Hello, and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. There was absolutely no news last week because nothing happened.Just kidding. Defying all early polling, Donald Trump swept the election and will soon be sworn in for his second term in office. From a space policy perspective, things are already starting to look interesting. Thats mostly due to the prominent role SpaceX CEO Elon Musk played in the run-up to the election, and the role he could play in the next administration.Theres already been some great reporting from The New York Times on their relationship; Ill point to this story, which describes how Musk joined a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and this one, in which sources say that Musk wanted Trump to hire SpaceX employees to top government positions, including at the Department of Defense.If Musk manages to secure even a fraction of the influence that he has talked about in recent weeks like heading a Department of Government Efficiency we could see the head of the biggest space company, the biggest electric vehicle manufacturer, and one of the largest social media platforms gain as-of-yet-unheard of influence.Want to reach out with a tip? Email Aria at aria.techcrunch@gmail.com or send a message on Signal at 512-937-3988. You can also send a note to the TechCrunch crew at tips@techcrunch.com.For more secure communications,click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop instructions and links to encrypted messaging apps.Story of the week Senior reporter Rebecca Bellan and I dove into what Trumps presidency might mean for Elon Musk. Bellan covers all things transportation, so she took a close look at the prospects for Tesla, and I threw in my two cents about the implications for space policy. We tried very, very hard not to speculate too much at this point, its too easy to drift into fantasy, and there are too many unknowns but theres still plenty of info to go on.Image Credits:Adam Gray/Bloomberg / Getty ImagesWhat were looking forward to this monthSpeaking of SpaceX, the company is gearing up to launch its sixth integrated flight test of Starship on November 18. Many of the test objectives are the same as the fifth test, which saw the Super Heavy booster return to the launch site for the first time ever, but SpaceX did say it will be testing some hardware and software upgrades.Image Credits:SpaceXThis week in space historyWith Musk having the ear of the next sitting president, Mars is on everyones minds in a new way. Its entirely possible that SpaceX could indeed launch an uncrewed Starship to Mars when the next Earth-Mars transit window opens in 2026. But this week, were looking back at a very small spacecraft that made history as the first human-made object to orbit the red planet: Mariner 9, which entered Mars orbit on November 13, 1971.When the probe arrived, a massive dust storm was obscuring most of the planets features. That calmed down, and Mariner 9 was able to take a number of incredible images over its 10 months orbiting the planet. Much of what it saw completely shocked scientists.olympus mons, the largest shield volcano on mars and earth.Image Credits:NASA

In BriefPosted:3:53 PM PST November 12, 2024Image Credits:Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty ImagesApple reportedly releasing a wall-mounted smart home tablet in 2025 and yes, it does AIApple is gearing up to announce a new smart home hub, according to Bloombergs Mark Gurman. As early as March 2025, the iPhone maker could release a tablet that mounts to your wall, control smart home appliances, does video calls, and of course does Apple Intelligence.The device reportedly has a 6-inch touchscreen, but its expected that, like a HomePod, most will use voice to control it, either through Siri, Apple Intelligence, or an upcoming system called App Intents that lets AI control applications. It supposedly runs on a new OS, with sensors to detect how close a person is, but will have traditional Apple apps like Safari, Apple Music, Notes, and Calendar.Apples command center for the home seems intended as a rival to Amazons Echo Hub and Googles Nest Hub, so expect it to be priced similarly (i.e. $100 to $250). However, Apple is also working on an iPad on a robotic arm that follows you around the room, which could cost closer to $1000.Topics

While Indias urban population is shifting from mom-and-pop stores to quick commerce platforms, its rural side home to more than 800 million people still heavily relies on offline businesses for daily consumption. Wheelocity aims to transform that untapped market to let people living beyond the top 200 cities of the country easily shop online.The Chennai-headquartered startup, founded in September 2021, has pivoted from the earlier B2B supply chain business for quick commerce platforms into building a platform to solve e-commerce access for people living in semi-urban. and rural areas, commonly referred to as Bharat.For a long time, e-commerce giants Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart have tried to tap rural India to get deeper into the worlds second-biggest internet market after China. The region has also attracted startups including Meesho and Rozana. However, Wheelocity founder and CEO Selvam VMS told TechCrunch that none of them could crack that space due to the access problem.Our approach to solving this problem is extremely unique, he said in an interview. We are focused on building a 100x better alternative for our consumers.Wheelocity has begun the shift by providing freshly produced goods including vegetables and fruits and groceries through its app. However, unlike traditional e-commerce platforms that sell products online, the startup has taken a phygital approach. This includes electric three-wheelers to let the startup take its products into villages physically daily to help gain the trust of consumers. These vehicles let consumers place orders using Wheelocitys app and get deliveries on their doorstep.Once they get used to it, consumers will start using the Wheelocity app at home, VMS predicted.The executive added that, unlike Wheelocity, which offers doorstep deliveries daily, other e-commerce platforms use their take as long as a week to get products delivered in the same region. This makes it a challenge to deliver fresh consumable items and groceries.Wheelocity uses its existing supply chain, built for the earlier B2B business, to offer customers freshly produced goods and groceries faster. After procuring them from third parties including farmers, the products reach consumers with Wheelocitys branding.VMS sees the shift, which silently started in October 2023, as a $1 trillion-plus opportunity. He didnt disclose the business-related figures but said the startup had a very, very good retention.The startup currently offers its e-commerce platform in 3,500 villages in central Tamil Nadu and owns 1,000 electric vehicles to allow physical order-placing and deliveries. It has already established an operations office in Tamil Nadus tier-II city of Trichy to understand consumers buying behavior better and get their feedback. Next, it plans to scale the business to 20,000 towns and villages and expand it to all five southern states of India within the next 12 months, taking its platform to 10 million consumers.Lightspeed, Wheelocitys existing investor, has backed the latest move by leading its Series A2 round of $15 million. In July 2022, the VC fund had led the startups $12 million Series A round.Alteria Capital, Anicut Capital, and VMS also participated in Wheelocitys fresh round. Further, the round includes an undisclosed amount of debt, primarily to fuel the financing of its electric fleet.Lightspeed partner Rahul Taneja told TechCrunch that the VC fund decided to reinvest into Wheelocity as the market size was significantly large and untapped and the startup created a unique business model, which allows profitable coverage of the areas which were historically not possible.The founders quality and passion for building a profit-making business before pivoting also helped convince Lightspeed to close the deal, Taneja said.Moving focus to smaller towns and villages in India has been an emerging trend in the VC market, as consumers in those areas often have disposable income and intent to buy. Earlier this year, Accel also started looking at the region to hunt for future unicorns.

Intudo, the Indonesia-only venture capital firm, said it has raised $125 million across two investment funds $75 million for Intudo Ventures IV, and $50 million for another fund that will invest in downstream natural resources and renewable energy.Intudo said Fund IV will invest in Indonesian startups that take advantage of the countrys location, digital advancements, and expanding middle-class population essentially those playing to the countrys strengths in consumer products, aquaculture and horticulture, as well as commercial distribution, regulatory, and deep tech startups. The other fund will be its first attempt to leverage Indonesias strong position in the global nickel and cobalt market to invest in natural resources and renewable energy.Identifying areas where Indonesia is competitive is essential for the country on a global scale, founding partner of Intudo, Eddy Chan, told TechCrunch.In Taiwan, its semiconductors going to the world. In Japan, electronics used to be prevalent. In Israel, its cybersecurity. SaaS in India. South Korea has K-pop. In Indonesia, we need to find more gold in aquaculture shrimp [farming], Chan said.Intudo typically writes checks between $1 million and $10 million, and is targeting a portfolio of 14-18 Indonesian companies, aiming to buy large stakes in each via Intudo Ventures IV, Chan said. He explained that in a typical Series A round, the firm will invest $3 million to $5 million for stakes of 20% to 30%.I think winning in Southeast Asia [requires] a small fund size and significant ownership In contrast, the market is currently dominated by many peers with $200 million or $300 million funds, but with ownership targets of only 10% to 15%, he said.Image credits: Induto VenturesMany of the funds in the market are Indonesia-focused, but we make the distinction that were Indonesia only. 100% of our funds investment is in Indonesia, said Patrick Yip, a founding partner at Intudo. The firm is finalizing a number of deals that it will disclose in the coming months, Yip added.Intudo said it caps each limited partners investment at 10% of the total fund size to ensure equitable treatment for all LPs and maintain its independent investment thesis.The new fund comes three years after the firm closed its third fund at $115 million. The firm seems to have broadened its LP base since then, receiving investments from institutions and family offices from the United States, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, including Netherlands-based Orient Growth Ventures and Singapore-based Black Kite Capital. More than 20 global funds and managing partners, 15 billionaires listed in Forbes and their related businesses, and over 30 influential families in Indonesia also invested, the firm said.Eighty percent of our deals are followed by our global LP base from Korea, Silicon Valley, Europe, the Middle East, Chan said.Before founding Intudo in 2017, Yip worked for a private equity firm, while Eddy Chan was a lawyer and ran his own startup. The firm has a team of 12 and more than $350 million in assets under management.Out of the new natural resources fund, Intudo has invested in CarbonEthics, an Indonesia-based developer of tech-enabled natural climate solutions.

Running payroll is hard in any country, but perhaps especially so in Brazil thanks to consistently changing laws and extremely influential unions that make it significantly harder to get it right. Fernando Gadotti struggled with this as the co-founder and CEO of DogHero, LatAms version of Rover. When Gadotti left the company in 2022, after selling it in 2020, he decided this is where he wanted to focus next.Every time the payroll came around, theres just a struggle, like its dreadful, many hours, just like double-checking data back and forth, and we couldnt really get any insight that we needed, Gadotti told TechCrunch. [We were] pretty much working in the dark, and as we kept growing, it hit me that these problems really werent just inconvenient; theyre actually slowing the company down. Were wasting a lot of time in busy work.Just a few months after leaving DogHero, Gadotti started working on So Paulo-based Tako, an employee life cycle platform that automates tasks like onboarding and payroll to save companies time and bring all their employee information into one place. Tako also provides employees with a dashboard to view information and access an interactive paystub meant to increase transparency.Gadotti said that while there are U.S. legacy payroll companies operating in Brazil, like ADP, it makes sense to have a local solution because Brazils payment system is quite unique. He said laws around payroll change frequently. There are also 10,000 unions companies often have employees in more than one, he said that update their rules a few times a year, too, and sometimes have more power than the actual laws.Tako uses an LLM (large language model) to keep up with these constant changes. The LLM ingests the labor law and union law data and digests it so Takos developers can keep the code base up-to-date. He said they want to keep humans in the loop to ensure accuracy, but having the LLM get a head start saves a lot of time.Tako launched its product in 2023. Gadotti said that the company processed tens of millions of dollars in payroll as its been operating in stealth but declined to share more details on its customers. Gadotti said the company is currently targeting mid-market white-collar companies with between 100 and 500 employees in the professional and financial service categories.The strategy we took is that we are not trying to boil the ocean, Gadotti said. We want to start in a segment we know before venturing into industrials or more complex areas. We are starting in more simpler segments; as the company evolves, we are going to more complex segments in the future.Tako is emerging from stealth with a sizable $13.2 million seed round co-led by Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The round also included ONEVC and the founders of Ramp. Gadotti said the company plans to put the majority of capital toward research and development in addition to doubling or tripling headcount on its R&D team.There are a lot of potential areas that Tako could expand into in the future, like the vast world of employee benefits. Gadotti said the company does plan to expand as it grows into building more features like instant payments.In addition to competing with legacy companies like ADP, there are multiple other HR tech startups in the country like Gupy and Caju, which are both more focused on other areas within HR and employee management. But if Tako expands into these areas, which it likely will, these companies could also become strong competitors.The name Tako is Japanese for octopus, which Gadotti said is how he thinks about the business. Takos platform is meant to be the brain of employee data with its tentacles reaching out into different areas of employee management.We want to focus on the whole employee life cycle, Gadotti said. We are constantly listening to our customers pain points and where they want us to help them on.

