Social media startup ShareChat’s valuation has cratered below $2 billion from nearly $5 billion in a new funding round, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch, marking a steep decline for the nine-year-old Indian startup that boasts over 400 million users in the South Asian market.
It did not disclose the valuation at which the funds were raised but strongly denied that its new valuation was below $2 billion, asserting there was “no valuation” attached to the round.
Existing investors including Lightspeed, Temasek, Alkeon Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures and HarbourVest have invested in the new round, the startup said.
Their debt will convert to equity at a valuation below $2 billion in the next round, according to a source with direct knowledge of the terms.
ShareChat was valued at $4.9 billion in a funding round it raised in mid-2022.
Tesla drops prices, Meta confirms Llama 3 release, and Apple allows emulators in the App StoreHeya, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the past few days in tech.
Google’s annual enterprise-focused dev conference, Google Cloud Next, dominated the headlines — and we had plenty of coverage from the event.
Lorenzo wrote about how hackers stole over ~340,000 Social Security numbers from government consulting firm Greylock McKinnon Associates (GMA).
Elsewhere, Sarah had the story on Spotify’s personalized AI playlists, which lets users create a playlist based on written prompts.
Emulators in the store: Apple updated its App Store rules to globally allow emulators for retro console games an option for downloading titles.
Tesla has slashed the price of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software subscription to $99 per month, down from $199 per month, as the electric vehicle maker aims to boost adoption of its advanced driver assistance system ahead of first-quarter earnings.
The price cut comes a couple of weeks after Tesla launched a free one-month trial of FSD for every customer in the U.S. with a compatible Tesla.
The FSD price cut comes the same week that Tesla released more tweaks to its latest V12 version of the software to certain users.
More drivers with FSD doesn’t only mean more money for Tesla.
Tesla might also be angling for more training data so it can meet CEO Elon Musk’s promise to unveil a Tesla robotaxi in August.
Tesla is reportedly abandoning its plan to build a lower-cost EV thought to cost around $25,000, according to Reuters, despite that vehicle’s status as a pivotal product for the company’s overall growth.
The company will instead focus its efforts on a planned robotaxi that is being built on the same small EV platform that was also supposed to power the lower-cost vehicle.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed, without proof, that Reuters is “lying” in a post on his social media platform, X, and did not dispute any specific details.
He also responded with an eyes emoji to another post that effectively summed up the Reuters report in different words.
Tesla was reportedly targeting a price of around $25,000 for the next-generation EV.
India is walking back on a recent AI advisory after receiving criticism from many local and global entrepreneurs and investors.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT shared an updated AI advisory with industry stakeholders on Friday that no longer asked them to take the government approval before launching or deploying an AI model to users in the South Asian market.
Under the revised guidelines, firms are instead advised to label under-tested and unreliable AI models to inform users of their potential fallibility or unreliability.
The revision follows India’s IT ministry receiving severe criticism earlier this month from many high-profile individuals.
Less than a year ago, the ministry had declined to regulate AI growth, identifying the sector as vital to India’s strategic interests.
Meta has dropped its lawsuit against an Israeli web scraping company Bright Data, after losing a key claim in its case a few weeks ago.
Beyond being just another case of web scraping, what made this case particularly interesting was that Meta was a Bright Data customer at one time.
However, when Bright Data scraped Meta’s own data, the company sued.
“This concession by Meta is a pivotal moment for Bright Data and the web scraping community.
“Bright Data remains committed to keeping public web data freely accessible to everyone.
OpenAI is always making slight adjustments to its models and pricing, and today brings just such an occasion.
It’s also a popular API, being lower cost and faster than GPT-4 on a lot of tasks.
Hence the steady ratcheting down of prices — though it’s also a natural result of streamlining the models and improving their infrastructure.
GPT-3.5 Turbo also gets a new model version, 0125 (i.e.
And the company also released a new version of its free moderation API — which identifies potentially harmful text.
Clockwork today announced a new service that utilizes its clock synchronization service to eliminate packet drops to help businesses improve their network performance. With this new service, businesses can reduce…
Europe’s startup ecosystem has not been immune to the global recession, with funding rounds drying up and companies leery of hitting ephemeral valuations. However, there are some notable exceptions: A…
Coinbase has been issued a Wells notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which could result in the company being fined for its past dealings in cryptocurrencies. Shares of Coinbase…
