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Enterprise workflow management platform ServiceNow on Wednesday announced its second AI-related acquisition this year. ServiceNow said that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Data.World, a cloud-native data catalog and data governance platform. Austin, Texas-based Data.World was founded in 2015, and previously raised more than $130 million in venture financing from firms such as Alumni Ventures, Prologis Ventures, and Shasta Ventures, according to Crunchbase. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Data.World was most recently valued at $350 million in the company’s 2022 $50 million Series C round, per PitchBook. Gaurav Rewari, an SVP and GM of data analytics at ServiceNow, told TechCrunch that ServiceNow was looking for companies they could partner with that would help customers deploy AI at scale. Specifically, ServiceNow was looking to give businesses better resources to make their data “AI-ready.” “As I like to say, this path to agentic ‘AI heaven’ goes through some form of data hell, and that’s the grim reality,” Rewari said. He added that Data.World was the right choice to help ServiceNow customers with this problem because Data.World helps enterprises organize and easily search through their data. The addition of Data.World’s data governance tools will help customers get the most out of their AI agents and other forms of AI automation, Rewari said. “We looked at a bunch of companies and came away so impressed with what they had built,” he added. “We felt that the whole journey that they were on, with respect to metadata management [and] knowledge-based infrastructure, to provide cataloging of data across the vast enterprise and the governance of that data itself — that could be an extremely important addition to our product portfolio.” Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Rewari said that once the deal closes, Data.World will begin integrating into ServiceNow, with Data.World’s platform being offered as a product to ServiceNow customers in the near future. It’s ServiceNow’s second acquisition in recent months. ServiceNow announced in March that it agreed to acquire Moveworks, which develops enterprise-focused automation and AI tools, for $2.85 billion. These acquisitions all fit nicely into ServiceNow’s plan to embrace agentic AI and the tools required to build it. In March 2024, ServiceNow SVP of corporate business development, Philip Kirk, told TechCrunch that ServiceNow was going to approach the transition to agentic AI through a mix of building and buying capabilities. “It is kind of three-dimensional chess right now to figure out whether to build, buy, or partner,” Kirk said at the time. “I think the biggest thing that we try to prioritize is how we can make decisions that are in the long-term best interest of our customers, and that differentiate us from what we know we’re world-class at, which is enterprise automation in our platform.” Updated 10:09 a.m. Pacific: An earlier version of this article referred to Data.World as “Declan.” ServiceNow provided TechCrunch with a blog post that used this name, which a spokesperson later said is internal product nomenclature and shouldn’t have been published. We regret the error.

Apple is looking at adding AI search engines from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic into Safari, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services, made the statement during his testimony in the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet. Cue’s disclosure was part of his testimony regarding Apple and Google’s estimated $20 billion-a-year deal that makes Google the default search engine on Safari. He noted that searches on Safari declined for the first time last month, a change that he attributes to the increased use of AI. Cue also stated that he believes AI search providers will end up replacing traditional search engines like Google, which is why Apple actively looking at adding these services into its browser. However, Cue noted that these services probably won’t be the default, as he believes that they still need to improve. Apple has already had some discussions with Perplexity, Cue said.

Design company Figma today announced multiple features, including AI-powered site and web app creation, a way for marketers to create assets in bulk, and a new drawing tool. With this launch, the company is taking on other creative solutions such as Canva and Adobe, along with AI-powered website and prototype creators such as WordPress, Wix, Hostinger, and Replit. The company’s website creation tool is called Figma Sites. The startup said that often designers build prototypes of what a site should look like within Figma. With the new AI-powered tool, they can easily create websites and even publish them. Once the site is generated, collaborators can easily change elements of the site through an editor without prompting. Users can also add transitions, animations, and scroll effects while making the site responsive. Figma is adding the ability to directly generate blog posts from its site. That means the Sites will have a content management system (CMS), which is an upcoming feature, baked in that lets users edit posts within the design of a blog and also manage other assets such as thumbnails and slugs. For interactive elements like stock tickers, you can add custom code or use AI to generate code for you. Figma Make, on the other hand, is a similar AI-powered tool, which is geared more towards ideation and prototyping. Users can input a prompt to create a web application. The prototype app is collaborative, and users can prompt the assistant to change or add certain elements. Plus, if there is a developer on the team, they can directly modify the code to make necessary changes. Users can also generate small interactive elements, such as a clock, and embed them in the pages published through Figma Sites later. Yuki Yamashita, chief product officer at Figma, said that both products share a lot of features and underlying technology. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW “We want to enable high-fidelity prototyping with Figma, especially with Figma Make. You can add more data to it and try to see how viable an idea is in terms of final implementation. Whereas Figma Site is useful for a marketing and design team when they exactly know how a site should look and take full control of that,” Yamashita told TechCrunch while describing the differentiation between these products. Image Credits: FigmaMultiple companies in different sectors are looking for a way to create interactive experiences using AI. Website hosting providers such as Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, and Hostinger have released tools to let users easily create websites through AI. On the other hand, tools like Replit and Lovable are pushing users to create apps or prototypes without coding knowledge. Last month, even Canva released a way to create interactive experiences within its designs with Canva Code. This isn’t the first foray for Figma into prototyping, though. Last year, it released a Make Design feature, which had to be pulled after users accused the company of heavily training the tool on existing apps. What’s more, Figma is releasing a new tool for marketers called Figma Buzz. With these tools, marketers can easily use templates created by designers with brand-specific designs to make new creatives. They can also use a tool to insert AI-generated images or change the background of certain assets. Marketers can also create assets in bulk using data from sources like spreadsheets. The startup is also launching a tool called Figma Draw for vector editing and illustrations. Yamashita said that designers often had to export their vector designs outside Figma to make edits. The company is now adding features like text on a path, pattern fill, brushes, multi-vector edit, adding noise and texture, and a lasso selection to its Draw product. Image Credits: FigmaFigma launched its Slides tool for creating presentations last year. With the new asset creation and drawing tool, the company is directly competing with creative suites such as Adobe and Canva. Yamashita denied that the company is directly competing with these creative tools. He said that Figma is in the business of building digital products, and a third of the company’s users are developers, thanks to tools like Dev Mode. The company is announcing a new plan called a content seat starting at $8 per month, which will give users access to Figma Buzz, Slides, FigJam, and Sites CMS.

