Jonathan Martinez Contributor Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who's helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups. More posts by this contributor CRO: Why startups should prioritize conversion rate optimization early Are you spending too much on paid acquisition? Launching a … [Read more...]

“This completes the transition to Apple silicon,” Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus noted during last week’s WWDC keynote. Apple never promised the process would happen overnight. At the 2020 event, CEO Tim Cook promised a two-year transitionary period. The company missed the deadline by a year, but a lot has happened during that time, not the least of which was a global … [Read more...]

VTubers — online personalities who use motion-capture-powered manga- and anime-inspired avatars to interact with the world alongside games, over YouTube, and in other places — have become big business, with the most popular of them collectively racking up hundreds of millions of hours of viewership in a month, along with loyal fan bases, lucrative sponsorships and demand for more. Now, it appears … [Read more...]

How about we kick off the week with some good news? This morning, American fast-casual restaurant chain Cava raised its IPO price range from $17-$19 per share to $19-$20 per share. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. As we reported during Cava’s IPO run, the company shares a number of similarities … [Read more...]

Not to be outdone by Google, Meta has released its own AI-powered music generator — and, unlike Google, made it available in open source. Called MusicGen, Meta’s music-generating tool — a demo of which can be found here — can turn a text description (e.g. “An ’80s driving pop song with heavy drums and synth pads in the background”) into about 12 seconds of audio, give or take. MusicGen can … [Read more...]

Just as thousands of Reddit communities went dark to protest the company’s controversial new policy that will put third-party apps out of business, the website itself has gone down. The cause of the outage, for the time being, is unclear. But according to user reports, Reddit.com has been experiencing problems since around 10:25 AM EDT. However, Reddit’s own Status page is showing “all systems … [Read more...]

Instagram Notes is today getting its first set of new features following its December 2022 public launch. Currently, Instagram Notes allows users to leave a status message that appears for their Close Friends or mutuals at the top of their inbox. With today’s update, Notes will also support music and translations, according to a post shared by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg via his Instagram Broadcast … [Read more...]

How well have alternative-protein companies done in the past year? It depends on who you ask. The industry has had an interesting go of it between the U.S. getting comfortable with cultivated meat production, layoffs and countries banning production. Yet, startups and investors are hanging in there. To get the pulse of what’s germinating in this fast-rising industry, TechCrunch+ surveyed five … [Read more...]

A team of Twitter alumni is today launching a new consumer social app, Rex, aimed at helping people share their personal recommendations of places to visit — like restaurants, bars, museums, and other businesses, even trails and parks. Using a combination of AI and computer vision technologies, the app aims to make it easier to get started sharing your recommendations by scouring your phone’s … [Read more...]

ABB this week announced that it has acquired Eve Systems, a German firm best known for a broad range of smart home accessories, including smart lights, plugs, air monitors and security cameras. I’ll admit the deal initially struck me as strange, given that Zurich-based ABB is well known – in my world, at least – as one of the leaders in industrial robotic arms. More broadly, however, it’s an … [Read more...]

The thin and light notebook is a creature of sacrifice. It’s a reminder that freedom of movement means leaving things behind. It’s packing a single knapsack for a week-long trip, leaving your home unencumbered, but entirely aware that some of the things you might want – or even occasionally need – won’t be coming with you. As technology advances, such sacrifices grow less common. Battery for one … [Read more...]

Following the UK government’s announcement last week that it plans to host a “global” AI safety summit this fall, prime minister Rishi Sunak has kicked off London Tech Week with another tidbit of news — telling conference goers that OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic have committed to provide “early or priority access” to their AI models to support research into evaluation and safety. Sunak has … [Read more...]

Despite some typically British (or, more accurately, English) doom-mongering about the UK’s VC ecosystem lately, there’s no denying it’s capability for re-invention. Witness Moonfire’s recent new $115 million fund, IQ Capital’s $200 million fund, and Seedcamp’s new $180 million fund. And there is fresh good news on the horizon in the shape of firstminute capital’s new third early stage … [Read more...]

One in six people are expected to be affected by infertility at some point in their lives, and with the cost of procedures, like in vitro fertilization, costing tens of thousands of dollars for each procedure, more people seek better ways to know their reproductive health. There are a number of startups tackling this issue, for example, Generation Prime, Flo, Future Family, Maven and Mate … [Read more...]

At the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) last week, Apple spent a lot of time discussing about new features and apps it is introducing with the next major releases of iOS, macOS, watchOS and iPadOS. A lot of those functionalities were available to users through third-party apps. That means Apple “Sherlocked” some of these ideas — which is a term used for features the company got inspired by … [Read more...]

CloudZero, a cloud cost management startup, today announced that it raised $32 million in a Series B funding round led by Innovius Capital and Threshold Ventures. Bringing the company’s total raised to over $52 million, the tranche will be put toward expanding CloudZero’s platform and scaling its go-to-market efforts, CEO Erik Peterson says — with an emphasis on savings insights and self-service … [Read more...]

Showing it’s playing for keeps in the generative AI race, Salesforce today announced that it’s growing its Generative AI Fund, the part of the company’s Salesforce Ventures VC off-shoot backing startups developing “responsible generative AI,” from $250 million in size to $500 million. In a canned statement, Salesforce Ventures managing partner Paul Drews said that the expansion would enable … [Read more...]

Salesforce is launching a new suite of products aimed at bolstering its position in the ultra-competitive AI space. Called AI Cloud, the suite, which includes tools designed to deliver “enterprise ready” AI, is Salesforce’s latest cross-disciplinary attempt to augment its product portfolio with AI capabilities. In many ways, it’s a continuation of the generative AI initiative that the company … [Read more...]

Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign up here. In recent years, a number of startups have made a business out of providing corporate credit cards to companies. These players compete not only with each other but with legacy providers such as Concur and Expensify by offering automated expense management. Many of these startups generate revenue from interchange fees, meaning that they receive a … [Read more...]

Nasdaq today revealed that it’s doling out $10.5 billion to acquire Adenza, a company that develops risk-management and related regulatory software for the financial services market. The megabucks deal, which constitues an even mix of cash and stock, will extend Nasdaq’s serviceable addressable market (SAM) to $34 billion, the company said in press release today, $10 billion more than what it … [Read more...]