Author: TechBrunch

Last week on StrictlyVC At an event in San Francisco, we spoke with Mamoun Hamid and Ilya Khushman, two longtime venture capitalists. They met as children in Frankfurt, Germany, and were brought in about six years ago to reboot the famed venture firm Kleiner Perkins. They seem to have accomplished their mission of polishing the brand. Among Kleiner's recent bets is Rippling, a workforce management company founded by serial entrepreneur Parker Conrad that was valued at more than $11 billion last year. Loom is a video messaging company that was recently acquired by Atlassian for just under $1 billion. And…

fast fashion is an industry It is embroiled in labor and copyright issues, and has a huge impact on the environment due to wastewater and carbon dioxide emissions. It also has the potential to make you a lot of money quickly. But despite all these problems, VCs don't stop loving this field. On Wednesday, my colleague Manish Singh wrote a scoop about Accel's potential investment in India-based fast fashion startup Newme. Newme is an app-based retailer that produces 500 new items each week with an average price of $10. The news comes just a week after the company closed its…

two creators A phone monitoring service appears to have shut down after its owner agreed to settle state charges that it illegally promoted spyware developed by his company. PhoneSpector and Highster were consumer phone monitoring apps that facilitated covert monitoring of personal smartphones. These apps, commonly referred to as stalkerware (or spouseware), are usually implanted by a spouse or domestic partner on an individual's cell phone, usually with knowledge of the device's passcode. These apps are designed to hide from your home screen, making them difficult to find and delete, while also uploading your phone's messages, photos, and real-time location…

“The focus should be on digital ownership.” Cryptocurrency world It's full of noise. Meme coins, speculation, rug pulling, scams, hype, and doom distract us from all the innovative things people are building with blockchain. And sometimes noise contaminates the flow of information so much that it becomes very difficult to maintain faith in the technology. Still, one venture capital veteran feels the only way to carve a clear path is to focus on blockchain technology and building startups in the industry. “Cryptocurrency and blockchain are in the news a lot, but a lot of it is about speculation and prices.…

Education technology company Blackbaud has agreed to a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over its security practices that led to a 2020 data breach. The FTC said “lax” security protocols at Blackbaud, a U.S.-based company that provides financial and management software to universities, nonprofits, medical institutions, and far-right organizations, allowed attackers to infiltrate the company's network and collect personal data. claims to have access to. Millions of consumers. In this February 2020 incident, a malicious hacker used a customer's credentials to gain access to Blackbaud's network, and the hacker remained undetected for more than three months, stealing large…

Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction. Get a roundup of TechCrunch's biggest and most important crypto articles delivered to your inbox every Thursday at 12pm PT. Subscribe here. Hello. Welcome to the third edition of the new and improved TechCrunch Crypto newsletter. As mentioned above, we plan to add some fresh regular segments and features in addition to our regularly scheduled news. If you like what you see (or don't), let us know at jacquelyn@techcrunch.com. Have a great February, friends! We are one-twelfth of the year complete. It wasn't that difficult, right? He only has 11 more…

US cybersecurity agency CISA has ordered federal agencies to urgently disconnect Ivanti VPN appliances due to the risk of malicious exploitation due to multiple software flaws. In an updated version of the emergency directive first announced last week, CISA now requires all federal civilian executive branch agencies (a list that includes the Department of Homeland Security and the Securities and Exchange Commission) to shut down all federal agencies due to “serious threats.” Requires disconnecting the Ivanti VPN appliance. It is caused by numerous zero-day vulnerabilities that are currently being exploited by malicious hackers. Federal agencies typically have several weeks to…

A broken iPhone was spotted during COP28 held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates on November 30, 2023. Image credits: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto (via Getty Images) In 2019, Apple announced that it would start sending some security researchers a “special” version of the iPhone designed to use to find vulnerabilities, and then report them to Apple so that the company could identify the vulnerabilities. I made it possible to fix it. In 2020, the company began shipping devices designed to disable some security features to help researchers find bugs in iOS. Before these devices existed, there existed a loosely organized group of…

Polygon Labs, the team focused on building the layer-2 blockchain Polygon, has laid off 60 employees, representing about 19% of its staff, according to a post published Thursday by CEO Marc Boisron. That's what it means. Polygon Chain is one of the largest layer 2 blockchains focused on scaling Ethereum. According to the company's website, it has facilitated more than 2.44 billion transactions, deployed more than 1.17 million smart contracts, and generated $12.8 billion in revenue. Polygon Labs is an organization that helps build blockchain ecosystems. Boisron said the team's growth during the last crypto bull market has “diminished” the…

US access and identity management giant Okta has announced that it will lay off approximately 400 employees, representing 7% of its global workforce. The layoffs come almost exactly one year after Okta announced plans to cut its workforce by 5%, or about 300 jobs. In an email sent to employees that Okta shared with TechCrunch, Okta CEO Todd McKinnon said the decision was necessary for the San Francisco-based organization to grow profitably. He said it was. His Okta, which has more than 18,000 customers, announced better-than-expected quarterly profits in November, with sales up 21% to $584 million. “While we have…