Swiggys upcoming IPO on Wednesday will finally give many analysts a public comparable for what has been long considered to be the Indian internet stock: Zomato. It will also test the nations appetite for IPOs that can scale past the $1 billion mark.For its IPO, Swiggy has already secured $1.4 billion from institutional investors including Norways sovereign wealth fund, BlackRock and eight of the top 10 Indian mutual funds. Still, it will enter a public market where large tech companies stocks have struggled historically three years since its $2.5 billion offering, Paytm is still trading 47% below its IPO price.More than a dozen Indian tech startups have gone public in the last four years, but the market has shown scant interest in large IPOs. Beauty and wellness e-commerce company Nykaa is still trading 53% below its debut price, and Star Health and Alliance Insurance Company remains 48% below its IPO price three years on.Startups that raised less than $500 million in India have performed incredibly well, in comparison.India has emerged as a hotbed for tech IPOs this year even as the U.S. market remains muted. All eyes are on Swiggys IPO at the moment, particularly as many growth-stage startups and their investors are eyeing a similarly large listing over the next 24 months.Furthermore, for many Indian startups that were based in the U.S. and Singapore, moving their official HQs back to India would let them better comply with local regulations to do such an IPO. Its also an opportunity to reap the benefits of a market whose benchmark index had risen more than 10% in the past year. Up to three dozen startups could be shifting their domiciles back to India in the coming years, according to investors.A slide from venture firm WEHs Presentation Last Week showing the markets preference for smaller IPOs. Image Credits: TechCrunchThe prospects for Swiggys IPO looks good especially given that rival Zomatos stock has surged over 100% since its $1.3 billion listing in 2021, reaching a market cap high of $29 billion this year. In comparison, Swiggy is seeking a valuation of $11.3 billion.It helps that the Indian food delivery market has long been a duopoly between Zomato and Swiggy. And what makes the offer even more attractive to investors is that Swiggy is among the dozen firms attempting to disrupt the $1.1 billion Indian retail market that is still dominated by millions of mom-and-pop stores.Swiggys Instamart is among the top three quick-commerce businesses in the country, which promise deliveries of groceries, wellness and beauty products and much more within 10 minutes. Whether these companies will be able to revolutionize the broader retail market in India remains to be seen, but they have already captured 56% of the online grocery delivery market from e-commerce firms, according to JPMorgan.Quick-commerce firms such as Instamart, Zomato-owned BlinkIt, Zepto, BigBasket, and Minutes are changing consumer behavior in urban Indian cities, home to about 80 million people. Together, they are on track to record sales of more than $6 billion this year, according to TechCrunch estimates.I dont think Swiggy will just be an e-commerce company in the future, but I do think that given the growth rate of Instamart, and the total addressable market its going after, the percentage of e-commerce in Swiggy is going to have a dramatic change, said Swiggy co-founder and chief executive Sriharsha Majety (pictured above at the top) in an interview with TechCrunch.Underpinning this business model is a unique supply chain system that involves strategically setting up hundreds of discrete warehouses, or dark stores, within kilometers of residential and business areas. This allows the firms to make deliveries within minutes of an order.This approach differs from that of e-commerce players like Amazon and Flipkart, which have fewer but much larger warehouses in areas where rent is cheaper and farther from residential areas.Swiggy operates over 600 such facilities, while Zomatos Blinkit ended the September quarter with 791 stores.Swiggy, which counts Prosus, SoftBank, Accel and Elevation among its backers, has scaled Instamart to 30 Indian cities. But many investors and analysts have expressed doubts about the viability of extending the quick-commerce model to smaller Indian cities and towns. Do we have an operating model for city number 500? Honestly, I dont know, said Majety. Asked if the model works on city number 75, Majety said: I think that probably exists. We will see city 75 having quick commerce.Swiggys IPO will also show how willing investors are to bet on business models that prioritize growth over profits amid challenging global conditions.For Dutch investor Prosus, Swiggys listing could deliver a three-fold return. It will also be the venture firms biggest hit from India, where its $1 billion-plus gains from Byjus have all but evaporated. Accel is expected to see a more than 35-fold return, one of its largest in the past five years.

A founder who was an early mover in the race to build autonomous vehicles has raised $15 million for his next act: a startup that claims its AI can write enterprise software on its own.Cogna as the U.K.-based startup is called is led by Ben Peters, the technical co-founder of FiveAI (the self-driving startup that was acquired by Bosch in 2022). Notion Capital is leading the Series A, with Hoxton Ventures and Chalfen Ventures also participating. It comes on the heels of Cogna, founded in May 2023, raising a seed round of $4.75 million earlier this year from a number of investors, including Peters FiveAI co-founder Stan Boland and Herman Hauser, the founder of Acorn Software.The focus of Cogna is the world of enterprise resource planning. ERP is a dry but very necessary software component in the running of organizations, covering everything from procurement and supply chain and inventory management through to risk assessments, finance and human resources. Typically large enterprises can pay up to billions of dollars in contracts with systems integrators and consultancies to handle their ERP, either by customizing off-the-shelf software for clients, or writing custom applications from the ground up, to fit an organizations particular needs. In typical AI startup fashion, Peters believes that this work is best done, and can be compressed into, an AI platform built for the purpose. While some challenges have been significantly trickier for AI to address than others, there have been some early signs of ERP potentially being one area where it might stick, and for Cogna to potentially become one of the players delivering on that pitch. A year since launch, Cogna has signed up customers that include the U.K. gas distributor Cadent Gas and infrastructure and utilities service provider Network Plus.To be clear, none of our customers think of it as ERP software, Peters said in an interview. For them, theyve got a problem which isnt solved by using SAP or [another] legacy system. We deliver a custom, precision-built piece of software for that. They experience [it] ike a classic piece of SaaS, but it happens to have been built specifically for them, specifically for their workflow. And its written by our AI.Cogna balances a mix of generative AI with other kinds of tooling to actually put together its custom software. Non-technical teams can describe their pain points in natural language, and the Cogna does the rest, the company claims. Were a team of experts in domain-specific languages, compilers, AI and reliable and scaleable enterprise SaaS, Peters said. These days, its not uncommon to come across AI startups leveraging multiple large language models simultaneously depending on a particular task at hand its the customization that makes a startup unique and that is the case here, too. Peters said that the language models used for people to interact with its platform come from a variety of providers that include OpenAI and Anthropic. These are a key part of our Natural Language Compiler, Peters told TechCrunch over a call.On top of that, Cogna is building an engine so that the software can truly write itself, said Hussein Kanji, the co-founder of Hoxton Ventures.In doing so, Cogna is an example of how generative AI which saw a viral explosion with the launch of consumer-accessible services like ChatGPT is indeed being folded into enterprise usage and more complex applications. That is important because a number of foundational AI companies, like OpenAI, have made it clear that they, too, have ambitions to tap into the enterprise market, a highly lucrative area that will help them generate the vast revenues that investors expect. Kanji likens what Cogna is doing to Cursor, the code building tool from OpenAI-backed Anysphere. We broke the news last week that Anysphere is in the middle a massive, unsolicited bidding war among investors that want to back it, valuing Anysphere as high as $2.5 billion on the back of massive business growth, so the area is clearly very hot. Thats kind of what Cogna is also doing, he said.Based on his experience at self-driving tech company FiveAI, Peters is adept at spotting openings in the market early, but he also has experience in how to shift gears, so to speak, when plans dont go as you expect them to. We had cars driving around London in 2018, he recalled. [But] we then pivoted to providing the development environment to develop a stack for other companies that were building their own electronic design automation stack. We were running a million simulations a day by the time we sold the company.Five.ai, which had raised around $78 million in funding was valued at $216 million in its last round before it was acquired by Bosch for an undisclosed sum.Cogna now plans to go up against classic IT consultancies such as Wipro and CapGemini.The investment into Cogna is the first from Bryan Gartner, formerly of Khosla Ventures, who joined Hoxton as its newest partner last year.

India, the worlds most populous country and the second-largest internet market after China, is becoming increasingly digitally active. However, this rapid digitization comes with a growing risk of online fraud.Cyber fraud is mounting in India to the point where the Indian government estimates it could amount to 0.7% of the countrys GDP over $14 billion within the next year. Even the government-backed systems, including Aadhaar, have been targeted by bad actors in some cases.New Delhi keeps introducing new regulatory requirements to limit fraudulent digital transactions. Nonetheless, these updates often place a burden on businesses to regularly update their tech. Efforts to eradicate digital fraud sometimes also result in disruptions. For instance, the recent clampdown on unauthorized use of the permanent account number disrupted transactions for some fintech platforms.Equal, a Hyderabad-based startup, aims to address all this with its suite of identity verification and financial data-sharing products.The two-year-old startup helps businesses streamline know-your-customer (KYC) requirements, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance by integrating more than 50 identity databases and thousands of API providers. The startup also recently acquired an undisclosed stake in account aggregator OneMoney to combine its identity verification services with the latters consent-based financial data sharing.Data sharing is still a major problem in this country if its not done digitally with consent, Keshav Reddy, the son of GVK Groups vice chairman GV Sanjay Reddy, told TechCrunch.Reddy founded Equal with former Swiggy engineering director Rajeev Ranjan after moving back to India from the U.S.For over the last two years, Reddy bootstrapped Equal, and the startup has added more than 350 customers, including State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Reliance Jio, Airtel, Uber, and Zoom.The startup has now raised a Series A round of $10 million at a post-money valuation of $80 million to scale its operations, expand the product suite, and forge strategic partnerships. The round was led by Prosus Ventures, along with Tomales Bay Capital and Reddy himself, and saw participation from other investors, including Blume Ventures, DST Global, Gruhas VC, and Quona VC.Equal is not alone in the space, as the market already has players such as Perfios (backed by Warburg Pincus and Teachers Venture Growth), IDfy (backed by TransUnion), and Bureau (backed by GMO VenturePartners). However, Reddy told TechCrunch that unlike the competition, Equal plays the role of an aggregator and partners even with some of its competitors.Ravi Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Upstox, who has also invested in Equals maiden round and is one of the early customers for its identity verification and account aggregator, told TechCrunch that its the cost and uptime that gives the trading platform a reason not to look for building a similar tech in-house.Upstox has been using Equal for about a year and is processing around 350,000 transactions a month. Before that, Kumar said, the platform was relying on existing ID-verification providers.Equal has been able to aggregate across a slew of different APIs and ensures very high uptime between all those different connections, he said.

Social network X has so far limited its AI chatbot Grok (built by Elon Musks other company xAI) to its premium, paying users. However, the platform is seemingly preparing to open up the chatbot to free users.Over the weekend, several app researchers and users posted about a free version of Grok being made available to people in certain regions.TechCrunch was able to confirm that X is at least testing access to Grok for free users in New Zealand. Image Credits: Screenshot by TechcrunchAccording to a researcher who goes by Swak on X, there are limits on the usage for now: 10 queries per two hours with the Grok-2 model, 20 queries per two hours with the Grok-2 mini model, and three image analysis questions per day.To use Grok for free, your account should be at least seven days old and have a phone number linked to it.xAI launched Grok-2 in August with image generation capacities, backed by Black Forest Labs FLUX.1 model. Late last month, the company also gave the model the ability to understand images.All these features were available only to Premium and Premium+ users until now. By opening up Grok to free users, xAI is possibly looking for a more significant userbase and faster feedback cycle for its products, so that it can better compete with other models on the market like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that xAI was in talks to raise several billion dollars at a valuation of $40 billion.

