Author: TechBrunch
surprise! There is a technological dimension to Donald Trump's big, bold ambition to buy Greenland from Denmark. Ken Howley, nominated by President-elect Trump to be the next ambassador to Japan (and thus the chief facilitator of all deals), is another member of the wealthy corps of tech talent who will serve in the incoming Trump administration. Howery, who was part of the original “PayPal Mafia” (he was the CFO who helped put it together and sell it to eBay), went on to co-found the storied VC firm Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and others. I did. He is also a…
A new AI orchestration startup from the founders of Lithuanian unicorn Nord Security will initially focus on improving the visibility, security, and adaptability of large-scale language models (LLMs) to help enterprises bring AI projects to production. We are currently working on supporting the implementation of this technology. The startup, called Nexos.ai, is the brainchild of Tomas Okmanas (pictured above) and Eimantas Savariauskas, who have built one of the most recognizable brands not only in Lithuania but throughout Europe. Best known for its flagship VPN product, NordVPN, Nord Security enjoyed a successful first decade of business, taking on a massive $100…
Apple on Friday launched a dedicated Apple Store app in India, deepening its retail presence in the world's most populous country as the iPhone maker looks to capitalize on growing consumer demand. The app is available for download on the App Store in India and allows customers to receive personalized shopping recommendations while purchasing Apple products directly, the company said in a statement. Through the app, users can customize their Mac with a more powerful chip, more memory, or more storage (features that Indian customers have been asking for for years), or arrange for the delivery or pickup of their…
After two years of relatively quiet investment activity, VCs appear to be pouring money into startups again at pandemic-era levels. But a closer look reveals that this is not actually the case. Investors poured $74.6 billion into U.S. startups in the fourth quarter of last year, up from an average of $42 billion invested in each of the past nine quarters, according to PitchBook data released Tuesday. . While such funding levels were previously only seen during the peak of the ZIRP era (end of 2020 to 2021), the reality is that this recent increase in venture capital funding has…
Jeff Holling's Insight Partners is to New York venture capitalists what Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia are to Silicon Valley. And this position was solidified with Insight's recent financial results. As expected, Insight Partners announced on Thursday that it had closed another large flagship fund known as Fund XIII and a second opportunity fund, totaling $12.5 billion in new capital. Opportunity funds are typically funds set aside to be reinvested when existing portfolio companies raise new rounds. In September, it was rumored that he was setting up a fund worth more than $10 billion. Insight clearly achieved that goal, and then…
Bench, the accounting startup that went bankrupt during the holidays, filed for bankruptcy in Canada on January 7, disclosing huge debts, according to documents obtained by TechCrunch. The filings (one with Bench and one with 10Sheet, Bench's original name) show that Bench had $2.8 million in cash on hand by the end of its lifespan, but $65.4 million in cash. This indicates that they were in debt. (TechCrunch converted bankruptcy filing data from Canadian dollars to US dollars at a rate of 1 US dollar to 1.44 Canadian dollars.) Founded in 2012, Bench has raised $113 million from investors including…
Apple is suspending AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps after facing backlash for generating inaccurate news alerts. Additionally, the company is making changes to the entire notification summary to increase transparency. In the latest developer preview for iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, Apple has completely disabled notification summaries for all news and entertainment apps, and plans to re-enable them in a future update with improvements. The changes come weeks after the BBC complained to Apple after one of its articles incorrectly said Luigi Mangione, who was charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson,…
Meta's Threads is internally prototyping the ability to add music to posts, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The option to add music to posts is already available on Meta's other social apps, Instagram and Facebook. The company is currently considering bringing this feature to X's competitor Threads. The feature has not yet been publicly tested and was first discovered by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi. He often finds unreleased features in development. The option to add music to your posts is reminiscent of the Myspace days, and will be a welcome addition for anyone looking to add a little more color…
The climate change technology industry may have slumped in 2024, but new data also shows it is a mature sector with larger deal sizes. Venture investment in climate technology fell 7% to $12.9 billion, $1 billion short of the 2023 tally, according to data from a new Pitchbook report. According to the report, round sizes will increase in 2024 and investors appear to be more keen to back companies emerging from seed rounds. For years, investors have favored early-stage companies and poured large sums of money into pre-seed and seed-stage startups. Part of the reason for this was that the…
Nvidia is releasing three new NIM microservices – small, independent services that are part of a larger application – to help enterprises introduce additional controls and safety measures to their AI agents. One of these new NIM services targets content safety and works to prevent AI agents from producing harmful or biased output. Another works to focus conversations only on approved topics, and a third new service helps prevent AI agents from attempting to jailbreak or lift software restrictions. These three new NIM microservices are part of Nvidia NeMo Guardrails, Nvidia's existing open source collection of software tools and microservices…