Sitting in Athens during the first COVID-19 lockdown, entrepreneur Rania Lamprou watched online e-commerce exploding because of social distancing. But merchants still struggled with low conversion rates because their checkout processes were complicated, and they had to integrate multiple providers for payments, shipping, and loyalty programs. “I knew there had to be a better way […]

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The new fund has already made around 20 investments, and it will operate with a generalist thesis, investing across the whole of Europe.

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The strategy is to create consumer agents, but then use those to inform how they train agents in the enterprise.

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A new Dealroom report shows that VC investment in defense-related tech is outpacing any other type of investment across NATO member states and allies. 

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Startup employees often go on to found interesting ventures, basing their new work on the experience gained from their time building a company from scratch. But not all of those experiences are positive, and sometimes, a less-than-satisfactory exit can do more to fuel a founder’s fervor than anything else. In the case of Forward Earth’s […]

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As well as being a major cause of premature death worldwide, hypertension, also known as high blood pressure, is a major risk factor for stroke, coronary artery disease, and heart failure, and is a contributing factor to dementia. It also affects an estimated 1.3 billion people; up to 95% of cases are due to lifestyle […]

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The war in Ukraine has shown that warfare changes by the day. It’s also clear that the tech used to make war today is costly: While larger countries can afford legions of tanks, helicopters, and precision-strike systems, smaller nations find themselves scrambling for cheaper ways to defend themselves. Origin, a new defense tech startup out of […]

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The startup ecosystem in the Iberian Peninsula — the region encompassing Spain and Portugal — has been on a roll the last couple of years. The value of Spanish startups surpassed €100 billion in 2023, according to Dealroom data, with venture investment of €2.2 billion across some 850 rounds. Meanwhile, Portugal has produced a slew of […]

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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 Five AI, […]

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Air Doctor's platform helps travelers find doctors in other countries, and it has now raised $20 million in a Series B round after seeing strong traction. 

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A team of founders who sold their last company to Amazon to build a new unit within AWS is setting out to reinvent the tricky business of backing up organizations’ cloud infrastructure. Now, Eon is coming out of stealth with a product, a set of customers, three rounds of funding totaling $127 million, and a […]

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The race is on for better chips and data center capacity to handle AI workloads, but all that activity comes with a catch. Heavy processing power means heat — a lot of it — and that has massive implications, both for how well servers operate and the environment.  With traditional cooling methods like air and […]

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The tech world took a major double take this year when a security startup called Wiz founded out of Israel just four years earlier became the subject of a record-breaking, $23 billion acquisition attempt by Google — an offer the startup boldly proceeded … to refuse. Really? Yes, really. We will be talking to Assaf Rappaport, […]

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Ultrasound is perhaps best known as the technology that enables noninvasive body scans and underwater communication and can help us park our cars. A young startup called Sonair out of Norway wants to employ it for something else: 3D computer vision used in autonomous hardware applications.  Sonair’s founder and CEO Knut Sandven believes the company’s […]

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While companies like OpenAI and Anthropic continue to popularize the idea of using ordinary language to ask artificial intelligence agents for answers to their questions, write their proposals or draw pictures, a London startup called Basecamp Research has raised $60 million to tackle a new frontier. It’s building an AI agent that not only answers […]

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Harry Stebbings (pictured above), the U.K. podcaster who broke into the world of tech with his 20-minute interviews of venture capitalists and founders, parlayed that fame into becoming a VC himself. Now, Stebbings has closed his third investment vehicle, and it’s his biggest yet: 20VC, the firm named after the podcast series, has closed a […]

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Cyera, the Israel-founded, U.S.-based cybersecurity unicorn that uses artificial intelligence to build what’s known as data security posture management — a full assessment and picture of where a customers’ data has been created, where it is stored, and how it is used — has been on a growth tear in the last year, picking up […]

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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 leveled a blow to one of the biggest apps to come out of the country. Canada has ordered the closure of ByteDance’s operations in Canada — specifically the […]

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There’s a big opportunity for generative AI in the world of translation, and a startup called Panjaya is taking the concept to the next level: a hyperrealistic, GenAI-based dubbing tool for videos that recreates a person’s original voice speaking the new language, with the video and the speaker’s physical movements automatically modifying to match up […]

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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 […]

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Fleek, an online marketplace that connects second-hand clothing wholesalers with those who sell it at retail, has raised a $20.4 million Series A.

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No awards for correctly guessing that today’s big Unpacked news is all about the Samsung Galaxy S24 series. As anticipated, the Korean hardware giant just unveiled its latest flagship line, including the Galaxy S24, Galaxy S24+ and Galaxy S24 Ultra. The devices start at $800, $1,000 and $1,300, respectively. Also as anticipated, Samsung is leaning […]

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As Samsung unveiled its new Galaxy S24 line today, Google announced a series of new AI features that are launching for Android Auto, which is the secondary interface that brings the look and functions of a smartphone, like navigation and messaging, to your vehicle’s infotainment screen. Google says that with the help of AI, Android […]

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Apple’s iPhone has overtaken Samsung for the first time ever as the best-selling smartphone in 2023, according to a new report from IDC. The tech giant accounted for 20% of the global market with 234.6 million shipments last year. Samsung closed the year with 226.6 million shipments, while Xiaomi and Oppo saw 145.9 and 103.1 […]

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It took Oura (pictured above) to show the world that the ring is a viable health-tracking form factor. There have since been a handful of likeminded devices on the market, but no one quite as big as Samsung has further validated the technology by offering up their own take. The company concluded today’s Galaxy S24 […]

