Eight years after joining Benchmark as the firm’s first woman general partner, Sarah Tavel announced on X that she is transitioning to a more limited role at the storied venture firm. In her new position as a venture partner, Tavel will continue to make investments and serve on existing company boards, but she will have […]
X is rolling out support for 4K video uploads
X is now allowing select creators to upload videos in 4K resolution, and will roll out the feature to all premium subscribers soon.
OpenAI is fixing a ‘bug’ that allowed minors to generate erotic conversations
A bug in OpenAI’s ChatGPT allowed the chatbot to generate graphic erotica for accounts where a user registered as a minor, under the age of 18, TechCrunch’s testing revealed, and OpenAI confirmed. In some cases, the chatbot even encouraged these users to ask for raunchier, more explicit content. OpenAI told TechCrunch its policies don’t allow […]
EWOR launches ‘founder fellowship’ program with $68M fund
Supporting early-stage entrepreneurs seems to be suddenly in vogue in Europe. Back in March, podcaster and venture investor Harry Stebbings launched “Project Europe” to great fanfare, aiming to back founders aged 25 and under with a small $10 million fund — riffing on the ‘Peter Thiel Fellowship’ model of yore. Now, a new fund hopes […]
Reddit now supports translation of posts and comments into Hindi
In a bid to broaden its user base in India, Reddit has updated its machine translation feature to support the automatic translation of posts and comments into Hindi. “With this expansion, authentic, more people-powered content is now accessible in one of India’s most spoken languages,” the company wrote in an update to a blog post. […]
IXI raises $36.5M from Amazon and others to bring autofocus to prescription glasses
Blink and you’ll miss it: A startup out of Finland is taking a new look at the market for prescription eyewear. Tapping into innovations in eye-tracking and liquid crystal lens technology, IXI is building low-power glasses that will invisibly and automatically adjust to account for a wearer’s presbyopia (far-sightedness). Four years into its life, Helsinki-based […]
Grouphug is a stealth-mode startup that plans use AI inside WhatsApp groups
Veterans of the European startup scene, who’ve launched multiple consumer apps in the past, are partly coming out of stealth Tuesday with a new app. On the face of it, Grouphug will simply generate memes from the archive of a group WhatsApp chat. However, that masks a wider play. Grouphug is led by Felix Petersen, […]
4chan is back online, says it’s been ‘starved of money’
4chan is partly back online after a hack took the infamous image-sharing site down for nearly two weeks. The site first went down on April 14, with the person responsible for the hack apparently leaking data including a list of moderators and “janitors” (one janitor told TechCrunch they were “confident” that the leaked data was […]
Early cancer detection startup Craif raises $22M
Cancer ranks as one of the top causes of death worldwide. The National Cancer Institute reported nearly 20 million new cancer cases and 9.7 million cancer-related deaths globally in 2022, with projections showing a rise to 29.9 million new cases by 2040. Craif, spun off from Nagoya University in Japan in 2018, is using microRNA(miRNA) […]
From coding tests to billion-dollar startups, Ali Partovi’s eight-year experiment is paying off
In Silicon Valley, where the same high-wattage names tend to dominate the headlines, Ali Partovi has long wielded outsized influence despite limited name recognition. The Iranian-born Harvard graduate built an impressive resume early on — joining the founding team of LinkExchange (acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million), co-founding iLike (sold to MySpace for […]