Author: TechBrunch

Today is the shocking conclusion to TechCrunch's early stage audience voting! We carefully fielded a large number of applications from experienced founders and startup luminaries vying for attention in our Audience Choice program. After careful sifting, only six remain. The clock is ticking. Secure your tickets to the show in Boston on April 25th at a discounted early bird rate before they're gone. Audience Choice voting is coming to an end in just a few hours and ends tonight, February 15th at 11:59pm Pacific Time. Today is your last chance to make an impact and decide which candidates will grace…

Hydrogen suffers from the classic chicken and egg problem. That means there isn't enough demand to get suppliers into the game, and there isn't enough supply to drive enough demand. One startup thinks there's a solution for both sides. Chicago-based Celadyne has developed a nanoparticle coating that can be applied to existing fuel cell and electrolyser membranes. Gary Ong, the company's founder and CEO, said the material has the potential to significantly improve the durability of existing fuel cell designs while increasing hydrogen production efficiency by 15-20%. He said there is. Celadyne recently raised a $4.5 million seed round, according…

API company Kong today announces an open source AI gateway. It is an extension to the existing API Gateway that allows developers and operations teams to integrate their applications with one or more Large Language Models (LLMs) and access them through a single API. In addition to this, Kong will release several AI-specific features such as prompt engineering, credential management, etc. “We see AI as an additional use case for the API,” Kong co-founder and CTO Marco Palladino told me. “APIs are driven by use cases like mobile, microservices, and AI just happens to be the newest thing. When we…

There are a lot of things that can go wrong with GenAI, especially third-party GenAI. It makes things. It's biased and harmful. And it may violate copyright rules. According to a recent study by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group, more than 55% of AI-related failures in organizations are caused by third-party AI tools. So it's not entirely surprising that some companies are still cautious about adopting this technology. But what if GenAI came with a guarantee? It's a business idea that entrepreneur and electrical engineer Kartik Ramakrishnan came up with a few years ago while working as…

Gemini, Google’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, is here. Is it any good? While it’s a solid option for research and productivity, it stumbles in obvious — and some not-so-obvious — places. Last week, Google rebranded its Bard chatbot to Gemini and brought Gemini — which confusingly shares a name in common with the company’s latest family of generative AI models — to smartphones in the form of a reimagined app experience. Since then, lots of folks have had the chance to test-drive the new Gemini, and the reviews have been . . . mixed, to put it generously. Still, we at…

Taylor Swift fake porn. Realistic yet fictionalized images of Gaza. The list of bewildering deepfakes continues, and as deepfake creation tools become easier and cheaper to use, the waves of fakes are hitting faster and harder. According to a recent Pew Center poll, nearly two-thirds (66%) of Americans say they at least sometimes encounter altered videos or images that are meant to mislead, and 15% answered that they encounter it frequently. In a separate Axios/Syracuse University survey of AI experts, 62% said misinformation is the biggest factor in maintaining news credibility and authenticity in the age of AI-generated content. I…

406 Ventures, a Boston-based venture firm that invests in enterprise-focused startups in healthcare, data and AI, and cybersecurity, has closed its fifth fund with $265 million in capital commitments. The company is partnering with Liam Donahue, founder of Boston venture firm Arcadia Partners, and two others, including Maria Cirino, co-founder of managed security services firm Gardent, and former Razorfish CFO Larry Begley. Founded by partners. The new fund is supported by a group of new and existing limited partners including university endowments, foundations, pension plans and strategic investors. Including the new fund, the 18-year-old firm has raised more than $1.4…

Bending Spoons, the owner of popular apps and services like Evernote and Meetup, today announced that it has raised $155 million in a new equity funding round at a post-money valuation of $2.55 billion. Durable Capital Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors including Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, NB Renaissance, NUO Capital, and StarTIP (managed by Tambuli Investment Partners). The company said it would use the new cash injection to acquire more brands. Bending Spoons has already begun an acquisition spree this year. The company acquired event startup Meetup in January. Later that month, his CEO of Bending…

The global venture capital market has endured limited exits for an extended period of time. The IPO market remains frozen, as startups continue to go private for an extended period of time, M&A activity is quietly taking place due in part to increased regulatory oversight. This means that many historic venture deals are slowly rotting away from an IRR perspective. The crypto market is no exception, but some investors in this space remain unfazed. New data from PitchBook’s Q4 2023 Crypto Report reveals that if the large startup market is suffering from an exit drought, crypto startups may be drying…

Amazon researchers have trained the largest text-to-speech model ever. This model claims to exhibit “emergent” properties that improve the ability to speak naturally even in complex sentences. A breakthrough could be just what technology needs to get out of the uncanny valley. These models are constantly growing and improving, but the researchers specifically hoped to see the kind of jump in power that was observed when language models got beyond a certain size. For unknown reasons, as LLMs grow beyond a certain point, they become more robust and versatile, capable of performing tasks for which they were not trained. This…