“So many folks in D.C. don’t actually know what it is,” he remarked.
When Graham put out a call for startup applications, a dozen startups got into YC’s debut class.
Lowe didn’t confirm where that was a strategy on Tan’s part, but he praised Tan for his warmness and his dedication.
After educating the D.C. market, YC aims to leverage its influence, particularly in areas like competition policy.
And if we don’t do that, then it’s pretty easy to see how this plays out,” Lowe said.
But the enormous growth of API usage — around half of all internet traffic — is putting businesses’ data at risk.
Cybersecurity startup Vorlon says it helps businesses protect their data from such incidents using its platform, and raised $15.7 million to improve its technology.
Founded in 2022 by former Palo Alto Networks executives Amir Khayat and Amichay Spivak, Vorlon analyzes network traffic to detect and remediate potential API abuse in real-time.
Vorlon uses AI to analyze and map all the API communication it monitors and translate it into human-readable language.
Khayat said Vorlon doesn’t send chatbot data anywhere; instead, it sends user queries to its own databases, and the chatbot will return the information from the startup’s database.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Ron has been working from home as a writer for almost as long as I’ve been alive.
Moar transpoLook, I’m trying my best to have a balance of everything here on Startups Weekly.
The Apple falls far from the car: Apple, after packing in its electric car project, let go of 600 staff who were reportedly working on the project.
I’d pay good money to see the prototypes …Apple, after packing in its electric car project, let go of 600 staff who were reportedly working on the project.
TikTok is working towards launching a new app called TikTok Notes that will allow users to post images in an apparent bid to rival Instagram, a service best known for its static-photo sharing feature.
Instagram, of course, has expanded into video and stories itself, taking pieces of other services and incorporating them into its own product.
As is nearly every social service you can imagine.
If it works for one social media service, expect the rest to follow in some manner at some point — probably sooner rather than later.
Expanding a feature set can bolster engaged time, and therefore how much revenue a social media service can earn.
Ah, spring has sprung here in the Northeast United States, and it’s not only flowers that are blooming.
Today on Equity’s startup-focused Wednesday show, we dug into the Multiverse-Searchlight deal, which reminded us of the Wonderschool-Early Day transaction that we covered on the show a few weeks ago.
Startup Land is feeling quite busy and high-dollar again, and that’s a lot of fun!
We wrapped up the show with a cool discussion of this new venture capital fund that’s targeting growth-rounds in Africa.
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
Sentry has long helped developers monitor and debug their production code.
While it’s called Autofix, this isn’t a completely automated system, something very few developers would be comfortable with.
In the process, Autofix will provide developers with a diff that explains the changes and then, if everything looks good, create a pull request to merge those changes.
Autofix supports all major languages, though Elser acknowledged that the team did most of its testing with JavaScript and Python code.
That also means that users must opt in to send their data to these third-party services to use Autofix.
Remember when you would “poke” your friends on Facebook to get their attention, annoy them or just start a poke war?
Well, Facebook is trying to bring back that experience with some small updates to the poking feature.
Plus, Facebook added the ability to poke a friend when you search for them on the social network.
Facebook says these small changes have led to a 13x spike in poking in the past month.
Facebook never defined what the idea behind poking was, and left it up to users’ interpretation, with some choosing to use it a way to flirt.
Fisker is laying off 15% of staff and says it needs more cash ahead of a “difficult year”Electric vehicle startup Fisker is planning to lay off 15% of its workforce and says it likely does not have enough cash on hand to survive the next 12 months.
“[W]e have put a plan in place to streamline the company as we prepare for another difficult year,” founder and CEO Henrik Fisker said in a statement.
Fisker said Thursday that it finished 2023 with $396 million in cash, though $70 million of that is restricted.
The company says it is talking with one of its lenders about making “an additional investment” in the company.
Fisker has also been dealing with a number of problems with its Ocean SUV, its only model so far, as TechCrunch reported earlier this month.
Forget Apple Vision Pro – rabbit r1 is 2024’s most exciting launch yet Apple is doing everything it can to make VR happen, but a tiny startup has a better vision of the futureThe year is off to a quick start in terms of new product launches and availability, even leaving aside the usual mid-tier smorgasbord that is CES.
Apple just started pre-sales of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset, with shipments beginning in early February; meanwhile Samsung debuted the next generation of the only viable iPhone competitor out there, the Galaxy S-series.
Unlike the Apple Vision Pro, which looks like the lavish, over-slick encumbered bit of technology’s past masquerading as technology’s future that it is, the rabbit r1 has a pared down, satisfying economy that I think comes much closer to what future generations want from their tech.
On the functionality side, Vision Pro is a an exercise in UI over saturation; the r1 aims to be as close as you can currently get to having no UI at all.
Rabbit is introducing the r1 when people are already in love with AI, as the term applies to large language models like ChatGPT.
T9 — the old text input from our trusty Nokia phones from the 1990s — is one of those throwbacks.
Direction 9 is a startup that is eager to introduce it to your television, so you can use the directional pad on your remote to enter text.
They showed it off at CES, and… I’d be extremely surprised if it ever makes much headway.
You have to focus up and down, and you can’t do blind typing,” explains Leon Chang, founder at Direction 9.
It seems unlikely that they’d be willing to add 20-50% to its cost just to add a new text input as a feature.