In BriefPosted:11:30 AM PST November 10, 2024Image Credits:I-Hwa Cheng / Bloomberg / Getty ImagesTSMC reportedly halts advanced chip shipments to Chinese companiesAfter a chip manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company was found inside a Huawei processor, the US Department of Commerce has ordered the company to halt shipments of advanced chips to Chinese customers, according to a report in Reuters.Huawei faces significant trade restrictions from the US, so the pause on shipments is supposed to allow the government to determine whether other companies are diverting chips to Huawei.TSMC reportedly notified affected customers that it will be halting shipments starting Monday. The advanced chips being targeted are often used for artificial intelligence applications an area where the US has already been restricting chip exports from companies like Nvidia.In a statement provided to Reuters and other publications, TSMC said it is committed to complying with all applicable rules and regulations, including applicable export controls.Topics

Folks in America: Your senators only have a few weeks left to pass the PRESS Act, a federal shield bill that the House passed with unanimous, bipartisan support in January but has been waiting in the Senate for a final vote ever since.The PRESS Act, if passed into law, would enshrine nationwide protections for journalists across the United States from forcibly having to identify or give up their confidential sources (except in emergency cases, like to prevent an act of terrorism). The bill also grants other protections, such as limiting what records the government can secretly take from journalists or their email or phone provider that could identify their sources again, with a narrow set of exceptions for emergency threats.Lawmakers have been pushing to pass federal protections for journalists in the PRESS Act for the past year, citing recent U.S. government abuses, including the secret seizure of phone records from journalists who worked for CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post at the request of the Justice Department under the Trump administration. As noted last week by The Verge, protections for journalists and their sources will become increasingly relevant in a second Trump term.Forcing journalists to turn over a sources identity can have a real chilling effect on newsgathering. Peoplewill feel discouraged from talking to journalists, and that harms the publics ability to be informed about things that affect them. We also increasingly consume our news from independent journalists and smaller outlets, which might not have the legal resources to fight a government subpoena for their records. The PRESS Act would provide the same blanket protections to journalists across the United States, and also covers independent journalists and outlets that publish information in the public interest.While the bill doesnt affect the tech industry directly, as a news outlet, were in favor of protecting and building upon press freedoms. Some of TechCrunchs most read and impactful reporting has come from readers like you, who have reached out and tipped us off to corporate wrongdoing, unearthing mismanagement in the startup world, detailing human rights abuses, and revealing major breaches and data spills, cyberattacks and criminality that otherwise might have gone unreported. TechCrunch has a history of standing up to legal demands to protect our sources. We can only do this with the protections of press freedoms.At this point, the PRESS Act already has bipartisan support in the Senate, with Sens. Ron Wyden, Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, and Dick Durbin as co-sponsors. The bill is just waiting for a final vote on the Senate floor, with weeks to go before the bill expires at the end of the congressional session. The ACLU has a web form if you want to send a note to your senators, or you can call or email them directly to ask them to vote for the PRESS Act.

In BriefPosted:3:00 PM PST November 10, 2024Image Credits:TechCrunchElon Musks X is moving its legal disputes to Northern TexasLawsuits against X (formerly Twitter) will soon be heard in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas.The shift was first announced last month as part of a broader set of changes to Xs terms of service and privacy policy. Now, with the changes set to take effect on November 15, The Washington Post spoke to a number of legal and tech experts about what the move might mean.X owner Elon Musk also recently moved the social media companys headquarters from San Francisco to Bastrop, Texas near Austin but Bastrop lies in Texas Western District.The Northern District, meanwhile, has become a destination for conservative activists seeking to challenge Democratic policies, with 10 of its 11 active judges appointed by Republican presidents.While its normal for companies to specify in their terms of service where lawsuits against them may be filed, Cornell law professor G.S. Hans described choosing the Northern District of Texas as weird compared to the Northern District of California, which most tech companies choose. Hans said the Texas district just doesnt have as much of a volume or history with tech lawsuits.Topics

A dearth of funding for vital open source technologies is leading to a swath of support from startups, unicorns, corporations, and even venture capital firms.Last year, Bloomberg launched its FOSS (free and open source software) fund, committing up to $90,000 per year to various projects. And in October, Indian financial services company Zerodha launched a similar initiative dubbed FLOSS/fund, pledging $1 million annually to open source projects. The reason? A significant portion of our success and growth is owed to FOSS, Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh said at the time.It goes without saying that this holds true for nearly every technology company founded in the last decade, whether it is publicly acknowledged or not, Nadh added. While there is no shortage of companies building businesses and raising money off the back of open source software, not every community-driven project lends itself to becoming a commercial entity. Some open source tools are more akin to Lego blocks: key components of a software stack, for sure, but difficult to monetize directly particularly in the early days.And this is why weve seen a steady rise in funding initiatives come to the fore. This includes reactive programs, such as 2022s Big Tech-driven $30 million pledge to bolster open source security in the wake of the Log4Shellsecurity flaw that wreakedhavocon the software supply chain. But were also seeing more proactive efforts, driven from all corners of industry. Silicon Valley VC Sequoia Capital launched an open source fellowship in 2023 to support project maintainers with equity-free capital to cover living expenses for up to 12 months. Its inaugural fellow was Colombian software developer Sebastin Ramrez Montao, creator ofFastAPI, an open source web framework for building APIs.In February, Sequoia revealed it would start accepting applications from any developer leading an open source project, with plans to provide funding for up to three qualifying projects annually. Nine months on, and the first two fellows from Sequoias expanded program have now been revealed: Chatbot Arena, a popular open source AI model benchmarking tool used by many of the industrys biggest names, including OpenAI, Meta, and Google; and vLLM, an open source library focused on memory management to power faster and cheaper LLM serving.FastAPI creator Sebastin Ramrez flanked by Sequoia partners Lauren Reeder and Bogomil Balkansky. Image Credits:Sequoia Capital (opens in a new window)Jolly good fellowsChatbot Arena, which spun out of a broader research organization called LMSYS, is the handiwork of doctorate students Wei-Lin Chiang and Anastasios Angelopoulos from Berkeleys Sky Computing Lab. With north of 1 million monthly users, Chatbot Arena is all about helping LLM developers validate claims around their models performance, while anyone can test these models and vote for their preferences. Companies such as OpenAI often share versions of their models with the Chatbot Arena team ahead of the models release to help fine-tune things before their formal launch.While Chatbot Arena receives financing as part of the creators doctorate research work at the Sky Computing Lab, the Sequoia fellowship award of $100,000 will help fund further technical development, including building a better interface.The Sequoia grant supports the development of Chatbot Arenas website, covering full-stack development and server maintenance costs, Chiang told TechCrunch. This is a gift to support the open source project, with no future obligations.Sequoia isnt the only VC firm to lend equity-free support to Chatbot Arena; Andreessen Horowitz launched an open source AI grant program last August, and Chatbot Arenas umbrella outfit LMSYS was among the second cohort of recipients.Chiang said that there are no plans to evolve the project into a commercial entity, underscoring the need for alternative sources of financing now, and perhaps long into the future.As part of our long-term vision, we may establish a nonprofit organization to host the leaderboard, keeping our focus on broad accessibility and community impact, Chiang said.In tandem, Berkeleys Sky Computing Lab also birthed vLLM in 2022, spearheaded by researchers Zhuohan Li, Woosuk Kwon, and Simon Mo, who started the project after developing a system to distribute complex processes across multiple GPUs more efficiently. vLLM leans on a new attention algorithm dubbed PagedAttention, which helps reduce memory waste and is already being used by developers at companies such as AWS, Cloudflare, and Nvidia.vLLM creators Woosuk Kwon, Zhuohan Li, and Simon Mo.Image Credits:vLLMSimilar to Chatbot Arena, vLLM serves as the focal point of its creators PhD research work, and future commercialization is not currently on the agenda. At the moment, we do not have a plan to transition it into a stand-alone company we are solely focused on making the open source project useful and widely adopted, Mo said.In addition to Sequoias $100,000 contribution for the year, other public sponsors include Andreessen Horowitz, which donated as part of its inaugural open source AI grant program last year, while the likes of AWS, Nvidia, and others have collectively helped vLLM cover its compute resources which are not insignificant.For vLLM, we intend to use the fund to cover our continuous integration testing and benchmark suite, Mo said. These suites, running on GPUs, are expensive to maintain but critical to ensure the performance and correctness of vLLM for production usage.One clear message emerges from all this: AI and data infrastructure might be driving demand for open source technologies, but this demand creates significant costs for the project maintainers. Ion Stoica, professor of the computer science division at Berkeley and a Sky Computing Lab adviser, says that the funding pressure on open source project maintainers is at least an order of magnitude higher with the advent of LLMs.You have multiple kinds of GPUs, you have all of these other accelerators, and theres also a difference in scale, he said. Ten years ago, most of the funding for a new startup would go to adding people; today, its going to infrastructure.AlignmentDigging a little deeper, and its clear that Sequoias involvement isnt quite as altruistic as it might seem, owing to the fact that its two new fellows intersect with startups in its existing investment portfolio. By way of example, vLLM is used by Replicate, which Sequoia (and Andreessen Horowitz) backed across its Series A and Series B rounds.Elsewhere, Sequoia last year co-led a $5 million seed round into an AI startup called Factory, with the startups founder and CTO Eno Reyes confirming that his company uses Chatbot Arena to keep close track of the top LLM options.Theyre a key input to make sure we have the best product for our users, Reyes said. Similarly, Sequoias first fellowship award last year, FastAPI, leans heavily on Pydantic, the popular data validation library created by the eponymous startup in Sequoias portfolio.However, Sequoia Capital partner Lauren Reeder told TechCrunch that this cross-pollination between fellows and portfolio isnt a strict condition of its funding decisions, merely a nice bonus when things do align. And in truth, when an open source project is genuinely popular, theres every chance that it will be picked up by one of Sequoias portfolio companies, which is a good way for the VC firm to hear about worthwhile projects.In terms of how the funding is dispersed, Reeder says its open to whatever suits the team in question. For FastAPI, this involved making a direct payment to Montao himself, which was simpler given that it was just the one individual. But where teams are involved, it makes sense to use a third-party fundraising platform such as Open Collective, which also comes with added transparency.For the two most recent fellows, we were supporting small groups rather than a single individual and Open Collective made it easier to manage the funds, Reeder said. Similarly, weve done both up-front payments as multi-install payments, depending on the needs of the project. Open Collective is more transparent, but the fees are not insignificant.Taking a pledgeThere have been numerous other efforts to formalize open source project financing in the past five years alone, including dedicated FOSS funds from Indeed and Salesforce, a tacit acknowledgment that critical components of the tech stack are crying out for support.One of the biggest efforts of late, however, hails from developer tooling unicorn Sentry, which itself has been donating to open source projects for many years. In 2021, Sentry adopted a more systematic program with firmer and more transparent commitments, and last month the company officially launched the Open Source Pledge to encourage other companies to get involved either by donating directly through platforms such as GitHub Sponsors or Thanks.dev, or indirectly via foundations.Weve run our program successfully for three years, but its not enough by itself to solve the open source sustainability crisis. So this year David [Sentry co-founder David Cramer] asked me to get other companies on board to make a bigger impact, Sentrys head of open source, Chad Whitacre, told TechCrunch.The rules of engagement are thus: Commitments should amount to at least $2,000 per year for each developer the member company has on staff, which for Sentry itself translated to around $500,000 last year $3,704 for each of its 135 developer headcount. Beneficiaries through the years have included Django, Python, Rust, and Apache. This year, Sentry has upped its own budget to $750,000, and with some two dozen additional members signed up to the Pledge at the time of writing, Whitacre is hopeful that open source software developers will see a little more compensation in the future.The primary intent with the Pledge is no-strings-attached payments to open source maintainers, Whitacre said. We vet companies when they join to ensure theyre complying with our guidelines, but theres a fair amount of latitude within those guidelines.Aside from corporate members contributing cash, the Pledge has also attracted ecosystem partners to endorse the pledge, which includes foundations, individuals, and even storied VC firm Accel, which itself has invested in numerous open source startups through the years (including Sentry, both before and after it transitioned away from an open source license in 2019).Accel partner Dan Levine said that if something is truly critical, then it should, in theory, be able to sustain itself as a business. The reality, though, is that if enough companies and developers are deriving value from a given open source project, there shouldnt be any issues in getting financial support at least in the early days, before the maintainers can forge a path to commercialization.In the case of open source software, while it can be used for free, users who find it essential are inherently motivated to ensure its sustainability, Levine told TechCrunch. The open source community, particularly on the demand side, needs to reassess its strategies and make more informed decisions to support critical projects. The Pledge is an excellent effort to galvanize the demand side to do whats in their own best interests.