Marathon Venture Capital, a venture firm in Athens that prides itself on being “day one partners to Greek tech partners,” just closed its newest fund with €75 million in capital commitments, according to partner Panos Papadopoulos. The vehicle brings the firm’s total assets under management to €175 million — a meaningful amount for an 8-year-old, seed-stage investor in Greece and a reflection, too, of some sizable exits. Among them was the sale last year of Marathon’s portfolio company Augmenta to CNH, a maker of farm machinery and construction equipment in a cash deal that valued Augmenta at $110 million. Marathon also sold some of its shares in Hack the Box, a cybersecurity upskilling and talent assessment platform, to the investment firm Carlyle in a secondary transaction. We chatted with Papadopoulos ahead of an in-person sit-down with him as part of TechCrunch’s first StrictlyVC evening in Athens on Thursday, May 8, a night that will also include a deep dive with Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. What we wanted to know — and what the central questions will be Thursday night — is why Greece, and why now? Greece has historically seen less venture investment than other European countries. What, if anything, has changed locally that enabled you to raise a €75 million fund when global fundraising has become more challenging? For starters, Marathon I is a top percentile performer globally in [realized returns]; we built a portfolio that captured the current zeitgeist well before, for example, AI-assisted scientific research, robotics, or defense became the norm. What is your firm’s thesis and how does this newest fund’s thesis differ given the extended timeline we’re seeing for exits globally? Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW We are backing founders who do something hard in important markets. It can be hard because it requires unique knowledge, like a research PhD, or high agency, meaning understanding of a regulated or overlooked industry like power grid management. And we’re going to continue doubling down on our fast-growing community, which has been accumulating experience and expertise, along with ambition. Greek startups have traditionally faced challenges scaling beyond the domestic market. How are you evaluating a company’s international growth potential in this environment where capital efficiency matters more than rapid expansion? I beg to differ. Greek startups leverage local talent to serve leading global customers and markets from day one. Across our portfolio there is virtually no revenue coming from the domestic market. But they are serving the best part of Fortune 500. At the same time, capital efficiency and team grit are second nature to our community. We’re seeing fewer IPOs globally and extended holding periods for venture-backed companies. How did this affect your conversations with your limited partners about expected timelines and returns? We don’t need decacorns for our fund economics to work. We invest early on, maintain substantial equity positions, and keep our fund sizes small. These provide for various opportunities for meaningful returns, including secondaries and strategic M&A, well before an IPO. We did secondaries back in 2021 when most of the market was promising infinite holding times. In our culture, cash is king. It seems that many others forgot it. Many European VCs are emphasizing deep tech and AI. Is Marathon taking a similar approach, or do you see different opportunities specific to the Greek ecosystem? Of course we all are, but the definition of deep tech is stretched and means many different things to different people. We are not focusing on any specific sector per se — instead, we are focusing on people changing their sectors. We were perhaps the first generalist VC to invest in defense before the Ukraine war. Greek founders have historically received less funding than counterparts in Berlin, Paris, or Stockholm. Are you seeing valuations for Greek startups that reflect this discount, and does this create opportunities for better returns? In our experience, this is not about geography or price. We are backing founders in nonconsensus opportunities that most VCs would ignore. We move fast with conviction and we don’t ask who else is investing. These might sound like table stakes; they still are not. Given the challenging global exit environment, how are you advising your portfolio companies about strategic alternatives like secondary sales or acqui-hires? We work with our portfolio companies toward default alive scenarios. Starting from there, all options are on the table. We see founders truly want to run their companies for the long term. We believe a secondary sale can actually help towards that, and most often we are supportive of such scenarios. The EU has emphasized supporting startups through various funding mechanisms. How important is nondilutive capital from these sources to your portfolio companies compared to five years ago? We welcome any such initiative. We advise, however, our portfolio founders not to waste time on non-market-related activities. How has Greece’s improved macroeconomic situation affected both your fundraising process and the quality of startups you’re seeing? It’s always good when you are not making the press headlines, but what we do is less relevant to local macro. When it comes to the talent front, I would say truly based on naive empiricism that, if there is any correlation, that is inverse. Adversity is the mother of all invention. Many American VCs have pulled back from European investments. Has this created more opportunities for local funds like Marathon, or has it made syndicating deals more challenging? It is definitely a different market but also creates increased opportunity for European investors. I do not think the flood of capital in 2021 truly changed the opportunity for European companies. We must always count on ourselves and be aligned with founders for the long term.

Design company Figma today announced multiple features, including AI-powered site and web app creation, a way for marketers to create assets in bulk, and a new drawing tool. With this launch, the company is taking on other creative solutions such as Canva and Adobe, along with AI-powered website and prototype creators such as WordPress, Wix, Hostinger, and Replit. The company’s website creation tool is called Figma Sites. The startup said that often designers build prototypes of what a site should look like within Figma. With the new AI-powered tool, they can easily create websites and even publish them. Once the site is generated, collaborators can easily change elements of the site through an editor without prompting. Users can also add transitions, animations, and scroll effects while making the site responsive. Figma is adding the ability to directly generate blog posts from its site. That means the Sites will have a content management system (CMS), which is an upcoming feature, baked in that lets users edit posts within the design of a blog and also manage other assets such as thumbnails and slugs. For interactive elements like stock tickers, you can add custom code or use AI to generate code for you. Figma Make, on the other hand, is a similar AI-powered tool, which is geared more towards ideation and prototyping. Users can input a prompt to create a web application. The prototype app is collaborative, and users can prompt the assistant to change or add certain elements. Plus, if there is a developer on the team, they can directly modify the code to make necessary changes. Users can also generate small interactive elements, such as a clock, and embed them in the pages published through Figma Sites later. Yuki Yamashita, chief product officer at Figma, said that both products share a lot of features and underlying technology. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW “We want to enable high-fidelity prototyping with Figma, especially with Figma Make. You can add more data to it and try to see how viable an idea is in terms of final implementation. Whereas Figma Site is useful for a marketing and design team when they exactly know how a site should look and take full control of that,” Yamashita told TechCrunch while describing the differentiation between these products. Image Credits: FigmaMultiple companies in different sectors are looking for a way to create interactive experiences using AI. Website hosting providers such as Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, and Hostinger have released tools to let users easily create websites through AI. On the other hand, tools like Replit and Lovable are pushing users to create apps or prototypes without coding knowledge. Last month, even Canva released a way to create interactive experiences within its designs with Canva Code. This isn’t the first foray for Figma into prototyping, though. Last year, it released a Make Design feature, which had to be pulled after users accused the company of heavily training the tool on existing apps. What’s more, Figma is releasing a new tool for marketers called Figma Buzz. With these tools, marketers can easily use templates created by designers with brand-specific designs to make new creatives. They can also use a tool to insert AI-generated images or change the background of certain assets. Marketers can also create assets in bulk using data from sources like spreadsheets. The startup is also launching a tool called Figma Draw for vector editing and illustrations. Yamashita said that designers often had to export their vector designs outside Figma to make edits. The company is now adding features like text on a path, pattern fill, brushes, multi-vector edit, adding noise and texture, and a lasso selection to its Draw product. Image Credits: FigmaFigma launched its Slides tool for creating presentations last year. With the new asset creation and drawing tool, the company is directly competing with creative suites such as Adobe and Canva. Yamashita denied that the company is directly competing with these creative tools. He said that Figma is in the business of building digital products, and a third of the company’s users are developers, thanks to tools like Dev Mode. The company is announcing a new plan called a content seat starting at $8 per month, which will give users access to Figma Buzz, Slides, FigJam, and Sites CMS.

