Author: TechCrunch News

Zanifu, a Kenyan fintech providing inventory financing to micro, small and medium-sized businesses, has raised $11.2 million debt-equity funding in a pre-Series A round led by Beyond Capital Ventures and Variant Investments. Founders Factory Africa, AAIC Investment, Google Black Founders Fund, and existing investor Launch Africa also participated in the round. This brings total debt-equity…

Tesla has said that insider wrongdoing was to blame for a data breach affecting more than 75,000 company employees. Tesla, the electric car maker owned by Elon Musk, said in a data breach notice filed with Maine’s attorney general that an investigation had found that two former employees leaked over 75,000 individuals’ personal information to…

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of the last week’s stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, Amazon announced that it’ll…

Welcome, friends, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering the major events in tech over the past few days. Haven’t had your eyes glued to the headlines? Not to worry. That’s our job, and we’ve compiled them in the nifty little digest that is WiR. In this week’s edition of WiR, we cover…

For years, cops and other government authorities all over the world have been using phone hacking technology provided by Cellebrite to unlock phones and obtain the data within. And the company has been keen on keeping the use of its technology “hush hush.” As part of the deal with government agencies, Cellebrite asks users to…

Anyone with a Costco card knows you save more when you buy in bulk. Now apply that same theory to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, and you can save a bundle when you take your team, your clients or your star startups to San Francisco in September. Heck, take your family and let them see what you…

Tech nonprofit Garbo announced today it’s ending its formal partnership with Match Group, the dating app giant behind Tinder, Plenty of Fish, Match and other apps. The two companies first teamed up in 2021, when Match made a seven-figure investment in the background check provider, following a series of reports about harm that came to…

Defense-focused space technology startup True Anomaly has received key permits from regulators that will allow it to demonstrate imaging and rendezvous capabilities on-orbit for the first time. The two authorizations — from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — give the company the greenlight to perform non-Earth imaging…

Startups that were deemed worthy of a $1 billion valuation while still private were once so unusual, they seemed almost mythical — hence the “unicorn” moniker they were awarded. But when the COVID pandemic started waning, venture capitalists started letting out all their pent-up energy and capital and unicorns might as well have grown two…

OpenAI, the AI company behind the viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, has acquired Global Illumination, a New York-based startup leveraging AI to build creative tools, infrastructure and digital experiences. It’s OpenAI’s first public acquisition in its roughly-seven-year-history. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. “We’re very excited for the impact they’ll have here at OpenAI,” OpenAI…