Author: TechBrunch
Uber Eats is launching a TikTok-like short-form video feed to encourage discovery and allow restaurants to showcase their food. Uber Eats senior director of product Awaneesh Verma told TechCrunch exclusively that the new feed is being tested in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto. The company plans to launch the feed globally in the future. With this launch, Uber Eats joins a number of other popular apps (including Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and Netflix, to name a few) that have launched their own short-form video feeds in response to TikTok's growing popularity. I did. TechCrunch also recently learned that LinkedIn has…
Microsoft has announced a new London hub for its recently announced Consumer AI division. The company will be led by Jordan Hoffman, an AI scientist and engineer recently hired from Inflection AI, a high-profile AI startup that Microsoft invested in last year. The news comes as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced a new consumer AI division led by the founders of Inflection AI, including Mustafa Suleiman, co-founder of AI company DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014. This was announced about three weeks after the announcement. At the time, Nadella said that “several members of the Inflection team” were also joining…
Paddy Cosgrave, co-founder of technology conference WebSummit, will return to his role as CEO after stepping down in October over controversial comments he made on social media last year about the Israel/Gaza war. . Rumors of his return began to surface over the weekend.Mr Cosgrave confirmed the move. Post on X today. Notably, Cosgrave made no mention in his announcement of the political comments he made that led to his resignation seven months ago, including a social media post he wrote at the time. have also been deleted). Instead, Cosgrave is trying to ease tensions with a plan to shift…
Avendus, India's leading venture investment bank, is looking to raise about $300 million for its private equity arm, three people familiar with the matter said. Backed by US private equity giant KKR, the Mumbai-based company worked with popular growth-stage startups like Zepto, LensKart, XpressBees, CaratLane, and Atomberg in its funding round last year, making it one of India's top has established itself as a financial advisor. Avendus is a third private equity fund with plans to write larger checks more frequently, one of the people said. The company raised a second round of funding of approximately $185 million in 2021.…
Spotify has already seen success with its popular AI DJ feature, but now the streaming music service is bringing AI to playlist creation. The company on Monday introduced AI Playlists into beta, a new option that allows users to generate playlists based on written prompts. The feature will initially be available to users of Android and iOS devices in the UK and Australia, and will continue to be available over the coming months. In addition to more standard playlist creation requests, such as those based on genre or time frame, Spotify uses AI to help users create songs like “Songs…
Welcome to TechCrunch FinTech! This week, we look at how many fintech companies joined Y Combinator's Winter 2024 cohort, how much funding they lost in Q1, and more. Get TechCrunch's roundup of the biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Sunday at 7:00 a.m. PT. Subscribe here. big story Y Combinator held a demo day for its winter cohort this week. As always, the TC team gave it their all. One of the things that struck me was how much fintech representation in their group has decreased. Of the 260 companies included in the latest cohort,…
Mahbod Moghaddam, the controversial and never-tiring Genius and Everypedia co-founder and angel investor, died last month at the age of 41 from “complications from a recurrent brain tumor,” his family said. According to a post by and published on Genius. The startup world seems to have caught wind of Moghaddam's death just this weekend, with numerous tributes pouring in on the X Platform, including former TechCrunch writer-turned-investor Josh Constine. He previously interviewed Moghadam and its founders when Genius was being founded. Still in a relatively early stage, he has been called a rap genius. Constine wrote: “Rest in peace, Mr.…
When Hubspot founders Brian Harrigan and Dharmesh Shah conceived their inbound marketing startup in 2004, they were still graduate students at MIT and inbound marketing wasn't fully understood. They developed the idea into a successful company that eventually went public in 2014. Currently, the Boston-based company has a market capitalization of over $30 billion. There were several factors that contributed to the favorable outcome. The founders met at one of the world's leading universities. They had an idea, but they were in a place where it could be nurtured, in an area with experienced venture investors who recognized the company's…
According to the CDC, 1 in 36 children in the United States has autism. Research shows that the earlier a child is diagnosed, the better the developmental outcome. EarliTec Diagnostics has just raised new capital to expand its system that allows clinicians to diagnose children as young as 16 months old. The Atlanta-based startup's FDA-cleared approach involves a child watching a short video or social interaction on a screen for 12 minutes, while the device uses AI to track the child's eye movements. That's what it means. According to EarliTec, children with autism do not concentrate as much on videos…
The tools that allow government hackers to break into iPhones and Android phones, popular software like Chrome and Safari browsers, and chat apps like WhatsApp and iMessage are now worth millions of dollars, and the prices of these products has doubled in the last few years. It will be harder to hack. On Monday, startup Cloudfence published an updated price list for these hacking tools. These hacking tools are commonly known as “zero-days” because they exploit unpatched vulnerabilities that are unknown to the software's manufacturer. Companies such as Cloudfence and one of its competitors, Zerodium, claim that they acquire these…