The affected divisions include voice-activated Google Assistant as part of the knowledge and information product team restructuring; and the Devices and Services PA (DSPA) team that manages Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit hardware.
Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
The report also mentioned that Google will now have one core hardware engineering team instead of separate teams working on Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest.
Separately, the company has also let go of people working on the Google Assistant team, as reported by Semafor.
Last year, Google had rolling layoffs in different teams including the Waze mapping service in June, its recruiting team in September, and its news division in October.
Female-founded companies in the U.S. raised $44.4 billion out of the $170.59 billion in venture capital allocated last year.
Such teams raised 26.1% of all venture capital allocated this year, a sizable jump from the 18.2% they picked up last year.
This follows the pattern that women founders still fare better with a male co-founder in the mix.
Kyle Stanford, lead VC analyst at PitchBook, told TechCrunch+ that it’s difficult to pinpoint a single reason why funding to women founders has dipped a bit, but he added that the decline in deal counts for women founders follows the trends of the broader market.
“That is not meant to make activity in female-founded companies look better, but the context of market difficulties is important.”Overall, less than 25% of all deals went to female-founded companies in 2023.
OpenAI is launching a new subscription plan for ChatGPT, its viral AI-powered chatbot, aimed at smaller, self-service-oriented teams.
Aptly called ChatGPT Team, the plan provides a dedicated workspace for teams up to 149 people using ChatGPT as well as admin tools for team management.
ChatGPT Team also lets people within a team build and share GPTs, custom apps based on OpenAI’s text-generating AI models.
ChatGPT Team is priced at $30 per user per month or $25 per user per month billed annually — higher than ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI’s individual premium ChatGPT plan, which costs $20 per month.
ChatGPT Team seems tailor-made for small- and medium-sized business customers who want team-oriented ChatGPT features without having to pay top dollar for them.
Defense tech startup Shield AI has expanded its latest funding round with another $300 million in equity and debt, bringing its total Series F to $500 million, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
This total amount reflects $200 million in equity closed in November, $100 million in new equity raised at the Series F price, and $200 million in debt.
Shield AI is building an “AI pilot” to turn aircraft into autonomous systems.
“AI pilots are becoming a strategic conventional deterrent in class with our aircraft carriers andguided missile submarines,” he said in a statement.
“Adopt AI pilots too slow, and we will fail.
Down under, only 3% of venture capital funding went to all-women-founded teams, and 10% went to teams with at least one woman founder.
In 2021 and 2020, 21% and 25%, respectively, of VC funding in Australia went to startups with at least one woman founder.
A report commissioned by consulting firm the Creative Co-Operative found that in 2021, despite a record increase in VC funding in Australia — about $10 billion — just 0.03% went to Bla(c)k women and women of color founders.
The VC aims to raise another $100 million for its Fund 2 in the spring of 2024.
Beyond just giving women money, Warren and F5 want to create generational change for a billion women across India, Southeast Asia and Australia.
Labrys is perhaps best described as Slack-meets-location-meets-payments for both military and humanitarian scenarios.
From 2015 onwards, when I founded the Techfugees non-profit, we found that both refugees and humanitarian workers almost always used WhatsApp to coordinate a response.
The Labrys platform, Axiom C2 and Axiom Communicator, allows for KYC/E verification, encrypted communications, task management, where individual users can be geo-located.
Meanwhile, Premise Data, which has raised $146 million, has a software platform for humanitarian organizations, and provides analytics about assets on the ground.
Plus, ‘dual use’ products that coordinate either civilian or military teams, is a growing market.
“Intrinsic is a fully customizable AI content moderation platform,” Mellata said.
Intrinsic, he explained, lets customers “ask” it about mistakes it makes in content moderation decisions and offers explanation as to its reasoning.
The platform also hosts manual review and labeling tools that allow customers to fine-tune moderation models on their own data.
“Most conventional trust and safety solutions aren’t flexible and weren’t built to evolve with abuse,” Mellata said.
“The broader slowdown in tech is driving more interest in automation for trust and safety, which places Intrinsic in a unique position,” Mellata said.
SimSpace, a startup that creates digital replicas of organizations’ tech and networking stacks for cybersecurity training, has raised $45 million in a funding round led by L2 Point Management.
And it’s expanding its private-sector customer roster, having shored up contracts with the U.S. Cyber Command, FBI and national cyber defense teams in unnamed U.S.-allied countries.
We’ve had to make hard decisions and to tough it out.”SimSpace’s origins lie in U.S. Cyber Command, where Hutchison designed and led a joint tactical cyber training exercise, Cyber Flag, drawing on the expertise of tech staffer Lee Rossey at MIT’s Lincoln Lab.
At the time, Rossey was working on creating cyber “training ranges” to simulate the IT production environments of companies and critical infrastructure.
“With SimSpace, because training occurs outside of a company’s network, it’s possible to ‘throw the kitchen sink’ at cyber teams without breaking something in an actual production environment and disrupting vital operations,” Hutchison said.
“Distributional is building the modern enterprise platform for AI testing and evaluation,” Clark told TechCrunch in an email interview.
Our platform is built for AI product teams to proactively and continuously identify, understand and address AI risk before it harms their customers in production.”Clark was inspired to launch Distribution after encountering tech-related AI challenges at Intel post-SigOpt acquisition.
While overseeing a team as Intel’s VP and GM of AI and high-performance compute, he found it nearly impossible to ensure that high-quality AI testing was taking place on a regular cadence.
“The lessons I drew from my convergence of experiences pointed to the need for AI testing and evaluation,” Clark continued.
The software offers organizations a “complete” view of AI risk, Clark says, in a pre-production environment that’s akin to a sandbox.
French startup Pivot is an interesting startup story as it is scaling at a rapid pace even though startup investments are down in Europe.
After raising a $5.3 million pre-seed round in April (€5 million), the company worked on the first iteration of its procurement tool over the summer.
And feedback has been so great that Pivot is raising another $21.6 million (€20 million) in a new Series A round from its existing investors — and in particular Visionaries, Emblem, Anamcara and Oliver Samwer.
I already wrote a lengthy description of Pivot, so I also encourage you to read my previous article on the startup.
But in short, Pivot is a modern spend management solution that supposedly works better than Oracle NetSuite’s procurement component or Coupa.
