Author: TechBrunch
The United States is facing a shortage of accountants. According to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, fewer candidates will take the CPA exam for the first time in 2022 than in 2006. One possible reason people are less interested in the field is that it involves a lot of tedious work: accountants must comb through large amounts of unstructured data to conduct audits or simply find answers to questions. Kevin Merlini, co-founder and CEO of Materia, left the industry for that very reason and is now working to ease the burden for other accountants. Materia integrates with accounting…
Christopher O'Donnell has a hobby. He loves music and playing guitar, but more than anything, he loves building software. That's why, three years after leaving HubSpot, he built Day.ai, a CRM for the AI era. Unlike modern CRMs, which are essentially giant spreadsheets that someone needs to enter and keep up to date, Day pulls all the information about an individual from public records like conversations with the company, emails, and LinkedIn. O'Donnell knows CRMs well: He helped develop HubSpot, one of the most popular CRMs today. O'Donnell spent over a decade at HubSpot, first helping to power the company's…
Active Directory is the Microsoft directory service that connects users and network resources and is used by over 90% of the Fortune 1000. So it's no surprise that Active Directory is a huge target for malicious hackers. This also means a lot of attention for security companies building tools to protect and restore AD services. Today, Semperis, a Hoboken, NJ startup focused on AD protection, announced that it has raised $125 million in funding from JP Morgan and Hercules Capital. The funding will be used for research and development and business development. In addition to Active Directory, Semperis recently also…
Online shopping trends are expected to remain strong this year, but e-commerce is more fragmented than ever. With brands selling on numerous platforms, from TikTok shops to established marketplaces, live shopping, and even their own channels, you might think it would be easier for shoppers to find what they're looking for. But that's not quite the case, and shoppers often have to spend a lot of time searching. To make matters worse, SEO algorithms and an influx of content have made it difficult to sift through useful information, making current search less effective for shopping. But it's 2024, and if…
Spotify is now allowing unhosted podcasters to upload videos to the platform, a new feature that the company quietly introduced last week, a Spotify spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. Previously, creators who wanted to upload video podcasts to Spotify had to sign up to host them with Spotify for Podcasters, a free platform for podcast creators, or a partner hosting company. Creators could also separate the video feed from the audio, but this wasn't ideal as it would be uploaded as two episodes. Now, any creator can upload directly to Spotify using their podcast hosting service of choice. To use the…
Amazon is opening up the smarts of its Generative AI listing creation to more sellers, announcing today that sellers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK will now have access to a tool designed to improve their product listings by generating product descriptions, titles and related details. Additionally, sellers can also “enrich” existing product listings by automatically adding missing information. The announcement comes nine months after Amazon first revealed plans to offer its generative AI technology to sellers. Amazon hasn't been very forthcoming about its availability by market, but it's likely limited to the U.S. so far; however, the…
WorldCoin, a cryptocurrency startup co-founded by OpenAI's Sam Altman, has been allowed to resume iris scanning and other operations in Kenya after a year-long government investigation into privacy concerns was halted. Kenya was one of the countries where WorldCoin launched its iris scanning system, which the company was building as the basis for a new identity and cryptocurrency system, but its operations there have been suspended for nearly a year after the program fell foul of regulators just days after it was launched. Now, the country's Directorate of Criminal Investigation (DCI) has issued a letter to the company's legal team…
Paris-based venture capital firm Briga has watched Africa's tech ecosystem mature over the years, with venture capital funding rising from less than $1 billion per year to a record $6 billion and the number of fast-growing companies on the rise, from one unicorn to seven in the space of three years. Now the venture capital firm wants to put some of its own money towards a $75 million fund to invest in early-stage startups in Africa, and told TechCrunch it had secured roughly 70% of the capital commitments by the first deadline. Since entering the venture capital industry in 2015,…
Malicious hacks are becoming more sophisticated, creating a very clear trend in security technology: security itself must continue to grow in complexity in order to keep people and organizations safe. Security startup PQShield is an early player in the concept, focusing on “post-quantum” encryption — a future-proof software and hardware solution that would theoretically be able to withstand hacks performed using the most powerful quantum machines of the future. Now the company has announced $37 million in funding to meet industry demand for building hardware and related systems based on its research. Addition, Lee Fixel's investment firm, led the Series…
Wordsmith, an emerging Scottish legal tech startup that has managed to secure backing from two well-known venture capital firms, offers an AI platform aimed at in-house legal teams and law firms that can be set up to assist other employees within the company, allowing anyone in the company to ask for help with legal tasks such as reviewing contracts or answering specific questions about documents. Founded in October last year, the Edinburgh-based company is the brainchild of former TravelPerk senior executives Ross McNairn (CEO) and Robbie Falkenthal (COO), and CTO Volodymyr Giginiak, who held various engineering roles at Microsoft, Facebook…