Usually, when something starts to rot, it gets pitched in the trash. But Joanne Rodriguez wants to turn the concept of rot on its head by growing fungus on trash to turn it into something better. “We train mushrooms to eat trash and create renewable, bio-based raw materials,” she told TechCrunch. Rodriguez is the founder…
Building a startup is hard. Building a company that helps startups is similarly difficult. That’s the takeaway from TechCrunch reporting on Techstars and Newchip. In the case of Newchip, the accelerator appeared to promise a bit more than it could deliver. Mix in a culture that appeared to be turbulent at best, and you have…
Close to a decade ago, brothers Aviv and Matteo Shapira co-founded a company, Replay, that created a video format for 360-degree replays — the sorts of replays that have become part and parcel of major sports broadcasts. Replay caught the attention of Intel, which acquired the company in 2016 for a reported $175 million, and…
Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents. The company announced Wednesday that it raised $9 million in an oversubscribed seed round, co-led by First Spark Ventures (Eric Schmidt’s deep-tech fund) and Patron (the seed stage…
Meta is encouraging more users to post to its X rival Threads. In its latest experiment, the company is providing an easy toggle for users to cross-post from Instagram to Threads, the company told TechCrunch. Earlier today, users shared that they saw control for cross-posting on their Instagram accounts. Users could cross-post an individual post…
U.S. realty trust giant Brandywine Realty Trust has confirmed a cyberattack that resulted in the theft of data from its network. In a filing with regulators on Tuesday, the Philadelphia-based Brandywine described the cybersecurity incident as unauthorized access and the “deployment of encryption” on its internal corporate IT systems, consistent with a ransomware attack. Brandywine…
TikTok is suing the United States government in an effort to block a law that would ban TikTok if its parent company, ByteDance, fails to sell it within a year. The lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday, argues that the bill violates the U.S. Constitution. TikTok argues that the law violates the U.S. Constitution’s commitment…
An international coalition of police agencies have resurrected the dark web site of the notorious LockBit ransomware gang, which they had seized earlier this year, teasing new revelations about the group. On Sunday, what was once LockBit’s official dark net site reappeared online with new posts that suggest the authorities are planning to release new…
When Itai Ben-Zaken’s first startup failed in 2018, the former BCG consultant and Wharton MBA spent months trying to understand what he could have done differently during the five years he ran the company. After analyzing most of his major decisions, he concluded that while Comprendi, a digital ad recommendation business, was an interesting offering,…
Amazon is launching a new tool, Bedrock Studio, designed to let organizations experiment with generative AI models, collaborate on those models, and ultimately build generative AI-powered apps. Available in public preview starting today, the web-based Bedrock Studio — a part of Bedrock, Amazon’s generative AI tooling and hosting platform — provides what Amazon describes in…
