Author: TechBrunch

Investors are betting on Indian wealthtech startups as a growing middle class looks to diversify its investments and startups challenge traditional financial advisers to cater to high-net-worth clients. Premji Invest is in final talks to lead a $30-40 million funding round for Deserve, an app that offers investment solutions to India's wealthy, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The current talks value Deserve at about $170 million pre-money, more than double its previous funding round. Lightspeed Ventures is in advanced talks to lead a $20 million-plus investment round in digital asset management platform Centricity, two sources said. PeakXV…

Lee Edwards, a partner at Root VC, says that at his firm, “pro rata rights aren’t given, they’re earned.” That might be a bit of a stretch, because pro rata refers to terms that VCs put into their term sheets that give them the right to buy more shares of their portfolio companies in subsequent funding rounds in order to maintain their percentage of ownership and avoid dilution. Still, these rights can be costly, as they're not exactly something you can “earn.”One of the hottest trends in VC investing these days is funds dedicated to helping seed VCs exercise pro…

I attended the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in May, and listening to CIOs talk about the latest technologies (in this case, generative AI) reminded me of a time around 2010 when the same symposium was all about the cloud. It's worth noting that the concerns about AI are very similar to the concerns I heard about the emerging cloud years ago: companies were concerned about governance (check), security (check), and responsible use of new technology (check). But in 2010, the consumerization of IT had just begun, and employees wanted the same experience at work that they had at home. When…

According to dispatch records, a police officer pulled over a Waymo self-driving vehicle in Phoenix after it ran a red light and veered into oncoming traffic. Though the incident happened on June 19, local media outlets, including The Arizona Republic, released body camera video of the traffic stop this week, which shows the vehicle traveling against traffic and eventually coming to a stop in a parking lot. The footage also shows an officer approaching an empty car. According to the Arizona Republic, the dispatch log (written in all capital letters) states the vehicle “panic[ed]” and the officer ultimately “was unable…

Parental controls are offered by nearly every popular media network, but many parents don't know about them: A Washington Post report earlier this year found that by the end of 2022, fewer than 10% of teens on Instagram had enabled parental control settings, and the percentage of parents who used the controls was in the single digits. In response to concerns from Congress and civil rights groups about the potential harms that social media poses to young users, tech companies have long argued that the parental controls they offer protect kids, but because they're not on by default, they do…

Generative AI models don't process text in the same way that humans do, and understanding their “token”-based internal environment might help explain some of their quirky behavior and stubborn limitations. Most models, from tiny on-device models like Gemma to OpenAI's industry-leading GPT-4o, are built on an architecture called a Transformer. Because of the way Transformers create associations between text and other kinds of data, they cannot take in and output raw text — at least, not without a massive amount of computation. Therefore, for practical and technical reasons, today's Transformer models work with text split into small, bite-sized pieces called…

There's no need to worry about the recent reported breach of OpenAI's systems, in which secret ChatGPT conversations were stolen. The hack itself, while troubling, appears to have been cosmetic. But it's a reminder that AI companies have quickly become some of the most attractive targets for hackers. The New York Times reported more about the hack after former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner alluded to it in a recent podcast. He called it a “major security incident,” but an anonymous company source told the Times that the hacker only had access to employee discussion forums. (I've reached out to OpenAI…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — TechCrunch's weekly dose of the startup news you can't miss. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox every Friday. This week's most interesting startup stories Even in seemingly crowded categories, new entrants can sometimes climb the ranks, and this includes social media: A new app called “noplace” shot to number one in the App Store as soon as it came out of invite-only mode. New social app “Noplace” hits #1 in the App Store. Image courtesy of Noplace This not only confirms users' appetite for new forms of social media, but also shows…

Elon Musk's X is exploring more ways to integrate xAI's Grok into the social networking app, with a series of recent discoveries revealing that X is working on new features like the ability to ask Grok questions about your X account, use Grok by highlighting text within the app, and access Grok's chatbot from a side popup while you continue using other parts of X. The findings were recently shared by Nima Owji, an independent app researcher who frequently tweets his ideas for features he'd like to see in X. In this case, however, Owji says he discovered the additional…

There are about four months left until TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, which will be held in San Francisco from October 28th to 30th. This world-class event wouldn't be possible without the help of our world-class partners, including leading technology companies in the startup ecosystem. Why? They're here with their expertise, educational resources, and connections. They'll deliver sessions on topics that will help founders at all stages of their startup journey take the next step towards building a solid, successful business. They also come looking for opportunities to form alliances, partnerships, or potentially become a startup's next customer. One thing we know…