“My whole life has been preparing me for this moment,” Ben Sanders said when asked about why he launched his emergency response startup Hyper. The company announced Monday a $6.3 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures, as well as an official emergence from stealth. As a child, he so wanted to become a police…
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Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! A little bird Image Credits:Bryce Durbin If it wasn’t obvious before, it is now. Uber wants a big piece of the autonomous vehicle technology pie. The ride-hailing company…
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Google announced Monday that it’s introducing a new feature that lets iOS users easily switch between work and personal Google accounts in Chrome. Previously, iOS users had to completely sign out of a Google account and then log in with another, and repeat this process every time they wanted to access a different account. “Many…
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When Figma announced its initial hoped-for price range on Monday ($25-$28), it also revealed an unusual decision for its highly anticipated IPO. It will allow existing shareholders to sell more shares than the company plans to sell, by a high ratio. The company plans to offer about 12.5 million shares. Yet existing shareholders will be…
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Hopefully not Grok’s companions … A new study by a U.S. nonprofit focused on the lives of kids and families, Common Sense Media, has found that a vast majority of U.S. teens (72%) have tried an AI companion at least once. By “companion,” the study is focused on AI chatbots that are designed for users to…
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The hackers behind the initial wave of attacks exploiting a zero-day in Microsoft SharePoint servers have so far primarily targeted government organizations, according to researchers and news reports. Over the weekend, U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA published an alert, warning that hackers were exploiting a previously unknown bug — known as a “zero-day” — in Microsoft’s…
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ChatGPT receives 2.5 billion prompts from global users every day, OpenAI told Axios. About 330 million of those are coming from users in the U.S. These numbers show just how ubiquitous OpenAI’s flagship product is becoming. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, does not release daily search data, but recently revealed that Google receives 5 trillion queries…
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AI companies are pushing agents as the next Great Workplace Disruptor, but experts say they’re still not ready for prime time. They often struggle with autonomous decision-making, can’t cooperate with other agents, fail at confidentiality awareness, and integrate poorly into existing systems. Industry pioneers like Andrej Karpathy and Ali Ghodsi have said that, like the…
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Programmable optics startup Lumotive has added a few more strategic backers to its recent Series B round. Redmond, Washington-based Lumotive reopened its recent Series B funding round to bring in Amazon, through its Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, and ITHCA Group, the technology investment arm of Oman’s sovereign wealth fund, as investors. These fresh funds bring…
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The founder of a spyware company who was banned from the surveillance industry following an earlier data breach is now seeking to undo the ban, according to the Federal Trade Commission. In a notice on Friday, the federal watchdog said Scott Zuckerman sought to rescind or modify the 2021 ban imposed by the FTC on…
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