Author: TechBrunch

Blisce becomes the latest VC firm to launch a fund focused on climate change technology, with plans to raise up to €150 million (approximately $162 million). The company has hired investor Pierre-Edouard Bellion to lead the fund, and Too Good to Go co-founder Lucie Basch will support the fund as a venture partner. For those not familiar with Blisce, the Paris-based VC firm also has offices in New York and is best known as the investment vehicle of Alexandre Mars (pictured above). Mars is an entrepreneur turned philanthropist who founded several technology companies in the early 2000s and sold them…

Senegal-based B2B e-commerce startup Maad has secured $3.2 million in debt equity funding to strengthen growth in the West African country and explore new opportunities in the wider Francophone region. did. The seed round was led by Ventures Platform with participation from Seedstars International Ventures, Reflect Ventures, Oui Capital, Launch Africa, Voltron Capital, and Alumni Ventures. It received $900,000 in debt financing from France's DFI Proparco and local banks. Maad's end-to-end distribution platform enables informal retailers (mom-and-pop stores) to source fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) directly from partner suppliers, increasing inventory driven by multiple levels of sales. You can tackle the…

OpenAI Startup Fund, a venture fund that invests in early-stage AI companies and recently transferred legal control from Sam Altman to Ian Hathaway, has invested in an additional 500 companies, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It is said that they have completed raising $10,000. The new capital was raised from two investors and transferred to a special purpose vehicle (OpenAI Startup Fund SPV III, LP), a legal entity affiliated with OpenAI Startup Fund. This is the third time OpenAI Startup Fund has raised an SPV. The investment arm closed on its second SPV investment…

Early-stage rounds continue to dominate investments in Europe's startup market, and on Tuesday one of the region's biggest companies announced a new fund to strengthen that trend. Accel has raised $650 million to support startups from seed to Series A across the UK, continent and Israel. The fund is Axel's eighth of its kind since it first set down roots in London in 2000. Accel has invested in over 200 startups in the region to date, making it one of the most prolific VC firms in the market. One of the recurring laments in Europe is that even though the…

When Keith Rabois announced in January that he was leaving Founders Fund to return to Khosla Ventures, it shocked many in the venture capital ecosystem. It's not just because Rabois is a big name in the industry. This was surprising because unlike many other fields, venture capitalists traditionally don't move around much. This is especially true when you reach the partner or general partner level, as Lavoie did. The lifecycle of a VC fund is 10 years, and partners have good reason to stay that way. In some cases, they may be the “key people” for a company's fund. This…

On the heels of OpenAI announcing the latest version of its GPT large-scale language model, America's biggest rival in generative AI has announced an extension of its own. Anthropic announced Monday that its AI assistant, Claude, is now live in Europe, with support for “multiple languages” including French, German, Italian, and Spanish across Claude.ai, iOS apps, and business plans for teams. It was announced that there was. This release comes after Anthropic extended its API to Europe to allow developers to use and integrate its models. Both are part of the startup's larger push toward faster growth. Anthropic has raised…

Former GV partner Terry Burns is embarking on a new chapter in his career by launching his own venture firm called Type Capital. It will focus on early-stage startups and cut pre-seed and seed-sized checks, Fortune reported. Burns told Fortune that the company is still in its early stages and has not yet invested in any companies. She confirmed to TechCrunch that a new company has been launched, but declined to provide details about the plans or the size of the fund.The launch of Type Capital marks a significant milestone as Terry Burns joins a select group of Black women…

OpenAI announced several updates to its flagship conversational AI model, ChatGPT. Among them are new apps and interfaces featuring the system's new user-facing personality: a giant black dot. On stage, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati hinted at the changes: ” So the new interface will be either a point, a hole, or a circle. It doesn't matter how you perceive it. In some ways, this is a positive and decisive change, a nod to the minimalism that Apple once embraced. The cheerful, saccharine voice is also an awkward step toward pseudo-humanity, but at least there's no creepy face to go…

OpenAI's livestream announcement took place Monday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. The company described the event as “an opportunity to demo updates to ChatGPT and GPT-4.” Meanwhile, CEO Sam Altman said: Promoted the event with a message”It's not gpt-5, it's not a search engine, but we've been working hard on some new things that we think people will love. It feels like magic to me.” As it turns out, what was announced was a new model called ChatGPT 4o (the “o” stands for “omni”) that is more responsive to voice prompts and has improved visual capabilities. “The why of GPT-4o…

OpenAI has released a new flagship generative AI model called GPT-4o that it plans to roll out “iteratively” across the company's developer and consumer products over the coming weeks. Muri Murati, chief technology officer at OpenAI, said GPT-4o provides “GPT-4 levels” of intelligence, but also improves GPT-4's capabilities across audio as well as text and vision. He said that “Why GPT-4o across voice, text, and vision,” Murati said in a keynote address at OpenAI's offices. OpenAI's previous flagship model, GPT-4, was trained on a combination of both images and text, and can analyze images and text to extract text from…