At the low end of this range, $31 billion, though Reddit would be worth $4.93 billion based on an expected 158.98 million shares outstanding.
With $804.0 million in 2023 revenue, Reddit is on track to trade for a multiple of 6.9x to 8.0x its revenue, depending on the valuation estimate you want to use.
Reddit’s game plan for AI is one good reason why it’s pricing its shares closer to Meta than Snap.
Reddit data constantly grows and regenerates as users come and interact with their communities and each other.
Investors might consider Reddit a side-bet on AI itself, even if the company’s core business isn’t creating AI models.
Would-be Twitter/X rival Bluesky is looking to more directly invest in its developer community in order to foster growth.
The company last week announced “AT Protocol Grants,” a new program that will dole out small grants to developers building on its new social networking protocol.
Initially, Bluesky said it would release $10,000 in grants of $500 to $2,000 per project apiece, based on factors like cost, usage, and more.
The concept of decentralized social networking has been around longer than Bluesky, however, with many projects, including Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, and others, backed by the ActivityPub protocol.
Bluesky says the projects receiving the grants can be useful to either developers or end users and will be paid out via public GitHub Sponsorships.
Covariant is building ChatGPT for robots The UC Berkeley spinout says its new AI platform can help robots think more like peopleCovariant this week announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1).
“We at Covariant have already deployed lots of robots at warehouses with success.
“We do like a lot of the work that is happening in the more general purpose robot hardware space,” says Chen.
“ChatGPT for robots” isn’t a perfect analogy, but it’s a reasonable shorthand (especially in light of the founders’ connection to OpenAI).
Chen says the company expects the new RFM-1 platform will work with a “majority” of the hardware on which Covariant software is already deployed.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution.
Despite the many ways in which women have advanced AI tech, they make up a tiny sliver of the global AI workforce.
According to a 2021 Stanford study, just 16% of tenure-track faculty focused on AI are women.
With any luck, TechCrunch’s humble contribution — a series on accomplished women in AI — will help move the needle in the right direction.
The women we profile share many suggestions for those who wish to grow and evolve the AI field for the better.
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How DMA gatekeepers are responding to the EU’s new competition rules — in their own wordsThe compliance deadline for the six tech giants regulated under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) expired yesterday.
The first batch of gatekeeper compliance reports — aka the non-confidential versions — have been published on the Commission’s DMA website.
The length is at least justified: Reflecting the fact a full eight of its products are designated as core platform services.
For handy reference, we’ve rounded up links to the gatekeepers’ first batch of public-facing DMA compliance reports below.
If you’re looking for an analytic overview of the DMA, its aims and early impacts, check out our earlier explainer.
Meta’s newest app Threads, a would-be Twitter/X rival, may not want politics on its platform, but it’s coming to the app anyway — or so Threads’ search trends indicate.
And with the expansion, it seems the topics that Threads users are talking the most are, in fact, political in nature.
In 2016, the company made a change to Facebook’s Feed, to prioritize posts from family and friends over news.
Creators who post about laws and legislation, elections or other political and social issues, were not happy about this change.
But there’s one area where Threads isn’t (yet) suppressing politics, and that’s in its Trends feature.
General Motors has resumed sales of the Chevrolet Blazer EV — and at a cheaper price — more than two months after the automaker pulled the vehicle over software problems.
The company temporarily halted sales of the Blazer EV in December after early customers reported problems with the SUV’s infotainment screen and charging at DC fast charging stations.
GM said in a statement that the company “made significant software updates that will improve features and functionality to deliver on the high expectations of our customers.
Existing Blazer EV owners will have to bring their car into a GM dealership for a software update to address any potential problems going forward.
The company says it has improved its quality testing and software processes to prevent similar problems in the future.
Yet another AI-powered fraud detection software provider is laying off staff.
Inscribe, whose platform works to detect fraud in areas like business underwriting, tenant screening, and onboarding, has cut just under 40% of its staff, which equates to dozens of employees.
San Francisco-based Inscribe.ai confirmed the headcount reduction to TechCrunch, noting that the AI advances in the financial services industry necessitated a pivot to a new product and direction for the company.
“2023 was a year of change for our customers and Inscribe,” explained Inscribe CEO and co-founder, Ronan Burke.
At the time, the company forecast it would double its then 50-person workforce over the coming 12 to 18 months.
Where Loon relied on balloons, however, the newer project utilizes Zephyr solar-powered drones.
“[Loon] got really good customer engagement,” AALTO CEO Samer Halawi told TechCrunch in a sit-down interview last week at Mobile World Congress.
Airbus acquired the technology for the fixed-wing drones from U.K. Ministry of Defence and Space spinoff QinetiQ in 2022.
Every six months or so, the system will land for a battery swap, as these still have a limited shelf life.
Like Loon before it, the company is also exploring temporary deployment for downed cell towers following natural disasters.
