Author: GT

The European Commission is stepping up efforts to bolster the security of Europe’s telecommunications networks by urging member states to phase out equipment from vendors such as Chinese tech giants Huawei and ZTE from its 5G and next-gen networks, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources. The EC had in 2020 recommended that member nations stop using tech from “high-risk” vendors like Huawei and ZTE, and now its vice president, Henna Virkkunen, is pushing to turn that recommendation into regulation, Bloomberg reported. Virkkunen’s proposal could push EU countries to follow the Commission’s security guidance more closely. If the recommendations become legally binding,…

Raising a $250 million Series D round may seem like a distant and unnecessary distraction to startup founders pitching investors for that first $1 million in seed money. But it shouldn’t be, according to several founders and venture capitalists. In their view, founders should be charting out a strategy for those later stage fundraises from the beginning. Aven co-founder and CEO Sadi Khan said, while on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, startup founders should start thinking about their later rounds before they raise their first financing. This strategy allows founders to determine how much capital they’ll likely need throughout the growth…

Israeli AI agent startup Wonderful has raised $100 million in a Series A round led by Index Ventures, with participation from Insight Partners, IVP, Bessemer, and Vine Ventures. The large round, in a market already crowded with AI agent startups, suggests Wonderful has convinced top tier investors it’s not just another GPT wrapper, but a company building the infrastructure and orchestration that could scale if multi-agent systems take off.   The round brings Wonderful’s total funding to $134 million just four months after the startup came out of stealth with a seed round and a promise to help enterprises deploy customer-facing AI agents across voice, chat, and email in every market and every language. The startup…

LONDON (AP) — A Chinese woman who was found with 5 billion pounds ($6.6 billion) in Bitcoin after defrauding more than 128,000 people in China in a Ponzi scheme was sentenced by a U.K. court on Tuesday to over 11 years in prison.Police said the investigation into Zhimin Qian, 47, led to officers recovering devices holding 61,000 Bitcoin in the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the U.K. Qian, dubbed “cryptoqueen” by British media, was arrested in April 2024 after spending years evading the authorities and living an “extravagant” lifestyle in Europe, staying in luxury hotels across the continent and buying fine…

Google Photos has rolled out a series of new AI-powered features, including a way to edit objects and people in images, a new Ask button for AI-powered answers about the photo or edit requests, AI templates to create new photos, and the expansion of natural language search. The company first introduced prompt-based editing for Pixel 10 series phones in August. Now, iOS users in the U.S. can describe their edits using voice or text to modify images, Google announced Tuesday. The company is also bringing its redesigned photo editor with easy editing options to iOS. The upgrade includes a new…

For all their pitches promising something new, AI startups share many of the same questions as startups in years past: How do they know when they’ve achieved the holy grail of product-market fit? Product-market fit has been studied extensively over the years; entire books have been written about how to master the art. But as with so many things, AI is upending established practices. “Honestly, it just could not be more different from all the playbooks that we’ve all been taught in tech in the past,” Ann Bordetsky, a partner at New Enterprise Associates, told a standing room-only crowd at…

In 2023, after nearly three decades as CEO of the company he founded, Robert LoCascio stepped down as CEO of LivePerson, the public firm credited with pioneering web chat in 1997. Generative AI advances inspired his next project, which he calls “the highest bar” for the technology: replicating human beings with their life stories and personality. In 2024, he founded and self-funded, Eternos, a legacy service that allows people to preserve their voice and stories for loved ones after they pass away. Now, it’s got a new name and modified mission. The startup gained significant media attention after its first…

January Ventures co-founder Jennifer Neundorfer stopped by the Equity podcast during TechCrunch Disrupt to chat about fundraising in this very AI-driven market.   Founders and investors alike are obsessed with AI, and even Neundorfer said her firm is looking at ways to use AI to make their work more efficient, such as helping to do due diligence on the market and competition. As for companies being built, she has a preference for the founders looking to create something entirely new.   “Where I tend to get excited is when I see someone who is using AI to do something that isn’t 10x better. It’s…

BANGKOK (AP) — Apple said it has pulled two of China’s biggest gay dating apps, Blued and Finka, under pressure from Chinese authorities, in the latest sign of a tightening grip on the LGBTQ+ community.An Apple spokesperson said in a statement that the company removed the two dating apps from China “based on an order from the Cyberspace Administration of China”, without further elaborating.“We follow the laws in the countries where we operate,” the spokesperson told The Associated Press.A check by The Associated Press on Tuesday found that the two apps are not available on Apple’s app store in China,…

A Chinese AI startup, Moonshot, has disrupted expectations in artificial intelligence development after its Kimi K2 Thinking model surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 across multiple performance benchmarks, sparking renewed debate about whether America’s AI dominance is being challenged by cost-efficient Chinese innovation.Beijing-based Moonshot AI, valued at US$3.3 billion and backed by tech giants Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, released the open-source Kimi K2 Thinking model on November 6, achieving what industry observers are calling another “DeepSeek moment” – a reference to the Hangzhou-based startup’s earlier disruption of AI cost assumptions.🚀 Hello, Kimi K2 Thinking!The Open-Source Thinking…