Microsoft says that it’s embracing Google’s recently launched open protocol for allowing AI “agents” to communicate with each other. On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that it would bring support for Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) spec to two of its AI development platforms, Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio. Microsoft has also joined the A2A working group on GitHub to contribute to the protocol and tooling. “By supporting A2A and building on our open orchestration platform, we’re laying the foundation for the next generation of software — collaborative, observable, and adaptive by design,” wrote the company in a blog post. “The best agents won’t live in one app or cloud; they’ll operate in the flow of work, spanning models, domains, and ecosystems.” A2A, which Google unveiled in early April, allows agents — AI-powered semi-autonomous programs — to work together across different clouds, apps, and services. Using the protocol, agents can exchange goals and invoke actions. Developers get a set of interoperable components they can use to make sure agent collaboration occurs securely. Once A2A support arrives for Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio, agents built using the platforms will be able to tap external agents for tasks, including agents created with other tools or hosted outside Microsoft. For example, a Microsoft agent could schedule a meeting while a Google agent drafts the email invites. “[C]ustomers can build complex, multi-agent workflows that span internal [agents], partner tools, and production infrastructure — while maintaining governance and service-level agreements,” the company explained in its blog post. “We’re aligning with the broader industry push for shared agent protocols.” While it’s far from perfect, agentic technology is attracting increasing investment as enterprises look to adopt it to boost productivity. According to a recent KPMG survey, 65% of companies are experimenting with AI agents. Markets and Markets projects that the AI agent segment will grow from $7.84 billion in 2025 to $52.62 billion by 2030. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Microsoft’s decision to throw its weight behind A2A comes after the company introduced support for MCP, Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI to the systems where data resides, in Copilot Studio. Other major AI model providers, including Google and OpenAI, announced that they would adopt MCP earlier this year.

In February of 2024, equity management startup Carta revealed that it was getting into the startup winddown business with a new offering called Carta Conclusions. By December, the company had decided to “retire” that offering, according to a blog post. And now, SimpleClosure, a startup that has described itself as “the Turbo Tax of shutting down,” has announced that Carta is a new investor in its $15 million Series A round. Carta’s decision to shift gears was driven by the realization that it “made more sense to invest and partner with a team laser-focused on solving this problem rather than building in-house,” said Carta spokesperson Amanda Taggart. (It’s also offering its customers a free consultation and a 10% discount on SimpleClosure’s services.) Dori Yona came up with the idea for SimpleClosure when building his last company after being tasked by a board member to create a “shutdown analysis.” The process was so complex, Yona felt compelled to build a software technology platform to help automate and streamline the shutdown process. Demand initially was so great that the young startup had already crossed seven figures in annualized revenue by February of 2024, according to Yona. At that time, SimpleClosure announced that it had raised $4 million less than six months after it raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding. In total, it has raised $20.5 million. TTV Capital led SimpleClosure’s $15 million Series A, which also included participation from existing investors Infinity Ventures, Anthemis, and Vera Equity. Besides Carta, new backers included The LegalTech Fund and a group of unnamed angel investors. “The reality is that 90% of startups don’t make it, and shutting down remains the unspoken but necessary part of entrepreneurship,” Yona said. “We hope companies never need us, but if they do, we’re here to help them do it the right way.” In 2024, SimpleClosure saw its revenue grow by 12x compared to the year prior, according to Yona. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW

For years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Energy Star program has helped consumers save a collective $40 billion in annual energy costs. Now, the Trump administration wants to wind it down, according to a report from CNN. The Energy Star program, which has a budget of $32 million, is a public-private partnership that works with appliance and electronics manufacturers to certify energy-efficient products while also helping consumers find rebates to lower the purchase cost. “Eliminating the Energy Star program would directly contradict this administration’s promise to reduce household energy costs,” Paula Glover, president of the nonprofit coalition Alliance to Save Energy, said in a statement. The program delivers a 350-to-one return on investment, she added. Energy Star was created in 1992 under President George H. W. Bush, and it was reauthorized in 2005 under President George W. Bush, placing oversight for the program under the EPA and the Department of Energy. The program’s signature yellow labels appear on appliances and electronics for sale throughout the U.S., informing consumers of how much they’ll spend on electricity or natural gas throughout a year of typical use. Energy Star saves the average U.S. household about $450 on their energy bills each year.

Uber and Chinese autonomous vehicle technology company WeRide plan to expand a commercial robotaxi partnership and bring the service to another 15 cities over the next five years. The expansion comes five months after the two companies launched a commercial robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi. As part of that expansion, Uber will increase its investment into WeRide by $100 million, according to a Wednesday regulatory filing. WeRide said it expects the cash to come through by the second half of 2025. The companies said the expansion will include cities in Europe. Under the partnership, WeRide’s robotaxi services are available through the Uber app. The relationship is similar to Uber’s deal with Waymo, in which the ride-hailing company handles the network routing and fleet operations, while the autonomous vehicle company remains responsible for the AV tech. Uber and WeRide, which went public on the Nasdaq in late October, operate together in Abu Dhabi and announced plans to add Dubai. In Abu Dhabi, they work with local Tawasul Transport to handle fleet operations. The additional 15 cities will focus on cities outside of China and the United States. Uber has locked up more than 15 partnerships with a wide-range of autonomous vehicle technology companies over the past two years across ride-hailing, delivery, and trucking. In the past two months, Uber has announced deals with Ann Arbor, Michigan-based May Mobility Volkswagen, and Chinese self-driving firm Momenta. It’s most high-profile partnership in the U.S. — and one that is commercially operating today — is with Waymo. The companies offer a Waymo on Uber service in Austin and are about to do the same in Atlanta. This story was originally published May 5. It has been refreshed with Uber’s capital commitment to WeRide. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW

