Oct 28th
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024
San Francisco, CA
The Latest
Fintech
PayPal Ventures leads $20M round into Gynger, which offers companies ‘buy now, pay later’ for technology purchases
2 days ago
Gynger, a platform that lends capital to companies for technology purchases, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by PayPal Ventures, it told TechCrunch exclusively. The financing…
Claude 3.5 Sonnet can analyze both text and images as well as generate text, and it’s Anthropic’s best-performing model yet — at least on paper.
Lightspeed Ventures-backed audio platform Pocket FM announced it has partnered with voice-cloning company ElevenLabs to quickly convert text content, such as script, into audio series using AI. Pocket FM, which…
Roots is designed to help people get a better handle on what sort of apps are worth spending time on and which are not.
The U.S. is facing an accountant shortage. Fewer first-time candidates took the CPA exam in 2022 than in 2006, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. One possible…
Startups
Ex-HubSpot exec builds an AI-powered CRM that learns for you, with $4M seed led by Sequoia
2 days ago
Christopher O’Donnell has hobbies. He likes music and playing guitar, but above all, he loves building software. Which is why three years after leaving HubSpot, he built Day.ai, a CRM…
Security
Semperis, a specialist in Active Directory security now worth more than $1B, raises $125M
2 days ago
Active Directory, the Microsoft directory service for connecting users with network resources, is used by more than 90% of all Fortune 1000 companies and many more besides. So it’s no…
Fundraising
Daydream rakes in $50M seed funding to build an AI-powered search engine suited for e-commerce
2 days ago
Online shopping trends are expected to stay strong this year, but e-commerce is more fragmented than ever. With brands selling on so many platforms — from TikTok Shop, to established…
Non-hosted podcasters can now upload videos to Spotify. Over 250K video podcasts are on the platform.
Fintech
Cadana, an emerging markets payroll services provider for global hiring platforms, banks $7.1M seed
2 days ago
The global freelancer market, a $1.3 trillion industry fueled by more than 200 million knowledge workers, drives demand for solutions that automate payroll and streamline employment and tax regulations worldwide.…
Where we’ll be next
Amazon is bringing its generative AI listing smarts to more sellers, revealing today that those in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. can now access tools designed to improve…
Crypto
Kenya closes its probe of Worldcoin, opening the door to a relaunch of its orbs after a year-long suspension
2 days ago
Worldcoin — the crypto “proof of personhood” startup co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman — has been given the green light to resume iris-scanning and other operations in Kenya after a…
Venture
Paris-based VC Breega hits first close of $75M Africa fund to back pre-seed and seed startups
2 days ago
Paris-based VC firm Breega has observed Africa’s tech ecosystem mature over the years. From receiving less than a billion dollars in venture capital per year to a record-high $6 billion,…
Malicious hacking is getting increasingly sophisticated, and that’s leading to a very clear trend in security technology. To keep people and organizations safe, security also has to continue improving. Security…
Startups
‘Lawyer-in-the-loop’ startup Wordsmith wants to bring AI paralegals to all employees
2 days ago
Wordsmith, a fledgling Scottish legal tech startup, has somehow managed to attract the backing of two well-known venture capital firms. The startup targets in-house legal teams and law firms with…
Hero, a new fintech startup based in Paris, is announcing an €11.3 million all-equity funding round led by Valar Ventures ($12.2 million at today’s exchange rate). For the past couple…
Featured Article
General Catalyst merges with Venture Highway in India push
General Catalyst is linking up with Venture Highway to make a deeper push into India, where it plans to invest over $500 million in coming years.
2 days ago
Like it or hate it, artificial intelligence — especially generative AI — is the technology story of 2024. OpenAI, with its rollouts of viral services like ChatGPT and billions in…
Featured Article
C12, a French quantum computing startup founded by twin brothers, raises $19.4M
C12 is announcing that it recently raised an €18 million funding round ($19.4 million at today’s exchange rate). Originally founded in 2020 as a spinoff from the Physics Laboratory of the École Normale Supérieure, the company has been working on a unique process to create quantum computers based on carbon…
2 days ago
Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, launches Safe Superintelligence (SSI), just a month after leaving OpenAI.
