Maggie Stamets is a Podcast Producer for TechCrunch based in Denver, Colorado. Previously, she worked as the Brand and Content Manager for BUILT BY GIRLS where she developed an interest in tech and a passion for creating equitable and welcoming professional tech spaces. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism with a minor in English…
Elon Musk’s brain computer interface startup Neuralink closed a $650 million funding round, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. The Series E fundraise included investors such as ARK Invest, Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital, among others. Neuralink last raised a $280 million Series D funding round in 2023, with an…
A platform for chatting and role-playing with AI-generated characters, Character.AI announced in a blog post on Monday that it is rolling out a slate of multimedia features. These features include AvatarFX, Character.AI’s video-generation model, plus Scenes and Streams, which allow users to create videos featuring their characters and then share them on a new social…
The surge in data company acquisitions continued Monday with Snowflake’s purchase of Crunchy Data. Cloud data platform Snowflake announced its intent to acquire Crunchy Data, a Postgres database partner, late this afternoon. A source familiar with the matter estimated the deal to be worth around $250 million. The terms weren’t disclosed. Snowflake declined to comment…
If you’ve ever been locked out of your work computer, you know the urgent need to reach IT support. Unfortunately, help desk staff are often busy assisting others, which can mean a significant delay before you regain access. Andrei Serban realized the critical importance of IT’s manual work when he was a product lead on…
After a while, Danae Shell got tired of hearing the same story over and over again. “Something bad would happen to someone at work, and the story always ended the same way,” she told TechCrunch. “They just left, because doing anything else was incredibly complex and expensive.” One doesn’t need to look far to notice…
DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg’s venture fund WndrCo co-led a $15.5 million Series A round for Creatify, an AI video ad platform. Creatify’s AdMax platform uses AI to quickly generate dozens of video advertisements, which are geared toward social media marketing — AdMax analyzes high-performing social video campaigns on apps like TikTok and Instagram to shape…
Microsoft Bing announced today that it is introducing the Bing Video Creator to its app, which uses OpenAI’s Sora model to let users generate videos from text prompts. OpenAI, which has a longstanding partnership with Microsoft, has locked down access to Sora‘s video generation for paying customers only. Its integration in Microsoft Bing represents the…
The rebooted version of social site Digg aims to bring back the spirit of the old web at a time when AI-generated content is threatening to overwhelm traditional social media platforms, drowning out the voices of real people. This presents an opportunity to build a social site for the AI era, where the people who…
Microsoft’s new sustainability report, released late last week, shows how a carbon-heavy economy can weigh on a company that wants to be carbon light. Since 2020, its carbon emissions are up 23.4%, mostly a result of breakneck data center buildout to support its growing cloud and AI operations. Buying enough clean electricity is actually the…
