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$450M for Noname, two billion-dollar rounds, and good news for crypto startups | TechCrunch

May 8, 2024 9:11 PM0


Good news, crypto founders! Venture capital activity is picking up in the sector, recovering from the multi-year lows investments fell to in late 2023. Put another way, venture folk appear more bullish on web3 than they used to be not very long ago.

But that was hardly the only news item we had to dig into on Equity this morning. Akamai is spending $450 million to buy API security firm Noname, a deal that TechCrunch previously reported would be worth around $500 million. Still, $450 million is a lot of money, and the deal is worth giving thought to given that Noname was valued at more than $1 billion back in 2021.

Speaking of M&A, Wiz is another name in the cybersecurity space that could go shopping, thanks to its recent $1 billion fundraise. It intends to buy both wounded unicorns and hot, smaller startups to bolster its business. The company is now valued at $12 billion, which is a lot. (Wayve also raised north of $1 billion, but is focused on the self-driving space instead of security.)

We also saw Monzo snag $190 million more, bringing its full-year fundraising score to more than $600 million. Meanwhile, TikTok is fighting a potential ban in the States, and Oyo’s been trying to raise new capital at a fraction of its prior worth.

In closing, Haje is bringing Pitch Deck Teardown to Equity! If you have not read the series (start here), you are in for a treat. We’re kicking the new segment off with a look at NOQX’s deck: what worked, what didn’t, and what’s next!

Chat Friday!

Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast.




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X launches Stories on X delivering news summarized by Grok AI | TechCrunch

May 4, 2024 1:47 AM0


X, formerly Twitter, is now using Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to power a feature that summarizes the personalized trending stories in the app’s Explore section. According to an announcement and screenshots posted by the X Engineering team on Friday, X’s Premium subscribers will be able to read a summary of posts on X associated with each trending story featured on the “For You” tab in Explore.

The For You page showcases the news and stories being shared across X’s platform that are popular within your network, along with other suggested items. It’s among the first stops for X users who want to catch up with what’s being said on the platform, without having to spend long amounts of time scrolling their timeline.

For instance, a TechCrunch reader’s For You page today may feature stories about Apple’s coming iPad event, Microsoft’s security overhaul, and burnout among AI engineers. As you tap into each story to view the associated X posts, a summary of the story will now appear at the top of the page, offering an overview of the subject matter.

In the case of the AI burnout story, for example, the Grok-powered summary begins: “AI engineers are facing burnout and rushed rollouts due to the competitive race in the tech industry, as companies prioritize investor satisfaction over solving actual problems.” After briefly touching on the problem of the AI “rat race,” the story concludes by saying that “critics argue that proper safeguards and thoughtful innovation should not be afterthoughts in the pursuit of AI investments …”

Humorously, a message appears below that summary, warning: “Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.”

The idea of summarizing trends is not a new one, but it is new in terms of how the summaries are being handled. Under its prior leadership, Twitter began adding headlines and descriptions to its trends in 2020, though not with the help of an AI bot. Instead, Twitter itself would annotate some of its daily trends with extra information and pin a representative tweet to provide further context. However, Twitter’s rollout was haphazard, with some trends getting written up and others not.

With Grok’s Stories, as the summaries are called, all the top news on the For You page is summarized.

Access to xAI’s chatbot Grok is meant to be a selling point to push users to buy premium subscriptions. With the Premium and top-tier Premium+ plans, users can access Grok by tapping on the bottom middle button of the app. A snarky and “rebellious” AI, Grok’s differentiator from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data.

A post published to X on Friday by tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz lays out Elon Musk’s further plan for AI-powered news on X, based on an email conversation with the X owner.

Kantrowitz says that conversations on X will make up the core of Grok’s summaries. Grok won’t look at the article text, in other words, even if that’s what people are discussing on the platform. That could be a problem in terms of painting a true picture of the news being shared, as what people are chattering about on X may be their reactions or opinions, not the news itself. Kantrowitz calls the move “controversial” but admits there’s opportunity there.

