Author: TechCrunch News

Make way for another forum on AI safety. The UK government has announced it will convene a “global” AI summit this fall with the aim of agreeing “safety measures to evaluate and monitor the most significant risks from AI”, as its PR puts it. There’s no word on who will attend as yet — but…

COVID-19 has upended many aspects of busienss, including the way enterprises sell software. As the pandemic kept people at home, SaaS sales teams were forced to adjust their strategies. In the past, they relied mostly on in-person meetings to close deals, but with social distancing measures in place during the pandemic, they turned to the…

While cloud computing has transformed just about every industry on Earth, a burgeoning backlash has led some businesses to seek alternatives to the Big Tech-dominated public cloud. Vendor lock-in, spiralling costs, security concerns, and a lack of control over how their data is processed are just some of the reasons companies might retreat from cloud-first…

Ceci Kurzman has spent much of her career building and investing in brands and serving as one of the few Black female board members for companies, including Lanvin, Revlon and Warner Music+. While investing on behalf of some clients interested in beauty and personal care, Kurzman saw a gap in what kinds of products were…

The European Union is leaning on signatories to its Code of Practice on Online Disinformation to label deepfakes and other AI-generated content. In remarks yesterday following a meeting with the 40+ signatories to the Code, the EU’s values and transparency commissioner, Vera Jourova, said those signed up to combat disinformation should put in place technology…

There’s room for startups to cut their cloud costs, even if they have to balance the implicit costs of doing so, such as the time required and the potential for slower development. The question then becomes: How much of a priority is finding incremental savings for young tech companies? A recent survey of founders by…

Helium Health, the African startup that provides software-as-a-service tools, financing, and insights for healthcare providers and public health organizations, has raised $30 million in Series B funding.  The news is coming three years after the Lagos-headquartered healthtech secured a $10 million Series A and 18 months following a rare Africa-GCC deal involving UAE-based healthcare provider-patient…

A conversation with Lidiane Jones about Slack’s future In a flurry of activity at the end of last year, Salesforce announced that co-CEO Bret Taylor was stepping down. Shortly thereafter, Slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield announced his exit. We would soon learn that his replacement would be Lidiane Jones, who at the time was…

Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the week in tech. Hope the summer’s treating y’all well — it’s a balmy 90 degrees here in NYC! — and that some much-needed R&R is on the agenda. Speaking of “agenda,” mark your calendars for Disrupt, TC’s annual conference, kicking off…

W elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. This week, I explore how one VC is feeling about a big chunk of her portfolio pivot into AI. And I have some…