Author: TechCrunch News

While the venture world is abuzz over generative AI, Dayna Grayson, a longtime venture capitalist who five years ago co-founded her own firm, Construct Capital, has been focused on comparatively boring software that can transform industrial sectors. Her mission doesn’t exclude AI, but it also doesn’t depend on it. Construct recently led a seed-stage round,…

Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the week that was in tech. This edition’s a tad bittersweet for me — it’ll be my last (for a while, anyway). Soon, I’ll be shifting my attention to a new AI-focused newsletter, which I’m super thrilled about. Stay tuned! Now, on with…

X, formerly Twitter, is now using Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to power a feature that summarizes the personalized trending stories in the app’s Explore section. According to an announcement and screenshots posted by the X Engineering team on Friday, X’s Premium subscribers will be able to read a summary of posts on X associated…

Hallucinations — the lies generative AI models tell, basically — are a big problem for businesses looking to integrate the technology into their operations. Because models have no real intelligence and are simply predicting words, images, speech, music and other data according to a private schema, they sometimes get it wrong. Very wrong. In a…

Microsoft has reaffirmed its ban on U.S. police departments from using generative AI for facial recognition through Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI tech. Language added Wednesday to the terms of service for Azure OpenAI Service more clearly prohibits integrations with Azure OpenAI Service from being used “by or for”…

In a new filing, Google is pushing back against Fortnite maker Epic Games’ numerous proposed remedies after a court determined Google engaged in anticompetitive practices on its Play Store. Following the jury’s decision late last year, the two sides pled their cases about how Google should have to change its behavior in light of the…

The downturn in venture capital funding has impacted startups, VC firms, and accelerators alike. One company in the final category, Techstars, has been shaking up its operations for some time now, leading to a number of departures. TechCrunch got curious about what happened, so we dove deep into exactly how it all went down. We…

Digital fraud detection company BioCatch has a new majority shareholder: U.K-based private equity firm, Permira, is acquiring shares in the company “primarily” from existing investors including Bain Capital, Maverick Ventures, and Tech Opportunities, in a secondary market transaction that values BioCatch at $1.3 billion. Existing shareholders Sapphire Ventures and Macquarie Capital are also increasing their…

The logistics industry in Nigeria, like any informal sector, struggles with poor infrastructure and other inefficiencies, making it difficult for businesses — both large and small — to move and store goods. Many startups have tackled middle-mile and last-mile delivery challenges, but one untapped area is providing an end-to-end fulfillment solution. Renda, a three-year-old startup,…

The Federal Trade Commission hit Razer with a $1.1 million fine Tuesday. The order claims that the gaming accessory maker misled consumers by claiming that its flashy Zephyr mask was certified as N95-grade. “These businesses falsely claimed, in the midst of a global pandemic, that their face mask was the equivalent of an N95 certified…