In BriefPosted:10:02 AM PST November 9, 2024Standing desks dont do squat, per new studyOver the years, numerous startups have gained traction by designing, making and selling standing desks as part of a workspace innovation trend to promote better health, and a lot of executives swear by them, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, who once called sitting the new cancer.But per the Washington Post, a new study of more than 83,000 adults found that standing for more than two hours a day not only doesnt protect against cardiovascular risks, but it heightens an individuals risk of circulatory problems, including varicose veins, abnormally low blood pressure, and blood clots. Standing also burns just nine extra calories per hour.Sitting too much is still problematic, the researchers note physical inactivity is definitely bad news. The answer instead is moving every 30 minutes or so, suggests the University of Sydney professor, Emmanuel Stamatakis, who oversaw the study. [M]uscular contraction is a necessary condition for any activity to maintain or improve health, he tells the Post.TopicsTC

In BriefPosted:10:41 AM PST November 9, 2024Image Credits:Brian HeateriPhones might be harder for police to unlock, thanks to new reboot featureNew code introduced in the latest version of Apples mobile operating system could make it more difficult for both police and thieves to unlock iPhones.404 Media reported Thursday that law enforcement officials were warning each other that phones being stored for forensic examination seemed to be rebooting themselves something that security experts confirmed in a follow-up story.After the reboot, its harder for those phonesto be unlocked by password-cracking tools.Apple did not immediately respond to TechCrunchs request for comment.This reboot appears to take place after iPhones with iOS 18.1 have not been unlocked for a set period of time. According to Chris Wade, founder of mobile analysis company Corellium, iPhones seem to reboot after their fourth day of in a locked state. Matthew Green, a cryptographer and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, described this as a huge improvement in terms of security that probably doesnt inconvenience anyone though the police might disagree.Topics

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, were unpacking the latest layoffs at Mozilla, Perplexity offering to cross a picket line, and Apple warning investors that it might never top the iPhone. Lets get into it.The Mozilla Foundation laid off 30% of its employees in the second round of layoffs for the Firefox browser maker this year. Executive director Nabiha Syed confirmed that two of the foundations major divisions advocacy and global programs are no longer a part of our structure. Mozillas communications chief, Brandon Borrman, told TechCrunch that advocacy is still a central tenet of the companys work but did not provide specifics.Anduril is considering building its first major manufacturing plant, a 5-million-square-foot facility known as Arsenal-1, in Arizona, Ohio, or Texas following its $1.5 billion round, according to someone familiar with the matter. When TechCrunch asked an Anduril spokesperson if the defense tech company was now choosing between these three locations for its factory, she responded, That is incorrect, but she would not specify what part exactly was incorrect.Video game giant Activision fixed a bug in its anti-cheat system that it said affected a small number of legitimate player accounts that were getting banned because of it. But according to the hacker who found the bug and was exploiting it, they were able to ban thousands upon thousands of Call of Duty players, who they framed as cheaters. The hacker spoke to TechCrunch about the exploit and told their side of the story.This is TechCrunchs Week in Review, where we recap the weeks biggest news. Want this delivered as a newsletter to your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.NewsImage Credits:Bryce Durbin / TechCrunchPerplexity crosses the picket line: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas offered to provide the AI companys services to mitigate the effect of a strike by New York Times tech workers, resulting in many X users chastising Srinivas for acting as a scab. Read moreNvidia becomes No. 1: Nvidia exceeded Apples market capitalization to become the worlds largest company. At the close of the market earlier this week, Nvidia was valued at $3.43 trillion, topping Apples $3.38 trillion. Read moreWill Apple ever top the iPhone? Apple is warning investors that its new and future products might never be as profitable as the iPhone. The disclosure comes as the company pursues AI technologies and mixed-reality headsets like the Apple Vision Pro. Read moreBowery Farming shuts down: The agtech unicorn known for building vertical farms that could produce crops is shutting down. The company held multiple rounds of layoffs in 2023 and was most recently valued at $2 billion in 2021. Read moreOur review of ChatGPT Search: OpenAI released its highly anticipated search product, ChatGPT Search, last week. But is it really the Google killer it was hyped up to be? TechCrunchs Maxwell Zeff doesnt think it is yet. Read moreInvesting in AI-powered parenting: Could AI help you become a better parent? Andreessen Horowitz partner Justine Moore introduced a new investment thesis for the firm on X, endorsing a new wave of parenting co-pilots built with LLMs and agents. Read moreBP axes 18 hydrogen projects: Tucked inside a 32-page earnings report, oil and gas giant BP revealed it was killing 18 early-stage hydrogen projects, a move that could have a chilling effect on the nascent hydrogen industry. Read moreInfinite Minecraft: AI company Decart has released what its claiming is the first playable open-world AI model. Called Oasis, the model powers a Minecraft-like game that generates frames in real time, simulating physics, rules, and graphics on the fly. Read moreCanada sets its eyes on TikTok: Canada has ordered the closure of ByteDances operations in Canada specifically the offices of TikTok Technology Canada, Inc. citing national security risks. However, Canadians can still download and use TikTok. Read moreNo Instagram until youre 16: Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese announced plans to ban social media for children under 16 with no exemptions for parental consent. If passed, it would be the strictest social media ban for teens globally. Read moreDrop the GPT, its cleaner: OpenAI bought Chat.com, which now redirects to ChatGPT. Last year, it was reported that HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah acquired the domain for $15.5 million, making it one of the top two all-time publicly reported domain sales. Read moreAnalysisImage Credits:Getty ImagesWhat Trumps win means for Elon Musk: The billionaire CEO took a sharp swing to the right this election to support President-elect Donald Trump, using his vast wealth, influence, and megaphone on X to influence the outcome of the election. Many have predicted that there will be a falling-out between the two huge personalities before Trumps term is over, but as Rebecca Bellan and Aria Alamalhodaei write, Musks role in the presidency could mark one of the most consequential instances of a businessman helping shape the policy and regulations that govern his own businesses. Read more

In BriefPosted:3:26 PM PST November 9, 2024Image Credits:OpenAIOpenAI reportedly developing new strategies to deal with AI improvement slowdownOpenAIs next flagship model might not represent as big a leap forward as its predecessors, according to a new report in The Information.Employees who tested the new model, code-named Orion, reportedly found that even though its performance exceeds OpenAIs existing models, there was less improvement than theyd seen in the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4.In other words, the rate of improvement seems to be slowing down. In fact, Orion might not be reliably better than previous models in some areas, such as coding.In response, OpenAI has created a foundations team to figure out how the company can continue to improve its models in the face of a dwindling supply of new training data. These new strategies reportedly include training Orion on synthetic data produced by AI models, as well as doing more improve models during the post-training process.OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In response to previous reports about plans for its flagship model, the company said, We dont have plans to release a model code-named Orion this year.Topics

Bankrupt cryptocurrency company FTX filed 23 lawsuits Friday against Anthony Scaramucci (pictured above), his hedge fund SkyBridge Capital, and other organizations including Crypto.com and the Mark Zuckerberg-backed lobbying group Fwd.us.These lawsuits are an attempt to claw back money for FTXs creditors following the companys collapse. FTX claims that the money targeted in these suits was part of a campaign of influence-buying by founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, conducted as the company was struggling to meet its own cashflow needs.The lawsuit claims, These investments conveyed little to no benefit to Debtors, and instead served only to prop up Bankman-Frieds standing in the worlds of politics and traditional finance, which he then attempted to leverage as potential sources of equity investment in FTX to fill the hole in the balance sheet and, therefore, keep his scheme afloat.Since the company went bankrupt, FTX executives have been convicted of crimes including fraud and money laundering. Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison and is currently appealing his conviction.In the case of SkyBridge and Scaramucci (a financier who briefly served as White House Communications Director under Donald Trump), FTX announced that it was acquiring a 30% stake in SkyBridge in September 2022, just a few months before FTX went bankrupt and Bankman-Fried was arrested.According to the lawsuit, FTX also paid $12 million to sponsor Scaramuccis SALT conferences and invested $10 million in the SkyBridge Coin Fund. In return, FTX claims Scaramucci took Bankman-Fried on a whirlwind tour of the U.S. and the Middle East to pitch potential investors, with Scaramucci so invested in the success of Bankman-Frieds fundraising efforts that he lent Bankman-Fried his own suit and tie in advance of their meetings so that Bankman-Fried wouldnt show up to important meetings in his trademark shorts and a t-shirt.The Fwd.us lawsuit, meanwhile, describes payments from FTXs corporate sibling Alameda Research to Fwd.us as part of an integrated plan by the FTX Insiders to siphon money from FTX Group creditors and enhance their own personal reputations at the expense of creditors.SkyBridge and Fwd.us did not immediately respond to TechCrunchs request for comment.

Cybersecurity continues to command a lot of attention from enterprises looking for better protection from malicious hackers, and VCs want in on the action. In the latest example, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Upwind a specialist in assessing and securing cloud infrastructure is closing in on a $100 million round at a valuation of between $850-$900 million, post-money.The round includes a mix of new and existing investors such as Craft Ventures, Greylock, CyberStarts, Leaders Fund, Omri Casspis Sheva Fund, and basketball star Steph Currys investment fund Penny Jar. The round is in its final stages of getting closed this could come in a matter of days and could include further investors. The round, a Series B, comes on the heels of the company picking up dozens of Fortune 500 companies and growing its staff to about 160 people, a source said. Its a significant leap for Upwind, which had previously raised just over $77 million, including a $50 million round in September 2023. Upwinds last valuation, from that most recent round, was $300 million. It will be using some of the funding for R&D, and some for hiring, with plans to add around 100 people across Israel, San Francisco and Iceland.Upwind was founded by Amiram Shachar, who sold his previous company, the cloud spend management startup Spot.io, to NetApp for $450 million. It is part of the guard of cybersecurity startups founded in Israel by teams that cut their teeth originally working in areas like military intelligence. In its case, it is also one of the many companies in the space focusing on vulnerabilities in the cloud through a platform approach. Specifically, Upwind aims to tackle the blizzard of alerts that are typically raised by threat detection tools. It claims to reduce these alerts by 90% to focus security operations teams more closely on understanding and responding faster to actual threats. The companys tech covers cloud services (covering areas like vulnerability management and identity security), workloads (which includes container security and detection and response) and apps (including areas like API vulnerability management). To some extent, these are all interrelated, one reason a platform approach makes sense.Well update this post as we learn more.

