Author: TechBrunch
The tech-wide reckoning that began in 2022 and ran throughout into 2023 has continued into this year. And while 2024’s losses are not at that scale, they’re still significant, driven by big names like Pixar, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and TikTok. It remains to be seen if this year’s layoff trends follow last year’s, in which layoffs slowed down in the summer, before cuts began ramping up yet again toward the winter. Momentum for a tech sector rebound remains slow to build, outside of bright spots within artificial intelligence and adjacent companies, resulting in tech companies continuing to cut back on their…
A new study focusing on the founders of so-called “unicorns” (companies valued at $1 billion or more) finds that most company founders are “underdogs” and are often chosen from top 10 universities. We found that the composition of female founders is increasing, but there is no clear monopoly at the seed stage of VC funding. Defiance Capital's study of 845 unicorn companies and 2,018 unicorn founders (the Unicorn Founder DNA Report) covers the US and UK (excluding EU/Europe) from 2013 to 2023. The purpose is to focus on investigating the “DNA” of unicorn founders. Define the characteristics common to these…
Few people are more excited about wastewater than Thomas Fudge. He has good reason. He and his colleagues believe they have discovered a way to turn sludge into gold. Wastewater from places such as breweries and food processing plants cannot be dumped down the drain. Special handling is required and expensive work is often done off-site. Fudge's company, Wase, is offering them an alternative: treating water on-site and getting energy for free. Recovering methane from organic waste and using it to generate electricity and heat is nothing new. Companies do this not only to squeeze some value out of the…
Hardware manufacturer Rabbit used a partnership with Celebrities to enable voice commands on its devices. Rabbit is set to ship its first set of r1 devices next month after garnering a lot of attention at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year. The Rabbit r1 ships with Eleven Labs technology that enables voice commands from the user and how the pocket AI device responds to the user. At launch, this feature is only available in English and has one audio option. Eleven Labs said the R1 was ready for voice interaction from the beginning, but that its low-latency model…
When Marissa Mayer co-founded a startup in Palo Alto, Calif., six years ago, expectations for the former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee were sky-high. When the startup Sunshine announced its first app, centered around subscription software for contact management, people wondered if something more ambitious was just around the corner. . Today, Sunshine released the Internet after he released two equally mundane features: event planning and photo sharing. Commenter definitively confused. I was also perplexed last week when Mayer told me about Sunshine's new product. Everything Sunshine offers includes an AI component, but it's hard to see how Sunshine's…
PayPal Ventures' latest investment is in an Indonesian startup that offers a personal insurance product that covers a variety of risks, including accidents, damaged phone screens, and ticket cancellations. Qoala has secured $47 million in a new round co-led by PayPal Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, the five-year-old startup announced Wednesday. In addition to MUFG Innovation Partners and Omidyar Network, existing backers Flourish Ventures, Eurazeo, and AppWorks also participated in the Series C funding, bringing Qoala's total funding to more than $130 million since its inception. Headquartered in Jakarta, Qoala is an insurance broker that works with top local insurance and…
Following Elon Musk's xAI move to open source the Grok large-scale language model in early March, He said it would be available to subscribers.in Post to XMusk announced this week that Grok will be available to Premium subscribers, instead of just the high-end Premium+ subscribers as before. The move may indicate a desire to compete more directly with other popular chatbots, such as OpemAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. But it could also indicate that X is trying to increase its subscriber base. The news comes at a time when data shows the number of people using the X platform is…
A number of accelerator programs are conducted each year with the aim of identifying and developing founders in the early stages of company formation. Only a small percentage of people look for founders who are clearly aligned with some values, let alone classic conservative values such as family, patriotism, and faith. Discipulus Ventures, which launched its first group of 10 people yesterday, is a unique exception. Mentorship programs for young founders, at least in the field of technology, are geared toward a rather unique type of talent: Platonic idealism, Aristotelian rationalism, and a strong desire to revive Norman Rockwellian Americana.…
A number of accelerator programs are conducted each year with the aim of identifying and developing founders in the early stages of company formation. Only a small percentage of people look for founders who are clearly aligned with some values, let alone classic conservative values such as family, patriotism, and faith. Discipulus Ventures, which launched its first group of 10 people yesterday, is a unique exception. Mentorship programs for young founders, at least in the field of technology, are geared toward a rather unique type of talent: Platonic idealism, Aristotelian rationalism, and a strong desire to revive Norman Rockwellian Americana.…
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project aimed at intercepting and decrypting network traffic between people using the Snapchat app and its servers. The purpose, according to newly released court documents, was to understand user behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat. Facebook called it “Project Ghostbusters,” an obvious reference to Snapchat's ghostly logo. A federal court in California on Tuesday released new documents discovered as part of a class action lawsuit between consumers and Facebook's parent company Meta. Newly published documents show how Meta can determine which competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing network traffic…