Eric Council Jr., 26, was sentenced to 14 months in prison and three years of supervised release on Friday for participating in the hack of the official X account of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The U.S. Department of Justice announced the sentencing in a press release. Council and other hackers took over the…
AI startup Cohere has acquired Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based platform that develops enterprise tools for automating certain kinds of high-level market research. Sully Omarr, one of the founders of Ottogrid, announced the deal Friday in a post on X. He didn’t disclose the terms. Ottogrid will sunset its product, according to Omarr, but give customers “ample…
TechCrunch is joining forces with VivaTech, Europe’s biggest startup and tech event, to select startups for the prestigious VivaTech Innovation of the Year at VivaTech 2025. This partnership will highlight exceptional creativity, technological ingenuity, and industry-transforming potential among exhibiting startups. The VivaTech Innovation of the Year Award acknowledges and celebrates exhibiting startups at VivaTech 2025…
OpenAI announced on Friday it’s launching a research preview of Codex, the company’s most capable AI coding agent yet. Codex is powered by codex-1, a version of the company’s o3 AI reasoning model optimized for software engineering tasks. OpenAI says codex-1 produces “cleaner” code than o3, adheres more precisely to instructions, and will iteratively run…
Epic Games claims that Apple is blocking its Fortnite app from the U.S. and E.U. App Stores. After winning a decisive victory for app developers in a legal battle with Apple, forcing the tech giant to allow external payments in its U.S. App Store without charging commission, Epic Games attempted to resubmit Fortnite to the…
When Max Cohen and Cameron Behar set out to launch a startup together during the pandemic, they decided to focus on the most top-of-mind sector of the era: healthcare. But since neither Cohen nor Behar had a background in healthcare (both worked at Google and Facebook previously), they had to think long and hard about…
Redpoint Ventures, a San Francisco-based firm that is about a quarter century old, has raised a $650 million 10th early-stage fund, according to a regulatory filing. Redpoint’s new fund matches the size of its prior fund, which was raised just under three years ago. In a market where many venture firms are decreasing their capital…
The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two men with boxes outside the company’s headquarters. One introduced himself as recently laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.” His real name is Rahul Sonwalkar but the prank went viral. While he never worked for X, he is actually very much a techy….
Apple says the warning messages now appearing next to EU App Store listings that use third-party payment systems are not actually new. According to a number of recent reports, Apple added a warning with a red exclamation mark next to apps that it found were not using its own “private and secure payment system.” The…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out a big vision for the future of ChatGPT at an AI event hosted by VC firm Sequoia earlier this month. When asked by one attendee about how ChatGPT can become more personalized, Altman replied that he eventually wants the model to document and remember everything in a person’s life….