Another one of OpenAIs lead safety researchers, Lilian Weng, announced on Friday she is departing the startup. Weng served as VP of research and safety since August, and before that, was the head of the OpenAIs safety systems team.In a post on X, Weng said that after 7 years at OpenAI, I feel ready to reset and explore something new. Weng said her last day will be November 15th, but did not specify where she will go next.I made the extremely difficult decision to leave OpenAI, said Weng in the post. Looking at what we have achieved, Im so proud of everyone on the Safety Systems team and I have extremely high confidence that the team will continue thriving.Wengs departure marks the latest in a long string of AI safety researchers, policy researchers, and other executives who have exited the company in the last year, and several have accused OpenAI of prioritizing commercial products over AI safety. Weng joins Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike the leaders of OpenAIs now dissolved Superalignment team, which tried to develop methods to steer superintelligent AI systems who also left the startup this year to work on AI safety elsewhere.Weng first joined OpenAI in 2018, according to her LinkedIn, working on the startups robotics team that ended up building a robot hand that could solve a Rubiks cube a task that took two years to achieve, according to her post. As OpenAI started focusing more on the GPT paradigm, so did Weng. The researcher transitioned to help build the startups applied AI research team in 2021. Following the launch of GPT-4, Weng was tasked with creating a dedicated team to build safety systems for the startup in 2023. Today, OpenAIs safety systems unit has more than 80 scientists, researchers, and policy experts, according to Wengs post.Thats a lot of AI safety folks, but many have raised concerns around OpenAIs focus on safety as it tries to build increasingly powerful AI systems. Miles Brundage, a longtime policy researcher, left the startup in October and announced that OpenAI was dissolving its AGI readiness team, which he had advised. On the same day, the New York Times profiled a former OpenAI researcher, Suchir Balaji, who said he left OpenAI because he thought the startups technology would bring more harm than benefit to society.OpenAI tells TechCrunch that executives and safety researchers are working on a transition to replace Weng.We deeply appreciate Lilians contributions to breakthrough safety research and building rigorous technical safeguards, said an OpenAI spokesperson in an emailed statement. We are confident the Safety Systems team will continue playing a key role in ensuring our systems are safe and reliable, serving hundreds of millions of people globally.Other executives who have left OpenAI in recent months include CTO Mira Murati, chief research officer Bob McGrew, and research VP Barret Zoph. In August, the prominent researcher Andrej Karpathy and co-founder John Schulman also announced theyd be leaving the startup. Some of these folks, including Leike and Schulman, left to join an OpenAI competitor, Anthropic, while others have gone on to start their own ventures.

In BriefPosted:4:26 PM PST November 7, 2024Image Credits:Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei speaking at Viva Technology in Paris / Getty ImagesAmazon may up its investment in Anthropic on one conditionAmazon is considering increasing its investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic.According to The Information, Amazon is in talks to invest multiple billions in Anthropic, its first financial pledge in the company since a $4 billion deal struck last year. The new investment is structured similar to the last one but with a twist. Amazon wants Anthropic to use Amazon-developed silicon hosted on Amazon Web Services to train its AI.Anthropic prefers Nvidia chips. But the money may be too good to pass up. Around the start of the year, Anthropic reportedly projected it would burn through over $2.7 billion in 2024 as it trained and scaled up its AI products. Anthropic has for several months been discussing new funding at a $40 billion valuation, per The Information, and no doubt the pressure is on to clinch something soon.To date, Anthropic has raised $9.7 billion close to half of OpenAIs $21.9 billion haul.(Above, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.)Topics

In BriefPosted:4:44 PM PST November 7, 2024Image Credits:Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty ImagesCrypto CEO kidnapped in Toronto, released after paying $1M ransomThe CEO of Canadian cryptocurrency firm, WonderFi, was kidnapped and held for ransom on Wednesday, according to CBC. Dean Skurka was reportedly shoved into a vehicle in downtown Toronto during rush hour, only to be released uninjured after electronically sending $1 million (presumably CAD) to his captors.The WonderFi CEO is the latest crypto celebrity to fall victim to a violent robbery. This is 171st incident of physical violence to steal cryptocurrency, a security firm tells the CBC.Skurkas company reported third quarter earnings a day before the incident, generating $41 million CAD in revenue during the last nine months. Meanwhile, the price of Bitcoin soared above $76,000 this week, reaching a new record high for the digital currency.WonderFi is backed by Shark Tank co-host Kevin OLeary and among the most prominent publicly-listed crypto firms in Canada, per Cointelegraph.Topics

With all eyes on how a new Trump administration in the U.S. will interface with China Tech in the years ahead, its neighbor to the north has levelled a blow to one of the biggest apps to come out of the country. Canada has ordered the closure of ByteDances operations in Canada specifically the offices of TikTok Technology Canada, Inc. citing national security risks. Those risks do not extend to the app itself: consumers can still download, use and create content for TikTok, and businesses can still advertise on it. The decision to use a social media application or platform is a personal choice, said Franois-Philippe Champagne, the countrys Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, in a statement.The statement did not specify more about the security risks. But the company has been under scrutiny for years over how it handles user data on the platform. Critics allege variously that user data is harvested by China and in ways that cannot be fully audited. TikTok has repeatedly denied that this is the case.The closure impacts hundreds of jobs in Canada, TikTok said in a statement to TechCrunch. It plans to appeal the decision. Shutting down TikToks Canadian offices and destroying hundreds of well-paying local jobs is not in anyones best interest, and todays shutdown order will do just that, a spokesperson said in a statement. We will challenge this order in court. The TikTok platform will remain available for creators to find an audience, explore new interests and for businesses to thrive.The company had been hiring most recently for dozens of roles across operations, engineering and marketing across different locations in the country. TikTok, by one estimate, has around 15 million users in Canada, working out to a penetration of about 41% of the population. In line with how its used elsewhere, among adults, those aged 18-24 are more engaged, according to eMarketer. But that study does not cover children, who as we know also love TikTok. Its a controversial issue in itself due to concerns over childrens mental health.Despite its mega popularity, TikTok has been simmering in hot water in Canada for a while now. This latest development is the result of a national security review under the Investment in Canada Act. That review was prompted after Canada banned the use of TikTok on all government devices in February 2023. That ban remains intact.The companys precarious situation in the country may have also had an impact on how it has developed further services there. TikTok Shop, the companys in-app e-commerce platform for selling and buying goods, was expected to launch in Canada by the end of 2023, but it has yet to do so. The Creator Rewards Program, for paying creators, also has yet to launch there, too. Canada is far from the only country making efforts to reign in TikTok. In addition to problems facing TikTok specifically in other countries, the app is also netted into a wider reassessment of social media in general. Just yesterday, the government in Australia announced a proposal to ban all social media for under-16s. International government attention around national security and TikTok really got its start during the last Trump administration, when the President laid out a plan to ban the app in the country where it now has 170 million users unless its operations there were separated and sold to a U.S. entity. Four years on, that case there is still ongoing, with TikTok appealing a signed order to sell its U.S. app operations by January 2025. Its anyones guess what will happen next, since Trump, ironically, reversed course over the summer. Im for TikTok because you need competition, he said in July after joining the app himself.

The co-founders of Swedish caller identification app Truecaller are stepping back from day-to-day operations, marking the end of an era for one of Swedens most successful consumer technology companies.Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam (pictured above), who co-founded Truecaller in 2009, will hand over control in January to Rishit Jhunjhunwala, the companys product chief and head of its crucial Indian business. Both founders will remain with the company as strategic advisors and board members.Were approaching half-a-billion users, and I am convinced we can reach one billion users within a few years, said Mamedi in his final quarterly statement as chief executive. We are one of the very few companies globally whose product has managed to attract hundreds of millions of people. By doing that, we have put Sweden on the world map, [and] that accomplishment is something my co-founder Nami and I are incredibly proud of.Jhunjhunwala, who joined in 2015 and holds a Swedish passport, inherits a company whose stock is rebounding after a tough few years. The companys shares lost value steadily following its IPO in 2021, and last year fell more than 32% overnight after the firm reported a 20% decline in quarterly advertising revenues, mostly due to a contracting advertising market. The stock has recovered well since then, however, nearly doubling in value, and Truecaller on Wednesday said its third-quarter revenues rose 15% to SEK 457.3 million ($42.3 million). More significantly, advertising revenue increased 8% in the third quarter after several quarters of decline alleviating concerns about its crucial ad revenue stream. The company also showed promising growth in strategic markets like Colombia and Nigeria, where user numbers jumped 40% year-over-year. Subscription revenues in the U.S. rose more than 60% as the company focused on converting users to paying customers.JPMorgan analysts have noted that new market entries and emerging revenue streams could drive further upside for the stock.Truecaller dominates caller identification in emerging markets, but has found it difficult to penetrate developed economies. And while iPhone users represent just 7% of the companys user base, they generate 40% of its subscription revenue a disparity that highlights both the challenges and opportunities ahead.Recognizing that opportunity, the company plans to launch what its executives are calling its largest product improvement ever for iOS this quarter in an effort to match some of the apps capabilities on Android. Having worked closely with Alan and Nami since 2015, I know these are big shoes to fill, said Jhunjhunwala, who has overseen product development and the companys two largest revenue streams.Jhunjhunwala will have to navigate a hopeful but challenging market. The company faces regulatory scrutiny in India, where it generates over 70% of its revenues. Recent reports suggested that telecom operator Airtels new spam-blocking tool could threaten Trucallers dominance, though early reviews of the telcos offering favor Truecaller.We have a fantastic management team in whom we have immense trust, said Mamedi and Zarringhalam in a joint statement. With these pieces in place, we are convinced that the company is well positioned for future success.

