Apple cancels autonomous car project

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Christine Hall Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome to TechCrunch PM. I'm here to help you wind down your day with today's biggest news, starting with Apple's decision to cancel its autonomous car project and lay off some employees. Meanwhile, Lapse grabs funding, Sony also makes layoffs and Threads is very popular. — Christine Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

TechCrunch PM Top 3 Apple slices and dices Project Titan: In a developing story, we learned that Apple made the decision to end its decade-long attempt to enter the autonomous vehicle space. We got word there are layoffs associated with this move, but we have not yet determined how many. Lapse snaps up $30 million: Lapse, the app that turns your phone into an "old school" camera, claims millions of users, 100 million photos captured each month and a top 10 ranking in the U.S. App Store for photographic apps. Now it has a new round of funding. Threads widens its gap with X: In the war to win users, Meta's Threads has won the most recent battle after seeing three times more daily downloads than X. Granted, Threads is a newer app, and a lot of people had X already or have vowed never to use X again. Still, it's Meta's market to make. Image Credits: Lapse under a license.

More top reads Sony and its layoffs: Sony is the latest Big Tech company to announce some major layoffs in recent weeks. The electronics giant is cutting 8% of its workforce, or 900 jobs, in its PlayStation division. The company cited that "changes need to be made to continue to grow the business and develop the company." Photoroom now valued at $500 million: After first reporting that Photoroom was looking for funding in January, we've now confirmed that it's raised $43 million. The company developed an AI-based photo-editing app currently processing some 5 billion images annually. GitHub Copilot! Get your GitHub Copilot!: GitHub made its Copilot Enterprise product generally available. The $39-per-month version of GitHub's code completion tool and developer-centric chatbot for large businesses, Copilot Enterprise includes all the features of the existing Business plan, including IP indemnity, but extends this with a number of crucial features for larger teams. Writer helps you generate text from images: There's no shortage of tools out there leveraging generative AI to help you get something done. In Writer's case, it can create text from images, including graphs and charts. TikTok loses more songs: TikTok's continued quarrel with Universal Music Group has no outcome yet, and that means more songs are being removed and videos containing any songs have to be muted. Apple's Vision Pro gets a split screen: Your work desk might not be big enough for multiple screens, but in Vision Pro’s world it is. A new app called Splitscreen gives you that and more. Meet Codified: The startup is out to solve the data compliance problem "by making sure that you can easily get access to data in a compliant manner within your company." Image Credits: Akio Kon / Bloomberg / Getty Images

Before you go Mobile World Congress is taking place this week in Barcelona, and we have a team bringing you all the products, announcements and startup news from the conference. Some of the highlights include Jolla's "blackbox for your life," the Displace wireless television, Lizcore's sport tracking system, eQub's peer-to-peer lending app and Synflora's skincare revolution. Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

On the pods On today's Found, Dominic-Madori Davis speaks with Parachute's Ariel Kaye. Kaye started the bedding and home goods company in 2013, the heyday of direct-to-consumer brands. She joins Dom to talk about what it was like building as a solo founder while she's established a well-known brand and expanded beyond bedding. Listen here. Every Tuesday, Becca Szkutak and Dominic-Madori Davis interview early-stage founders on their origins, product roadmaps, funding efforts and how they grow from failures. Want to be featured? Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Join Waymo, Signal, and more at StrictlyVC Los Angeles Join StrictlyVC’s cocktail party in Los Angeles on February 29 to hear from leaders like Meredith Whittaker (president, Signal) and Tekedra Mawakana (co-CEO, Waymo), and connect with top VCs and entrepreneurs. Tickets are $150 — register today. Read More

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Here, read this AI-improved novel

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Alex Wilhelm Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Good morning and welcome to TechCrunch AM. If you are building a startup that uses AI, there's a lot for you in today's issue. We also bring: New venture funds that founders can target in their next fundraising cycle, notes for folks who run platforms on major, potential legal changes in a key market for Internet media, and several mega-rounds that should make everyone in Startup Land breathe a sigh of relief: Big checks are back, baby! – Alex

