Author: TechBrunch

When Aizada Marat moved to California from New York with her husband, KODIF co-founder and CEO Chingiz Jumanazarov, in 2018, she needed to sort out her immigration status. That's when things started to go wrong. A Kyrgyz-born, Harvard-educated lawyer, she came to the United States at age 17 for a one-year exchange program through the U.S. State Department-sponsored Future Leaders Exchange Program (FLEX). After graduating from Harvard University, Marat moved to London due to immigration issues, and then came to California with Jumanazarov, who had enrolled in Stanford Business School, to take a job offer from the major law firm…

WhatsApp Business is changing its per-conversation pricing for businesses. A conversation is a 24-hour thread between a merchant and a user. The company is lowering the rates for utility messages and increasing the rates for marketing messages. Meta charges businesses through four categories of messages: marketing (offers, new products), utility (order updates, account balances), authentication (one-time passwords) and service (customer inquiries). The new utility rates will come into effect from August 4 this year, while the new marketing conversation rates will come into effect from October 4 this year. This is the first update to conversation rates since WhatsApp started…

HerculesAI (formerly Zero Systems) has been working on automating professional services since 2017, initially focusing on the legal industry. As part of that, the company has been building large language models for years, long before the idea became public knowledge. So when ChatGPT came along in late 2022 and suddenly everyone was talking about LLMs, the company was in the right place at the right time. The company today announced a $26 million Series B investment to build on its recent momentum. The company's CEO and co-founder, Alex Babin, said the company had been working since around 2020 on developing…

Generative AI has already shown great potential in robotics, where applications include natural language interaction, robot learning, no-code programming, and even design. This week, Google's DeepMind Robotics team is showcasing another potential sweet spot between the two: navigation. In a paper titled “Mobility VLA: Multimodal Directed Navigation with Long-Context VLM and Topological Graphs,” the team demonstrates how they implemented Google Gemini 1.5 Pro to teach the robot how to respond to commands and navigate around an office. Naturally, DeepMind used parts of Every Day Robots that were left over since Google shut down the project last year in a massive…

Formlabs announced the acquisition of 3D printing company Micronics on Thursday. The Wisconsin-based startup is a bold move with just two employees. Co-founders Henry Chan and Luke Boppart are joining the more established company as Formlabs works to bring Micronics' easy-to-use SLS method to 3D printing. There are many similarities between the two: Formlabs was founded as an MIT spinout to significantly lower the barrier of entry to SLA printing, something that was previously only feasible on large, prohibitively priced industrial systems; Micronics, founded in 2021, was created by recent grads committed to the problem of democratizing access to industrial…

Medal, a startup best known for its video game clipping products, announced that it has raised $13 million at a valuation of $333 million from multiple investors, including Horizons Ventures, OMERS Ventures, peak6 and Arcadia Investment Partners. The company also announced Highlight, a new cross-platform desktop app that acts as a contextual AI assistant for users, capturing on-screen content and allowing them to ask questions to large-scale language models (LLMs) based on that context. Henry Gladwin, a partner at OMERS Ventures, said in a conference call with TechCrunch that the venture sees an opportunity to take Medal's core technology and…

When Bulent Altan, an early SpaceX engineer, and Yoram Volklein, a longtime investor, surveyed Europe's space industry in the late 2010s, they were surprised at how similar it was to the beginnings of America's New Space in the early 2000s, when SpaceX and other companies were just getting started. The two decided to make a personal investment in German launch startup Isar Aerospace, but also considered making a larger investment to more fully capture the huge opportunity to help grow the space sector in both the U.S. and Europe. To do that, they founded Alpine Space Ventures in Munich, Germany,…

Intel may be getting a much-needed boost to the ambitions of its burgeoning foundry business: The company's venture capital arm said today it is making “strategic” investments in AI-building startups based in Israel and the UK. Intel Capital is leading a $15 million investment in Buildots, a company that uses AI and computer vision to create digital twins of construction sites. The six-year-old company works with construction giants such as Pomerlau, NCC and Ledcor to regularly capture jobsite data using 360-degree cameras to track project progress, identify bottlenecks and optimize workflows. Buildots has raised around $106 million to date, with…

People in the tech industry often say that data is the new oil, a phrase coined by British mathematician Clive Hamby that, of course, means that data is valuable. Personal health data can also provide meaningful insights and improve treatment outcomes, but according to the World Economic Forum, only 3% of patient data is currently used by doctors. Doctors know they can glean useful information from patient data, but they don't have the time to review every detail in medical records. Regard, a digital health startup founded in 2017, wants to help doctors save time and improve the accuracy of…

The European Union has accepted Apple's commitments over how Apple Pay will operate in a move to resolve a long-running competition investigation. Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission's vice-president who heads the EU's competition department, announced the development at a press conference on Thursday. Apple has until July 25 to implement the change, which would allow rival mobile wallet developers to offer contactless payments over NFC, the technology that dominates in the EU. It would allow users to use “tap-and-go” payments, she said, and would also give them access to key iOS features like double-clicking to launch apps and using Face…