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TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco and — if you don’t already know — it’s the startup world’s big tent. It draws founders, investors, CEOs, tech professionals, scientists, policy makers, researchers and entrepreneurs. It’s where you’ll find inspiration, gain knowledge, forge new relationships and discover tools to help you build your business. Shameless, but helpful, plug: Buy your pass now for significant savings. Prices increase on May 12 at 11:59 p.m. PDT . Who doesn’t like to save money? Pivotal partners at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 We’re fortunate to partner with some of the startup world’s leading companies to help make magic at Disrupt. We say fortunate because they’re passionate, thoroughly engaged and hands-on. They consistently deliver highly relevant content, educational expertise, resources and connection to the event. Their participation elevates, engages and supports early-stage founders. Our partners also come to Disrupt to conne

The Wall Street Journal went under the hood of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultivated or cell-cultured meat, and the struggles within. The Journal particularly homed in on what’s going on at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration related to its process for making cultivated chicken, essentially saying it was safe to eat and making it the first company to receive this approval. Eat Just, which has been selling its product in Singapore, the first nation to approve the sale of cultivated meat, followed , getting its “thumbs-up” from the FDA in March. WSJ’s story pays particular attention to UPSIDE Foods’ success at making small batches of its chicken product, as well as its lack of being able to produce large amounts of product at a low cost, or at even price parity with traditional meat — and to be fair, most cultivated meat companies struggle with this too. “Initially our chicken will be sold at a price premium,” UPSIDE fou

There are oodles of advantages to having a diverse workforce, but, as inBeta founder James Nash points out , you can’t simply take your homogenous workforce, add diversity, stir and hope for the best. Often, something subtle gets in the way of diversity at startups: Companies depend on employee referrals in the beginning, but if a startup’s makeup is already not diverse, referrals aren’t going to change that. That’s for startups. In the world of venture capital, things are more pronounced: A warm introduction is the only way to get in front of investors at many VC funds. That’s great for people who are already hooked into the startup ecosystem, but you don’t have to look for very long to realize that this is not a very diverse group of people. “We’d love to hear from you. The best way to reach us is through someone we mutually know.” A VC firm's website For many companies, employee referrals are one of the main ways to attract new talent. That’s all good until you stop to thi

Kim Keenan Contributor Share on Twitter The first female co-chair of the DC-based Internet Innovation Alliance , Kim Keenan has fought for digital equity for more than a decade, previously serving as president and CEO of the Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council (MMTC) and as general counsel and secretary of the NAACP. The finish line is within sight. “Internet for All,” as the Biden administration put it, will soon be a reality if America keeps its priorities straight. During his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden set a high bar, “We’re going to buy American,” as the U.S. spends billions of dollars on new broadband connections. This is a smart strategy to create American jobs and boost the U.S. economy, but our leaders must not sacrifice speed in the race to close the digital divide in cases where “Buy American” isn’t yet a realistic option. Strengthened during the pandemic when all finally understood that broadband is a necessity, bipartisan

Hey, TechCrunch people. If you’re looking for a recap of the week’s news in tech, you’ve come to the right place. It’s Week in Review (WiR) , TechCrunch’s regular recap column. Glad to have you. Before we get on with the meat of it, a PSA that tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 are available now. Disrupt, of course, is TechCrunch’s flagship in-person event, focused on founders, investors and the future of tech year after year. In San Francisco on September 19–21, expect to hear from thought leaders in the fields of AI, fintech, hardware, sustainability, SaaS, security and more. It’ll be well worth the trip. In the nearer term, tune into the next TechCrunch Live show, which will spotlight Cambrian BioPharma, a startup billing itself as a pharmaceutical outfit with a revolutionary approach to managing drug development. Founder James Peyer will be joined by Maryanna Saenko of Future Ventures, who invested in Cambrian’s Series A, B and C rounds. Now, without further ado! most read E

India’s crime-fighting agency searched three premises of edtech giant Byju’s and its founder Byju Raveendran, it said Saturday, and seized various “incriminating” documents and digital data. The Enforcement Directorate said it conducted the searches under the provisions of the nation’s anti-money laundering law, but declined to elaborate. The agency has conducted several similar probes in recent months, including at crypto firm WazirX, phonemaker Vivo and news broadcaster the BBC. The Bengaluru-headquartered Byju’s, which is India’s most valuable startup and counts BlackRock, Sequoia India, Lightspeed Venture Partners India, UBS among its backers, termed the searches as “a routine inquiry,” and said the startup maintains complete transparency with the authorities. “We have nothing but the utmost confidence in the integrity of our operations, and we are committed to upholding the highest standards of compliance and ethics. We will continue to work closely with the authorities to ens

