Author: TechBrunch
In the video, a crowd roars at a packed summer music festival. Beats start to play through the speakers, and finally, a performer steps onto the stage: The Joker. Dressed in a red suit, green hair and distinctive face paint, he pumps his fists, dances around the stage, and jumps down the runway to get even closer to the sea of fans. As he begins to rap, the Joker bends his knees and leaps off the ground, bouncing up and down before spinning 360 degrees on one foot. It looks effortless, but if you tried to pull this off in…
After the Wirecard scandal, Germany's financial regulator BaFin began to place greater scrutiny on emerging fintech startups looking to grow quickly. Better to be safe than sorry. In particular, N26, the Berlin-based start-up bank that has raised hundreds of millions of euros and quickly become a unicorn, has had a complicated relationship with BaFin in recent years, after the regulator imposed a cap on new registrations as a sanction to force start-up banks to improve their anti-money laundering processes. This week, N26 announced that BaFin will lift the growth limit from June 1, 2024. The cap was initially set at…
Laws are constantly being revised to provide the best education to students across the country. While these new education policies are generally helpful, they are often difficult to implement and hard for parents to understand. That's where Odyssey comes in. The company has developed an end-to-end public funding distribution and e-commerce platform for program management that eases access to education services such as school tuition, tutoring, technology and extracurricular enrichment. One would think that with this technology, states would race to get on board, but alternative education is a fairly controversial topic for some because it goes beyond the traditional…
A new startup called Kinnect aims to help people privately store intergenerational memories, traditions, recipes, and more. Its app, released this month, lets you create invite-only spaces where the whole family can share images, videos, audio, text, and more. Kinnect was founded in May 2023 by Omar Alvarez, an entrepreneur with experience working for a telehealth brand focused on mental health. Alvarez came up with the idea for Kinnect after losing his grandfather to Alzheimer's disease and his best friend to leukemia. As his grandfather began his battle with Alzheimer's, Alvarez and his family were coming to terms with the…
The European Union has revealed the structure of its new AI Office, an ecosystem-building and oversight body that will be established under the Union's AI law. The risk-based regulatory framework for artificial intelligence is expected to come into force by the end of July, following the regulation's final approval by EU lawmakers last week. The AI Office will come into force on June 16. The AI Office reflects the European Union's ambitious ambitions for AI. It will play a key role in shaping the European AI ecosystem in the coming years. It will play a dual role in regulating AI…
Climate tech hasn't escaped the fever that swept through the startup world at the start of the decade. Funding was attractive to founders and venture capitalists alike: Interest rates were low, capital was cheap, and investors looking for higher returns were eager to get in the game. Instead, Clean Energy Ventures is taking a different approach, and it seems to be paying off. “When COVID hit, we really had to do some soul-searching and say, 'This looks like a bubble. We need to be very careful,'” Dan Goldman, co-founder and managing partner at Clean Energy Ventures, told TechCrunch. His firm…
ChatGPT has changed the way most people view and interact with AI, with the tool being used for everything from making travel plans to helping developers code — and its developer, OpenAI, announced Wednesday that it had signed a major enterprise customer, which the company hopes will be a sign of a similar impact in the world of work. With 100,000 users, management consulting giant PwC becomes OpenAI's largest client to date, and at the same time, the consulting firm becomes OpenAI's first partner to sell the AI company's enterprise services to other businesses. As part of a larger effort…
Tech enthusiasts and entrepreneurs, the clock is ticking. There are only 72 hours left until the deadline for early bird tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Now is your chance to secure your seat and save big at this premier technology event. Don't miss your chance to experience an unforgettable experience in San Francisco filled with innovation, networking, and insights from industry leaders. Here are some of the speakers we can expect to see at Disrupt 2024. Alexander Wang (Founder and CEO of Scale AI) Dennis Dresser (CEO of Slack) Matt Rogers (Co-founder and CEO of The Mill) Navin Chaddha, Managing…
Indian venture capital giant Avendus confirmed on Wednesday that it plans to raise up to $350 million for a new private equity fund. The new fund, called Future Leaders Fund III, will enable the Mumbai-based firm to raise larger capital and maintain a key position in the startups it backs, Ritesh Chandra, managing partner at the firm, said in an interview with TechCrunch. TechCrunch reported in early April that Avendus was planning to raise a new fund. Avendus has established itself as India's largest venture advisor to startups and has been a fixture in most of the country's growth-stage deals.…
China has closed its third state-run investment fund in a bid to strengthen its semiconductor industry and reduce its reliance on other countries for both wafer use and production, prioritizing so-called chip sovereignty. China's National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, also known simply as the “Big Fund,” has had two funds: Big Fund I (2014-2019) and Big Fund II (2019-2024). The latter was significantly larger than the former, but Big Fund III is larger than both, at 344 billion yuan (about $47.5 billion), public filings show. The larger-than-expected size of Big Fund III underscores China's goal of self-sufficiency in chip…