Telegram founder Pavel Durov said today that the service now has more than 1 billion active users. This number is up from last year’s reported 950 million monthly active users. Durov also noted that the company registered $547 million in profits last year. He had announced the company’s profitability in December but hadn’t provided any … Read more
Social media site X’s valuation has bounced back to $44 billion, according to a new report from the Financial Times. Elon Musk purchased the platform, formerly known as Twitter, for $44 billion back in 2022. However, a report from Bloomberg states that X has raised close to $1 billion from investors in a deal that … Read more
Ribbit Capital is raising $500 million for a new fund, an SEC filing seen by TechCrunch has revealed. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
NVIDIA’s GTC conference kicked off with a series of announcements highlighting its role in advancing autonomous driving technology. The chipmaker provides automakers and autonomous vehicle companies with a handful of Nvidia-branded tools to help power self-driving cars and create digital twins of factories. On Tuesday, companies including Torc, Gatik, and even General Motors announced plans … Read more
Dataminr, a data analytics company that counts NATO and OpenAI among its customers, has raised $85 million in a combination of convertible financing and credit, Dataminr announced on Wednesday. It’s chump change for Dataminr, which closed a $475 million round at a $4.1 billion valuation in 2021. But the company has seen its fair share … Read more
Streaming service and software maker Plex is raising its prices. The company announced on Wednesday its first price increase in a decade for its premium subscription service Plex Pass, which offers power users a variety of additional features, like offline access, themes, hardware transcoding, and other advanced settings. The service will now cost $6.99 per … Read more
Google Search and its Play Store app marketplace are suspected of breaching the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), per preliminary findings announced Wednesday by EU Commission enforcers of the bloc’s flagship market contestability law, who have been investigating the company for months. The DMA applies to a handful of tech giants, Alphabet (Google’s parent) … Read more
The judge also found that the nonprofits will “suffer imminent, irreparable harm” if they don’t gain access to their funding. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Have researchers discovered a new AI “scaling law”? That’s what some buzz on social media suggests — but experts are skeptical. AI scaling laws, a bit of an informal concept, describe how the performance of AI models improves as the size of the datasets and computing resources used to train them increases. Until roughly a … Read more
Robots are part of an exciting new frontier in tech, but here’s the challenge: robots rely on arrays of sensors, external signals like GPS and Wi-Fi, and customized software to navigate their environments. Further, robotics often involves expensive, ready-made hardware solutions that include built-in software and sensors designed for specific tasks, like estimating relative motion. … Read more
PSEA says it “took steps to ensure” its stolen data was deleted, suggesting a ransom demand was paid © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Max announced on Wednesday that the HBO series “The Last of Us” will be available to stream in American Sign Language (ASL). Season 2 premieres on April 13. Notably, this is the first time HBO’s original content will be accessible for streaming in ASL on the service, representing a step towards inclusivity for deaf and … Read more
AI startup Hugging Face has released a new app for iOS that only does one thing: uses offline, local AI to describe what’s in view of your iPhone’s camera. The app, called HuggingSnap, taps Hugging Face’s in-house vision model, smolvlm2, to analyze what your phone sees in real-time without sending data off to the cloud. … Read more
During a recent dinner with business leaders in San Francisco, a comment I made cast a chill over the room. I hadn’t asked my dining companions anything I considered to be extremely faux pas: simply whether they thought today’s AI could someday achieve human-like intelligence (i.e. AGI) or beyond. It’s a more controversial topic than … Read more
Former NSA deputy director George Barnes has made his first investment as a venture capitalist for his new job at the VC incubation studio Red Cell Partners. It’s a $3 million seed deal in an open source cybersecurity startup called Hunted Labs, he told TechCrunch exclusively. Barnes spent his entire 35-year career at the spy agency, … Read more
After hitting record lows at the start of the pandemic, mortgage rates began to climb in 2022 and haven’t come down significantly since. With 30-year mortgage rates hovering at over 6.5% today (they were as low as 2.49% in 2020!), buying a home is simply not that attainable for many people. One Denver-based startup is … Read more
Google has officially unveiled the Pixel 9a smartphone, its new midrange phone that will retail for $499. The A-series smartphone’s biggest change is its appearance, as the latest model ditches the camera bar on the back of the phone. The smartphone is getting a chip upgrade, as the new model features Google’s Tensor G4 processor, … Read more
Zoox, Amazon’s autonomous driving unit, has issued a voluntary recall for 258 vehicles due to issues with its autonomous driving system that could cause unexpected hard breaking. The recall follows a preliminary investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) last May after the agency received two reports of incidents in which motorcyclists collided … Read more
Mobile networks continue to be a major target for cybersecurity breaches, and Chinese hacking group Salt Typhoon‘s persistent attacks on multiple carriers are only the latest known examples. The mobile carrier startup Cape is taking a novel approach to addressing the problem: it has built a service it says can provide a more secure, private … Read more
TechCrunch Sessions: AI is nearly upon us, and you have the power to decide who you want to see lead a dynamic breakout session. We have whittled speaker applications down to six incredible finalists to take the stage on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley. Who do you want to see share their … Read more
Google announced on Wednesday that kids with Android phones can now tap to pay at stores using Google Wallet in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, and Poland. Parents and guardians in these countries can now allow their children to access digital payments on their Android devices with supervision. Kids can also use Google … Read more
Booking an ad campaign with social media influencers is currently not exactly easy. For starters, influencers’ approaches to marketing can be unconventional, and there’s no standard way to engage with them. On the other side, marketing agencies that employ hosts of people to book and track brand campaigns are limited by how many influencers they … Read more
The Citizen Lab said it believes several governments may be customers of spyware maker Paragon Solutions. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nearly 10 years after filing to go public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Toronto Stock Exchange, Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify has announced that it’s transitioning its U.S. listing to the Nasdaq. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday, Shopify said it is removing its Class A shares … Read more
There’s a controversy brewing over “AI-generated” studies submitted to this year’s ICLR, a long-running academic conference focused on AI. At least three AI labs — Sakana, Intology, and Autoscience — claim to have used AI to generate studies that were accepted to ICLR workshops. At conferences like ICLR, workshop organizers typically review studies for publication … Read more
Prezent has raised $20 million in an all-equity funding to build specialized presentation models and expand its footprint into new markets. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.S. crossed the 100 million paid subscriber mark for music streaming services for the first time ever last year, as per a new report by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA). The subscriber number was up from 96.8 million in 2023, with year-on-year growth of roughly 3%. RIAA’s report said that these numbers … Read more
Aletiq has raised a €6 million funding round led by Point Nine a few months ago (around $6.5 million at current exchange rates). The French startup is announcing the founding round today. Aletiq has been developing product lifecycle management (PLM) software for manufacturing industrial companies working in aerospace, automotive, electronics, luxury and more. When you … Read more
While Rippling and Deel duke it out in the field and in the courtroom alleging illegal sales and marketing tactics, here’s another way to boost business growth: pick up a massive sum of cash to expand your operations in those areas. Factorial, the Barcelona-based “unicorn” startup that provides an all-in-one HR platform in the cloud … Read more
President Trump fired the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Tuesday, setting up a challenge to a 1935 Supreme Court precedent prohibiting the firing of FTC commissioners for reasons other than “good cause.” The White House terminated commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya earlier Tuesday, The New York Times reported. … Read more