Category: Tech Crunch

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,...

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...

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....

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...

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...

It’s been a busy year for TechCrunch events — and it’s about to get even bigger. StrictlyVC, our boutique, highly exclusive event series for VCs and startups, is crossing the Atlantic this May with stops in London and Athens! We’re bringing StrictlyVC’s insider conversations to Europe. On May 8, we’ll dive into Athens’ booming tech...

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...

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)...

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...

When Deepankar Rustagi last raised money for OmniRetail in 2022, excitement was high for African startups addressing the supply chain and operational challenges in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector. At one point, these startups received more capital than all sectors, except fintech. Recently, though, the industry’s enthusiasm and venture capital’s interest have faded, as...