Author: TechBrunch

Hyped AI startup Humane has announced plans to enter its first international market by signing a deal with South Korean carrier SK Telecom. The announcement comes shortly after the San Francisco-based company revealed that it would be delaying the shipment date of Ai Pin devices in the U.S. domestic market from March to mid-April. Founded in 2017 by former Apple executives Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, Humane was founded by Microsoft, Qualcomm Ventures and OpenAI's Sam before anyone outside knew what the company was building. It had raised more than $200 million from backers including Altman. The company finally revealed…

Yesterday, Mistral AI, a Paris-based AI startup working on foundational models, announced a new large-scale language model that could rival OpenAI's GPT-4, a chat assistant, and a sales partnership with Microsoft. It was announced yesterday. However, Microsoft and Mistral AI suppressed this news, or at least a significant part of it. As part of the partnership, Microsoft will invest 15 million euros ($16.3 million at today's exchange rates) in the French startup. Microsoft says this investment will be converted into equity in Mistral's next funding round. This means that Mistral AI's rating will remain unchanged after this investment. Microsoft's stake…

Recurring revenue is almost the holy grail for any business. This is exactly why Apple has pivoted to become a services company as well as a hardware company, with 20% of its revenue now coming from Apple TV+, Apple Music, and iCloud. Among various other subscription-based and non-subscription-based services. The cost of acquiring new customers has also reportedly increased by more than 200% over the past decade, highlighting the importance of predictable revenue streams. However, subscription-based business models have their own challenges. Companies should not only focus on increasing the number of people willing to pay for a particular service,…

Chinese technology companies are marshalling all sorts of resources and talent to close the gap with OpenAI, and the experiences of researchers on both sides of the Pacific can be surprisingly similar. A recent post by an Alibaba researcher in his You can get a glimpse of it. Binyuan Hui, a natural language processing researcher at Qwen, Alibaba's large-scale language modeling team, said: share His daily schedule on X is post This article by OpenAI researcher Jason Way recently went viral. A parallel glimpse into their typical day reveals striking similarities, with wake-up times around 9am and bedtimes around 1am.…

Shadowfax, one of the largest logistics service providers to hyperlocal and on-demand delivery businesses in India, has posted 35% annual growth and raised $100 million in a new funding round. TPG NewQuest led Shadowfax's Series E funding round, which also includes secondary transactions, the startup announced Tuesday. TechCrunch reported last year that TPG NewQuest was considering investing in Shadowfax. Existing backers including e-commerce giant Flipkart, Mirae Asset Venture Investments, IFC, Nokia Growth Partners, Qualcomm, Eight Roads Ventures and Trifecta Capital also participated in the new funding, the company said. Ta. Shadowfax addresses the country's highly fragmented last-mile delivery infrastructure. India's…

Dubai-based early-stage venture capital firm COTU Ventures has announced that it has raised $54 million for its first fund to support startups in the Middle East from pre-seed to seed stage. With the final deal closed last year, COTU Ventures, which identifies and supports founders from inception to post-product launch, is investing $500,000 to $1.5 million in initial checks. Over the past two and a half years, COTU Ventures has been actively funding startups across the GCC, primarily focusing on the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with additional investments in Pakistan. As outlined in the statement, the company has already…

As someone famous said, everyone has a story inside them. A startup called Inkitt uses AI to turn the most powerful of these pieces of content into blockbusters, around which he believes he can build a new “Disney” for the 21st century. He has now raised $37 million to support that ambition. The startup's eponymous app lets users self-publish their stories, uses AI and data science to select and fine-tune the ones they find most compelling, and then Distribute and sell with the second app Galatea. The company says its business already has 33 million users and dozens of best-sellers.…

Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) will launch a $1 billion venture capital (VC) fund of funds for international and regional venture capital funds, the sovereign wealth fund announced on Monday. According to QIA, the program aims to attract international VC funds and startups to Qatar and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, with a particular focus on the fintech, edtech and healthcare sectors. Similar to a typical fund of funds structure, QIA initiatives invest indirectly through other VC funds, but also through targeted co-investments with participating funds. Sovereign wealth funds are increasing the number of startups in Qatar and attracting VC…

A few days later The notorious LockBit ransomware group, based in Russia, was taken offline by a major law enforcement operation over the years, but has returned to the dark web with a new leak site and numerous new victims. I'm here. In a verbose and rambling statement released Saturday, the remaining Rockbit administrators blamed last week's turmoil on their own. A global law enforcement effort reveals how ransomware gangs exploit vulnerabilities in public websites, including the dark web leak site used by ransomware gangs to publish data stolen from victims. An operation was launched to hijack the gang's infrastructure.…

A team led by a former Twitter engineer is reimagining how AI can be used to help people process news and information. Particle.news, which entered private beta last weekend, is a new startup that offers a personalized “multi-perspective” news reading experience, leveraging AI to not only summarize news, but how to compensate it fairly. We aim to do so. Author and publisher, or so it is claimed. Particle has yet to reveal its business model, but it arrives at a time of growing concern about the impact of AI on the rapidly shrinking news ecosystem. News summarized by AI could…