Author: TechBrunch

Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday that Meta's Threads now has more than 175 million monthly active users. The announcement came just two days before Threads' one-year anniversary. Zuckerberg revealed in April that Threads now has more than 150 million monthly active users, up from the 130 million reported in February. Threads was launched on July 3, 2023, at a time when users were looking for alternatives to X (formerly Twitter) after Elon Musk introduced major changes to the social network. The updated metrics confirm Musk's recent claim that X now has 600 million monthly active users, half of whom use the…

What do Tesla, startups, General Motors, venture capital, and Lyft have in common? John McNeil, co-founder and partner at DVx Ventures, appears on Equity with TechCrunch editor Kirsten Kolosec to discuss how Elon Musk's compensation packages have affected founders, when it makes sense to have less cash and more stock, and the firm's unique investment approach that eschews traditional management fee structures. McNeil describes DVx as VC 2.0. The firm develops business ideas and grows them into startups internally before seeking a leadership team. To date, the firm has launched and invested in 14 portfolio companies across EV, AI, SaaS,…

Ashwin Nandakumar and Ashwin Jainarayanan were PhD students in neighboring departments at Oxford University, but didn't know each other. Nandakumar, who was studying oncology, came across an interesting dataset on prostate cancer one day and needed help sequencing it. “I reached out to a few friends and asked them to help me analyze this data,” Nandakumar says. “They said, 'There's another guy named Ashwin, why don't you get in touch with him?'” The two Ashwins hit it off immediately, and soon after they met, Ashwin began working in the lab of Jainarayanan's supervisor, Michael Dustin, a professor of molecular immunology.…

Leading Indian cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX is expanding internationally through the acquisition of Middle East and North Africa digital asset platform BitOasis, the companies announced on Wednesday. The Bengaluru-based startup announced that the BitOasis team will join CoinDCX, with the original management team continuing to manage the exchange and offering trading for more than 60 tokens. CoinDCX told TechCrunch that BitOasis will also retain its brand. Dubai-based BitOasis has secured more than $40 million in funding over its eight-year history. The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal, but a CoinDCX spokesperson told TechCrunch that BitOasis investors will receive…

Switzerland-based privacy-focused productivity app maker Proton has added document creation, editing and collaboration features to its secure cloud storage service, adding another milestone. The release of the new product, branded Docs in Proton Drive, follows the company's acquisition of secure note-taking app Standard Notes in April. Proton launched its end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) cloud storage service, Proton Drive, in September 2022, initially with web support and expanding to mobile later that year. The new collaborative document capabilities will be available within Proton Drive, further extending the company's trademark robust security and making it a key productivity tool for information workers and…

Last month, Telegram introduced Stars, a digital currency that can be used within the app. Now, the company is expanding its use cases to paid content. The chat app also allows channels to convert their Stars into Toncoin, the cryptocurrency that Telegram uses on The Open Network (TON) blockchain. Stars can also be used to receive discounts on channel promotions. The company initially introduced Stars as a way to pay for digital goods offered by bots and apps within Telegram, but now content creators can post content that users can unlock using Stars. The app also allows channel owners to…

The past few years have seen an acceleration of innovation in new materials development, and French startup Altrove is set to play its role in this innovation cycle. The deep tech startup has already raised 3.7 million euros (about $4 million at current exchange rates). If you are interested in developing new materials, you may have noticed that several teams have shared important breakthroughs with the research community when it comes to materials prediction. “Historically, over the last 50 years, research and development to find new materials has moved at a very slow pace,” Altrove co-founder and CEO Thibaud Martin…

Koo, an Indian social media platform that was positioned as a rival to Elon Musk's X, is shutting down after last-ditch acquisition talks with Daily Hunt fell apart. Despite securing over $60 million in funding from prominent investors such as Tiger Global and Accel, Koo faced significant challenges in growing its user base and generating revenue over the past two years. TechCrunch exclusively reported in February that Koo was in talks with Daily Hunt, an internet media startup valued at $5 billion, about a possible sale. Koo's founders said Wednesday that the talks had not resulted in an agreement. “We…

European regulations are transforming ESG reporting from a “nice to have” to a “must have,” creating new momentum for start-ups such as Paris-based Apiday, which offers a platform to target private equity funds and blue-chip companies that need to track and pilot sustainability efforts. Asset managers, particularly in Europe, are a prime target for Apiday. With the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), it's not just impact funds that are closely monitoring sustainability metrics: all kinds of companies are now paying attention to ESG reporting. This has created a different environment than when Apiday was founded in 2021, and a backlash…

Google has published its 2024 Environmental Report, an 80+ page document that explains all the efforts the giant is making to apply technology to environmental issues and reduce its own environmental footprint. But it doesn't address the question of how much energy AI uses at all, probably because the answer is “a lot more than we'd like to say.” You can read the full report here (PDF) and, frankly, it's full of interesting takeaways. It's easy to forget that a company as big as Google has multiple tasks on its hands, but there's some really noteworthy stuff here. For example,…