Author: TechBrunch

Social networking platform Blue Sky lifted its ban on registration of heads of state over the weekend. This means that different executives can participate on the platform. Brusky's move comes ahead of major general elections scheduled to be held this year in countries such as the United States and India. During Bluesky's invitation-only period last year, the company said it would not allow heads of state to register and asked users to contact the startup before inviting celebrities. “While we appreciate the enthusiasm of everyone who has sent invitations, our current policy does not yet allow us to accommodate heads…

OpenAI is expanding into Japan, opening a new Tokyo office and planning a GPT-4 model specifically optimized for Japanese. The creators of ChatGPT opened their first international office in London last year, followed by a European Union (EU) office in Dublin a few months later. Tokyo will be OpenAI's first office in Asia and fourth office in the world (including its San Francisco headquarters). CEO Sam Altman highlighted Japan's “rich history of people and technology coming together to do more” as one of the reasons for establishing a formal presence in the region. . While the EU is currently driving…

Social media startup ShareChat has been valued at less than $2 billion, down from nearly $5 billion in a new funding round, the 9-year-old Indian company with more than 400 million users told TechCrunch. This was a significant drop for emerging companies. South Asian market. The Bangalore-based startup, which operates a popular social network and short-form video app that supports more than a dozen Indian languages, announced Monday that it has raised $49 million in a transformational round. The company did not disclose the valuation at the time of the funding, but strongly denied that the new valuation was less…

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,…