation equipment to build and automate the factories,” said Co-Founder and CEO. Drewery told TechCrunch. “I had been hearing and seeing trends in nearshoring and reshoring in American manufacturing. As a supply chain manager, I had been looking with a…

Amira Rasool founded The Folklore in 2018 to help fashion brands from emerging markets such as Africa, Asia and the Caribbean reach international markets. In 2022, after transitioning away from sourcing and direct-to-consumer sales, the company introduced The Folklore Connect, a B2B marketplace and wholesale management software for brands to sell to partner global retailers like Nordstrom. What began as a mission to develop a global market for fashion brands has grown into a platform serving a variety of consumer businesses, including those in the beauty, health and wellness sectors. In the process, we've enabled global retailers to source inventory…

IT operations professionals have a lot on their plate, and when an incident occurs that takes down a critical system, it's always a race against time. For years, companies have sought the benefits of getting back on their feet faster with playbooks designed to find answers to common problems and perform post-mortems to prevent them from happening again. But not all problems are easy to solve, there is so much data and so many possibilities. Point of failure. In fact, this is the problem that generative AI is perfect for solving, and AIOps startup BigPanda today announced a new generative…

Mentee Robotics wasn't exactly stealth. The Israeli company rode a small wave of press at the end of 2022 after the initial announcement of Tesla's humanoid robot. It was the year of the startup's founding, so there wasn't much that stood out at the time. Still, the company made some headlines after its co-founder and chairman, Amnon Shashua, joined forces with Mobileye to form a well-funded AI company, AI21 Labs. But on Wednesday, the company offered a glimpse of Menteebot, a unique take on the rapidly growing humanoid category. In its current form, this system represents a dramatically different approach…

Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs as they are commonly known) are the foundation of everything we do online. APIs allow two things on the Internet, such as connected devices or phone apps, to communicate with each other. However, a significant increase in API usage (roughly half of all internet traffic) is putting enterprise data at risk. A common security risk is granting overly permissive API access to third parties. Malicious hackers can leverage APIs to access sensitive company information. Vorlon, a cybersecurity startup that uses its platform to help businesses protect data from such incidents, says it has raised $15.7…

Social media company Snap announced Tuesday that it plans to add watermarks to AI-generated images on its platform. The platform has added a small ghost logo with a glowing icon to indicate AI-generated images. The company says the watermark will appear when you export the image or save it to your camera roll. Snap will use its own tools to display a glittering Ghost logo on AI-generated images.Image credit: Snap The company said on its support page that removing Snap's “glitter watermark ghost” violates its terms. It's unclear how Snap intends to detect watermark removal. We have reached out to…

Former SpaceX senior executive Tom Ochinero teams up with SpaceX alumnus-turned-VC Achal Upadhyaya and Spencer Hemphill, one of Sequoia's top financial leaders, in a new venture called Interlagos Capital According to research by TechCrunch, this is the case. Little information has been made publicly available about Interlagos, and the three individuals did not respond to TechCrunch's requests for comment. The company was officially incorporated in Delaware on March 7 and registered as an out-of-state corporation in California a few days earlier, on April 11. Ochinello, Upadhyaya and Hemphill are all on the docket. Its principal address is in El Segundo,…

The round could total $870 million, including $670 million worth of secondary funding. Late-stage HRtech startup Ripped is raising new funding. The company's new round, which has not yet been completed, will inject $200 million into Rippling, with an additional $670 million worth of shares sold by existing shareholders, according to two people familiar with the deal. It's planned. This will be Rippling's Series F, with a post-money valuation that could rise to as much as $13.4 billion, which it reached when it last raised a $500 million Series E exactly a year ago. That's more than its valuation of…

Once the Kickstarter campaign is complete, you'll need to visit the creator's own page to pre-order the product. That is, until now. Today, Kickstarter announced that they will (finally!) include pre-order functionality as part of the core platform once the campaign ends. The feature is called “Late Pledges,” and the platform says it plans to make it available to all creators “soon.” Those who follow the industry will likely greet this announcement with an eye roll and a “welcome to the club” feeling, as Indiegogo launched a comparable service, his InDemand, almost a decade ago. Sho. Party-ness aside, Kickstarter has…

Will generative AI designed for the enterprise (AI that auto-completes formulas in reports, spreadsheets, etc.) ever become interoperable? Together with related organizations like Cloudera and Intel, we are supporting and supporting a growing number of open source efforts. The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization that sustains it, aims to find out. The Linux Foundation today announced the launch of Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA). This is a project that fosters the development of open, multi-provider, configurable (i.e. modular) generative AI systems. Under the Linux Foundation's LFAI and Data organization, which focuses on AI and data-related platform initiatives, OPEA's goal…