Author: TechBrunch

India-based audio platform Pocket FM has secured $103 million in Series D funding led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Stepstone Group. The company, which counts Tencent and Times Internet as backers, is looking to expand into Europe and Latin America after seeing positive results in the US market. The company has now raised $196 million across multiple rounds at a valuation of $750 million, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. TechCrunch reported last year that the company was in talks with Lightspeed to lead the funding round announced today. How does the platform work? Pocket FM offers audio series consisting of…

India’s Ultrahuman is prepping for a growth tear. Today it’s announcing the close of $35 million in Series B* funding, a mix of equity ($25M) and debt. The smart ring startup is a less familiar name than category veteran — and market leader — Oura. But founder Mohit Kumar tells TechCrunch he sees a route to snatching the No.1 position from the US rival — in as little as 12 or 15 months, by his reckoning. Currently Ultrahuman believes its smart ring sits in second place vs sales of Oura. The new funding is about stepping on the gas. “Oura…

Have you ever needed to take a copy of your medical images to your doctor or other health care provider and they gave you a CD? You're not alone. Many radiologists still use CDs and similar outdated technology to share patient image files. A startup called PocketHealth has taken issue with this. The company has built a medical image exchange platform that digitizes all patient and provider processes without the use of CDs. The Toronto-based company announced Wednesday that it has secured $33 million (C$45 million) in a Series B funding round. PocketHealth's journey began after one of its co-founders,…

Rather than rigorously collecting data on cancer deaths to predict treatment outcomes, Cure51's founders had a different idea in mind. They decided to rotate the model 180 degrees. Instead, the company hopes to collect data on long-term cancer survivors and crack the code on the mechanisms that keep people alive. It has now raised €15 million in a seed round led by Paris-based Sofinnova Partners. Other investors in this round include Hitachi Ventures GmbH, Life Extension Ventures, Xavier Niel, and Olivier Pomel, his CEO and co-founder of Datadog. The company will now use the funding to build “cohorts” of data…

Cowboy is best known for its sleek electric bikes that can be found in many major European cities. And when you see these cowboys riding their bikes, you almost always see young adults with laptops in their backpacks heading to the office. That's why the company is launching an all-new bike called the Cowboy Cross. This is an all-road model that pursues comfort for long-distance travel. Last week I had a chance to see the new Cowboy Cross and test drive it for a few minutes. As for the design, it looks exactly like a cowboy bike, with its pill-shaped…

The Pokémon Company announced that it detected a hacking attempt against some users and reset the passwords for those user accounts. Last week, a warning appeared on Pokémon's official support website, saying, “Following an attempt to compromise our account systems, Pokémon has proactively locked the accounts of potentially affected fans.” The content was A warning about a hacking attempt posted by The Pokémon Company on its official support website. As of Tuesday, the warning has been lifted. A company spokesperson said there was no breach, just a series of hacking attempts against some users. “The account system was not compromised.…

Artificial general intelligence (AGI), often referred to as “strong AI,” “full AI,” “human-level AI,” or “general intelligent action,” represents a major future leap forward in the field of artificial intelligence. I am. Unlike narrow AI that specializes in specific tasks (such as detecting product defects, summarizing news, or building websites), AGI will be able to perform a wide range of cognitive tasks at or above the human level. Addressing the press this week at NVIDIA's annual GTC developer conference, his CEO Jensen Huang seemed genuinely tired of discussing the subject. Especially, he says, because he found himself being misquoted a…

“I want you to understand that this is not a concert,” Nvidia President Jensen Huang said in front of a crowd so large that it filled the SAP Center in San Jose. This is how he introduced the company's GTC event, which is perhaps the exact opposite of a concert. “You've come to a developer conference. There's going to be a lot of science explaining algorithms, computer architecture, mathematics. You feel a very heavy weight in the room. Suddenly you've come to the wrong place. It is.” It may not have been a rock concert, but the 61-year-old leather-jacketed CEO…

While the tech world waits with bated breath for Reddit's public debut, another company you may have never heard of is about to go public: Astera Labs. And that could be a more important test of investors' appetite for returning to tech IPOs. Astera announced in a public filing this week that its initial public offering will be larger in every respect than originally planned. The company plans to sell more shares, 19.8 million shares versus the previous plan of 17.8 million shares, and at a higher price. $32 to $34 per share, previous range of $27 to $30. Astera…

Threads, Instagram's Twitter-like app, is rolling out its “Trending Now” feature broadly to all users in the United States. The official rollout comes a month after the app started testing the feature with some users in the country. Trending topics are available on the search page and in the app's For You feed. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the official launch in a post on Threads, which the company sees as “an easy way to see what other people are talking about on Threads.” said. The launch of trending topics allows users to discover timely conversations happening on social networks,…