TechCrunch Top 3 Inkitt raises $37M for AI-tweaked fiction: Inkitt's fresh Series C (led by Vinod Khosla) is proof that reading is not yet dead. The service offers a place for authors to share their works with potential readers, and their works are included in its reading app Galatea if they do well. There's an AI angle, with Inkitt picking the "most compelling [stories uploaded to its service] to tweak and subsequently distribute and sell on Galatea." I am 85,000 words into writing a novel, so I'm viscerally aware of how large a project writing a book is. More folks writing, more tools to help, and potentially more readers? I dig it. The future of the Internet up for debate: Can companies control what is uploaded to, and shared on, their own platforms? That's the question before the United States Supreme Court, which is hearing a case concerning two state laws that "limit how social media companies can moderate the content on their platforms," Taylor Hatmaker reports. It's a massive case and it could reshape how online platforms function in the United States, a critical market for digital services. Microsoft tosses Mistral AI $16M: Compared to the funds that Microsoft has pumped into OpenAI, the recent investment by the U.S.-based tech giant into French AI startup Mistral is modest. But it's important for two reasons: One, Microsoft wants to ensure that no matter which company makes the best AI models, it has access to those LLMs and can ensure that they play nice with its Azure cloud platform. Second, with regulators poking at Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI, having more than one AI buddy is good corporate politics. Image Credits: Richard Sharrocks / Getty Images

Don't miss these Will Reddit become a meme stock? Reddit, the social forum service many individual investors call home, is going public. Many Reddit users love to trade, and have turned some companies' equity into "meme stocks" (investments that are driven more by community sentiment than, say, traditional investing philosophies). We all recall the Gamestop matter, right? The question before Reddit is what it will be like to live as a public company that is also a conversational host to a bunch of folks with itchy trading fingers. At a minimum, the company's IPO will give us a fascinating look at how much power individual investors have over market movements. Did you know that AI engineers work a lot? That was my takeaway from reading cross-cultural work notes by AI researchers. After an OpenAI denizen shared his daily work and life schedule, a member of Alibaba's own LLM crew did the same, which ended up as direct evidence that AI research is more or less the same everywhere. It's a lot of work, a lot of thinking, and not a lot of time doing much else. Capital incoming: Based in Dubai, COTU Ventures has put together a $54 million first fund. The capital will go to "startups in the Middle East from pre-seed to seed stages." We love a pre-seed fund, and it's good to see a new one pop up in a region that could use the investing capital. Speaking of the Middle East, and capital inflows, the Qatar Investment Authority intends to inject $1 billion into the venture world through a fund-of-funds. Qatar wants startups and VCs to consider it as a destination (money from wealthy nations in the region is not anything new in venture capital, of course). Elsewhere in the world of technology, Asymmetric Financial has put together a bitcoin-focused decentralized finance fund worth $21 million. This round adds to the evidence that there's good reason to expect 2024 to be far better for web3 than 2023 was. And to close out the fund-focused portion of this newsletter: Zacua Ventures has compiled a $56 million fund focused on early-stage construction tech startups. Construction tech – and close cousin proptech – is not simple, but it is a massive market. Shadowfax raises $100M for Indian last-mile logistics: In India, Shadowfax wants to unify "disparate elements in India's last-mile ecosystem," and has raised a Series E to keep working on the challenge. The round stands out thanks to its size – India has seen venture capital inflow slow down in recent quarters, which makes this nine figure round a positive signal. Glean raises $200M for enterprise AI: When Glean was born, the startup's founders wanted to help workers at companies find the information that they needed faster. Now with generative AI at the forefront of its tech, Glean can do a lot more, like ingesting operational data from companies – chats, support tickets, etc. – to better answer employees' queries. Danish startup wants to limit subscription churn: Danish startup Subsets is building retention-focused software for subscription media. I know from personal experience how brutal churn can be for media products that depend on recurring revenue, so I can see why the startup exists. It just raised $1.65 million, and is working with The Athletic as well as a Danish newspaper. SpaceX's Starship fixes approved by FAA: Building big rockets from scratch is not an easy task because early versions tend to go boom. SpaceX had to endure a review by the Federal Aviation Administration after its second Starship orbital test ended in a fiery mess, despite some notable achievements. The FAA has approved the fixes SpaceX wants to make, and once they are done, the company will be able to give its massive rocket another go. Image Credits: TechCrunch

Before you go Can your phone do this? Many phones can fold these days — it's a neat way to create larger phones that can still have a compact form factor some of the time. However, Motorola has something even better up its sleeve: a rollable phone. I struggle to come up with a use case, but I want one all the same. Image Credits: Brian Heater

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Mistral AI is taking on OpenAI, Anthropic

