Author: TechBrunch
The UAE faces a good problem: The real estate market is booming and there's no shortage of buyers. According to Deloitte, rents in Dubai are expected to rise 23% year-on-year in 2024, returning to pre-pandemic levels, while sales are up 18%, a trend that's set to continue for the next few years. Some of that demand is no doubt spreading to neighboring Abu Dhabi, so much so that its sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala Investment Company, recently participated in a $14 million Series A funding round raised by Dubai-based Stake, which plans to bring its fractional real estate investment platform to…
The folks at Collaborative Fund certainly like a challenge. They don't specialize in SaaS, VCs' favorite business model, but instead prefer to invest in areas like climate, health, and food. Plus, they like consumer-focused companies, whose fickle attitudes can add another layer of complexity to any business plan. Oh, and they decided to raise their sixth flagship fund at a time when limited partners are getting increasingly stingy. It turns out that wasn't a bad strategy after all: Collaborative recently raised $125 million for its sixth flagship fund, a process that was completed in just over 90 days, the firm…
Apple today kicks off its week-long Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2024) event with its traditional keynote at 1 pm ET / 10 am PT. The presentation will focus on the company's software products and the developers behind them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS. You can watch the stream on Apple's event page , and there's also a stream on YouTube , though it tends to be a bit delayed. Over the past few years, critics have pointed out that the company has so far lagged behind companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI when…
Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) kicks off today at 10am PST/1pm ET with the customary Tim Cook keynote. Last year's event will be remembered as the one where Vision Pro was finally introduced to the world, but the company wants to make WWDC 2024 even more memorable by finally clarifying its generative AI plans. Some things to look forward to include a major update to Siri, Mail incorporating Apple's Ajax LLM for suggested email replies, plus a new look and new features for Apple Photos. Find out how to live stream your event here. The opening of WWDC is…
Although funding for Italian startups is on the rise, the country still ranks eighth in Europe for venture capital investment, according to Dealroom. The newly founded Italian Founders Fund (IFF) wants to help catch up, both in terms of quantity and quality: with 50 million euros to invest in 25 companies, it understands the pain points of entrepreneurs and positions itself as a sector-agnostic, founder-friendly fund. IFF already has four companies in its portfolio, with a fifth deal in the works, and two have been publicly announced so far: Prior to customer survey platform Glaut in April, IFF led a…
Time is running out to get involved in the Startup Battlefield 200, a showcase of the top startups from across industries from around the world. This elite group (200 companies) will dominate (and dazzle) the exhibit floor at TechCrunch Disrupt. Tomorrow is the last day to apply for Startup Battlefield 200 We're accepting applications from early-stage startups until tomorrow, June 10th, at 11:59pm PDT. Founders, do you qualify? Investors, do you want to recommend one of your startups? Apply here now to make it in time for the deadline! Investor Tip: Startup Battlefield 200 is a unique opportunity for founders…
According to the American Pet Products Association, dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S., with 65.1 million households owning a dog, but cats aren't far behind with 46.5 million households, and yet a lot of innovation in the pet space focuses solely on dogs, and even when services cater to both species, the focus is on dogs. Sonia Petkavić, founder of cat care app Meowtel, believes cats and cat lovers deserve better. When her beloved cat Lily died in 2015, Petkavich realized she might not have been the best cat mom. Her job in sales for Philip Morris…
Anterior, a company that uses AI to speed up health insurance approvals for medical procedures, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by NEA at a post-money valuation of $95 million, according to two people familiar with the deal. Existing investors Sequoia, which led Anterior's $3.2 million seed round last September, and Neo, the accelerator that helped the company launch in summer 2022, also participated in the Series A funding. The round also included a number of angel investors, including Mustafa Suleiman, the co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI who was hired by Microsoft in March to…
Google and Microsoft have used their developer conferences as a platform to show off their generative AI tech, and now all eyes are on next week's Worldwide Developers Conference, where Apple Intelligence is expected to make its debut. The Cupertino-based company is under a lot of pressure: Apple is lagging behind in the AI race, and it may feel it needs to go all out to impress fans and shareholders, but that shouldn't mean overpromising on features. Reliability First Apple makes some of the most popular devices in the world, and its AI features should make them even more useful.…
AI systems and large-scale language models need to be trained on vast amounts of data to be accurate, but they shouldn't be trained on data they don't have the rights to use. Licensing agreements signed by OpenAI with The Atlantic and Vox last week indicate that both sides are interested in licensing AI training content. Human Native AI is a London-based startup that is building a marketplace to broker such deals between the many companies building LLM projects and companies willing to license their data to them. Its goal is to help AI companies find data to train their models…