Author: TechBrunch

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is set to welcome a stellar slate of judges to its Startup Battlefield 200 competition, this year hosted by Google Cloud. These judges will decide which company will win the coveted Disrupt Cup and a $100,000 prize. This year, we are pleased to announce that Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner at Mayfield Fund, will be joining the judging panel. He will “dig deep” into the startups' business plans, product development, and pitches. Navin Chaddha is a prominent figure in the venture capital world, known for his strategic insight and track record. At Mayfield, Chaddha focuses the firm's Cognition…

With so many concerns weighing heavily on many people's minds – current global conflict, climate change, economic uncertainty – it's no wonder the world is grappling with a mental health crisis. Some users are turning to apps to deal with mental health issues, with the global mental health app market estimated to reach $6.2 billion in 2023, according to data from Grand View Research. Scribble Journey is an art therapy and mental health app that aims to help users express and explore emotions through art. On Monday, the startup announced a new feature for iOS devices that lets users complete…

Recipe app and cooking assistant Pestle is using AI to make it easier to save recipes from social media, but it doesn't use OpenAI's ChatGPT tech to do so. Instead, Pestle's latest feature uses on-device machine learning to import recipes directly from Instagram Reels, quickly processing the recipes and saving them to your collection. The result is the ability to “almost instantly” save a recipe you come across while scrolling through Reels, says Pestle developer Will Bishop. First released in 2022, Pestle was created by Bishop to solve a common problem: finding recipes on the web. Unfortunately, today's recipe sites…

Berlin-based food delivery giant Delivery Hero has warned investors that it could “eventually” face antitrust fines of up to 400 million euros. The move, previously reported by Reuters, follows unannounced raids by European Union authorities in July 2022 and November 2023 on the offices of Delivery Hero and its Spanish subsidiary, Globo. The EU confirmed at the time that both companies had been inspected but did not name them. The European Commission said it was concerned about possible violations of competition laws that ban the formation of cartels and other restrictive trade practices. In a note to investors on Sunday…

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…