Amazon is making a sizable investment to support new and existing Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers in Chile. The tech conglomerate announced on Wednesday that it will pour more than $4 billion into building an AWS infrastructure region of data centers in Chile by the end of 2026. The investment will go toward establishing three availability zones, or groups of isolated data centers, in the new AWS region. Amazon said it also plans to hire and develop local talent to operate and support its region in Chile. “The AWS South America (Chile) Region will help serve the fast-growing demand for cloud services across Latin America and in Chile with secure, reliable, and efficient cloud infrastructure,” Prasad Kalyanaraman, VP of infrastructure services at AWS, said in a statement. “With the new AWS Region, organizations will have the ability to build with advanced AWS technologies, like artificial intelligence and machine learning, to help accelerate growth, productivity, and innovation.” AWS already has numerous customers in Chile, including LATAM Airlines, AgroSuper, and Andrés Bello National University. This isn’t the first time Amazon has invested in AWS infrastructure and services in Chile. In 2021, Amazon launched AWS Outposts in Chile, which helped extend on-premises access to AWS in the country. In 2023, the company gave customers the ability to leverage private connectivity between AWS and their data centers or offices. That same year, Amazon rolled out AWS Local Zones to help customers connect to very-low-latency AWS offerings. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW TechCrunch has reached out to AWS for more information. Several Amazon cloud competitors have a Chilean footprint. Google Cloud launched its first cloud region in Chile in 2021, after unveiling its plans five years ago. Microsoft’s Azure announced its first data center region in Chile in 2020.

Uber and Chinese autonomous vehicle technology company WeRide plan to expand a commercial robotaxi partnership and bring the service to another 15 cities over the next five years. The expansion comes five months after the two companies launched a commercial robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi. As part of that expansion, Uber will increase its investment into WeRide by $100 million, according to a Wednesday regulatory filing. WeRide said it expects the cash to come through by the second half of 2025. The companies said the expansion will include cities in Europe. Under the partnership, WeRide’s robotaxi services are available through the Uber app. The relationship is similar to Uber’s deal with Waymo, in which the ride-hailing company handles the network routing and fleet operations, while the autonomous vehicle company remains responsible for the AV tech. Uber and WeRide, which went public on the Nasdaq in late October, operate together in Abu Dhabi and announced plans to add Dubai. In Abu Dhabi, they work with local Tawasul Transport to handle fleet operations. The additional 15 cities will focus on cities outside of China and the United States. Uber has locked up more than 15 partnerships with a wide-range of autonomous vehicle technology companies over the past two years across ride-hailing, delivery, and trucking. In the past two months, Uber has announced deals with Ann Arbor, Michigan-based May Mobility Volkswagen, and Chinese self-driving firm Momenta. It’s most high-profile partnership in the U.S. — and one that is commercially operating today — is with Waymo. The companies offer a Waymo on Uber service in Austin and are about to do the same in Atlanta. This story was originally published May 5. It has been refreshed with Uber’s capital commitment to WeRide. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW

“Day 25 of starting over my whole entire life,” Raegan Lynch narrates over a short video. “Right now, I’m wandering around the city I just moved to, in a country I’d never seen, all by myself after my relationship ended, and I had to leave my old life behind.” It’s a pretty enticing hook, which is why Lynch starts every video this way. She pulls us along as she navigates British grocery aisles – which are evidently quite different from those in the States – and bravely compliments a stranger’s outfit in a feeble attempt to make a new friend. Within a few months of posting her first video, Lynch has grown her accounts to over 588,000 followers on Instagram and 432,000 on TikTok. But what made Lynch’s story go viral has more to do with her crisp storytelling and attention to cinematography than her catastrophic breakup. These episodic, web series-esque videos are bringing a new spin to short-form content, pushing TikTok from raw “get ready with me” routines into more ambitious territory. As recently as last year, TikTok thrived off the idea that anyone could be a star – like Reesa Teesa from the “Who TF did I marry?” series, you could go viral just by telling your craziest stories while you drive to and from work. Viewers seemed to gravitate toward this off-the-cuff, casual style, where the videos feel like a friend is telling you a story on FaceTime. Even brands had shifted their marketing style, exchanging studio shoots for simple footage of someone talking into the camera. In the past, holding a clip-on microphone in front of your mouth would seem unprofessional, but in that moment, a more carefree nature was the point. Now, a year after Reesa Teesa blew up, short-form video viewers are starting to crave something different and more cinematic than these more casual clips. As viewers tune in to see if Lynch is settling into her new life, a scripted microdrama called “The Group Chat” has made its way from TikTok to the Today Show. The creator behind The Group Chat, Sydney Jo Robinson, plays each character in a group of friends as they navigate a tenuous text conversation. The mundanity of this drama is what makes it so fun. The Group Chat is about a group of friends who planned a girls’ night, but one friend asked to bring her boyfriend, and chaos ensues. The series has now entered its second season after the first season racked up nearly 100 million views across five TikTok videos. The serialized show garnered so much attention that, now, instead of making their ads blend in with casual content, brands like Alo Yoga and Little Caesar’s are producing higher-budget micro dramas to capitalize on the trend. Like Robinson, Nicholas Flannery, who has 5.5 million TikTok followers, plays each character in his serialized TikTok dramas. He takes inspiration from cliché plots in popular movies, like a series playing off the prompt, “every movie where the high-powered CEO has an affair with a younger man.” But while Flannery and Robinson tell complete stories across several videos, each clip can stand alone on its own. That way, if a video from the middle of the series surfaces on people’s For You Pages, they’ll still be drawn in. Before the rise of vertical video, scripted web series on YouTube were successful enough to spin out into cult-favorite TV shows like “Broad City,” “Insecure,” and “Letterkenny.” When YouTube tried to mimic this success on its own, however, its original content initiatives didn’t catch on. But trends ebb and flow, and now, creators like Lynch, Robinson, and Flannery are reviving the concept of the web series for a new generation. They’re not without direct competition from streamers themselves. Streaming platforms like Rakuten Viki have cemented themselves in Asian markets with short, serialized video series with timed comments. More recently, microdrama apps like DramaBox and ReelShort have boomed in the U.S. According to app store data provider Appfigures, DramaBox and ReelShort have made $99 million and $152 million from in-app purchases in the U.S. each, respectively, reflecting a 203% and a 233% year-over-year growth from the same time frame in 2024. Since the start of 2025, each app has earned at least 1 million downloads a month in the U.S. As Americans’ viewing habits trend more towards social video or bite-sized entertainment, rather than traditional television shows, there could be more demand for this scripted, crisply-edited content. TikTok is also rumored to be looking into scripted video, and the streaming network Peacock trained four TikTokers through a creator accelerator to make four new TV shows. American viewers seem to be enjoying this kind of social-first, scripted comedy, even when they have rejected this kind of media before. (Remember Quibi?). TikTok’s audience will never fully turn its back on “get ready with me” style videos, which are broadly accessible and duplicable for novice creators, but short-form video could pave the way for a renaissance of the web series.

Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike said on Wednesday that it would lay off 5% of its global workforce, which amounts to about 500 workers. In an 8-K filing, CrowdStrike said the layoffs were part of a “a strategic plan (the ‘Plan’) to evolve its operations to yield greater efficiencies as the Company continues to scale its business with focus and discipline to meet its goal of $10 billion in ending [Annual Recurring Revenue].” The company also said it was planning to “to hire in key strategic areas throughout its fiscal year ending January 31, 2026.” “These changes position us to move faster, operate more efficiently, and continue our cybersecurity leadership,” company CEO George Kurtz said in a letter to employees, according to The Wall Street Journal. CrowdStrike became a household name in 2016 when it investigated the Democratic National Committee hack and attributed it to the Russian government. Last summer, the company made headlines for the wrong reasons — a faulty update to its software impacted 8.5 million Windows devices around the world, caused a massive outage all over the world, forcing airports to shut down, and hindering airlines, banks, hotels, and other kinds of businesses.

French AI startup Mistral is releasing a new AI model, Mistral Medium 3, that’s focused on efficiency without compromising performance. Available in Mistral’s API priced at $0.40 per million input tokens and $20.80 per million output tokens, Mistral Medium 3 performs “at or above” 90% of Anthropic’s costlier Claude Sonnet 3.7 model on “benchmarks across the board,” claims Mistral. It also surpasses recent open models including Meta’s Llama 4 Maverick and Cohere’s Command A on popular AI performance evaluations. Tokens are the raw bits of data models work with, with a million tokens equivalent to about 750,000 words (roughly 163,000 words longer than “War and Peace”). “Mistral Medium 3 can […] be deployed on any cloud, including self-hosted environments of four GPUs and above,” explained Mistral in a blog post sent to TechCrunch. “On pricing, the model beats cost leaders such as DeepSeek v3, both in API and self-deployed systems.” Mistral Medium 3’s performance on AI benchmarks.Image Credits:MistralMistral, founded in 2023, is a frontier model lab, aiming to build a range of AI-powered services including a chatbot platform, Le Chat, and mobile apps. It’s backed by VCs including General Catalyst, and has raised over €1.1 billion (roughly $1.24 billion) to date. Mistral’s customers include BNP Paribas, AXA, and Mirakl. According to Mistral, Mistral Medium 3 is best for coding and STEM tasks, and excels at multimodal understanding. The company says that clients in financial services, energy, and healthcare have been beta testing the model for use cases like customer service, workflow automation, and analyzing complex data sets. In addition to Mistral’s API, where enterprise customers can work with Mistral to fine-tune it, Mistral Medium 3 is available on Amazon’s Sagemaker platform starting Wednesday. It’ll soon come to other hosts, including Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry and Google’s Vertex AI platforms, the company added. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW The launch of Mistral Medium 3 follows on the heels of Mistral’s Mistral Small 3.1 in March. In its blog post, the company teased the release of a much larger model in the coming weeks.

Spotify on Wednesday announced an update to its app designed to give users more control over their listening experience and recommendations. The refreshed experience introduces a handful of new features that will roll out gradually to Spotify users and Premium subscribers, including those to help you manage your Queue, your current listening experience, aid with playlist creation, and more. The changes help to balance out an app that often leans heavily on algorithmic recommendations to suggest and play music by instead giving users the power to shape what’s played, when, and how often. For Premium users, Spotify’s Queue has been revamped. The new design provides easier access to controls like Shuffle, Smart Shuffle, Repeat, and Sleep Timer, the company says. Smart Shuffle and Autoplay can also be switched fully off from Spotify’s Settings, if preferred. Plus, Premium subscribers will start seeing the tracks that Spotify is recommending to play after their queued-up tracks, so they can choose in advance what gets to stay in their Queue. As you listen to music, you can tap a refreshed Hide button that’s now more intuitively located, Spotify claims, when you come across a song you’re not in the mood for within your playlist. The button will hide the track in the playlist across all devices. However, the company will soon introduce an even stronger version of the “hide” with the launch of a new 30-day Snooze feature that will temporarily remove a track from your recommendations. The company is also introducing features to improve the management of playlists on mobile. At the top of your playlists, you’ll now find Add, Sort, and Edit buttons that allow you to add tracks, change the playlist’s title or cover art, and organize the sequence of songs. Listeners in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the U.K., and the U.S. will be able to use their Liked songs to create a playlist after first filtering it by genre, then tapping the new option to “turn into a playlist.” Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Other music curation tools have also been relocated. Now, users can tap the Create button at the bottom-right of the mobile app to access tools to create playlists, collaborate on playlists with friends, and join a Blend (a playlist that combines two people’s musical tastes by featuring songs they’ll both enjoy). Premium subscribers, meanwhile, can tap the Create button to access the newer AI Playlist feature and Jam, a real-time listening session where multiple people can contribute to a shared Queue. As a result of the changes, Spotify has relocated the Your Library tab to be the third option at the bottom of its mobile app.

Ford is raising the price of the all-electric Mustang Mach-E SUV and popular entry-level Maverick pickup by as much as $2,000 due to the import taxes President Donald Trump is placing on vehicles made in Mexico, according to Reuters. Higher prices could make it harder for traditional automakers like Ford to sell their EVs. Ford was already losing billions of dollars on scaling up its EV program. It may only get more difficult if the $7,500 federal EV tax credit goes away, which is something both Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have hinted is coming. The price hikes come just a few days after Ford said the tariffs will add $2.5 billion to the company’s costs across the remainder of 2025. General Motors said the impact could be as high as $5 billion. The new pricing applies to vehicles built after May 2, Reuters reports. Ford did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Energy Star program has helped consumers save a collective $40 billion in annual energy costs. Now, the Trump administration wants to wind it down, according to a report from CNN. The Energy Star program, which has a budget of $32 million, is a public-private partnership that works with appliance and electronics manufacturers to certify energy-efficient products while also helping consumers find rebates to lower the purchase cost. “Eliminating the Energy Star program would directly contradict this administration’s promise to reduce household energy costs,” Paula Glover, president of the nonprofit coalition Alliance to Save Energy, said in a statement. The program delivers a 350-to-one return on investment, she added. Energy Star was created in 1992 under President George H. W. Bush, and it was reauthorized in 2005 under President George W. Bush, placing oversight for the program under the EPA and the Department of Energy. The program’s signature yellow labels appear on appliances and electronics for sale throughout the U.S., informing consumers of how much they’ll spend on electricity or natural gas throughout a year of typical use. Energy Star saves the average U.S. household about $450 on their energy bills each year.