Journalists are already having to contend with AI news summaries in other areas as well, including from startups. Arc’s new web browser includes an AI summary feature and former Twitter engineers are building an AI news summary service called Particle, for example. How this will play out in terms of traffic to the news sites themselves remains to be seen. Kantrowitz believes that users may be interested in going “deeper into the source material once their curiosity is piqued,” he writes. But it’s also likely that at least some news sites will go out of business as page views drop due to AI summaries, leaving fewer sources for AI bots like Grok to summarize in the long run.

For that reason, some news publishers are doing deals with AI providers like OpenAI’s recently announced partnership with the FT. Axel Springer, the AP, Le Monde and others have also announced similar moves. In X’s case, it’s able to get at the news by way of the conversation around it — and without having to partner to access the news content itself. That’s both clever as well as worrisome, the latter from a misinformation standpoint.

Grok’s Stories are rolling out to Premium X subscribers now. Access to Premium starts at $8 per month, if paying on the web and not through the app stores.




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Good news for Rubrik, bad news for TikTok and medium news for early-stage startups | TechCrunch

April 27, 2024 12:01 AM0


Rubrik’s strong IPO pricing and warm reception by the public markets after its listing add more weight to the perspective that the public markets are not as closed to tech startups as some thought. If Rubrik’s result isn’t enough to break the logjam, well, maybe there’s something else going on.

But there was a lot more that happened this week, which meant that the Equity crew had a pile of news to get through as always, with a little bit of our own mixed in. Happily it was all pretty darn interesting, so Mary Ann and Alex started with Rubrik before pivoting to Pomelo, a startup that has a very interesting twist on the remittances market.

From there it was time to talk about TikTok. What was once an unfathomable result — TikTok being forced to divest from its parent company or face a ban — became reality pretty darn quickly. The United States is not the first company to ban the service, but we noted during the show that the company we are keeping is not the most enticing. Still, here we are; what does it mean for consumers?

And to close, Early Stage. TechCrunch held its annual early-stage focused event this year, and it was a banger. Not to toot our own horn, but it was the second year in a row that our shindig in Boston was packed, useful and lots of fun. The coffee was even good. At a tech conference. Alex had notes.

Equity is back on Monday, thanks for hanging out with us!

Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

For the full interview transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, read on, or check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast.




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Curio raises funds for Rio, an 'AI news anchor' in an app | TechCrunch

April 26, 2024 11:37 PM0


AI may be inching its way into the newsroom, as outlets like Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, CNET and others have experimented with articles written by AI. But while most respectable journalists will condemn this use case, there are a number of startups that think AI can enhance the news experience — at least on the consumer’s side. The latest to join the fray is Rio, an “AI news anchor” designed to help readers connect with the stories and topics they’re most interested in from trustworthy sources.

The new app, from the same team behind AI-powered audio journalism startup Curio, was first unveiled at last month’s South by Southwest Festival in Austin. It has raised funding from Khosla Ventures and the head of TED, Chris Anderson, who also backed Curio. (The startup says the round has not yet closed, so it can’t disclose the amount.)

Audio journalism app Curio can now create personalized episodes using AI

Curio itself was founded in 2016 by ex-BBC strategist Govind Balakrishnan and London lawyer Srikant Chakravarti; Rio is a new effort that will expand the use of Curio’s AI technology.

First developed as a feature within Curio’s app, Rio scans headlines from trusted papers and magazines like Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Washington Post and others, and then curates that content into a daily news briefing you can either read or listen to.

In addition, the team says Rio will keep users from finding themselves in an echo chamber by seeking out news that expands their understanding of topics and encourages them to dive deeper.

Image Credits: Curio/Rio

In tests, Rio prepared a daily briefing presented in something of a Story-like interface with graphics and links to news articles you could tap on at the bottom of the screen that would narrate the article using an AI voice. (These were full articles, to be clear, not AI summaries.) You advance through the headlines in the same way as you would tap through a Story on a social media app like Instagram.

Curio says Rio’s AI technology won’t fabricate information and will only reference content from its trusted publishers partners. Rio won’t use publisher content to train an LLM (large language model) without “explicit consent,” it says.

Image Credits: Curio/Rio

Beyond the briefing, you can also interact with Rio in an AI chatbot interface where you can ask about other topics of interest. Suggested topics — like “TikTok ban” or “Ukraine War,” for example — appear as small pills above the text input box. We found the AI was sometimes a little slow to respond at times, but, otherwise, it performed as expected.

