Author: TechCrunch News

Saviu Ventures, a VC firm targeting startups in Francophone Africa, has made an initial close of €12 million for its second fund with the backing of private investors, including French and Kenyan family offices. The VC firm aims to close the fund at between €30 million and €50 million to primarily invest in startups within…

Raphael Ouzan Contributor Raphael Ouzan is the founder and CEO of A.Team, a future-of-work company pioneering the world’s first AI-enabled team formation platform. More posts by this contributor The AI skills gap is real. A recent study from Randstad, the recruitment company, found that job posts referencing generative AI skills have risen by 2,000% since…

Berkshire Hathaway sold its shares in the Paytm-parent firm One97 Communications Friday, booking a loss of about 40% on the investment it made more than five years ago. The Warren Buffett firm invested about $260 million in Paytm in 2018, acquiring a 3% stake in the financial services startup at a valuation of about $10…

Well before Washington banned Nvidia’s exports of high-performance graphic processing units to China, the country’s tech giants had been hoarding them in anticipation of an escalating tech war between the two nations. Baidu, one of the tech firms building China’s counterparts to OpenAI, has secured enough AI chips to keep training its ChatGPT equivalent Ernie…

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with some truly spectacular founders. One guy was a three-star general at one point. Another is in the U.S. because his research is so far ahead of the AI learning curve that the U.S. State Department issued him an O-1 extraordinary ability visa. Another had a…

The OpenAI power struggle that captivated the tech world after co-founder Sam Altman was fired has finally reached its end — at least for the time being. But what to make of it? It feels almost as though some eulogizing is called for — like OpenAI died and a new, but not necessarily improved, startup…

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said Wednesday that the app now allows all users across the world to download public Reels to their devices. Prior to this rollout, you could only save Reels to the Instagram app for viewing them later. Mosseri said on his broadcast channel on Instagram that downloaded Reels will have an Instagram…

Sunbird, which aims to bring iMessage to Android users, has halted development and pulled its app from the Play Store amid security issues raised this week. Earlier this week, the company sent a notification to its users, as noted by 9to5Google first, saying that it is pausing the development of the app to investigate security…

Incumbents in the parcel deliveries space usually have fixed daily routes from suburban depots. But since most parcels are fairly lightweight, this is a bit of a hammer to crack a nut. So it makes sense to “Uber-ise” local deliveries. Indeed, in Asia, the ‘asset free’ delivery model of using mini depots instead of large owned…

While everybody is trying to figure out how artificial intelligence can be leveraged across various industries, French startup Osium AI has found an interesting use cases for AI — research and development in materials science. Founded by Sarah Najmark and Luisa Bouneder, the startup raised a $2.6 million seed round from Y Combinator, Singular, Kima Ventures,…