Author: TechBrunch

Checker, a 10-year-old startup that provides background checks for employees, was valued at $5 billion as of April 2022, but has lost 382 employees as companies hire significantly less. I was fired. TechCrunch has exclusively learned that Checkr implemented layoffs across all departments and at various levels on Tuesday. The San Francisco-based startup confirmed the layoffs in an email. “In response to economic conditions impacting corporate employment, we have made the difficult and difficult decision to reduce the size of our team. to ensure the long-term health of their businesses,” a Checkr spokesperson said in a statement. The layoffs, which…

Brazilian startup Salvy, an enterprise mobile carrier, is the only Latin American-based company included in Y Combinator's latest batch, the accelerator confirmed to TechCrunch. This is a significant decrease compared to cohorts that took advantage of the accelerator during COVID-19, which were remote, but is also similar for more recent classes. Y Combinator's winter 2022 batch included 33 Latin American companies, followed by 16 in summer 2022 and 10 in winter 2023. One caveat to the Winter 2024 tough group data points is that the directory is not exhaustive. Some companies prefer to remain in stealth mode. But that also…

Is it possible that AI will take away the jobs of developers who are busy building AI models? The short answer is no, but the long answer is still undecided. This week's news that Google has created a new AI-powered coding tool for developers comes as big tech companies build the best service to help programmers write more code, faster. This means that competitive pressures continue to intensify. Microsoft's GitHub Copilot service, which has a similar outline, is also steadily moving towards enterprise adoption. Ultimately, the companies hope to build developer assistance technology that can understand a company's codebase and…

Google Photos is getting an AI upgrade. The tech giant announced Wednesday that several enhanced editing features (including the AI-powered Magic Editor) that were previously limited to Pixel devices and paid members will now be available for free to all Google Photos users. . The extension also includes Google's Magic Eraser, which removes unwanted items from your photos. Photo Unblur uses machine learning to sharpen blurry photos. Portrait light, etc. that allows you to change the light source of a photo after the fact. Editing tools have long been a selling point for Google's high-end Pixel smartphones, as well as…

AT&T began notifying U.S. state authorities and regulators of the security incident after confirming that millions of customer records posted online last month were authentic. In a legally required filing with the Maine Attorney General's Office, the U.S. telecommunications giant said that more than 51 million people, including about 90,000 people in Maine, had their personal information compromised in the data breach. He said he had sent a letter informing them. AT&T, the largest U.S. telecommunications company, said the compromised data included customers' names, email addresses, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and Social Security numbers. AT&T said the leaked…

Meta is desperate to catch up with rivals in the generative AI space, spending billions of dollars on its own AI efforts. Some of these billions of dollars will go toward hiring AI researchers. But an even bigger chunk is going into developing the hardware, specifically the chips to run and train Meta's AI models. A day after Intel announced its latest AI accelerator hardware, Meta today announced the latest in its chip development efforts. Dubbed the “next generation” Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA), the successor to last year's MTIA v1, the chip runs models such as ranking and…

Ah, spring has arrived here in the northeastern United States. It's not just the flowers that are blooming. No, this season is all about deals between startups! Today on Equity's startup-focused Wednesday show, we dug into the Multiverse and Searchlight deal, which reminded me of the Wonderschool and Early Day deal we covered on the show a few weeks ago . We also talked about the latest round of Guesty. This was large and interesting. The Monad Labs transaction that inspired us to explain the difference between L1 and L2 blockchains. And Cyera's recent quick mega round. Startup Land is…

It's easy to think that the e-commerce ship has sailed, given that giant platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Wix dominate the space. However, the field of e-commerce remains vast and fertile, as so many small and medium-sized businesses continue to go online in the wake of the pandemic. Further evidence of this has surfaced in the form of one of the largest financings by a Turkish startup, given that the average Series A is typically less than $15 million. E-commerce platform ikas has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round as it looks to expand into new markets…

The humanoid sucked a large amount of air out of the room. After all, it's much easier to generate press with a robot that looks like a human and moves like a human. Ultimately, however, both the effectiveness and scalability of such a design remain to be proven. Brad Porter, founder of Collaborative Robotics, has been avoiding robots that look like humans for some time. But machines that can potentially reason in the same way as humans are a completely different story. As the two-year-old startup's name suggests, Collaborative Robotics (cobots for short) is interested in how humans and robots…

If you've been feeling lonely for the past few years, you're not alone. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, about half of U.S. adults reported feeling lonely, according to a 2023 report from the U.S. Surgeon General. The report warns that loneliness and isolation can lead to physical effects, including a 29% increased risk of heart disease and a 32% increased risk of stroke. A new app called Buffet aims to address the loneliness epidemic by helping users meet new people by quickly matching people and places to meet (Think Tinder + OpenTable). This app is designed to remove the barriers…