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The iPhone 15 and its many iterations comprised more than half of Apple’s Q4 smartphone shipments of nearly 2.8 million units in India, Canalys said in its quarterly report. The handset has seen remarkable success in India as Apple pushed the latest models during the festive sales, which occur across online and offline channels in […]

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Since launching its self-repair program in August 2022, Samsung has been aggressively adding new devices to the mix. Another upgrade this week brings the current offering up to 50 products (when you factor in variants like the Plus and Ultra), including smartphones, tablets, TVs, laptops, monitors, soundbars and even a projector. There are 14 new […]

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Sahmyook University this week showcased some of the ongoing work the Seoul-based research institute is doing with Samsung on the robot exosuit front. There aren’t a ton of details surrounding EX1 (not to be confused with an old Samsung digital camera by the same name) at the moment, but there are some promising results here. […]

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Last week’s Vision Pro release shed some fascinating light on Apple’s generally top secret development process. A Vanity Fair interview with Tim Cook detailed — in part — what a long and heavy lift it took to get the company’s first headset off the ground. The Apple CEO gave an early iteration of the device […]

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Samsung this morning announced that the Galaxy Watch line has received FDA approval for sleep apnea detection. The move is a big one for the smartwatch category, where health and fitness now comprise a majority of new features. For the last several years, the industry has focused on heart monitoring and blood oxygen detection, as […]

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After a brief tease at the end of its big Galaxy S24 event earlier this month, Samsung officially debuted the Galaxy Ring this morning at MWC. The earlier announcement offered little more than an image and confirmation that the hardware giant is entering that emerging corner of the wearable tech space. Following the Unpacked presser, […]

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The search giant is updating its Gemini for Android app to be more suitable for foldables with the ability to use Gemini with overlay and split screen interfaces.

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At the heart of the features is the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which is the same system on a chip that powered the Galaxy S24.

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While Samsung has maintained its own familiar design with the standard Galaxy Buds 3, the Pro are experiencing a sort of Apple identity crisis.

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Samsung is still foldables’ 500-pound gorilla, but the company successes have made the category significantly less lonely in recent years.

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Security researchers found a dozen vulnerabilities in 5G baseband chips found in phones made by Google, OPPO, OnePlus, Motorola, and Samsung.

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India's wearable market declined in Q2, primarily because smartwatch are not attracting consumers.

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We’ll be straight with you. There’s no 1:1 Twitter replacement, but there are plenty of social apps that might be worth substituting into your obsessive timeline-checking routines if you’re done with Twitter for whatever reason (we can think of plenty). Twitter’s current situation — advertisers leaving, Nazis logging back on — presents an opportunity to […]

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Abel creates AI that uses body cam footage and other data to fill out consuming police reports. For research, founder Daniel Francis shadowed the police.

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Eric Council Jr. and unnamed co-conspirators were allegedly behind the hack of the official @SECGov account on X.

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On Wednesday, social network X (formerly Twitter) updated its Privacy Policy to indicate that it would allow third-party “collaborators” to train their AI models on X data, unless users opt out. While X owner Elon Musk trained xAI’s Grok AI chatbot on X user data, leading to an investigation by the EU’s lead privacy regulator, […]

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Elon Musk’s X is planning to make a change to how the block function works, breaking from the established standards of other social media apps. When the policies around blocking change, people who have been blocked by someone will still be able to see that person’s posts, so long as they’re public. They just won’t […]

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X’s revenue in India plummeted 89.8% to $2.51 million in the financial year ending March, according to regulatory filings from the Elon Musk-owned social network. The company, which had posted revenue of $24.7 million in the previous fiscal year, also significantly reduced its expenses in India to $2.2 million from $20 million year-over-year, the filing […]

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In the final days leading up to the U.S. presidential election, Elon Musk’s X suspended the official account of a progressive-donor-backed ballot initiative called SwapYourVote. The volunteer-run website tries to get third-party voters in swing states to cast their ballots for Kamala Harris, matching them with Democrats in solidly blue states who agree to vote […]

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Similar to how Mastodon offers an open source, distributed version of X, the fediverse is getting its own TikTok competitor. This week, an app called Loops began accepting signups on its new platform for sharing short, looping videos. Still in the early stages, Loops is not yet open sourced, nor has it completed its integration […]

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Even cybersecurity companies aren’t safe from deepfake attacks. Speaking onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Wiz’s CEO and co-founder Assaf Rappaport, who recently turned down a $23 billion acquisition offer from Google, noted that his employees had been targeted by a deepfake attack just two weeks ago. “Dozens of my employees got a voice […]

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Ashton Kutcher’s VC firm, Sound Ventures, co-led by general partners Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein, is betting on AI — including with an investment in Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, the investors confirmed onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday. The startup, founded by Li, the Stanford professor dubbed the “Godmother of AI,” has already raised […]

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Creator of the iPod, Nest Labs founder, and investor Tony Fadell took a shot at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday during a spirited interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco. Speaking about his understanding of the longer history of AI development before the large language model (LLM) craze and the serious issues with […]

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WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Wednesday, said he’s not worried that the recent legal drama between his company, Automattic, and WordPress host WP Engine may lead to a fork of the open source WordPress software. In fact, he said, he’d welcome it. “There might be […]

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Instagram on Friday announced an update to DMs, its direct messages inbox, which will improve the experience for those who receive a lot of inbound messages, like creators and influencers. Now, the app is introducing tools that will allow users to sort and filter their “message requests” — meaning those messages that don’t arrive in […]

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