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Christine Hall Monday, February 26, 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome to TechCrunch PM, the afternoon equivalent to our daily newsletter bringing you all the startup, venture capital and Big Tech news. Today, we just so happen to have a lot of Big Tech. We cover Mistral AI, a startup taking on some of the biggest LLM companies; a big M&A deal; and a news reader. And we catch up on what the TechCrunch team is covering at Mobile World Congress. — Christine Image Credits: Nathan Laine / Bloomberg / Getty Images

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TechCrunch PM Top 3 A large language model to rival OpenAI: Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is launching Mistral Large, a new flagship large language model that is designed to rival OpenAI and Anthropic. There's also an alternative to ChatGPT called Le Chat. How has the company been able to do this? For starters, the founders are from the likes of Google's DeepMind and Meta. It also raised an extreme amount of seed capital. KKR to acquire VMware unit: Among the multibillion-dollar M&A pool of deals we are seeing lately, KKR is jumping in with the acquisition of VMware's end user computing business. It is expected to pay Broadcom $4 billion for it. Ransomware attack blamed for Change Healthcare outage: We have an update for you on the ongoing cyberattack affecting U.S. health tech giant Change Healthcare. We've learned it was caused by ransomware and is being attributed to the BlackCat ransomware group. It's still not known if patient data was stolen. Image Credits: MaboHH / Getty Images

More top reads FlowGPT is the Wild West of GenAI apps: OpenAI's GPT Store is great; however, not everyone wants to only use OpenAI's models. FlowGPT decided to create its own app store for generative AI models where users can build their own apps, make them public and earn tips for their contributions. Meet Particle, a new AI news reader: Some former Twitter engineers are out to use AI to help people process news and information. Called Particle.news, the startup entered into private beta with a personalized "multi-perspective" news reading experience where AI will summarize the news for you. It also claims to do so in a way that fairly compensates authors and publishers. BLKFAM launches kids’ programming: BLKFAM, which considers its platform "the first and only Black-owned and Black-focused family streaming service," launched with over 1,000 hours of kid-friendly animation titles. The free, ad-supported family streaming service is backed by Whoopi Goldberg, who is also BLKFAM's creative director. More original live-action and animated series are set to debut throughout 2024. Meta drops lawsuit against Bright Data: Meta has decided not to move forward with a lawsuit against Israeli web-scraping company Bright Data, which was accused of scraping Meta's own data when Meta was a customer. It may be that Meta also didn't like that the court recently ruled in favor of Bright Data on a breach of contract claim, saying that Meta hadn't presented sufficient evidence that proved the firm had scraped anything other than public data. UiPath pivots: After Rob Enslin joined the enterprise SaaS company as co-CEO in 2022, he went to work reorganizing the company's structure, sales motion and product focus. Today, its growth rates have not only bounced back to double digits, but have also posted consecutive quarters of accelerating growth. Things are not going well for ConnectWise: Two of the popular remote-access tool's easy-to-exploit flaws are now "being mass exploited, with hackers abusing the vulnerabilities to deploy ransomware and steal sensitive data." We still don't know the extent of the damage, but given the number of devices, it could be in the millions. Speaking of hacks: Days after the notorious Russia-based LockBit ransomware group was knocked offline by a sweeping, years-in-the-making law enforcement operation, it has returned to the dark web with a new leak site and new victims. I think LockBit rather enjoys a good cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement, don't you? Instagram and its Friend Map feature: Want to know where your friends are? Instagram is working on a feature for that. Should the feature go public, it would be copying from Snapchat, but also appealing to people who want to tell their friends about a swinging hotspot. Image Credits: FlowGPT

Before you go Mobile World Congress is taking place this week in Barcelona, and we have a team bringing you all the products, announcements and startup news from the conference. Some of the highlights include Xiaomi’s first electric car, Microsoft’s new AI access principles designed to offset any OpenAI competition concerns and Samsung’s first smart ring.

On the pods Today on Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines, Alex Wilhelm looked back at the weekend and what's ahead for this week. Here's what we got into: We have a big earnings week, with Workday, Zoom, Unity, Coupang, Klaviyo, Salesforce, Snowflake, Okta and Duolingo, among other names, sharing their quarterly data. Google, and its work to bring Gemini to a host of hardware endpoints. Why U.S.-based venture capitalists face a host of troubles in conquering Europe. Interview Kickstart is the latest startup to self-fund for a long time before taking on venture capital. In its case, that patience has led to a $10 million round. And to close, who is the CEO of Byju's? Listen here. Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

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