Tech executives have long talked about how AI is going to revolutionize the advertising industry. In particularly, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been quite vocal about how exactly he wants his company to lead the transformation. Speaking onstage at Stripe’s annual Sessions conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Zuckerberg laid out his plans to automate the entire ad industry with a black-box, end-to-end AI ad tool. A key component of such a product would entail putting thousands of AI-generated “test” ads in front of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads users, said Zuckerberg. “The basic end goal, here, is any business can come to us, say what their objective is — we get new customers to do this thing, or sell these things — tell us how much they’re willing to pay to achieve those results, connect their bank account, and then we just deliver as many results as we can,” he explained. “In a way, it’s kind of like the ultimate business results machine. I think it’d be one of the most important and valuable AI systems that gets built.” Zuckerberg first described this hypothetical machine on Ben Thompson’s Stratechery podcast last week, and — if built as Zuckerberg envisions it — it would have huge implications for the ad industry. During his Sessions appearance, Zuckerberg posited that while creative ad agencies would continue to exist were Meta to deploy this AI, small businesses might not “have to start off with the creative” and Meta could simply handle all of their advertising operations. In fact, Zuckerberg asserted during Sessions that Meta’s ad tools, several of which have generative AI capabilities, are sophisticated enough already that the company doesn’t even recommend that customers specify the demographics they’d like to target. Meta’s tools can find interested users better than human marketers can, claimed Zuckerberg. The next logical step, he says, is trying to apply this data-driven optimization to the creative side. “We’re gonna be able to come up with, like, 4,000 different versions of your creative and just test them and figure out which one works best,” said Zuckerberg. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW While this sort of solution may appeal to businesses, it’s an open question as to what AI ad testing will do to Meta’s platforms from a user experience point of view, considering they’re already brimming with generative AI slop. Meta has experimented with AI-generated images and comments in feeds, as well as AI chatbots users can interact with. The company more recently launched a social portal and dedicated app that spotlights generative AI content. Now, it appears yet another category of generative AI — ads — is poised to gunk up Meta’s social media ecosystem. If it wasn’t clear before that users are the product on Meta’s platforms and advertisers the customers, it’s about to become crystal. While testing AI-generated ads may deliver value for companies, it means users will have to suffer through yet more slop. The ad industry isn’t likely to take kindly to Zuckerberg’s vision, either. There’s been significant backlash over the ethics of using generative AI in creative fields. In October 2024, more than 11,000 creators signed an open letter condemning the use of human-generated art to train AI systems. Creators have also filed lawsuits against companies developing AI art tools, such as Midjourney and Stability AI. To be fair, there are just as many creators and advertising executives who believe AI tools won’t threaten their livelihoods anytime soon. Johnny Hornby, founder of the ad agency The&Partnership, on Tuesday published an op-ed arguing that creating successful branding campaigns is still a uniquely human task. In any event, it seems that Zuckerberg has a pretty clear idea of how he wants to automate the ad industry and fill Meta’s feed with AI — whether ad agencies or users like it or not.

Photo and video editing platform VSCO on Wednesday launched an AI-powered collaborative moodboard to expand how its products are used by photographers and artists. Called Canvas, the moodboard lets you import and edit your photos using the standard VSCO editing tools — so you can tune settings like shadows, brightness, exposure, temperature, tint, grain, blur, vibrance and hue. The AI chops come into play when you want to generate images using text prompts. The moodboard also lets you select parts of an image and use a “region prompt” menu to have AI recreate those parts with text prompts. The weights of the region prompt can be adjusted with a slider to generate different versions. There’s also a variation button that, as it says on the tin, makes the AI create variations of a generated image. This also comes with a slider to control how close to the original image the generated image is. Image Credits: Screenshot by TechCrunchUsers can share the moodboard with other people in a project and create different iterations of an idea. “Photographers, who often work alone, use Google Slides or Pinterest to create a vision for a project that they want to show the clients. We thought there could be a better tool that was designed for ideation with creators in the front and center of it,” VSCO’s CEO Eric Wittman told TechCrunch. The moodboard feature uses tech from an image editing startup called Facet that VSCO acquired last year. Facet had raised over $13 million in funding before it was acquired. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Image Credits: VSCOThis is VSCO’s first time implementing AI features into its products, and the company says it has seen positive traction. VSCO said more than 84% of content was generated using AI during Canvas’ test phase. The company plans to enable users to search VSCO and import photos uploaded onto the platform into the moodboard. The launch comes days after Adobe unveiled its own moodboard that has AI-powered image generation and editing features. Startups like Visual Electric, Cove and Kosmik have also tried to build whiteboards and moodboards to help people collaborate on ideas. Canvas is available to all users, but paying subscribers will get extra credits for prompting and generating images using the AI model.