OpenAI , the startup behind the widely used conversational AI model ChatGPT, has closed its new funding round of over $10.3 billion, TechCrunch has learned. VC firms including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global are in the round, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. A source tells us Founders Fund is also investing. Altogether the VCs have put in just over $300 million at a valuation of $27 billion to $29 billion. This is alongside a big investment from Microsoft announced earlier this year , a person familiar with the development told TechCrunch. The size of Microsoft’s investment is believed to be around $10 billion, a figure we confirmed with our source. If all this is accurate, this is the closing of the round that The Wall Street Journal reported was in the works in January. We confirmed that was when discussions started, amid a viral surge of interest in OpenAI and its business. While Microsoft’s investment comes with a strong strate

States have taxed motorists at the pump for more than a century . Yet, as electric cars gain ground, what happens when folks stop refueling altogether? State lawmakers are increasingly imposing annual fees on EV owners, arguing they should pay up because they still rely on public infrastructure to get around. Texas is on track to become the latest state to levy such a tax, following more than a dozen others , including Georgia, Michigan and Ohio. The Texas Senate passed SB 505 at the end of March. This week, the state’s House has cleared a similar bill, sending it on to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. The latest version of the bill lays out a $200 yearly registration fee for electric vehicles, with exceptions carved out for slow “ Neighborhood Electric Vehicles ,” as well as autocycles, mopeds and motorcycles. The bill states that the resulting fees “must be deposited to the credit of the state highway fund.” Though Texas is certainly not alone in moving forward with such a bill, its $200

The prospect of contacting a satellite to send a text or contact emergency services may soon be an effortless reality as startups move from proof of concept to actual product. Canadians on the Rogers network, which just inked a deal with Lynk, will get direct satellite-phone connections across the country; and not to be outdone, AST SpaceMobile claims to have made the first satellite voice call using a regular cell phone as well. Connecting a stock smartphone like last year’s Samsung or iPhone to a satellite would have sounded like a fantasy a few years ago, when we all knew it was impossible. But now companies are jostling for position as it becomes clear that satellite services will be a compelling offering on any mobile plan or phone model over the next few years. Lynk’s approach is to offer as universal as possible an SMS service to as much of the planet as possible, in the hopes that no one who needs help or is off the grid for any other reason will ever have to face “no signal.

A refrain I hear from a lot of startups is that there’s “no need to rethink the gripper.” It’s something I appreciate from an economic standpoint. It’s expensive, resource intensive and both your time and money are probably best spent elsewhere when there are already so many effectors on the market. I also recently made an analogy to a claw machine during an interview — and got some pushback. I understand a bit better now why that’s the case — at least in part. Discussing its new approach to robotic gripping, MIT invokes the perennial arcade favorite, noting, “When manipulating an arcade claw, a player can plan all she wants. But once she presses the joystick button, it’s a game of wait-and-see. If the claw misses its target, she’ll have to start from scratch for another chance at a prize.” Image Credits: MIT If you think about that for a moment, you realize that you’re suddenly faced with something that comes up over and over again in this field of study: That’s not how humans a

Snapchat Rolled out their generative AI chatbot, My AI to their 750 million monthly users so it feels like the right time to pause and ask whether we’re ready for the real thing – and ready or not, whether anybody wants one. This week on the TechCrunch Podcast , we’re talking to TechCrunch reporter Amanda Silberling about making robot friends on the internet. Articles from the episode: Snapchat’s AI chatbot is now free for all global us Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature, calling for its removal Missouri trans ‘snitch form’ down after people spammed it with the ‘Bee Movie’ script SpaceX’s successful failure is a wake-up call for Starship’s timeline Google’s Bard AI chatbot can now generate and debug code Apple wins antitrust court battle with Epic Games, appeals court rules #NotMyAI and other TC news by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/02YIsAh

The future is very much yet to be written about vertical farming. In many ways, the technology presents hope in the midst of rising food safety concerns, aging populations and potential environmental collapse. It’s also an intensely hard row to hoe, as it were. Early companies in the space are going to be the ones focused on driving down unit economics (hopefully) to a point where the technology makes sense from a price perspective. But sometimes being early to a party means you’re among the first to leave. Last January, we covered what looked to be an important next step for Upward Farms, as the company announced plans to open a 250,000-square-foot farm in Northeastern, Pennsylvania early this year. The Brooklyn-based firm recently announced , however, that it has closed up shop. “We found that vertical farming is almost infinitely complex — as we tackled challenges, new ones emerged,” founders Jason Green, Ben Silverman and Matt La Rosa said in an open letter. “Our team faced thes

