Only Products and Other Stuff

Capillary Technologies , an Indian SaaS startup that offers solutions for loyalty management and customer engagement, has raised $45 million in a funding round, as it plans to expand into global markets and widen its reach through mergers and acquisitions. The funding arrives at a crucial time amidst the prevailing market slowdown, where startups, particularly those at the late stage, are facing a capital crunch. Capillary’s Series D funding round was led by Avataar Ventures and its LPs Pantheon, 57Stars and Unigestion. It also saw participation from Filter Capital and Innoven Capital. The round comprises $40 million in equity and about $5–$7 million in debt. With the latest capital injection, the startup has raised nearly $150 million in capital to date. Founded in 2012, Capillary Technologies initially focused on the retail vertical in India and Southeast Asia. In recent years, it has broadened its offerings and launched in more markets including the Middle East and South Africa, ...

Amazon will pay the FTC a $25 million penalty as well as “overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards” to avoid charges of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to spruce up its AI. Amazon’s voice interface Alexa has been in use in homes across the globe for years, and any parent who has one knows that kids love to play with it, make it tell jokes, even use it for its intended purpose, whatever that is. In fact it was so obviously useful to kids who can’t write or have disabilities that the FTC relaxed COPPA rules to accommodate reasonable usage: Certain service-specific analysis of kids’ data, like transcription, was allowed as long as it is not retained any longer than reasonably necessary. It seems that Amazon may have taken a rather expansive view on the “reasonably necessary” timescale, keeping kids’ speech data more or less forever. As the FTC puts it: Amazon retained children’s recordings indefinitely — unless a parent reques...

Eric Thomas Contributor Share on Twitter Eric Thomas is vice president of security GTM at Logz.io , an open source observability platform for DevOps teams. Security information and event management (SIEM) is one of the most well-established categories of security software, having first been introduced about 20 years ago. Nevertheless, very little has been written about SIEM vendor evaluation and management. To fill that gap, here are six top-line tips on procuring and implementing a SIEM solution for maximum value. Evaluating and purchasing a SIEM solution Size your spend SIEM software solutions are priced differently: either by the number of employees in the customer organization, by the rate of events per second or based on the log volume ingested. It’s important to figure this out early to get a rough idea of what you will pay over time. You’ll also identify the various data sources meaningful to your security operations center (SOC). Buying a SIEM is a massive c...

Demand for AI via consumer mobile apps has been climbing, with market leader OpenAI’s ChatGPT mobile app topping half a million downloads in its first six days. Now, another AI app is touting its own launch success, as the a16z-backed Character.AI app is claiming to have pulled in over 1.7 million new installs in less than a week on the market. The AI app maker, which announced a whopping $150 million in Series A funding earlier this year, valuing its business at $1 billion, offers customizable AI companions with distinct personalities, as well as the ability for users to create their own characters. While there are a number of these AI character generators available on today’s app stores, interest in Character.AI has a lot to do with its founders. The Palo Alto-based startup was created by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, AI experts who previously led a team of researchers at Google that built LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a language model that helps power ...

By the time Howard Rheingold’s “Virtual Reality” was published in 1991, the Sensorama was already a “slowly deteriorating” relic stashed away in a cabana next the pool at its inventor’s West Los Angeles home. Rheingold describes awe — even surprise — that the system was still operable almost 30 years after its introduction. “I was transported to the driver’s seat of a motorcycle in Brooklyn in the 1950s,” the author writes. “I heard the engine start. I felt a growing vibration through the handlebar, and the 3D photo that filled much of my field of view came alive, animating into a yellow, scratchy, but still effective 3D motion picture.” The experience is immediately identifiable to anyone who has spent time in a modern VR headset. In the early 90s, it no doubt felt “a bit like looking up the Wright Brothers and taking their original prototype out for a spin,” as the book describes. At the dawn of the decade that gave us both “The Real World” and “The End of History,” virtual reality...

