The global venture capital market is enduring a long period of limited exits. Startups are staying private longer, M&A is quiet in part due to sharpened regulatory oversight, and the IPO market remains frozen. This means many historical venture deals are slowly rotting on the vine, in IRR terms. The crypto market is no different,…
Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits “emergent” qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally. The breakthrough could be what the technology needs to escape the uncanny valley. These models were always going to grow and improve, but the researchers specifically hoped to see…
This is a transcript of the latest episode of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast. New episodes of Equity air every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Listen above or read below to catch up on our Wednesday show, in which we talk through the week’s leading startup and venture capital news. Transcript 0:10 Hello and welcome back to…
KTrust, a Tel Aviv-based security startup, is taking a different approach to Kubernetes security from many of its competitors in the space. Instead of only scanning Kubernetes clusters and their configurations for known vulnerabilities, KTrust is taking a more proactive approach. It deploys an automated system that tries to hack into the system. This allows…
Andrej Karpathy, a widely respected research scientist, announced today that he has left OpenAI. This is the second time Karpathy has left the top AI firm and his departure is not because of any event, issue or drama, he said. Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI, initially left the company to join Tesla in 2017.…
In November, Airbnb acquired a stealth AI firm launched by Siri’s co-founder, called GamePlanner.AI. The deal valued the secretive startup at around $200 million, according to reports. Though the hosting company didn’t telegraph its plans for GamePlanner at the time, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky today shared a high-level overview of Airbnb’s larger plans…
Otter, the AI-powered meeting assistant that transcribes audio in real-time is adding another layer of AI to its product with today’s introduction of Meeting GenAI, a new set of AI tools for meetings. Included with GenAI is an AI chatbot you can query to get information about past meetings you’ve recorded with Otter, an AI…
Klaus – an Estonian-born startup which emerged in 2019 to aid customer services agents – has been acquired by global customer services platform Zendesk for an undisclosed amount. Last year Zendesk also acquired Tymeshift, a workforce management tool, to fold into its product. It would be remiss of us not to mention that the downturn in…
Macquarie dramatically cut its 12-month price target on One97 Communications, the parent company of digital payments firm Paytm, citing risks of customers leaving the platform in the wake of heightened regulatory scrutiny. Macquarie, which famously predicted the slump at Paytm before the listing, lowered its target to 275 rupees (down 57.7% from its previous target of…
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. We’re just two days away from Intuitive Machines’ first-ever mission to the moon. Pro-tip: If you haven’t already, check out this ultra thorough press kit on the mission — the company goes into a ton of detail about the lander architecture, the payloads on board and everything that will…