Solar energy is booming, which is good news for Glint Solar. The Norwegian software-as-a-service startup has built a platform thats helping energy giants and large solar developers such asE.ON, Recurrent Energy, and Statkraft cut the time it takes to plan and pre-design solar installations to accelerate the transition to renewables.Glints software pulls in data from multiple sources to help speed up Solar project assessments. The platform features adaptable layout designs and yield estimates, along with country-specific geographic information system (GIS) data and topographic analysis to make it easer for solar developers to evaluate potential sites. Cloud-based collaboration features allow teams to access essential project data. The platform can also be used as a project presentation aid by serving up 3D-rendered project layouts in seconds.Since TechCrunch last spoke with the climate startup in June 2022, when it closed a $3 million seed round, its customer base has grown almost 10x, according to CEO and co-founder Harald Olderheim. Its now announcing an $8 million Series A to keep stoking the growth fire by expanding into more markets in Europe.Its main regions for customers currently are France, Germany, the Nordics, and the U.K. but with the new funding, the March 2020-launched SaaS will be expanding its sales teams to target customers in the rest of Europe, including Italy and Spain, Olderheim says.One notable change since Glint Solar launched is that its narrowed the service proposition to support the planning of land-based solar installations dropping an earlier dual product focus that had included floating-solar installations, too.Olderheim said the software can still be used for planning floating solar. But he noted theres more demand for ground-based installations. Its a bigger market, he said, explaining why theyve opting to streamline their sales approach.Glint Solar also isnt focused on roof-mounted solar installations. Some of its customers are using its software to help plan solar arrays on big rooftops as well, per Olderheim. But, again, the reason its not focusing effort there is because its going after the largest demand chunk.If you look at the market, about 60% of the market is utility, large scale. And then about 20% is big rooftops, and 20% is residential. So we are going for the biggest market, he told TechCrunch. If you want to make a big impact in the world we can do it through the utility scale, because thats much faster if youre going to build increase the [solar] energy in the world.If you think the impact we are making by one solar plant, a big one like 10 megawatt, maybe with 7,000 or 15,000 solar panels its a very efficient way of growing the energy production fast.Expanding impact Another big focus for the Series A cash injection is product development. Olderheim said the startup will be expanding its platform to help customers plan where to site batteries that can be used to optimize renewable investments by storing energy. Factors such as grid capacity, protected areas, and sound (since batteries produce some noise once operational) are all considerations the software will be able to factor in, per Olderheim, as well as providing customers with support to ensure a battery is compatible with the proposed solar array and helping them share the information with landowners as they work to obtain the necessary permits.Image Credits:Glint SolarHe emphasizes how much the cost of solar installations have dropped over the last decade (down around 90%). But he also says that projects still arent happening as fast as they need to given the existential threats of a heating planet that are driving waves of disasters, from devastating floods and hurricanes to heatwaves, droughts, and forest fires.It takes time to get all the agreements with the land owner, with the grid, and with the municipality to [deliver a solar project] and all these processes take time; so thats one of the reasons we are doing Glint Solar, he adds.The startup is very focused on software design to maximize accessibility as another tactic to help remove friction from solar project approvals. We are making it very user friendly so everyone in a team can use one software together and work on this problem to make [project delivery] much faster. And you can share everything with the land owner, with the grid, with the municipality so they can easily take decisions much faster with the lower risk.The platform has multiple modules that allow the same person to, for example, evaluate the site, organize all the projects, and design a solar park, per Olderheim, supporting project teams to get more applications out.He also flags the platforms cloud-based collaboration features that allow everyone to work in the same tool, which he suggests help give it an edge versus other tools.Glint says customers are reporting its SaaS is helping solar developers to triple their project pipeline on average and evaluate potential sites 10x faster than traditional methods.Of course software can only do so much. Olderheim agrees that infrastructure investment and regulatory reform are key to further accelerating solar rollouts, pointing to grid capacity and solar permitting as the main areas for lawmakers to tackle.Sometimes it takes five years from a [project] to start to get building, he points out, adding: I know the EU is looking at this to reduce it to 12 or 24 months. So I think thats a very good [start].Glint Solars Series A is led by Smedvig Ventures, with additional investment from Antler Nordic and Antler Elevate, Futurum Ventures, and Momentum.Commenting in a statement, Jonathan Lerner, partner at Smedvig Ventures said:

SpaceX will conduct the sixth flight test of Starship, the largest rocket ever built, as soon as November 18, following the smooth success of the previous mission less than a month ago.The high flight cadence is thanks, in part, to that success, which included the first-ever return of the Super Heavy booster to the launch site where massive chopstick arms jutting from the launch tower caught it in mid-air and a controlled, on-target splashdown after suborbital flight of the Starship upper stage in the Indian Ocean. This sixth test includes many of the same objectives; this fact led the Federal Aviation Administration to approve both flight 5 and 6 at the same time last month. Up until this point, SpaceX has needed to wait (sometimes months) for regulatory approval before each Starship launch.In a post on its website, SpaceX says it will attempt to re-create these same successes on November 18, including catching the booster at the launch site and an accurate Starship splashdown. The company will also continue to test the heat shield and maneuvers for the upper-stage reentry, to expand the envelope on ship and booster capabilities and get closer to bringing reuse of the entire system online. Engineers also introduced a number of upgrades to the system, including more redundancy in the booster propulsion system, updated software controls, and other changes.SpaceX will also attempt to relight one of the Ships six Raptor engines on orbit, a key capability to eventually also reuse the Starship upper stage. Engineers will put this stage through its paces in other ways as well: The company will test new secondary thermal protection materials. In addition, as the company put it, The ship also will intentionally fly at a higher angle of attack in the final phase of descent, purposefully stressing the limits of flap control to gain data on future landing profiles.Image Credits:SpaceXAll this testing will culminate in significant upgrades to the ship, starting with flight 7, like redesigned flaps, larger propellant tanks, and the most up-to-date thermal protection.A live webcast of the test will start around 30 minutes before the 30-minute launch window at 2 p.m. PT, which will be viewable on X or SpaceXs website. This late-afternoon launch window (which opens at 4 p.m. local Texas time) will enable better viewing conditions upon reentry, SpaceX said.

In BriefPosted:4:02 PM PST November 6, 2024Image Credits:Yuichiro Chino / Getty ImagesPrediction markets set to pay out $450M to election bettorsFollowing Donald Trumps election victory, thousands of bettors anticipate a potential $450 million payout from online betting sites, says Reuters. As Trumps odds surged on so-called prediction markets near the end of the race, platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket gained attention for diverging sharply from traditional polls, which suggested a much closer race.Talking with the outlet, a Princeton neuroscience professor credited the markets comparative accuracy to their ability to measure crowd wisdom where no hard data is available.Backers in Kalshi plainly saw what was coming. As TechCrunch reported last week, its investors loaned the outfit tens of millions of dollars in short-term loans to pay its customers.Their individual winnings may pale in comparison to a Polymarket bettor known as the Polymarket whale. As Reuters notes, the French former trader made $40 million worth of Trump-related bets on the site. If Trump also wins the popular vote, the whale will reportedly walk away with $80 million.Topics:Government & Policy

In BriefPosted:4:48 PM PST November 6, 2024Image Credits:SolStock (opens in a new window) / Getty ImagesAustralia looks to ban social media for kids under age 16Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday announced plans in the country to ban social media for children under 16, saying that social media is doing harm to our kids, and Im calling time on it.The proposed legislation will enter parliament this year, taking effect a year after lawmakers ratify it, said Albanese, adding that there will be no exemptions for parental consent. This means platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, and likely YouTube will bear the responsibility to prevent access by children, per a Reuters report.Australias approach is among the strictest globally, but numerous other countries are moving in the same direction. Norways prime minister last month said the country will soon enforce an age limit on use of social media of 15 up from age 13, saying it needs to more aggressively campaign against profit-driven tech companies that are pitted against small childrens brains. Topics:Social

Apple could soon let users share the location of lost or missing items such as an iPhone, Macbook, or something with an Airtag attached via the Find My app with people who are not in their contacts using a link.Macrumors spotted the updated feature in the iOS 18.2 developer beta, and noted that Apple says its intended to help locate your lost items by sharing the location with people such as a cab driver or an airline employee.The Find My app on the iOS 18.2 developer beta has a new Share Item Location option, which gives you a shareable link to the location of the missing item. People can open the link on any device (including non-Apple devices) to try and track it. The link automatically expires after a week or when the item is back with you.Theres also a Share Contact Info option that lets any phone connect with an item and open a website, which will show your phone number and email if youve added those details to the items contact page. Seemingly, this is meant to help the person who finds the item contact you.Find My already lets you share an items location with people in your contacts.The update would also let users look at statistics like how many people visited the link.

In BriefPosted:3:47 PM PST November 5, 2024Image Credits:Bryce Durbin / TechCrunchApple warns investors its new products might never be as profitable as the iPhoneApple is warning investors that its new and future products might never be as profitable as the iPhone. The disclosure comes as the company is pursuing newer technologies like artificial intelligence and mixed-reality headsets.Apple added the warning in its latest annual report under the business risks section, as first reported by the Financial Times.New products, services and technologies may replace or supersede existing offerings and may produce lower revenues and lower profit margins, which can materially adversely impact the companys business, results of operations and financial condition, Apple wrote in the report.The company has been working to implement consumer AI features in its products to compete with rivals like Google and Meta. Apples initial Apple Intelligence features launched last week, and the company has promised additional features, such as a ChatGPT integration, in the coming months. As for Apples Vision Pro headset, the device has seen limited sales, likely due to its hefty $3,499 price tag. Topics:Hardware

Amber Hill spent 14 years as a medical researcher. She didnt mind the work, but there was one thing she consistently hated: administrative tasks.I think most people do, especially in research, she told TechCrunch. She would rather be analyzing data or building relationships with patients, she said. But I was spending so much time doing manual tasks that didnt require any medical expertise. Its a process thats completely broken, and I knew it could be fixed.So, she did what any problem solver would do: She launched a company.Her startup, called Research Grid, was founded in London in 2020. The company is trying to make clinical trials more efficient by automating administrative and data management workflow. It hails itself as the the only software that can automate full back-office trials.Research Grid on Tuesday announced a $6.4 million seed round, led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from firms including Ada Ventures and Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab.Research Grid consists of two patent products: Inclusive and Trial Engine. Together, the products handle tasks such as flagging protocol errors, data extraction, and workflow. Right now, clinical trials use a more manual process supported by legacy software systems that often cause expensive delays during a trial.They are built on old codebases, which means its almost impossible for them to innovate, she said. Our tech is already superior, and while the displacement of large players wont happen overnight, its going to happen, and I dont see why it wont be us that does it.But there are other issues Research Grid hopes to tackle, such as making clinical recruitment faster and better handling of the pressure that often comes from the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) regarding compliance. Recruitment can take months, its manual, administrative, and hard to find people, she said. Its also hard to do consistently when it comes to finding people who fit in a narrow, strict criteria for a research trial.Right now, its a very manual process, using non-targeted social ads and parsing health records. If theres not enough participation, researchers cant understand if a drug or intervention is safe and effective, which ultimately means its not approved by regulators to go to the people who might need it most.Plus, the FDA has now made it a requirement to make clinical trials more diverse, since women and people of color are often left out of medical trials. Hill sought to build a customer relationship management feature in Research Grid that has more than 80,000 groups, across 157 countries, representing around 2,000 medical conditions, she said. It uses AI to extend far beyond traditional methods of finding people, she said. It helps out partners to find who they need to find in seconds rather than months.Hill was introduced to her lead investor by the EMEA team of the venture firm Plug and Play, who came into this round early. The company, which has raised $8 million in venture funding to date, will use this latest funding to invest in more research and development, build out its engineering team, and further expand into the U.S. and Asian markets.The next challenge is mostly about setting up the corporate infrastructure to seamlessly serve these partners, she said of operating in the U.S., U.K., and Asia.Though this company, like many great ones, was built out of a frustration point, Hill said she always had a passion for entrepreneurship. She ran a nonprofit while studying for her doctorate as a way to widen her access to research. Running the business taught her how to be resilient and resourceful, and how to work with different types of people. I kept a volunteer team together over three years without financial resources, she recalled. We fundraised the old school hard way in buckets and took it to the bank.Her first tech idea was to use AI to automate all the work that goes into running a nonprofit. Weve come full circle because that idea morphed into our pre-trial product and meaningful IP, she said. When she knew she wanted to launch Research Grid, she applied to an incubator program to help switch her mindset from nonprofit to for-profit, from academic to an entrepreneur. Then she went through an accelerator program that put her in front of some of the largest investors in London; she raised her first 1 million a feat in a country where Black founders raise less than 2% of all venture capital. And from 2019 to 2023, only eight Black women raised more than $1 million in venture funding, as TechCrunch previously reported.The hardest part for Hill was getting the company off the ground during the pandemic as a solo founder. She managed through and is now in growth mode. Revenue grew over 20x last year and is expected to continue to grow, she said. The company is working across Big Pharma, Contract Research Organisations, and Clinical Sites, hiring more experts, and improving their AI technology.AI is expediting precision medicine, drug development operations, and changing the care pathway for everyone, she said. Its here to stay.