Apple Music Classical is now available on the Google Play Store, bringing the tech giant’s app for classical music to Android users with an Apple Music or Apple One subscription. The launch was first spotted by 9to5Mac . Back in 2021, Apple acquired classical music streaming service Primephonic and had announced plans to launch a classical music app in the future. Apple Music Classical first debuted on iPhone earlier this year in March . Notably, the Android launch of the app comes before the release of an optimized app for iPad and Mac. There are more than five million tracks available on the app right now, as well over 50+ million data points with data attributes of 20,000+ composers, 115,000+ unique works and 350,000+ movements. This data helps Apple Music subscribers find recordings across the catalog through the app’s specialized search engine built for classical music. When Apple launched the iPhone version of the app, the tech giant explained that classical works have m...

Make way for yet another headline-grabbing AI policy intervention: Hundreds of AI scientists, academics, tech CEOs and public figures — from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis to veteran AI computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, MIT’s Max Tegmark and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn to Grimes the musician and populist podcaster Sam Harris, to name a few — have added their names to a statement urging global attention on existential AI risk. The statement, which is being hosted on the website of a San Francisco-based, privately-funded not-for-profit called the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), seeks to equate AI risk with the existential harms posed by nuclear apocalypse and calls for policymakers to focus their attention on mitigating what they claim is ‘doomsday’ extinction-level AI risk. Here’s their (intentionally brief) statement in full: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuc...

Blackrock, a minority investor in Byju’s, has yet again cut the valuation of its holding in the Bengaluru-based startup, this time to about $8.4 billion, even as the most Indian valuable startup continues to raise capital at a better price. Blackrock cut the value of Byju’s share by 62% in the quarter ending March this year, from a year ago, it disclosed in a filing. Nonetheless, a series of qualifications merit attention: Blackrock is not a substantial stakeholder in Byju’s, and owns less than 1% equity in the startup. A similar move from Prosus, one of the more prominent investors in Byju’s, would have raised greater alarms for the Indian edtech leader. Additionally, it’s worth noting that valuation methodologies may vary across different investors. Thus, other portfolio investors could potentially hold vastly contrasting views. Furthermore, Byju’s recently secured a $250 million in fresh funding at a valuation cap of $22 billion earlier this month, indicating that the startup ...

Carrum Health , a value-based healthcare company enabling self-funded employers to buy specialist medical care, raised $45 million in Series C funding. When we last checked in with Carrum Health in 2021, the company had raised $40 million . Founded in 2014, the company provides surgical and cancer treatment guidance and coordination. Members pay a fee to get an all-inclusive pricing model and 30-day warranty on care via Carrum’s Centers of Excellence network. Carrum Health CEO Sach Jain told TechCrunch that a published study by the RAND Corp. showed that by working closely with members, the company is able to reduce unnecessary procedures by as much as 30% and help employers save up to 45% per episode of care. Following the investment in 2021, the company launched its oncology offering in partnership with top cancer institutes, including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and University of Chicago Medicine. “We started exploring new areas where we can expand the value propositi...

After shutting down its food delivery business last year , Amazon India is now experimenting with dine-in payments. The company has initiated a limited introduction of bill payments at restaurants using Amazon Pay. The facility is currently active in select areas of Bengaluru with a limited set of restaurants. Users can head to Amazon Pay > Dining in the Amazon app to make payments using credit/debit cards, net banking, UPI, or Amazon Pay Later. At the moment, Amazon India is offering discounts on bill payments at almost all listed restaurants. Image Credits: Amazon It’s not clear if the e-commerce group is testing this in any other city. Amazon India spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment. Image Credits: Amazon Food delivery bigwigs Zomato and Swiggy both offer in-restaurant payments and discounts as they attempt to attract more customers. Earlier this month, Zomato launched its own UPI service in partnership with the ICICI bank for quicker checkout and ...

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Happy Memorial Day everyone. In this issue: Astranis’ novel approach to GEO satellites Virgin Galactic’s return to the skies News from SpaceX, and more Astranis’ novel approach to internet satellites is starting to pay off Astranis , a satellite internet startup based in San Francisco, said Wednesday that its first spacecraft completed a milestone test and will start bringing broadband access to rural Alaskans as soon as mid-June. It’s a major step for the company, which was founded in 2015 by John Gedmark and Ryan McLinko. By taking a first principles approach to satellite development, the pair bet that they could make a smaller, cheaper spacecraft for geosynchronous orbit — the orbit farthest from Earth and arguably the most inhospitable — and use them to bring internet to millions, or even billions, of people around the globe. Their bet is paying off: The company’s first satellite, Arcturus, launched on a Falcon Heavy at the end of April. W...