Today, Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s AI-powered design tool, launched in public preview with an expanded set of features. Announced in October, Designer is a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics and more to share on social media and other channels. It leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2 , OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, to ideate designs, with drop-downs and text boxes for further customization and personalization. “Since October, the AI models have steadily improved, and we’ve worked to weave these powerful capabilities throughout the Designer canvas in even more delightful ways while keeping you in control,” Bryan Rognier, GM at Microsoft’s 365 Consumer division, wrote in a blog post published today. Now Designer can generate written captions and hashtags relevant for social media posts, offering several suggestions users can choose from. It can also create animated visuals, complete with background

Pinterest today announced a multi-year strategic ad partnership with Amazon aimed at bringing more brands and relevant products to its platform. The new deal will make the e-commerce giant Pinterest’s first-ever partner on third-party ads, the company said in a blog post shared alongside the company’s first-quarter earnings beat . The partnership is a step in a new direction for the image sharing and social media site, which has been working to adjust to consumers’ changing interests around product discovery in recent years. As demand for video platforms like TikTok and Reels grew, Pinterest’s image pinboard began to feel dated, leading it to launch its video-first Idea Pins and increase its investment in creator content. But some of those creator efforts were recently wound down , ahead of Pinterest’s last quarter miss on revenue where the company warned also of low first-quarter sales, sending its shares down. By comparison, Amazon’s digital ads unit in the same quarter did we

Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Earlier this week, Binance.US broke off its $1.3 billion deal to buy crypto broker Voyager Digital’s assets due to a “hostile and uncertain regulatory climate.” The announcement comes about nine months after Voyager filed for bankruptcy . At the time, the U.S.-headquartered firm — and its two affiliates — said in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in the Southern District of New York that it had between $1 billion and $10 billion in assets and more than 100,000 creditors. In a court filing on Tuesday, Voyager lawyers said the company reserves all rights for the $10 million good-faith deposit from Binance.US to Voyager, in addition to a reverse-termination fee owed by the U.S.-based crypto exchange. “While our hope throughout this process was to help Voyager’s customers access their crypto in kind, the hostile and uncertain regulatory climate in the United States has introduced an unpredictable operating environment impacting the entire American busines

YouTube Music is officially adding podcasts to its platform in the United States on Android, iOS and the web. The rollout comes a few months after YouTube podcasting head Kai Chuk revealed that podcasts would be added to YouTube Music soon. The update allows users watching podcasts on the main app to continue listening to them on YouTube Music. The company notes that all users call listen to podcasts on-demand, offline, in the background, while casting and seamlessly switch between audio-video versions on YouTube Music. “This podcast listening experience is different from our music listening experience where you need a Premium or Music Premium subscription to enjoy some of these features,” the company wrote in a blog post . “This new podcast listening experience complements the podcast video experience on YouTube.” Podcasts in YouTube Music will be available regardless of whether you have a YouTube Premium subscription. YouTube even notes that paying customers may encounter host-r

Investors continue to pump money into generative AI tech. Case in point, Replit, an IDE startup developing a code-generating AI-powered tool called Ghostwriter, this week raised nearly $100 million ($97.4 million) at a $1.16 billion post-money valuation. Andreessen Horowitz led the round — a Series B extension — with participation from Khosla Ventures, Coatue, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Bloomberg Beta, Naval Ravikant, ARK Ventures and Hamilton Helmer. “We are relentless in our mission to empower a billion software developers,” Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad said in a statement, adding that the new funds — which bring Replit’s total raised to over $200 million — will be put toward further developing the core product experience, expanding Replit’s cloud services and “driving innovation” in AI. “AI has already brought that future closer,” Masad continued. “We look forward to expanding our offerings for professional developers.” Based in San Francisco, Replit was co-founded by progr

AI is very much a work in progress, and we should all be wary of its potential for confidently spouting misinformation. But it seems to be more likely to do so in some languages than others. Why is that? The question comes in the wake of a report by NewsGuard , a misinformation watchdog, that shows how ChatGPT repeats more inaccurate information in Chinese dialects than when asked to do so in English. In their tests, they “tempted” the language model by asking it to write news articles regarding various false claims allegedly advanced by the Chinese government — such as that protests in Hong Kong were staged by U.S.-associated agents provocateurs. When asked to do so in English (both prompt and output), ChatGPT only complied in one out of seven examples: specifically, it generated an article that echoed the official Chinese government line that mass detention of Uyghur people in the country is in fact a vocational and educational effort. But when the prompts and outputs were in si