Author: TechBrunch

TestParty, an AI-powered software compliance company, today announced a $4 million seed round co-led by Harlem Capital and Urban Innovation Fund. The company's CEO and CTO, Michael Babel and Jason Tan, co-founded TestParty in March 2023 with the goal of automatically rewriting source code to help companies avoid violating global digital accessibility regulations such as the European Accessibility Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Currently, nearly all of the home pages of the world's most popular websites do not comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This means that most of the world's websites are completely inaccessible to people who…

Swipewipe, a US photo management app that has gone viral among Gen Z thanks in part to TikTok, is being acquired. French mobile app publisher and developer MWM is developing the app in-house after working with Swipewipe's indie developer Adam O'Kane to expand the app's usage. The acquisition allows Swipewipe's founders to part with some funds while still financially benefiting from their work through an ongoing revenue-sharing agreement with MWM. The sale price was not disclosed, but O'Kane praised MWM for selling the app for a life-changing amount without giving up on his hopes of future success. “If I were…

As generative AI permeates more and more industries, companies that make the chips that run the models are reaping huge profits. Nvidia, which is estimated to control 70% to 95% of the AI ​​chip market, has particularly strong influence. Cloud providers from Meta to Microsoft, wary of falling behind in generative AI, are spending billions of dollars on Nvidia GPUs. Generative AI vendors have understandable reasons to be unsatisfied with the status quo: Their success depends in large part on the whims of the major chipmakers, so they, along with opportunistic venture capitalists, are on the hunt for promising startups…

The European Union on Tuesday accused Microsoft of violating competition law. In a formal statement of objection, the bloc said it suspects the software giant of abusing antitrust laws by bundling its real-time communications and collaboration tool, Teams, with popular productivity apps such as Office 365 and Microsoft 365, the cloud-based suites for businesses. The EU launched an antitrust investigation into Microsoft's bundling of Teams in July 2023, two years after a complaint from Teams rival Slack. Following this scrutiny, Microsoft announced a partial separation of Teams in late August last year, which ultimately took effect in April 2024. But…

Snapchat on Tuesday announced a series of new safety features, including an updated account blocking feature and enhanced friend-add protections, that will make it harder for strangers to contact users on the platform. The new moves come amid concerns about predators exploiting teens on the social media app, which often leads to more serious cases such as sextortion. One of the latest updates to address these issues is an improvement to Snapchat's existing user blocking tool, which blocks new friend requests from bad actors who have already been blocked by a user, sent using other accounts created on the same…

Yelp is rolling out updates to its app, including adding an accessibility identifier for businesses, improving the screen reader experience, and adding AI-powered alt text for images. The company says searches for “wheelchair accessible” locations are growing by an average of 40% between 2020 and 2023. In a new update, the company is adding eight additional attributes across mobility, hearing and vision to show how accessible a business is. Yelp partnered with Disability:IN, the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), Open to All and The Arc to define these attributes. Mobility The company defines handicapped parking near entrances according…

Rocketlane, a SaaS startup that provides an automation platform to professional services teams in the US, India, Europe, and other countries, has raised $24 million in new funding as it plans to employ AI to help businesses better understand customer feedback. Enterprise professional services teams are tasked with delivering projects to customers on time and on budget. However, for such a critical task, these teams lack an integrated solution and often juggle multiple tools to get the job done. This leads to delayed project delivery and customer anxiety. Recently, a category of professional services automation (PSA) for service teams has…

Pennylane, Qonto, Agicap, Pleo, and Mollie all have one thing in common: they all use Chift in some way to manage their integrations with other services. The relatively young, Belgium-based startup just raised a seed round of 2.3 million euros ($2.5 million at today's exchange rates). Many fintech startups rely on integrations to align their products with their customers' financial stack. They often end up building a myriad of connectors and partner integrations to keep financial information consistent across multiple products. As their integration ecosystem grows, they may also rely on iPaaS providers (integration platform as a service). Chift essentially…

Days after The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple and Meta were in talks to integrate Meta's AI models, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said that Apple has no plans for such a move. According to Bloomberg, Apple briefly held talks with Meta about a potential partnership in March, when the company was in talks with several companies about integrating their models into its devices. However, Bloomberg reports that the company has shelved plans to include Meta's AI models in iPhones due to privacy concerns, and the article also notes that Cupertino-based Apple has continually criticized Meta's privacy practices, and that a…

As layoffs continue to rock the technology world, the need for technical talent in organizations is only increasing, putting a premium on how to manage in-house talent. TechWolf, a startup based in Ghent, Belgium, has taken a unique approach to addressing this need: The company built an AI engine that ingests data from internal workflows and learns about the people performing those tasks. This data is then transformed into information that helps managers and internal recruiters better assess the interests and skills of different employees, connect them to different projects, and ultimately provide better training and more. The company has…