Author: TechBrunch

Since 2015, Kenya-based insurtech company Pula has been strengthening access to agricultural insurance for smallholder farmers in emerging markets, protecting them from losses due to pests, diseases, and extreme weather events such as floods and droughts. He is working hard. So far, the insurtech has helped 15.4 million farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America gain insurance coverage, and has launched a $20 million series that will allow it to establish new partnerships including livestock insurance. BIt is attracting even more attention after receiving funding. BlueOrchard, a global investment management company, led the round through its InsuResilience strategy, which aims…

It's a long road from pedal bikes to Formula 1. But that's exactly the leap AI-based startup Neural Concept and its co-founder and CEO Pierre Baquet have made in just his six years. In 2018, the company's fledgling software helped create the world's most aerodynamic bicycle. Four out of ten F1 teams now use an advanced version of the same technology. Along the way, Baquet's company won contracts with aerospace suppliers such as Airbus and Safran, and earned a $9.1 million Series A raise in 2022. Switzerland-based Neural Concepts, which currently employs 50 people, is working towards a Series B…

Welcome to TechCrunch FinTech! This week, we're taking a look at two fintech companies serving underserved populations, 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 PayJoy is an example of a company with positive unit economics and a mission to help the underprivileged. You don't often see these two intersect, so it's very exciting when they do. Last year, I wrote about the company's milestones of reaching $300 million in annual revenue and profitability and raising $150 million in Series C…

Generative AI, which can create and analyze images, text, audio, video, and more, is increasingly making its way into healthcare, driven by both Big Tech and startups. Google Cloud, Google's cloud services and products division, is collaborating with Highmark Health, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit healthcare company, on generative AI tools designed to personalize the patient admission experience. Amazon's AWS division said it is working with an anonymous customer on how to use generative AI to analyze “social determinants of health” in medical databases. Microsoft Azure also helped nonprofit healthcare network Providence build a generative AI system to automatically triage messages sent…

Airchat is a new social media app that encourages users to “just talk.” Previous versions of Airchat released last yearBut a team led by AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and former Tinder product executive Brian Norgard rebuilt the app and relaunched it on iOS and Android yesterday. Airchat, which is currently invite-only, is already ranked 27th in social networking on Apple's App Store. Visually, Airchat feels very familiar and intuitive, allowing you to follow other users, scroll through a feed of posts, and reply to, like, and share posts. It has functions. The difference is that posts and replies are audio…

In the generative AI boom, data is the new oil. So why not sell the products yourself? From big tech companies to startups, AI manufacturers are licensing e-books, images, video, audio, and more from data brokers, all for better (and more legally defensible) AI-powered products. We aim to train. Shutterstock has deals with Meta, Google, Amazon, and Apple to provide millions of images for model training, while OpenAI has contracts with several news organizations to train models on news archives. has a contract with. In many cases, the individual creators and owners of that data never see a single penny…

When Josh Silverman started exploring the idea for his methane-eating microbial startup Windfall Bio eight years ago, the market wasn't ready. No one cared about methane, he said. Companies focused instead on reducing their carbon footprint. But a few years later, the market is starting to pick up again. Menlo Park-based Windfall Bio has raised $28 million in a Series A round to expand its commercialization efforts. The round was led by Prelude Ventures, with participation from Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, Incite Ventures, Positive Ventures, and existing investors including Mayfield. Windfall works with industries that produce large amounts of methane,…

This week in Las Vegas, 30,000 people gathered to hear the latest and greatest from Google Cloud. What they heard was always generative AI. Google Cloud is first and foremost a cloud infrastructure and platform vendor. If you didn't know that, you might have missed it amidst the onslaught of AI news. Not to discount what Google had on display, but like Salesforce at its New York City roadshow last year, the company couldn't do anything other than nods to its core business — not to mention generative AI. (out of context). Google announced a number of AI enhancements designed…

Ad blockers may seem like an unlikely defense in the fight against spyware, but a new report reveals how spyware makers are weaponizing online advertising to enable government surveillance. sheds new light on what is happening. Spyware makers can reportedly use banner ads to identify specific targets and secretly infect them with spyware. One of the startups working on ad-based spyware infection systems is Intellexa, a European company that develops Predator spyware. Predators have real-time access to the entire contents of the target's mobile phone. In 2022, Intellexa unveiled a proof-of-concept system called Aladdin that enables the planting of phone…

Noname Security, a cybersecurity startup that protects APIs, is in talks with Akamai Technologies to sell itself for $500 million, according to people familiar with the deal. Co-founded in 2020 by Oz Golan and Shay Levi, Noname is headquartered in Palo Alto but has roots in Israel. The startup has raised $220 million from venture investors and was last valued at $1 billion when it raised $135 million in Series C led by Georgian and Lightspeed in December 2021. Ta. The sale price is a significant discount to its appraised value, but the current transaction will be done in cash,…