Month: August 2024

Traditionally seen as private financial entities, family offices are key players in the supply of venture capital, using startup investments as a way to diversify their portfolios and engage with groundbreaking technologies. Catch Eti Lazarian, principal of Elle Family Office, and Bruce Lee, CEO and founder of Keebeck Wealth Management, on the Builder’s Stage at
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OpenAI could reportedly increase its valuation to $100 billion. Nvidia and Apple are apparently in talks to contribute to the company’s next fundraising round, and Thrive Capital would lead the deal should it happen, according to The New York Times. OpenAI’s annualized revenue reportedly eclipsed $3.4 billion early this year, but it’s said to be
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Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, caused a stir a few months ago.  He announced that the organization’s prestigious Grammy Awards would finally accept music made with artificial intelligence. At first, people were confused, and then Mason came out to clarify that he meant only humans can submit to the awards, but that
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Amazon announced Friday evening that it has hired Covariant’s founders — Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Duan — along with “about a quarter” of the startup’s employees. It’s also signed a non-exclusive license to use Covariant’s robotic foundation models. Earlier this year, Chen told TechCrunch that Covariant is building “a large language model, but
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The South Korean startup ecosystem has grown over the last decade as major tech firms and venture capital from the West has sought to make inroads in the country. No surprise there: South Korea has long been one of Asia’s strongest economies. Startups here have enjoyed good access to funding, benefiting from Big Tech companies
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Elle Russell, co-founder of Cairns, Australia-based NightCafe, which offers a suite of AI-powered art-creating tools, prefers to avoid the spotlight. “I like to remain hidden behind my monitors,” she told me in a recent interview. NightCafe is similarly low profile. The company, which Russell helped her partner, Angus Russell, launch five years ago, doesn’t get
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A top court in Brazil ordered an immediate, country-wide suspension of the X platform on Friday after a months-long legal battle with Elon Musk’s social media company over content moderation, according to Bloomberg.   The court added that anyone using VPN to access the X platform would be subject to daily fines of 50,000 reais
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Stock-trading startup Public has acquired the brokerage accounts of Carta’s secondaries business, TechCrunch has confirmed. Carta, best known for its cap table management software, sits on a stockpile of data. It tried to expand into the bubbling hot secondary marketplace brokerage business, but in January, a startup customer publicly accused Carta of using the startup’s
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Reliance Industries, India’s largest company by market capitalization, is not ignoring the AI frenzy that has gripped the tech world. At the company’s 47th annual general meeting on Thursday, Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani and other executives mentioned AI nearly three dozen times within two hours, detailing plans to integrate the technology across the company’s various
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Update: California’s Appropriations Committee passed SB 1047 with significant amendments that change the bill on Thursday, August 15. You can read about them here. Outside of sci-fi films, there’s no precedent for AI systems killing people or being used in massive cyberattacks. However, some lawmakers want to implement safeguards before bad actors make that dystopian
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TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco is just two months away, and we’re still looking for enthusiastic and driven volunteers to assist our events team. Don’t miss this opportunity to be part of something big! If you aspire to be a startup founder, marketer or event coordinator, this experience is a rare chance to see
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Agriculture in India provides livelihood support to over 42% of its population, contributing 18% to the country’s GDP, according to government data. However, the agri-input market, which provides inputs for the sector — be it seeds, pesticides, herbicides, or cultivation and harvesting tools — largely relies on traditional channels, including local offline marketplaces. The sector
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Nvidia and Apple are reportedly in talks to contribute to OpenAI’s next fundraising round — a round that could value the ChatGPT maker at $100 billion. Per its sources, the New York Times says earlier OpenAI investor Thrive Capital would lead the deal should it happen. (Bloomberg was the first to report Nvidia’s involvement, and
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A new service from the makers of the Mammoth app for Mastodon intends to bring the creator economy to the fediverse, also known as the open social web. Sub.club, launching on Thursday, will allow creators on Mastodon — a decentralized Twitter/X rival — to offer paid subscriptions and content by way of premium feeds. In
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Spotify claims Apple may be again in violation of European regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires interoperability from big technology companies dubbed “gatekeepers.” This time, the issue isn’t about in-app purchases, links or pricing information, but rather how Apple has discontinued the technology that allows Spotify users to control the volume on their
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Atlassian on Thursday announced that it has acquired Rewatch, an AI-powered meeting notetaker, screen recording tool and video hub. The company plans to integrate Rewatch into Loom, the asynchronous video messaging platform it acquired for $975 million last October. But maybe even more importantly, it also plans to integrate it into its recently launched Rovo
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