Games drove the creation of GPU processors back in the 1990s, so it’s only fitting that artificial intelligence — the technology that GPUs are used to power nowadays — is making its way into nearly every aspect of video game design. In keeping with that trend, on Wednesday a startup called Sett — which is building AI agents to build and run mobile games — is emerging from stealth with $27 million in funding. The funding was raised in two tranches, the most recent of which was a $15 million Series A, led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Saga VC, Vgames and Akin Babayigit — the founder and former head of the UK-based games unicorn Tripledot, who now heads VC firm Arcadia Gaming Advisors — also invested. Earlier, Sett had raised $12 million in seed funding from F2, Bessemer, and some gaming industry leaders as angel investors. (In a case of uncanny timing, sources tell me that AppLovin, a would-be competitor of Sett’s, is today announcing the sale of its gaming assets to Tripledot. That deal, for $800 million — not $900 million as AppLovin previously estimated — is set to be publicly confirmed later today around AppLovin’s Q1 earnings. More on that below.) Up to now, Tel Aviv-based Sett has taken the same approach to ‘stealth mode’ as a lot of other B2B startups. Since being founded in 2022, it’s been under the radar, honing product-market fit and nurturing its early customer base. Today, that customer list features Zynga, Scopely, Playtika, SuperPlay, Rovio, Plarium, Candivore and Unity. It announced a website five months ago, but now that it’s fully out of stealth, Sett is still not putting its pedal to the marketing metal. It says it has over 100 gaming studios on a waiting list to be onboarded, and so the plan is to use the new funding to hire engineers and AI specialists. As for the product, the focus is on what CEO Amit Carmi — who co-founded the company with CTO Yoni Blumenfeld — believes is one of the biggest pain points in the mobile gaming business: Getting noticed. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW “Gaming is one of the most competitive industries in the world,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. “There are a lot of players, but you actually have more games than people. It’s pretty easy to build games, but almost impossible, statistically, to make a game that is successful.” (R-L) SETT’s CTO Yoni Blumenfeld and CEO Amit Carmi. Image Credits: SettImage Credits:SettCompanies spend a lot on user acquisition marketing to improve those chances of success, he continued, but typically it’s very expensive to build and place that content. On average, approximately $29 billion is spent to make around $100 billion in revenue, according to research from AppsFlyer. Sett’s solution is an AI agent for game publisher marketing. Extensive user-level tracking is a thing of the past on iOS, so the focus is now on what Carmi describes as “creative content” — in-game and marketing streams of interactive moments built on the aesthetics of the game that aim to draw in users to try out new games, or to play them more. These “playable” ads and marketing efforts are very catchy at the moment, but they can be very expensive and time-consuming to create, akin to building new versions of the game. That is where Sett sees an opportunity. What humans previously had to code, place and measure from the ground up can now be built using Sett, the startup claims, 15 times faster and 25 times cheaper. Arcadia’s Babayigit, from his time at Tripledot, knows first-hand how important marketing is for helping games stand out and get played. He described the idea as a “no brainer” in an interview. “It’s just a phenomenal team and an incredibly talented group of people.” The opportunity that Sett is targeting is also one that has been proven out. The gaming studio assets that Sett’s competitor AppLovin is selling to Tripledot for $800 million were built out in the first place, we understand, in large part to train the AI models that AppLovin now uses across a wide range of ad and marketing tools, including the creation of its own playable ads for customers by way of SparkLabs. Now that the AI models and wide networks of users are established — AppLovin has a market cap of $103 billion, despite a lot of short seller noise — the game studios are no longer core to AppLovin. Meanwhile, AppLovin has its sights set on a much bigger prize: It’s one of the companies that has publicly stated it will bid to buy the global business of TikTok. How much AI is too much? There is a big question mark over all the AI services that have the capacity to take over an increasing number of functions previously carried out by humans. How much is too much? Is there even a “too much”? Companies like Agave are already putting some AI into the creative process, and arguably, once the genie is out of the bottle, that could be it. Carmi said while he believes that you will eventually be able to build AI agents to develop and market games end to end, this may not be where Sett settles. “We believe it’s actually a bigger opportunity than what we’re doing now. This is the reason why we built our game engine and the agentic layer in a way that it generates code and enables us to enter all of what we’re doing basically to the game itself,” he said. “The vision of Sett is really taking both the marketing content and in-game content for now.” “I don’t think the genesis is to replace ‘all aspects’ of game design and execution,” Babayigit said. “I don’t even know if that’s possible right now, since to compete in a very crowded area, the bar is SUPER high, so you need to make a game in which the details are SUPER SUPER important. But what I do know is that this team is operating with real technology behind them, so if anyone can make certain parts of game production and distribution automated, it’s them.”

Rubrik co-founder Soham Mazumdar, who left in 2023, has a new data startup called WisdomAI. The company offers AI data analytics that can deliver business insights with structured, unstructured, and even “dirty” data, meaning data not cleaned of typos or errors. Working with data where and how it is, that’s essentially the holy grail for enterprise business intelligence software and why Coatue led the giant seed round of $23 million. Madrona, GTM Capital, The Anthology Fund, and others also participated. Rather than asking a data analytics team to run reports, business managers can ask WisdomAI questions and drill into the details. Mazumdar gives an example of a chief of revenue wanting to know, “How am I going to close my quarter?” WisdomAI’s answer would offer a list of pending deals the team should focus on, along with the information on what’s delaying each one, such as the list of the questions each customer is waiting on. “You can get the CRO to literally see all the way down to this last level of detail through our platform with, like, five key strokes, as opposed to a process which involves five individuals, including some analysts, and a whole lot of time,” Mazumdar told TechCrunch. That’s just one example of the type of questions WisdomAI hopes to answer. Another early customer is an oil and gas company that has thousands of workers in the field using WisdomAI to ask questions about production, tapping into data from everything from stored documents to telemetry. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Obviously, every business analytics tool already available — and a host of startups — are also offering AI-powered natural language prompts. WisdomAI stands out for the pedigree of the founders — all previously worked with Mazumdar at Rubrik. But the platform’s superpower is its accuracy, even against messy data, Mazumdar says. It can find answers in structured data like databases as well as unstructured data stored in files. Equally importantly, WidsomAI won’t deliver hallucinations. Most enterprises are pursuing AI app accuracy by focusing on the data used to train their AI models, as well as model size, prompt engineering, and, perhaps, real-time retrieval techniques like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Yet they still run the risk of fabricated answers. WisdomAI uses GenAI in the query formation — not in the creation of answers. “Ultimately, GenAI can hallucinate. What we use GenAI to do is to write small little programs … that can query these different systems,” Mazumdar says. So if WidsomAI’s model hallucinates, all it will do is write a fake query that fails to retrieve data. The data itself – the answer to the question – won’t be fabricated. WisdomAI claims ConocoPhillips, Cisco, and Descope as early customers and has customers who are working with major cloud data storage services like Snowflake, Google’s BigQuery, Amazon’s Redshift, Databricks, and Postgres. It can be trained on any data storage system by studying the query language through query logs and other sources, Mazumdar says.

