Nigeria is actively seeking information from Binance regarding its top 100 users in the country and all transaction history spanning the past six months, according to a Financial Times report.
As a result, the detained executives may allegedly face charges related to currency manipulation, tax evasion, and illegal operations, per a Bloomberg report.
FT says Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency was granted permission to detain both Binance executives for 14 days, which concluded on Tuesday; there’s a proposed hearing to extend the court order scheduled for Wednesday.
Nigeria’s request for Binance’s top users in the country is a focal point in negotiations between the largest crypto platform and the top African crypto market.
Meanwhile, documents reviewed by FT reveal that Nigeria, through its national security adviser, has requested that Binance address any outstanding tax liabilities.
Thus, SaaS startups are not category-specific, instead sharing a business model approach more than any particular industry focus.
Among myriad SaaS startups, those focused on selling to business clients — a group often called enterprise SaaS — are a magnet for venture capital.
Since then, investment into enterprise SaaS startups has slowed.
Enterprise SaaS startups raised $21.9 billion, $45.0 billion, $55.1 billion and $58.3 billion in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively.
Perhaps a rate cut or two and a strong enterprise IPO are the tonic required to really reignite venture investment into enterprise SaaS.
Phantom Auto, a remote driving startup that launched seven years ago amid the buzz of autonomous vehicle technology, is shutting down after failing to secure new funding, TechCrunch has learned.
Phantom Auto, which had cut staff last year, employed a little more than 100 people as of this week.
Phantom Auto’s demise is the latest in a long line of startups that popped up as the autonomous vehicle technology industry gained attention and investment from investors.
Phantom Auto was founded in 2017 and initially focused on applying its teleops technology to autonomous vehicles on public roadways such as robotaxis and self-driving trucks.
Phantom Auto pivoted in 2019 and started shopping its remote driving system to logistics, specifically forklifts and yard trucks that have no autonomy as well as autonomous sidewalk delivery robots.
The “State of Subscription Apps” report offers a bird’s-eye view into the subscription app universe, as RevenueCat has nearly 30,000 apps using its platform’s tools to manage their monetization.
Outside of Apple and Google, that makes RevenueCat the largest collection of subscription app developers on one platform.
For instance, 59% of the apps that reach $1,000 will go on to reach $2,500 and 60% of the apps that reach $2,500 will make it to $5,000.
The report highlights other aspects of the race to subscription app monetization, as well, including that North America-based apps have 4x the monetization of the global average.
The larger report gets into more specifics that will be useful to subscription app developers, including details about subscription packages, pricing, trial strategies, conversion, refund rates, retention, growth, and more.
Aura combines highly realistic voice models with a low-latency API to allow developers to build real-time, conversational AI agents.
Backed by large language models (LLMs), these agents can then stand in for customer service agents in call centers and other customer-facing situations.
Deepgram’s Aura combines human-like voice models that render extremely fast (typically in well under half a second) and, as Stephenson noted repeatedly, does so at a low price.
“Everybody now is like: ‘hey, we need real-time voice AI bots that can perceive what is being said and that can understand and generate a response — and then they can speak back,'” he said.
The Aura model, just like all of the company’s other models, were trained in-house.
Apple will allow iOS developers located in the European Union to distribute apps from the web, rather then via its App Store.
“Web Distribution, available in a software update later this spring, will let authorized developers distribute their iOS apps to EU users directly from a website the developer owns and operates,” it writes.
iOS users will also need to approve the developer installing apps from their site via their iPhone Settings.
Apple’s initial proposal for DMA compliance did not allow web based distribution for apps.
While its current attempt to force EU users to consent to tracking is being challenged via GDPR and consumer protection complaints.
Simply put, Tierra is enabling customers to order proteins online that can make anything from antibodies to growth factor for a food product.
Its reagents are combined with the customer’s protein sequences, and put into a robotic platform to create the proteins.
We profiled Tierra Biosciences in 2018 after it rebranded from Synvitrobio and raised $2.6 million in new financing.
Prior to joining the company, Nemzek was chief commercial officer at Synthego Corp. where he led the commercial expansion and growth of its CRISPR genome engineering business.
The round had participation from new and existing investors, including Prosus Ventures, In-Q-Tel (IQT), Hillspire, Freeflow Ventures, Creative Ventures and Social Capital.
“So much of the AI conversation has been dominated by … large language models,” Jones said, “but the reality is that no one model can do everything.
Pienso believes that any domain expert, not just an AI engineer, should be able to do just that.”Pienso guides users through the process of annotating or labeling training data for pre-tuned open source or custom AI models.
“Pienso’s flexible, no-code interface allows teams to train models directly using their own company’s data,” Jones said.
“This alleviates the privacy concerns of using … models, and also is more accurate, capturing the nuances of each individual company.”Companies pay Pienso a yearly license based on the number of AI models they deploy.
It’s fostering a future where we’re building smarter AI models for a specific application, by the people who are most familiar with the problems they are trying to solve.”
Four things we learned when US spy chiefs testified to Congress US intelligence leaders gave their most recent — and frank — assessment of global cyber threatsCyberattacks, regional conflict, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, commercial spyware, AI, misinformation, disinformation, deepfakes and TikTok.
These are just some of the top perceived threats that the United States faces, according to the U.S. government’s intelligence agency’s latest global risk assessment.
Some cybersecurity experts have called on governments to outright ban ransom payments as necessary to stop hackers profiteering from cybercrime.
Given how much data we share from our phone apps (which many don’t give a second thought), U.S. spy agencies are simply buying up vast troves of Americans’ commercially available location data and internet traffic from the data brokers.
In other words, U.S. spy agencies can keep buying data on Americans that is readily available for purchase until Congress puts a stop to the practice — even if the root of the problem is that data brokers shouldn’t have our data to begin with.
The loneliness of the robotic humanoid Humanoid robots are all the rage, but Agility’s Digit was a singular presence at this year’s Modex conferencePerhaps a few years from now, the halls of the Georgia World Congress Center will be peppered with humanoid robots the week of Modex.
A line of the bipedal robots were moving totes to a nearby conveyor belt at select times throughout the week.
This week in Atlanta, a rotating cast of eight Digits are working each day from show opening to close.
Agility is ramping up production volumes, with plans to hit “high double-digit” production of its bipedal robot by end of year.
This week at Modex, the company took the wraps off Agility Arc, deployment and fleet management software for Digit.
