Crunchbase is expanding the scope of its tagging options in Europe to start tracking how much venture capital funding goes to minority founders on the continent.
Diversity Spotlight is a feature on Crunchbase that lets companies add tags to their profiles to label themselves.
Crunchbase is now making this feature available in Europe.
Crunchbase initially launched the Diversity Spotlight feature in 2020, and last year expanded it to add an LGBTQ+ tag.
Women globally, meanwhile, typically receive less than 2% of venture capital funding across the world.
Privacy watchdogs in the U.K. and Canada have launched a joint investigation into the data breach at 23andMe last year.
In its data breach notices, the company said it didn’t detect the hackers’ activities for around five months, from April until September 2023.
23andMe said it only became aware of the account breaches in October 2023, when hackers advertised the stolen data on the unofficial 23andMe subreddit and a well-known hacking forum.
Hackers broke into around 14,000 accounts of 23andMe customers by reusing their passwords from previous breaches, a technique known as password spraying.
That’s how the hackers were able to scrape information on 6.9 million users by only hacking 14,000 accounts.
He had been accused of falsely inflating revenues at the UK startup ahead of its $11 billion sale to HP in 2011.
This verdict closes the book on a relentless 13-year effort to pin HP’s well-documented ineptitude on Dr Lynch.
Mr Lynch made £500M from the sale of Autonomy to HP.
Prosecutors accused Lynch and Chamberlain of illegally inflating revenues prior to the acquisition and hiding high-margin software revenues inside unprofitable hardware sales.
In the trial, Lynch successfully argued that he had not been involved in accounting and contract matters, instead focusing on technical and marketing issues.
BIRA also takes aim at Amazon’s “Buy Box,” claiming that Amazon manipulated which retailers were selected for the coveted placement.
BIRA and its legal team say that the claim is the biggest ever collective action to be launched by retailers in the country.
Making itself a must use for retailers, Amazon has then proceeded to cause damage and financial loss to retailers by misusing their confidential data that Amazon was entrusted to keep safe and by preferencing its own retail operations.
Retailers in the U.K. were entitled to be treated better and fairly by Amazon.
The U.K. is its largest international market, where it made $33.6 billion in revenues in 2023 (out of $575 billion in global revenues).
Google on Thursday said it is rolling out NotebookLM, its AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 new countries, nearly six months after opening its access in the U.S.
The list of countries that NotebookLM now supports includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and the U.K., as well as 208 other countries and territories.
It uses AI to help generate summaries and answer questions from documents, transcripts, notes and other sources that users can upload.
Some early users of NotebookLM in the U.S. anticipated it would support traditional note-taking apps, including Evernote and Google Keep.
Gemini 1.5 Pro also lets NotebookLM have up to 50 sources in each notebook, with 500,000 words per source.
The tools would be part of a wider set of proposals Ofcom is putting together focused on online child safety.
Consultations for the comprehensive proposals will start in the coming weeks with the AI consultation coming later this year, Ofcom said.
AI researchers are finding ever-more sophisticated ways of using AI to detect, for example, deep fakes, as well as to verify users online.
It found that 32% of the kids reported that they’d seen worrying content online, but only 20% of their parents said they reported anything.
Among children aged 16-17, Ofcom said, 25% said they were not confident about distinguishing fake from real online.
UK-based legaltech company Lawhive, which offers an AI-based in-house ‘lawyer’ through a software-as-a-service platform targeted at small law firms, has raised £9.5 million ($11.9M) in a seed round to expand the reach of AI-driven services for ‘main street’ law firms.
To date, most legaltech startups that are deploying AI have concentrated on the big, juicy market of ‘Big Law’ — meaning large, either country-wide or global, law firms that are keenly pushing AI into their workflows.
These include Harvey (US-based; raised $106M); Robin AI (UK-based; raised $43.4M); Spellbook (Canada-based; raised $32.4M).
Lawhive targets its platform at small law firms or solo lawyers running their own shop.
That’s a very small number of big law firms in the US in the UK.
Indian ride-hailing giant Ola is shutting down its operations in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, six years after expanding to international markets as it shifts focus to shoring up its domestic business ahead of an initial public offering.
An Ola spokesperson told TechCrunch that the SoftBank-backed ride-hailing startup sees “immense opportunity for expansion in India,” where it operates in hundreds of cities and offers a range of transportation options, including two-wheelers.
“With this clear focus, we’ve reassessed our priorities and have decided to shut down our overseas ride-hailing business in its current form in the UK, Australia and New Zealand,” the spokesperson added.
The startup plans to file for an initial public offering after the public listing of Ola Electric, the leading electric two-wheeler brand in India that spun out of Ola.
Ola Electric is looking to raise $662 million from its IPO in India, according to paperwork it filed late last year.
Microsoft has announced a new London hub for its recently unveiled consumer AI division.
It will be fronted by Jordan Hoffmann, an AI scientist and engineer Microsoft recently picked up from high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, which Microsoft invested in last year.
The news comes some three weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a new consumer AI division headed up by Inflection AI’s founders, which include Mustafa Suleyman — co-founder of Deepmind, the AI company Google acquired in 2014.
At the time, Nadella said that “several members of the Inflection team” also joined Microsoft’s new AI unit (Bloomberg reported that most actually joined).
In a blog post today, Suleyman calls Hoffmann an “exceptional AI scientist and engineer,” and with Suleyman himself reporting directly to Nadella in the U.S., Hoffmann will take charge of the new London unit.
The company announced on Tuesday that it’s expanding its dedicated STEM feed across Europe, starting in the U.K. and Ireland, after first launching it in the U.S. last year.
The STEM feed will begin to automatically appear alongside the “For You” and “Following” feeds for users under the age of 18.
Users above the age of 18 can enable the STEM feed via the app’s “content preferences” settings.
TikTok says that since launching the feed in the U.S. last year, 33% of users have the STEM feed enabled and a third of teens go to the STEM feed every week.
Content that doesn’t pass both of these checkpoints will not be eligible for the STEM feed.