Few markets are moving as rapidly as China’s automotive sector. There, new models are rolled out in as little as 18 months, putting tremendous pressure on legacy Western automakers, which need four-plus years to go from concept to sales floor. “With the increasingly short development cycles in China, it’s driving a huge amount of cost and time focus,” Ian Campbell, co-founder and CEO of Breathe Battery Technologies, told TechCrunch. “In both geographies, in the East — in China and Asia — and in the West as well.” Much of that focus has been centered around batteries — the components that can make or break electric vehicle sales. Automakers are forced to predict where the market will be a few years out, but those forecasts don’t always pan out given how quickly the EV landscape is evolving. Making changes to physical components can be expensive and unpredictable, which is why Campbell’s startup has been trying to give batteries more flexibility via software. Breathe has developed a suite of tools that Campbell said helps automakers and others get the most out of their batteries. The startup recently raised a $21 million Series B led by Kinnevik Online AB, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Lowercarbon Capital and Volvo Cars Tech Fund participated. The new funding will help Breathe continue to push its software earlier in the battery development process. The company currently has four products: Design, Model, Map, and Charge. Charge was Breathe’s first offering, and it optimized charging strategies to speed refilling or increase the longevity of a battery. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Though battery manufacturing is tightly controlled, no two cells that roll of the line are 100% identical. As a result, some might generate more heat during fast charging, while others might be able to withstand more charge and discharge cycles than their peers. Chinese mobile phone maker Oppo was the first to adopt it, and the software cut charging time by 27%. On the automotive side, Volvo has Breathe’s code installed on its forthcoming ES90 sedan, helping it to charge 10% to 80% in 20 minutes. In essence, Breathe’s software lets them make the most of each cell given its individual quirks. The startup’s other offerings help automakers and electronics companies design and predict how their batteries will perform years down the line, letting them determine where to invest development resources. For example, if a new chemistry is lower cost and looks to have a longer lifespan, then designers may decide to let it charge a little faster at the expense of some of that longevity. “They want to understand what room they have and what will happen when they make trade offs throughout the development program of their battery system,” Campbell said. To do that, Breathe has built a lab in London where it can run a range of tests on batteries its customers are interested in using. In as little as four weeks, it has enough to ship the customer a model (called Breathe Model) that can simulate likely future performance. After that, the cells stay on in the lab, contributing more data so that Breathe can eventually ship the customer its Map product, which augments simulated data with more real world results, Campbell said. The Design product will round out the suite when its released in the coming months, providing a customers with set of software tools to speed — you guessed it — battery design. The goal is to reduce the amount of “brute force lab testing” needed to bring a battery to market, Campbell said. He likens Breathe’s software tools to those used in the semiconductor industry, which have helped companies like Apple and Nvidia work closely with foundries like TSMC to implement their processor designs in silicon. “We want to try and do for batteries what we’ve seen the simulation software from Cadence and Synopsis do so effectively in semiconductor design,” he said.

Netflix announced on Wednesday that it’s currently testing a short-form video feature, signaling that even a streaming giant with over 300 million subscribers is concerned about losing viewers’ time spent on mobile to apps like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. The company debuted the feature at its first-ever product and tech event, where it also revealed several other upcoming plans for the service. These plans include a redesign of the TV homepage and improved real-time recommendations. Netflix’s new mobile-only vertical feed allows users to easily scroll through clips of its original titles. Within this feed, users can tap on buttons to either watch the entire show or movie immediately, save it to their “My List,” or share it with friends. Of note, the clips are curated from the “Today’s Top Picks for You” section, rather than being chosen from Netflix’s entire library. This approach makes it specifically tailored to each user, ultimately encouraging viewers to watch the full shows. The experiment rolls out globally in the coming weeks on iOS and Android devices. It’ll appear for users as a tab on the in-app homepage. The introduction of this feature comes at a pivotal time, as competition among platforms for viewer attention intensifies. Audiences increasingly favor quick entertainment, leading to a shift in traditional viewing habits. As a result, even large players like Netflix are adapting to retain and attract subscribers. This also follows President Trump’s second extension of the deadline for the TikTok ban. The latest test follows a trend among other streaming services that are trying out similar features. Tubi had its entry into short-form video last year with its “Scenes” feature. More recently, Peacock launched curated vertical video playlists earlier this year that not only feature short clips from TV series and films but also sports and news content. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Netflix is no stranger to experimenting with short-form video content. In 2021, the platform rolled out a TikTok-inspired feature called “Fast Laughs,” which focused on funny clips. However, this new test aims to reach a broader audience beyond just comedy fans and will be more personalized. In terms of Netflix’s new homepage update, one small change implemented is that the shortcuts for “Search” and “My List” were moved to the top of the page, where they were previously located on the left-hand side, making them easier to access. Netflix also has new “callout” badges that help viewers discover titles. For example, if users are searching for the latest Emmy-winning content, these badges will be prominently displayed on the title cards featured on the homepage. Additionally, Netflix improved its real-time recommendation system. Now, when subscribers search for content, it considers factors such as the trailer a viewer recently watched or the actors they are looking up. For instance, if they give a thumbs up to the popular TV series “Wednesday,” the system will quickly adjust their homepage to display similar recommended titles.

After hinting at a new AI-powered search experience during its recent earnings call, Netflix officially unveiled the feature at its tech and product event on Wednesday. This new search experience will utilize OpenAI’s ChatGPT to provide users with a conversational discovery experience. Users can enter their preferences using natural phrases like “I want something funny and upbeat” or even more detailed requests, such as “I want something scary, but not too scary, and maybe a little bit funny, but not haha funny.” The feature is set to roll out this week to iOS users as an opt-in beta. Some subscribers in Australia and New Zealand have already had access to it, as reported by Bloomberg last month. Other competitors are also leveraging generative AI for search. For instance, Amazon has an AI voice search experience on Fire TVs that responds to open-ended inquiries about TV shows and movies. A closer comparison is Tubi’s ChatGPT-powered search tool, which answered content-related questions and suggested movies based on a user’s specific request. However, Tubi later discontinued the feature, probably because of low adoption. It remains to be seen whether Netflix’s new feature will face similar challenges. Additionally, at the tech and product event, the company mentioned plans to use generative AI to update title cards in subscribers’ preferred languages.

Kapor Capital’s managing partner Ulili Onovakpuri said yesterday that she is leaving the firm. Onovakpuri started as a principal at Kapor Capital more than a decade ago, and rose through the ranks to become managing partner, and eventually (with Brian Dixon) took over the reins from the firm’s co-founders Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein. In her LinkedIn goodbye post, Onovakpuri said she had co-raised a $126 million fund and backed more than 70 companies during her time at Kapor. “I’ll truly miss it,” she wrote. “This isn’t a goodbye to investing or to funding the founders building critical solutions. But it is a purposeful pause,” she wrote, noting that she didn’t have any plans just yet. She did say, however, that the venture world hasn’t seen the last of her. “But my inbox has definitely seen the last of ‘just wanted to follow up on the deck I sent you,” she said. “At least for now.”