Plus, Rio would offer to create an audio episode for your queries if you want to learn more.

Co-founder Balakrishnan said that Curio users had asked Rio over 20,000 questions since it launched as a feature in Curio last May, which is why the company decided to spin out the tech into its own app.

“AI has us all wondering what’s true and what’s not. You can scan AI sites for quick answers, but trusting them blindly is a bit of a gamble,” noted Chakravarti in a statement released around Rio’s debut at SXSW. “Reliable knowledge is hard to come by. Only a lucky few get access to fact-checked, verified information. Rio guides you through the news, turning everyday headlines from trusted sources into knowledge. Checking the news with Rio leaves you feeling fulfilled instead of down.”

It’s hard to say if Rio is sticky enough to demand its standalone product, but it’s easy to imagine an interface like this at some point coming to larger news aggregators, like Google News or Apple News, perhaps, or even to individual publishers’ sites. Meanwhile, Curio will also continue to exit with a focus on audio news.

Curio is not the only startup looking to AI to enhance the news reading experience. Former Twitter engineers are building Particle, an AI-powered news reader, backed by $4.4 million. Another AI-powered news app, Bulletin, also launched to tackle clickbait along with offering news summaries. Artifact had also leveraged AI before exiting to TechCrunch’s parent company, Yahoo.

Rio is currently in early access, which means you’ll need an invitation to get in. Otherwise, you can join the app’s waitlist at rionews.ai. The company tells us it plans to launch publicly later this summer. (As a reward for reading to the bottom, five of you can use my own invite link to get in.)

 

Former Twitter engineers are building Particle, an AI-powered news reader, backed by $4.4M




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Post News, the a16z-funded Twitter alternative, is shutting down | TechCrunch

April 20, 2024 12:57 AM0


Post News, a microblogging site that emerged in the days after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, is shutting down just a year and a half after launching in beta.

Founder Noam Bardin, previously CEO of Waze, broke the news in a post on Friday.

“At the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform,” Bardin said. “A consumer business, at its core, needs to show rapid consumer adoption and we have not managed to find the right product combination to make it happen.”

Post was backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Scott Galloway, an NYU professor and tech commentator, but the platform never disclosed how much it raised. Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher was an adviser to the company.

Post News, a Twitter alternative, gets funding from a16z

Post’s strategy was to harness Twitter’s reputation as a virtual watercooler for journalists, then build on that further by creating a new way for publishers and writers to monetize. Instead of subscribing to various different publications, Post users could purchase individual articles from certain partner outlets.

Despite Post’s closure, Bardin said he thinks that the company proved something about the different ways in which digital news outlets can monetize. He wrote that Post “validated many theories around Micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles.” The platform also allowed users to tip writers for their work.

Bardin is right that the media landscape is changing. There are more independent and worker-owned publications than ever, hosted on tech platforms like Substack, Beehiiv and Ghost. But perhaps it was too soon to try to capture this nascent movement in a social platform.

Around the same time that Post sprung up, a number of other Twitter alternatives threw their hat into the ring to capture the population of users who would be dissatisfied with Musk’s ownership decisions. Post managed to hang in there for more than a year after launch, but it’s not the only new microblogging site that’s folded. Pebble, also known as T2, shut down in October.

As we knew all along, social media is a tough business — and even if users flock to your site for a fleeting moment, that doesn’t mean they’ll stick around.

AirChat, the buzzy new social app, could be great — or, it could succumb to the same fate as Clubhouse


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Apple News is testing a game that kind of looks like NYT Connections | TechCrunch

April 19, 2024 6:45 PM0


Apple News is testing a new game for iOS 17.5 called Quartiles, which requires players to organize a grid of 20 syllables into 5 four-syllable words. Spotted by Gadget Hacks, the interface for Quartiles looks a lot like the New York Times’ newest hit, Connections. Did Apple News sherlock the New York Times?

Okay, Quartiles isn’t exactly like Connections, where you organize 16 words into four cohesive categories of four. It’s maybe closer to something like Boggle, since you’re being tested on your ability to put words together from their components. But there is something about finding groups of four that we seem to find really alluring these days — Connections is now the Times’ second most popular game, after Wordle.