As some crypto companies gain mainstream adoption through partnerships, alliances or deals with big brand names, others are operating by the beat of their own drum and not worrying about whether a big label is with them. Solana, a layer-1 blockchain that launched in 2020, is one of the biggest chains that developers are building on. Excluding stablecoins, Solana is the eighth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization at around $7.6 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data . “Solana has the potential to be the Apple of crypto,” co-founder Raj Gokal told TechCrunch+. For many years, Apple focused on two things: user experience and performance, he said. “I think about Apple, having worked for close to a decade on latency for touchscreens to allow for the iPhone to come out and it just felt like magic.” “There were a lot of things to be built on top of that platform to get the iPhone and App Store and app ecosystem to where it is today,” Gokal added. “But it all started with one...

It’s Memorial Day here in the United States, which means that the flow of tech news is slower than normal. This might leave you feeling bereft, adrift without the usual 3,239 individual items that happen daily in startup land. But have no fear, for TechCrunch+ is here with a quick rewind of our work from May. Consider this a roll call of some of our favorite journalism from the last few weeks, packaged in a simple format for your quick perusal and ingestion. To the lists! News you wished you had read 10 years ago: Haje has been a busy bee this month, writing about how to write the perfect cold email , how to hire early employees , how to get warm intros to investors (he’s hot then he’s cold , etc.), and even more on the warm intro front . We also have notes from a founder on how they bootstrapped to $40 million ARR  and key metrics from an investor for cybersecurity product managers (cybersecurity is a topic Alex has been working on as well ). Oh, and if you want to get yo...

JioCinema, the affordable on-demand video streaming service rival to Netflix and Disney’s Hotstar in India, will soon be the home for “The Office” and other NBCUniversal titles. The Viacom18 streaming service said on Monday said it has signed a “multi-year” partnership with NBCUniversal to bring “thousands of hours” of NBCU movies and TV shows to India. The partnership follows Viacom18 bagging the streaming rights for HBO and other Warner Bros. titles for the South Asian market. The partnership is not exclusive, so Netflix is likely to continue to offer NBCU titles on its platform in India as well. Nonetheless, JioCinema scoring these international catalogs should be cause of concern for global giants. JioCinema, which has over the years poached many high-profile talent from Hotstar, offers the most affordable streaming service among the mainstream streamers. Compared to a standard Netflix plan, which costs $6 a month, JioCinema Premium costs $12 for a year. The streaming serv...

Krafton’s Battlegrounds Mobile India, the once chart-topping mobile game in the South Asian market, is now available to download on Android nearly a year after being ousted due to national security concerns . The South Korean developer said on Monday that BGMI is returning with version 2.5 update, which features a fresh map, called Nusa, and upgraded weapons. BGMI is returning to India as part of a three-month trial , the Indian Ministry of Electronics and IT said earlier this month. The ministry will be watching the game for any sign of disruptions, including its addictive nature. In response, Krafton said it will cap the gameplay at three hours daily for players under 18 and six hours for adults. The reemergence of the game offers respite to the teeming millions of gaming enthusiasts in India who once crowned its predecessor, PUBG, as the nation’s favourite. That game was banned in mid-2020 amidst escalating geopolitical strains between India and China. The resurgence of BGMI c...

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. I’m turning the wheel over to Rebecca Bellan next week, and she’s mostly steering things this week (I had to add a few of my thoughts in here cuz I can’t help myself). You’re in good hands! The big news before the Memorial Day holiday weekend caught many by surprise. I’m talking about the Tesla-Ford agreement. The deal will mean Tesla tech, specifically its charging port, will be integrated into Ford’s second-generation EVs that are slated to come out in 2025. The deal was announced by Ford CEO Jim Farley and Tesla CEO Elon Musk via, you guessed it, a Twitter Spaces — Musk’s latest push toward turning Twitter into an actual town square. No glitches for this one, at least.  In the future, Ford’s next generation of EVs will be equipped with Tesla’s charge port, called the North American Charging Standard, starting in 2025. This will give ...