Ahead of the polls closing on Tuesday, most of the major AI chatbots wouldnt answer questions about U.S. presidential election results. But Grok, the chatbot built into X (formerly Twitter), was willing to respond and often with mistakes.When asked by TechCrunch on Tuesday evening on the East Coast who won the U.S. presidential election in key battleground states, Grok sometimes responded Trump, despite that vote counting and reporting in those states had not concluded yet.Based on the information available from web searches and social media posts, Donald Trump won the 2024 election in Ohio, Grok said when prompted with the question, Who won the 2024 election in Ohio?Grok also falsely claimed that Trump won North Carolina, according to TechCrunchs checks.Screenshot: TechCrunchImage Credits:XScreenshot: TechCrunchImage Credits:XFor election-related questions, Grok advised that users check Vote.gov for up-to-date results and authoritative sources, like election boards. However, unlike OpenAIs ChatGPT, Googles Gemini, and Anthropics Claude, Grok did not outright refuse to answer opening it up to hallucinations.In several instances when asked by TechCrunch, Grok stated without context, minus a top-line header that Donald Trump won the 2024 election in Ohio, and, Based on the information available, Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election in Ohio.The source of the misinformation appears to be tweets from different election years and misleadingly worded sources. Grok, like all generative AI, struggles to predict the outcome of scenarios it hasnt seen before, including close elections, and doesnt understand that past election results arent necessarily germane to future elections.The answers TechCrunch received werent consistent. In some cases, Grok said that Trump hadnt, in fact, won Ohio or North Carolina because voting was ongoing. The way in which the question was worded made a difference; adding presidential before election in the query, Who won the 2024 election in Ohio? was less likely to yield a Trump won answer, TechCrunch found in our tests.By comparison, other major chatbots were handling election results questions more gingerly.In its recently releasedChatGPT Searchexperience, OpenAI directs users who ask about results to The Associated Press and Reuters. Metas Meta AI chatbot and AI-powered search engine Perplexity, which launched an elections tracker earlier on Tuesday, were answering election queries during active voting but correctly in TechCrunchs brief testing. Both correctly said that Trump hadnt won Ohio or North Carolina.Grok has been accused of spreading election misinformation in the recent past. In an open letter in August, five secretaries of state claimed that Xs AI-powered chatbot wrongly suggested that Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, wasnt eligible to appear on some U.S. presidential ballots. Within hours of President Joe Bidens announcement that he would suspend his presidential bid, Grok began answering questions about Harris eligibility with the misleading claim that the ballot deadlines had passed in nine states.The ballot deadlines hadnt, in fact, passed. But Groks misinformation spread far and wide, reaching millions of users on X and beyond before it was corrected.TechCrunch has an AI-focused newsletter!Sign up hereto get it in your inbox every Wednesday.

Apple products are getting an integration with OpenAIs ChatGPT in December when iOS 18.2 rolls out, which should supercharge Siri and a few other features with smarter AI. On Monday, iOS 18.2 beta testers got a taste of how OpenAI could profit off of its Apple partnership.Apple is including an option to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus inside its Settings app, according to an update to the iOS 18.2 beta spotted by 9to5Mac. This will give Apple users a direct route to sign up for OpenAIs premium subscription plan, which costs $20 a month. This could drive lots of users to sign up for ChatGPT Plus, a core revenue driver for OpenAI, especially because the free version of ChatGPT can be quite limited. Free ChatGPT users wont have access to OpenAIs latest models (such as o1-preview) or premium features such as Advanced Voice Mode. They also can only make two images with Dall-E per day, and cant send as many messages to the AI chatbot as premium users.A big lingering question in Apple and OpenAIs partnership is how both companies expect to make money off the deal. Apple reportedly isnt paying Sam Altmans startup for the integration in money, but rather, exposure. The ability to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus in Settings might be enough exposure that this whole thing is worth it for OpenAI, but only if users actually sign up. Otherwise, OpenAI will be on the hook for a large influx of new ChatGPT free users, which will undoubtedly drive up the startups AI inference costs.Its also unclear whether Apple is taking a cut of the revenue OpenAI generates from ChatGPT Plus signups through the Settings app. Its possible the iPhone maker is simply betting that having cutting-edge AI features is worth the free exposure its giving OpenAI, because it will push enough customers to upgrade to new phones.Nevertheless, this is a strange deal. Even though Apple is letting ChatGPT power many of its biggest AI updates yet, the iPhone maker isnt making this an exclusive deal. Apple says it will soon integrate AI models from other developers, potentially including Googles Gemini.In the background of this integration, OpenAI is raising money and losing key executives at an unprecedented rate. Apple was reportedly supposed to participate in the latest $6.6 billion round, but pulled out shortly after OpenAIs CTO Mira Murati abruptly left the company.

In BriefPosted:2:43 PM PST November 4, 2024Image Credits:Nigel SussmanBowery Farming is ceasing operationsAgtech unicorn Bowery Farming is shutting down, according to PitchBook, which cited internal documents and multiple company employees.The New York-based agtech company was known for building vertical farms that could produce crops, including lettuces, herbs, and berries. Per Pitchbook, Bowery Farming has raised more than $700 million in funding from First Round Capital, General Catalyst, and GV, among many other venture firms. Its most recent round in 2021 valued it at more than $2 billion.PitchBook previously reported that Bowery Farming held multiple rounds of layoffs in 2023.Vertical farming has proved to be a tough category, with both AeroFarms and AppHarvest filing for bankruptcy protection. AeroFarms raised more than $300 million from backers before filing for bankruptcy. In September 2023, it exited bankruptcy protection fully funded. AppHarvest raised more than $700 million before being taken public in 2021 at a $1 billion valuation; it filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2023. TechCrunch has reached out for more information.Topics:Startups

The end of zero-interest rates has driven companies to look for savings wherever they can, but one area continues to be a major budget drain. Observability collecting and understanding data and systems typically remains an organizations second-highest cloud expenditure, right after cloud provisioning itself. People have even gone so far as to talk of an observability cost crisis, underscored by anecdotes like Coinbase spending $65 million on its Datadog bill.And why is observability so pricey and important? Complex cloud architectures and microservices are here to stay, and with security issues and service outages all too common, ops teams need observability data to keep systems running. Now a startup called Dash0 is launching to address the cost issue if not by being cheaper, then by at least making buying and paying for their services easier.Dash0 pronounced Dash-zero is a Datadog competitor whose pitch doesnt revolve around drastically lowering observability costs. Founder Mirko Novakovic (left in the picture above) still expects companies to spend 10% to 20% of cloud costs on this budget item. But he and his team want to improve transparency, both in terms of pricing and of observability itself.Dash0 says it can do this by way of how its built, by fully leveraging the open source observability framework OpenTelemetry (aka OTel), Novakovic told TechCrunch, which includes a feature called Semantic conventions that allows someone, at any given time, [to] see exactly which service or which developer or which application creates how much cost on the observability side, he said.There are other companies, such as Signoz, that describe themselves as OTel-native, but Dash0s positioning has resonated with investors. It raised a $9.5 million seed funding round led by Accel, with participation from Dig Ventures, the investment firm of MulesSoft founder Ross Mason. Novakovics track record may have also helped. His previous company, Instana, also backed by Accel, was acquired by IBM at the end of 2020 for $500 million, a price that has never been publicly disclosed before now. Several other Instana alums are also now part of the Dash0 team. If Dash0 is built on OTel, its also trying to improve it. The framework has actually been around since 2019, but it is not that easy to use at the moment, Novakovic said. Vendors have to do a lot of work in making sure that it gets at least as easy as installing a Datadog agent. Thats where we are still lagging behind the proprietary folks.As a company, Dash0 hopes to unlock OTels benefits vendor-agnostic standardized data but with an intuitive UI, dashboards, and integrations with Slack, email and other tools. Its initial target customers are companies that have between 50 and 5,000 employees.The company is now launching publicly, but it wont heavily invest in sales and marketing until it is sure it has hit product-market fit. In the meantime, Novakovic said, its resources will go toward growing the tech and product side of its team, which now consists of 21 people, of whom 19 are engineers, all working remotely.Its next 10 hires will include a developer relations specialist who will also contribute to driving the adoption of OpenTelemetry as a solid alternative to proprietary options. On that front, the company intends to work with other OTel-related startups while making sure that missing parts like dashboards and query languages fall into place with projects like Perses and PromQL. Thats a community effort together with the customers, Novakovic said.

The former head of Metas augmented reality glasses efforts announced on Monday she is joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware, according to a post on LinkedIn. OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch that Caitlin Kalinowski will be joining the startup.Kalinowski is a hardware executive who began leading Metas AR glasses team in March 2022. She oversaw the creation of Orion, the impressive augmented reality prototype that Meta recently showed off at its annual Connect conference. Kalinowski also led the hardware team behind Metas virtual reality goggles for roughly nine years. Before that, she worked at Apple, designing the hardware for MacBooks.Im delighted to share that Im joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware, said Kalinowski in her post. In my new role, I will initially focus on OpenAIs robotics work and partnerships to help bring AI into the physical world and unlock its benefits for humanity.Possibly, Kalinowski will work with her old boss, former Apple executive Jony Ive, on a new AI hardware device that OpenAI and Ives startup, LoveFrom, are building together. In September, Ive confirmed he was building a hardware product with OpenAI, describing it as a product that uses AI to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.OpenAI also recently started hiring research engineers for a robotics team thats aimed at helping OpenAIs partners incorporate its multimodal AI into their hardware. The reboot of OpenAIs robotics team comes roughly four years after the startup disbanded its hardware research to focus its efforts on software. In 2018, OpenAI built a robot hand that could learn how to grip objects all on its own.Several companies already are incorporating OpenAIs models into their hardware. The most obvious is Apple, which will launch its ChatGPT integration for the iPhone later this year. Another is the robotics company, Figure, whose humanoid 01 robot leverages OpenAIs software for natural speech conversations.

