Block Party, a startup developed by software engineer and tech diversity advocate Tracy Chou, was among the victims of Twitter’s (now X’s) API changes earlier this year, forcing it to pivot its business. At the SXSW conference in Austin this weekend, Chou presented a glimpse of what Block Party is now up to with its […]

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Founded by former Silicon Valley engineers, UK-based Griffin Bank bills itself as an API-driven ‘Banking as a Service’ platform. After raising $28.1 million, it has now raised another $24 million (£19 million) in a fresh, extended Series A, funding round led by MassMutual Ventures, NordicNinja and Breega, with participation from existing investors Notion Capital and […]

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Turo, the venture-backed, peer-to-peer car rental service, reported its fourth-quarter and full-year financial performance this week in an updated IPO filing. The company first filed an S-1 to go public in early 2022, later updating the document quarterly in preparation for an eventual offering. TechCrunch covers its regular financial disclosures as they provide insight into […]

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Yet another AI-powered fraud detection software provider is laying off staff. Inscribe, whose platform works to detect fraud in areas like business underwriting, tenant screening, and onboarding, has cut just under 40% of its staff, which equates to dozens of employees. The news follows that of another, small round of layoffs at AI-powered plagiarism detector, […]

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Sunnyvale-based Brevian wants to make it easier for business users to build custom AI agents. Currently, the company is focused on support teams and security analysts — areas where both the use cases and training sets are well defined — but plans to expand to other areas over time. The company is coming out of stealth […]

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People worry that advances in AI will lead to job losses, but rarely does a company’s CEO openly admit that AI will help to reduce their headcount. Turnitin, a plagiarism detection company whose CEO Chris Caren last year warned that, in 18 months, his company would be able to reduce 20% of its headcount thanks […]

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Anonymous social apps are in for a reckoning. Yes, again. This week, University of North Carolina (UNC) System President Peter Hans announced a plan to block the use of popular anonymous social apps on campus, including Yik Yak, Fizz, Whisper, and Sidechat. The ban would impact the 16 universities, like UNC Chapel Hill, NCSU, UNC […]

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Build something people want. It’s a simple concept — and one that Y Combinator loves to repeat — but one that can be hard to get right when building a startup. How strongly a technology good or service resonates with potential customers is often called “product-market fit,” or PMF. The more product-market fit you have, […]

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While many entrepreneurs are currently facing the harsh reality of a VC funding crunch, Qonto isn’t one of them. The Paris-based business banking startup still has hundreds of millions of cash on hand. And it is using an undisclosed portion of its cash reserve to acquire Regate, an accounting and financial automation platform. Qonto originally […]

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In today's episode, we talk about OpenAI bringing receipts to its tussle with Musk, Monzo's big fundraise, a big startup deal, and new climate regulations.

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Making a video game successful is already hard. Doing so while complying with the growing number of child safety laws and regulations around the world is an almost insurmountable task. A new technology company called k-ID aims to make this process much easier for game makers, by offering a framework that protects publishers and developers […]

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UK startup Fluent has closed a $7.5M seed round to apply LLMs to business databases, making them far easier to interrogate.

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