Unplugged, a company cofounded and backed by Erik Prince, who is also the founder of infamous private military contractor Blackwater, has just released a new version of its “privacy-first” UP Phone that will be made in the US — at some point. The original UP Phone was described by the company as “the ultimate privacy-focused…
Cluely’s revenue has skyrocketed to about $7 million in ARR since it launched its new enterprise product a week ago, founder Roy Lee told TechCrunch. “Every single person who has a meeting or an interview is testing this out.” Cluely, one of Silicon Valley’s most-talked-about startups, offers products that use AI to analyze online conversations,…
Angelo Sotira started the online digital art platform DeviantArt when he was just a teenager, growing a formative community for millions of artists in the 2000s. Twenty-five years later, Sotira wants to change digital art again, but with a focus on the way it’s displayed. On Thursday, Sotira revealed his new venture, Layer, a screen…
Kaito AI, an artificial intelligence-powered platform that aggregates crypto data to provide market analysis for users, and its founder Yu Hu, were the victims of an X social media hack on March 15. In several now-deleted posts, hackers claimed that the Kaito wallets were compromised and advised users that their funds were not safe. According…
A district court judge has dismissed the US securities regulator’s lawsuit accusing Hex founder Richard Heart of raising over $1 billion through unregistered crypto offerings and defrauding investors of $12.1 million. Heart, whose real name is Richard Schueler, was also accused of spending those allegedly stolen funds on luxury items — including the world’s largest…
A founder who was an early mover in the race to build autonomous vehicles has raised $15 million for his next act: a startup that claims its AI can write enterprise software on its own. Cogna — as the U.K.-based startup is called — is led by Ben Peters, the technical co-founder of FiveAI, a…
There’s a big opportunity for generative AI in the world of translation, and a startup called Panjaya is taking the concept to the next level: a hyperrealistic, gen AI-based dubbing tool for videos that re-creates a person’s original voice speaking the new language, with the video and the speaker’s physical movements automatically modifying to match…
OpenAI and Anthropic spend billions of dollars a year training models like GPT-4 and Claude, but competitive price dumping is making the business around these platforms rather precarious. Aidan Gomez, CEO of competing AI provider Cohere, says that selling access to models is quickly becoming a “zero margin business” in a podcast appearance on Monday….