Author: TechCrunch News

Pula, an insurtech based in Kenya, has since 2015 been keen on enhancing the access to agricultural insurance by small-holder farmers across emerging markets, shielding them against losses from pests, diseases and/or extreme weather events like floods and droughts. So far, the insurtech has supported 15.4 million farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America to…

UK-based legaltech startup Lawhive, which offers an AI-based, in-house “lawyer” through a software-as-a-service platform targeted at small law firms, has raised £9.5 million ($11.9 million) in a seed round to expand the reach of AI-driven services for “main street” law firms. To date, most legaltech startups that have deployed AI have concentrated on the big,…

Social media startup ShareChat’s valuation has fallen to $2 billion from nearly $5 billion following a new funding round, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch, marking a steep decline for the 9-year-old Indian startup that boasts over 400 million users in the South Asian market. The Bengaluru-based startup, which operates a popular social…

Heya, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the past few days in tech. Google’s annual enterprise-focused dev conference, Google Cloud Next, dominated the headlines — and we had plenty of coverage from the event. But it wasn’t the only thing afoot (see: the spectacular eclipse). Lorenzo wrote about how…

This week in Las Vegas, 30,000 folks came together to hear the latest and greatest from Google Cloud. What they heard was all generative AI, all the time. Google Cloud is first and foremost a cloud infrastructure and platform vendor. If you didn’t know that, you might have missed it in the onslaught of AI…

Noname Security, a cybersecurity startup that protects APIs, is in advanced talks with Akamai Technologies to sell itself for $500 million, according to a person familiar with the deal. Noname was co-founded in 2020 by Oz Golan and Shay Levi and is headquartered in Palo Alto but has Israeli roots. The startup raised $220 million…

Ad blockers might seem like an unlikely defense in the fight against spyware, but new reporting casts fresh light on how spyware makers are weaponizing online ads to allow governments to conduct surveillance. Spyware makers are reportedly capable of locating and stealthily infecting specific targets with spyware using banner ads. One of the startups that…

In the generative AI boom, data is the new oil. So why shouldn’t you be able to sell your own? From big tech firms to startups, AI makers are licensing e-books, images, videos, audio and more from data brokers, all in the pursuit of training up more capable (and more legally defensible) AI-powered products. Shutterstock…

When Josh Silverman started shopping around the idea for his methane-eating microbe startup, Windfall Bio, eight years ago, the market just wasn’t ready. Nobody cared about methane, he said. Companies were instead focused on lowering their carbon emissions. But a few years later, the market is starting to come around. Menlo Park–based Windfall Bio raised…

Tesla has slashed the price of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software subscription to $99 per month, down from $199 per month, as the electric vehicle maker aims to boost adoption of its advanced driver assistance system ahead of first-quarter earnings. The price cut comes a couple of weeks after Tesla launched a free one-month trial…