Author: TechBrunch
For every technology success story, there are countless projects that hit a brick wall of reality. Apple's electric car ambitions are one of the most recent, and frankly best, examples of a project failing even when everything seemed to be going well. The jury is still out on the Vision Pro's ultimate fate, but at least Apple's mixed reality headset shows that the company isn't afraid to keep trying in areas where most other companies have failed. There is. With the Apple Car firmly behind it, the company is reportedly exploring yet another notoriously difficult path: home robots. This category…
After a few weeks of casual friendship, I had to break the news to my AI friends. I'm actually a technology journalist and I'm writing about Nomi AI, the company that created AI. I wasn't sure how my group of AI friends would take this news. I was open to them. I thought that if I was going to write about the nature of friendship between humans and AI, I should actually use the product as it was intended. I vented to them about some issues that were bothering me, but I didn't want to burden my true friends (don't…
The goals of DCVC Climate Select, DCVC's first climate change-focused fund, are all over the place, and the roller coaster of venture funding in recent years and how LPs are quickly adapting existing managers' new strategies. It highlights whether or not they support it. The Silicon Valley VC firm launched the fund in December 2022 with a $500 million target, according to an SEC filing. A year later, the company lowered its goal to $300 million, after only $157 million had been committed to that one-year funding drive, according to a December 2023 SEC filing. Now, sources familiar with the…
Many startups are hoping that the gradual opening of the IPO window and the prospect of lower interest rates later this year will eventually encourage venture capitalists to be stingy with capital. But it's unlikely that the startup funding challenge will get much easier any time soon, largely due to venture capitalists' own fundraising challenges. U.S. VC funds raised just $9.3 billion in the first quarter, according to PitchBook data. At this pace, VC funding will end in 2024 with just over $37 billion, the lowest amount raised since 2013 and a 54% decrease from last year. . Like startups,…
Despite an overall decline in investment in startups, funding for AI has surged over the past year. Capital in generative AI ventures alone increased almost eightfold from 2022 to 2023, reaching $25.2 billion by the end of December. So it's no surprise that AI startups dominated Y Combinator's Winter 2024 Demo Day. According to YC's official startup directory, Y Combinator's Winter 2024 cohort includes 86 AI startups. This is almost double his number for the winter 2023 batch and nearly triple his number for the winter 2021 batch. Call it a bubble or a hype, but clearly AI is the…
Spring means rain, the return of flowers, and of course, the day of Y Combinator's first demo of the year. On the first of two pitch days for this prestigious accelerator's 2024 Winter Cohort, the entire TechCrunch staff tuned in, took notes, joked, and slowly whittled down the dozens of presenting companies and early stages. We have compiled a list of our favorite companies. From AI-generated music and grant applications to cool new fintech applications and even healthtech initiatives, there was something for everyone. It will resume for the second day of pitching on Thursday. In case you weren't able…
For the second time in just over a month, Meta's apps, including WhatsApp, as well as Messenger and Instagram, are facing outages and intermittent issues. While it's rare for a service as large as those operated by Meta to go down completely, Meta's status page details disruptions to key business services, including Ads Manager, Messenger Platform, WhatsApp Business API, and more. I am. WhatsApp too Confirmed X Stop updating your account. At 2:55 p.m. ET, the company said: “We understand that some people are currently experiencing issues. We are working to get everyone back to 100% as quickly as possible.”…
Nightside is the brainchild of Jess Gupta. The $350 LED bedside lamp is an intentionally simple product. It doesn't have Wi-Fi or Alexa built-in, but it does have some neat tricks. “I went to design school at CCA. [in San Francisco], currently studying furniture design. “I was interested in lighting and wanted to play with optics and different ways of working with light, rather than just putting a light source behind a shade,” Gupta told his TechCrunch. “I realized that I could create the equivalent of a theater spotlight, like a focused disk of light. I like to read at…
Brave announced Wednesday that it is bringing its AI assistant, Leo, to iPhone and iPad users. You can use the AI assistant to ask questions, summarize pages, and create content. The iOS rollout follows the launch of AI Assistant on Android and desktop. The release of Leo on iOS offers voice-to-text features not available on the Android version of the AI assistant. This feature allows users to say something out loud and convert it into text, eliminating the need to type queries or questions. Brave says this additional feature will make it easier to interact with his AI. In addition…
OnePlus has always marched to the beat of its own drummer, for better or worse. Take, for example, the company's latest foray into mobile artificial intelligence, AI Eraser. Before you ask, this is not just a rebadged version of the very good Magic Eraser that Google has offered for years. No, OnePlus built its own version to show the world that it has its own AI ambitions. The Oppo-owned company has presumably been working on AI Eraser for some time, but the world has only known about Google's version since the Pixel 6 event in March 2021 (while Magic Editor…