Artificial Intelligence

Some startups are defying the trend of scarcer capital. Descope, a “developer-first” authentication and user management platform, raised $53 million in seed funding today. Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, TechAviv, J Ventures, Cerca, Unusual Ventures, Silicon Valley CISO Investments, and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz and Microsoft chairman …

Twitter announced earlier this month that it would restrict free use of its API, the programming interface that enables developers to communicate with Twitter. While the change undoubtedly has an impact on startups and independent developers who are creating tools to make the platform entertaining and safe, it also poses …

Google announced the launch of the first Beta for its “Privacy Sandbox” adtech stack proposal, which aims to iterate how ad tracking, targeting, and reporting is done so it appears less creepy for individual users while maintaining an interest-based, behavioral targeting capability on web users’ eyeballs. Google has started letting …

Microsoft has confirmed that it is finally killing off Yammer, the business social network it bought for $1.2 billion more than ten years ago. Yammer’s founding team was based in San Francisco, and co-founder David Sacks officially launched the company at a TechCrunch startup event in 2008. Before Microsoft intervened …

According to four people with knowledge of the situation, Amazon is in talks with Times Internet to investigate buying MX Player, one of the biggest on-demand video streaming services in India, as the American e-commerce company looks to expand its entertainment ambitions in the important international market. Three sources warned …

A “highly-targeted” phishing attack led to the access of internal documents and source code, according to Reddit. Reddit’s chief technology officer, Christopher Slowe, also known as KeyserSosa, stated in a post that on February 5, the company learned about the “sophisticated” attack aimed at Reddit staff members. According to him, …

Otonomo, a connected automotive company that went public in 2021 and has seen a sharp decline in the value of its stock, recently announced a reverse merger with roadside assistance tech company Urgent.ly. In an all-share merger, Urgently shareholders will receive 67% of the combined company, and Otonomo shareholders will …

Tech industry layoffs continue. The company GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, announced today that it will be letting go of 10% of its workforce through the end of its fiscal year. GitHub had about 3,000 employees prior to this announcement, which was first reported by Fortune. Additionally, the business …

The new Bing, which is supported by a combination of a next-generation OpenAI GPT model and Microsoft’s own Prometheus model, was launched by Microsoft yesterday on the web and in its Edge browser. With this, Microsoft beat Google to the punch in popularizing this type of search experience, though the …

A number of startups are vying to surpass Canva and unseat Adobe’s hegemony in three-dimensional modeling. PixCap, a newly funded participant, is entering the fray with a web-based, no-code 3D design tool. Singapore-based PixCap, which was established in 2020, recently received $2.8 million from a seed funding round. It was …