Prometeo, a startup out of Uruguay building channels to enable open banking across Latin America, is today announcing that it has picked up $13 million in funding to expand its business.
A lot of open banking these days focused on national rollouts — not least because banking conventions and regulations are often very localized.
(It’s not the only company that believes that open banking has a big role to play in financial services in the future: last year, the open banking startup Ivy raised funding specifically to expand to Latin America; and Christine wrote here extensively on Finerio, an ambitious open banking startup out of Mexico.
More recently, last year it led a $14 million round into nocnoc, a Latin America cross-border commerce specialist.
It also owns the point-of-sale payments company Zettle, which has been making very big inroads into Latin America for years now.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a complaint alleging that SpaceX illegally fired eight employees who wrote and distributed an open letter with workplace concerns.
Circulated in June 2022, the open letter called out how SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk’s public behavior was harming the company’s reputation.
At the time, Business Insider alleged that SpaceX paid a $250,000 settlement to a flight attendant that Elon Musk sexually harassed.
As a result of its complaint, the NLRB regional director in Los Angeles will seek to arrive at a settlement with SpaceX.
If SpaceX doesn’t settle, the company will face a hearing before an administrative law judge in March.
For the longest time, Mozilla was synonymous with the Firefox browser, but for the last few years, Mozilla has started to look beyond Firefox, especially as its browser’s importance continues to wane.
Late last month, I sat down with Mozilla’s president and executive director, Mark Surman, to discuss what’s next for Mozilla — and what that means for the fans and Firefox.
“Mozilla AI, which had a broad mandate around finding open source, trustworthy AI opportunities and build a business around them.
Meanwhile, the open source and AI communities are still figuring out what exactly open source AI is going to look like.
“The question that we’re asking ourselves now is: What’s the pop-up blocker for the AI era?
Earlier this year, GitHub rolled out Copilot Chat, a ChatGPT-like programming-centric chatbot, for organizations subscribed to Copilot for Business.
Copilot Chat more recently came to individual Copilot customers — those paying $10 per month — in beta.
“And code complete was just the beginning.”Little else about Copilot Chat has changed since the beta.
Developers can prompt Copilot Chat in natural language to get real-time guidance, for example asking Copilot Chat to explain concepts, detect vulnerabilities or write unit tests.
Like all generative AI models, the model underpinning Copilot Chat, GPT-4, was trained on publicly available data — some of which is copyrighted or under a restrictive license.
Cisco announced this morning that it intends to acquire Isovalent, a cloud-native security and networking startup that should fit well with the company’s core networking and security strategy.
Tetragon is the company’s open source security visibility component.
Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco said that it is essential for companies to work together where security is concerned.
And we need to make sure that we stay open in this market and co-innovate, and I think open source is probably one of the best models to co-innovate with,” Patel said.
Cisco has been extremely acquisitive this year with this representing the 11th acquisition by the company, the fifth related to security.
Spill, a platform founded by ex-Twitter employees, is closing out its first year on the market by opening up its beta to all users, whether they’re on iOS or Android.
Spill is like the polar opposite of X, a platform that continues to alienate users with platform policies that make the app actively less inclusive.
Around his one-year anniversary of being laid off from Twitter, Spill CEO Alphonzo Terrell told TechCrunch that the app has amassed around 200,000 users.
Spill may not be growing as quickly as other Twitter competitors like Bluesky, Mastodon or Threads, but Terrell isn’t worried.
“People are looking for something new,” Terrell told TechCrunch last month.
Softbank is selling its Open Opportunity Fund to its chairman and managing partner, Paul Judge, and Marcelo Claure, who is being appointed the fund’s vice chairman and general partner.
Judge and Claure will fully own the firm’s $100 million Open Opportunity Fund 1, the $150 million Fund 2, as well as the entire portfolio.
Claure called the acquisition a “significant milestone,” saying it “demonstrates a concrete move towards more diverse representation within all layers of the venture capital ecosystem.”Softbank rebranded its Opportunity Growth Fund to Open Opportunity Fund (OOF) earlier this year, and appointed Judge as its chairman, who became co-owner of the Fund.
Fund 1 deployed $100 million in 75 Black-and-Latino companies, yielding seven exits and 46 follow-on rounds.
Fund 1 companies may also receive funding from Fund 2 on a “case-by-case basis,” Judge said.
As 2023 comes to a close, a critical cohort of tech companies has regained the value it lost after the summer rally, potentially setting the stage for a stronger IPO cycle in early 2024 than some may anticipate.
Earlier this year, we saw three companies go public in quick succession: Arm, Instacart and Klaviyo‘s IPOs represented a liquidity peak, but they failed to inspire other tech companies to a rush towards the public market.
The three companies had pretty good IPOs, too, but they mostly failed to make the sort of splash some had hoped for.
Arm’s stock has performed well compared to its IPO price (trading at $71.30 per share today, up from its $51 list price), but Klaviyo and Instacart haven’t fared as well.
Klaivyo’s shares are trading 24 cents above its IPO price, while Instacart’s stock is trading at about $5 less than its listing price this morning.
Netflix today announced that it is discontinuing its support for Conductor, a popular orchestration engine for microservices the streaming giant open-sourced in 2016.
While Netflix will no longer be maintaining this repo, members of the Conductor community have been active in promoting alternative forks of this project, so we trust that the health of the community will remain strong moving forward.”One of those companies is Orkes, a startup founded by the engineers who originally created the Conductor project while they were at Netflix.
The team plans to maintain in close relationship with the rest of the Conductor community.
“We are excited to work in partnership with the broader community to ensure that Conductor continues to thrive and this new chapter for Conductor OSS reflects the collective vision of this thriving community,” Orkes writes in its announcement.
This makes it easier for developers to add language models and machine learning inferencing to their workflows by leveraging Orkes’ pre-built integrations with services like Azure Open AI, OpenAI and Google’s Vertex AI.
But things are now starting to shift again back to the open web, Mullenweg believes.
With Texts.com, he saw an opportunity to invest in another area where consumers are pushing for more openness: messaging.
As for Texts.com, Mullenweg saw the acquisition as a way to move into a third major market beyond publishing and commerce.
“I thought that we had a lot of ideas to build, and Automattic seemed like the right place,” Bagaria added.
Competitor Beeper recently made its iMessage-on-Android app Beeper Mini free as it does battle with Apple, which has been working to shut down its service.