Last year, Apple added crossword puzzles and mini crossword puzzles for Apple News+ subscribers. While it may appear odd for a news aggregator to continue investing in games, that’s exactly what has been working for the New York Times. When the paper bought the game Wordle in 2022 for an undisclosed seven-figure sum, the purchase brought in “tens of millions” of new users in just one quarter. Over the last few months, the Times’ data shows that users have spent more time playing its games than reading the news.

Apple is just beta testing Quartiles, which doesn’t mean it’s definitely going to appear in iOS 17.5. But given that the New York Times is low-key running a gaming studio now, it’s not a bad idea for Apple to churn out some new, preferably square-shaped games.

Wordle brought ‘tens of millions’ of new users to the New York Times

Wordle founder Josh Wardle on going viral and what comes next




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TechCrunch Minute: Yahoo buys Artifact news app from Instagram’s co-founders | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 10:49 AM0


News that Yahoo is buying Artifact stirred the technology watercooler yesterday. Artifact was an interesting app, employing AI to help its users find and consume more, and more targeted news. It had some devoted fans, but never reached the sort of scale that would have made it an attractive long-term project. So, the Instagram founders who built it decided to sunset the service.

Then TechCrunch’s parent company Yahoo decided to snap up its technology. The app itself isn’t long for the world, but all the same the deal is an echo of an older time when Yahoo was famous for buying smaller, mobile-focused companies.

Regardless of whether or not you were an Artifact user — I was for a time — that Yahoo is still feeling acquisitive under its current ownership structure matters. Artifact is hardly the only startup project in the market today that might be looking for a new home, after all.


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TechCrunch Minute: You're likely seeing less news and politics on Instagram. Here's why | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 10:19 AM0


As the election cycle heats up, Instagram and Threads will be cooling down the amount of political content entering many users’ feeds. These changes, which limit the reach of political content from accounts users don’t already follow, are enacted by default. If you’re already wondering how to get that kind of content back into your feed, you can follow our guide on changing Instagram’s political settings here.

Meta has made an effort to decrease the reach of news and political content across its platforms, especially in regards to content that is algorithmically recommended versus being surfaced from a direct connection to an individual or account. Threads will host, but not “amplify” news, per remarks from its head Adam Mosseri last year. And Facebook is shutting down the News Tab as it continues to block news content in Canada in an ongoing dispute with legislation requiring platforms to pay publishers for content.

And which posts and topics will Instagram actually deem to be political? The answer, as expected, is both far-reaching and vague, covering anything “potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics.” As for why these changes have gone into effect, and what it says about Meta’s priorities across its wide-ranging social empire, well, you’ll have to give today’s episode a look.


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Yahoo is acquiring Instagram co-founders’ AI-powered news startup Artifact | TechCrunch

April 12, 2024 12:04 PM0


Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the company announced on Tuesday. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Artifact will no longer operate as a stand-alone app, and its AI-powered personalization technology will be integrated across Yahoo, including the Yahoo News app in the coming months. Yahoo is TechCrunch’s parent company.

Systrom and Krieger will work with Yahoo in an “advisory capacity” during this transition.

The announcement comes a few months after Artifact said it would be winding down operations as the market opportunity wasn’t big enough to warrant continued investment. Although Artifact started as a simple news app, the end result seemed more like a Twitter replacement. There’s already a lot of competition in that space with numerous challengers, including Meta’s Threads.

Artifact’s technology surfaces content users want to see and becomes more attuned to their interests over time. As a result, users receive a personalized feed of news stories that they want to read. The app also included several AI tools to summarize news, rewrite clickbait headlines and surface the best content. Yahoo says bringing these capabilities into its portfolio “accelerates the opportunity to connect users with even richer content experiences and tailored personalization.”

“Artifact has become a beloved product and we’re thrilled to be able to continue to grow that technology and further our mission of becoming the trusted guide to digital information and the best curator connecting people to the content that matters most to them,” said Kat Downs Mulder, SVP and general manager of Yahoo News, in a press release.

Systrom said in the press release that Artifact’s technology has the opportunity to benefit millions of people, and that “Yahoo brings the scale to help the product achieve what we envisioned while upholding the belief that connecting people to the trusted sources of news and information is as critical as ever.”


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