Author: TechBrunch
Months after Microsoft gained observer status on OpenAI's board, the company is leaving its non-voting position. In a letter to OpenAI on Tuesday, Microsoft said it has seen enough progress with the AI company that it is confident in its direction, according to Axios. OpenAI said that after this change, it will no longer have an observer on the board, which likely puts to rest reports that Apple was getting an observer seat. “We appreciate Microsoft's expression of confidence in our board and the direction of the company, and we look forward to our continued successful partnership,” OpenAI said in…
SaaS founders thinking about what they need for their next funding round can turn to Point Nine’s popular annual report, “SaaS Funding Napkin” (the term refers to “back of the napkin” plans and calculations). Now, the European Hardware Deep Tech team is getting similar resources from First Momentum, a pre-seed fund that invests in technology B2B and deep tech startups. Through DeepTech Hardware Napkin, the German venture capital firm wants to democratize knowledge and benchmarking on funding, team, product and commercialization, step by step. The company focuses on the fast-growing deeptech sector in Europe, which delivers very different results than…
The Icelandic startup scene is performing better than expected. This may be due to a subdued 2021, but mainly because the Icelandic tech ecosystem is maturing. Iceland attracted the most venture capital per capita among Nordic countries in 2023, although this statistic is somewhat skewed by its relatively small population of less than 400,000. Even more notable is that foreign co-investment in Icelandic startups reached an all-time high in 2023. In this context, it makes sense that venture capital firms would raise more money. Frumtak Ventures is a perfect example: The firm recently closed its fourth fund at $87 million,…
Index Ventures is announcing a new $2.3 billion fund to fund the next generation of technology startups around the world. The new funds are diversified across multiple stages, with $800 million dedicated to venture investing and $1.5 billion dedicated to growth and later-stage companies. How do these funds compare to previous funds? In 2021, Index Ventures raised $900 million for Index Ventures XI and $2 billion for Index Ventures Growth VI, and also has another early-stage fund. The firm raised $300 million for its seed fund, Index Origin II, in 2022. That means the fund is a bit small, but…
Prompt engineering has become a popular job in the AI industry over the last year, and Anthropic now appears to be developing tools to at least partially automate it. Anthropik released several new features on Tuesday to help developers create more useful applications using the company's language model, Claude, according to a company blog post: Developers can now use Claude 3.5 Sonnets to generate, test and evaluate prompts that use prompt engineering techniques to create better input and improve Claude's answers to specialized tasks. Language models are pretty forgiving when you ask them to perform some tasks, but sometimes a…
Hebbia, a startup that uses generative AI to search documents at scale and answer questions at scale, raised a $130 million Series B led by Andresen Horowitz, with participation from Index Ventures, Google Ventures and Peter Thiel, at a valuation of roughly $700 million. And this funding shows that 50x annual recurring revenue (ARR) is becoming the norm for AI startups, especially those that have booked millions of dollars in revenue in the early stages. The official funding announcement confirmed most of the details previously reported by TechCrunch, although Hebbia went on to raise an additional $30 million after our…
The easiest way for humans to get carbon dioxide is to eat vegetables, and David Tse hopes his protein startup will be a close second. Tse's company, Novonutrients, is working on ways to use microbes to turn carbon dioxide into proteins that can be used in human food and animal feed. Tse says the startup is currently working on building a pilot plant in the San Francisco Bay Area to produce proteins for companies looking for alternative sources. To support construction, Novonutrients has raised $18 million in a Series A round of funding from investors including Australian energy company Woodside…
Since AI began to gain historical attention in 2022, the debate on how to regulate the industry has been growing at a similar pace. Many startup founders believe that regulating the industry now could stifle innovation. However, others believe that waiting to implement policies and regulations could have a negative impact on the industry in the future. Helen Tonner, director of strategic and basic research grants at the Center for Security and Emerging Technologies and a former OpenAI executive, understands the AI industry's fears about regulation. But at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in June, Tonner told an audience that AI companies…
Bumble is asking users to help protect the dating app from AI-generated profiles, with the company on Tuesday introducing a new reporting option that allows users to report profiles they suspect of using AI-generated photos or videos. If users want to report a profile, they can select “Fake Profile” and choose the option “Use of AI-generated photos or videos.” Other reporting options include inappropriate content, minors, scams, and use of someone else's photo. Bumble's new reporting option unfortunately comes at a time when AI-generated photos on dating apps have become commonplace and are often used to scam and deceive. With…
Henrik Fisker once envisioned a burgeoning electric-vehicle empire led by the Ocean SUV at his eponymous startup, but cracks in that vision started to show as soon as the Ocean hit the road in 2023. Fisker repeatedly cut production goals, missed sales targets, and laid off employees. Additionally, its Ocean SUVs were hit by software and mechanical problems that rendered them inoperable for some. Problematic brakes, sudden loss of power, and doors that wouldn't open added to a list of issues that led to multiple safety investigations and ultimately a production halt to raise new capital. These and other factors…