In BriefPosted:4:52 PM PST November 4, 2024Image Credits:Bloomberg / Getty ImagesCoatue is raising $1B for AI betsCoatue Management, a hedge fund that invested heavily in tech startups during the pandemic-infused boom, is raising $1 billion to back AI-focused companies, Bloomberg reported on Monday.The funding, which will top up the firms flagship fund, will be raised primarily from institutional investors. However, high-net-worth individuals with accounts at the brokerage Raymond James and Associates could also invest in Coatue, per the report.Coatue, which has nearly $50 billion in assets under management, has invested in over 170 VC-backed companies in 2021, according to PitchBook data. Coatue has since drastically slowed its startup investing pace, backing only 81 companies in 2022 and about 30 companies in 2023.The crossover investor isnt done with investing in private companies, however. So far in 2024, Coatue has backed 29 startups, PitchBook data shows. The firms latest AI-focused investments include Glean, Scale AI and Skild AI, which is building a general-purpose AI robot. Philippe Laffont, Coatues founder (pictured above) has said he is particularly excited about humanoid robots with AI-powered brains.Topics:AI, Fundraising

Last week, OpenAI released its highly anticipated search product, ChatGPT Search, to take on Google. The industry has been bracing for this moment for months, prompting Google to inject AI-generated answers into its core product earlier this year, and producing some embarrassing hallucinations in the process. That mishap led many people to believe that OpenAIs search engine would truly be a Google killer.But after using ChatGPT Search as my default search engine (you can, too, with OpenAIs extension) for roughly a day, I quickly switched back to Google. OpenAIs search product was impressive in some ways and offered a glimpse of what an AI-search interface could one day look like. But for now, its still too impractical to use as my daily driver.ChatGPT Search was occasionally useful for surfacing real-time answers to questions which I would have otherwise had to dig through many ads and SEO-optimized articles to find. Ultimately, it presents concise answers in a nice format: You get links to the informations sources on the right side, with headlines and a short snippet that confirms that the AI-generated text you just read is correct.Here is OpenAIs answer to Google search. (image credits: Maxwell Zeff/openAI)However, it often just felt impractical for everyday use.In its current form, ChatGPT Search is unreliable for what people use Google for the most: Short, navigational queries. Queries shorter than four words represent the bulk of searches on Google; these are often just a few keywords that get you to the right webpage. Theyre the kind of searches most people are barely even conscious theyre making all day, and its what Google tends to do very well.Im talking about Celtics score, cotton socks, library hours, San Francisco weather, cafes near me, and other queries that make Google the doorstep to the internet for billions of people.My test run with ChatGPT Search was quite frustrating at times, and it made me conscious of just how many keyword searches I perform in a day. I couldnt reliably find information using short queries, and for the first time in years, I actually longed for Google Search. Dont get me wrong, Google has declined in quality for the last decade or so, largely because its been flooded with ads and SEO. Still, I kept opening Google in a separate window during my test because ChatGPT Search couldnt get me a correct answer or webpage.Who would win: ChatGPT Search or short queries?I typed in Nuggets score to check how a live NBA game between the Denver Nuggets and the Minnesota Timberwolves was going. ChatGPT told me the Nuggets were winning even though they were actually losing, and showed a Timberwolves score that was 10 points lower than it really was, according to a Google result at the same time.Comparison of ChatGPT Search (left) and Google search (Right) for live NBA scores.(image credits: Maxwell Zeff/OpenAI)Another time, I tried earnings today, to check the companies reporting quarterly results that could affect stock prices on Friday. ChatGPT told me that Apple and Amazon were reporting their results on Friday, even though both companies had already reported a day earlier. In other words, it hallucinated and made up information.In another test, I typed in a tech executives name to find their contact information. ChatGPT showed me a summary of the persons Facebook profile, and hallucinated a link to their LinkedIn page, which produced an error message when I clicked it.Another time, I typed in baggy denim jeans, hoping to shop. ChatGPT Search described to me what baggy denim jeans were in the first place (a definition I didnt need), and recommended I go to Amazon.com for a nice pair.ChatGPT Search for baggy denim jeans. (image credits: maxwell zeff/OpenAI)I could go on, but you get the idea. Broken links, hallucinations and random answers defined my first day using ChatGPT Search.Maybe a Google killer someday, but not todayThis was not an insignificant launch for OpenAI. Sam Altman praised the feature for being really good, even though hes known for downplaying his startups AI capabilities. The reason this time is different may have something to do with search being one of the biggest businesses on the internet, and OpenAIs version could be a real threat to its biggest competitor, Google.To be fair, Google Search is a 25-year-old product and ChatGPT Search is brand new. In a blog post, OpenAI says it plans to improve the feature based on user feedback in the coming months, and it seems more than likely this could be a significant area of investment for the startup.ChatGPT Search works well for longer questions. (Image credits: Maxwell zeff/Openai)To its credit, ChatGPT Search is rather good at answering long, written-out research questions. Something like, What American professional sports league has the most diversity? isnt a question you could easily answer with Google, but ChatGPT Search is pretty good at scraping multiple websites and getting you a decent answer in just a couple of seconds. (Perplexity is also pretty good at these questions, and its search product has been around for well over a year.)Compared to the traditional version of ChatGPT, which already had web access, the search feature feels like a better interface for browsing the web. There are more clear links to the sources where ChatGPT gets its information now for news stories, ChatGPT will be tapping the media companies that its been striking all those licensing deals with.ChatGPT search taps OpenAIs news partners (Image credits: Maxwell Zeff/Openai)The problem is that most searches on Google are not such long questions. To really replace Google, OpenAI needs to improve these more practical, short searches people are already making throughout their day.OpenAI is not shy about the fact that ChatGPT Search struggles with short queries.With ChatGPT search, weve observed that users tend to start asking questions in more natural ways than they have in the past with other search tools, said OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix in a statement emailed to TechCrunch. At the same timeweb navigational querieswhich tend to be short, are quite common. We plan to improve the experience for these types of queries over time.That said, these short keyword queries have made Google indispensable, and until OpenAI gets them right, Google is still going to be the mainstay for many people.There are a couple reasons why OpenAI might be struggling with these short queries. The first is that ChatGPT relies on Microsoft Bing, which is widely regarded as an inferior engine compared to Google. The second reason is that large language models may not be well suited to these short prompts. LLMs typically need fully written out questions to produce effective answers. Perhaps there needs to be some re-prompting running short queries through an LLM as a longer question before ChatGPT Search can do such searches well.Though OpenAI has only now released its search product, Perplexitys own AI search tool is already serving 100 million search queries a week. Perplexity has also been touted as a Google killer, but it runs into the same problems with short queries. Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, discussed how people use his product differently compared to Google Search at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this week: The median number of words in a Google query is somewhere between two and three. In Perplexity, its around 10 to 11 words. So clearly, more of the usage in Perplexity is people coming and directly being able to ask a question. On the other hand, at Google, youre typing in a few key words to instantly get to a certain link.I think the fact that people are not using these products for web navigation presents a bigger problem than OpenAI or Perplexity are letting on. It means that ChatGPT Search and Perplexity are not replacing Google Search for the task its best at: web navigation.Instead, these AI products are filling a new niche, surfacing information that gets buried in traditional search. Dont get me wrong, thats valuable in its own right.OpenAI and Perplexity both claim they will work on getting better at these short queries. Until then, I dont think either of these products can fully replace Google. If OpenAI wants to replace the doorstep to the internet, it has to create a better one.

One of the lessons that the wild Silicon Valley venture funding environment of the past few years has clearly taught is this: Bigger valuations are not always better.I think weve all kind of seen the negative impact of having a valuation too high from the last, call it, three years, Elizabeth Yin, co-founder of Hustle Fundsaid onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. When a VC bull market hits and startups are able to easily raise a lot of money before they have real, provable businesses, theyve set themselves up for difficult times.Because the bar is higher for that next round, she said. The general rule is for each early round,business growth should justify double, or possibly triple, the previous valuation, Yin said.So early valuations shouldnt be anything really crazy that you dont think you can grow into realistically with your traction, because it always catches up with you, she said.If the company fails to grow into a lofty valuation, it could wind up burning its most valuable employees, said VC Renata Quintini, co-founder of Renegade Partners. Most startups grant stock to employees, or sometimes grant stock options which the employee is required to buy. And most startups offer that stock as a significant portion of their employees salaries. People join startups because they believe if they help build the company, their stock will pay off. So, obviously, it is not good if employees stock grows less valuable over time.If that gap doesnt close, youre actually disincentivizing the people that joined you early on, Quintini warns.A much better way to raise money is to create a tight process,by setting reasonable valuation expectations from the get-go, VC Corinne Riley, partner at Greylock, said onstage. You dont want to be dillydallying and have a multi-month round. Youre wasting your own time. Youre wasting the VC time, she said. You want to know exactly how much you want to raise.Quintini advises founders to have ranges in mind for both an amount and a valuation. To do that, she says, a founder should spend more time in an information-gathering phase than in an actual pitching phase.They should ask VCs in their network their opinions on their valuation. They should know what type of market they are in and what the multiples on revenue or other pricing metrics are in vogue for their area at the moment. They should carefully consider how much dilution they are willing to take that is, how much of their company they are willing to sell off and how much of a stake they will retain after the round.Should the founder want to sell a smaller stake 10% versus the more typical 20% the founder should find out which firms would even entertain that idea. Many firms wont bother with small stakes, as that decreases their chances for a big return.Coming into the pitch meeting wanting too much for too little means you better have a fantastic business and be an outlier company to back it up; otherwise, youre actually going to be turning VCs off, Quintini says.Renata Quintini, Corinne Riley, Elizabeth Yin (left to right). Image Credits:Barak Shrama/ Slava Blazer Photography / Flickr (opens in a new window)If a VC comes in with a term sheet that wildly beats all the others in valuation, founders should look at the fine print. Has the VC banked the term sheet toward giving its firm outsized power? This could also mean that the company wont be able to convince other VCs to invest in later rounds.Startup accelerator Y Combinator distributes a sample term sheet that shows off what most VCs consider standard terms. These cover everything from voting rights to board seats.Ive definitely seen a number of my founders, especially international companies, get all kinds of term sheets with all kinds of terms that I would consider nonstandard, Yin described, such as weird board configurations like the VC wanting multiple board seats, or all kinds of liquidation preferences. Anything above a 1x liquidation preference means that the investor gets paid out more money, and first, should the company sell and isnt standard.In addition to being prepared to negotiate on dollar amount, valuation, and stake size, founders should be prepared tonegotiate board composition and items like who gets to choose the independent board members.Whatever you decide on the terms that give VCs power could impact your company, and its future valuations, forever.I encourage our founders to turn the very nonstandard things down. And then there are some others that are borderline. And maybe you take it because you dont have any other options, but, once its done, its really hard to unwind, Yin says.

The City of Columbus, Ohios state capital, has confirmed that hackers stole the personal data of 500,000 residents during a July ransomware attack.In a filing with Maines attorney general, Columbus confirmed that a foreign cyber threat actor compromised its network to access information including residents names, dates of birth, addresses, identification documents, Social Security numbers, and bank account details.The city, which is the most populous in Ohio with approximately 900,000 residents, says around half a million individuals were affected, though it has not confirmed the exact number of victims.The regulatory filing comes after Columbus was the target of a ransomware attack on July 18 of this year, which the city claimed to have thwarted by disconnecting its network from the internet.Rhysida, the ransomware gang responsible for last years British Library cyberattack, claimed responsibility for the attack against Columbus in August. At the time, the gang said it had stolen 6.5 terabytes of data from the city in Ohio including databases, internal logins and passwords of employees, a full dump of servers with emergency services applications of the city and access from city video cameras, according to local news reports.Rhysida asked for 30 bitcoin, around $1.9 million at the time of the cyberattack, as payment for the stolen data.Two weeks after the cyberattack, Columbus mayor Andrew Ginther told the public the stolen data was likely corrupted and unusable.The accuracy of Ginthers statement was thrown into doubt the following day after David Leroy Ross, a cybersecurity researcher also known as Connor Goodwolf, revealed that the personal information of hundreds of thousands of Columbus residents had been listed on the dark web.In September, Columbus sued Ross, alleging that was threatening to share the Citys stolen data with third parties who would otherwise have no readily available means by which to obtain the Citys stolen data. A judge filed a temporary restraining order against Ross, preventing him from accessing the stolen data.In a listing on its leak site, seen by TechCrunch on Monday, Rhysida claims to have uploaded 3.1 terabytes of unsold data stolen from Columbus, amounting to more than 250,000 files.