Wednesday, April 3, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning we have notes on a new IPO, a big cybersecurity issue over in India, news on some profitable startups, sick LLM hacks, and even a novel way to store seasonal power. — Alex

TechCrunch Top 3

1. Rubrik’s IPO filing could bolster public offerings: After Reddit and Astera Labs’ successful IPOs, everyone was wondering if other private tech companies would follow suit. Data cybersecurity outfit Rubrik has answered the call with a Form S-1 that shows slow overall growth, a strong subscription business, and sticky losses. Its success on the public market could prove an illustrative indicator of the environment for unprofitable unicorns looking for an exit... Read More

2. India’s government fails to keep citizen data private: In the wake of the AT&T leak, you might think we are due a short break between major news about data leaks. Not so. India’s government “has finally resolved a years-long cybersecurity issue that exposed reams of sensitive data about its citizens,” Jagmeet Singh reports. What’s worse, the issue took far longer to resolve than it should have... Read More

3. BlaBlaCar secures €100M credit line: French startup BlaBlaCar tells TechCrunch it has been profitable since April 2022, so why would the carpooling and bus ticketing startup secure nine figures worth of credit? To buy smaller companies, apparently. Heck yes, bring on the startup dealmaking! Read More

Morning Must Reads

We’re still learning how LLMs work: Researchers at Anthropic have found a new way to get a large language model (LLM) to do things its makers didn’t want it to. Called “many-shot jailbreaking,” the method involves a sequence of less-harmful queries that will eventually allow the user to get the LLM to do things it’s been forbidden from, like telling you how to make a bomb, for example... Read More

Photoncycle raises $5.3 million to develop seasonal energy storage: Solar energy is great, but it has a key drawback: seasonality. Energy storage is a known issue, but normal batteries aren’t great at long-term storage for smaller generation systems. Photoncycle wants to use ammonia synthesis reactors to make local, seasonal energy storage a real thing, and it has raised a chunk of money to do so... Read More

HD wants to bring healthcare chatbots to Southeast Asia: Using AI to help answer questions is one of the leading use cases for LLMs, because it just makes sense: no one wants to suffer through a chatbot telling you to “press 1 to get more information.” To improve that experience, HD, a startup based in Thailand, has raised $5.6 million Series A to build an AI chatbot powered by proprietary data to help users of its marketplace better choose healthcare products... Read More

Investors raise a toast to Full Glass Wine: Is the glass half full or half empty? Neither, if you over at Full Glass Wine, a startup that acquires wine marketplaces and just raised $14 million. The company has purchased Winc and Bright Cellars in its bid to snap up a good portion of the online wine marketplace. Cheers! Read More

Thrive Market talks about building a billion-dollar grocery company: Making money while doing good is always a noble goal, but it’s hard to attain. After all, corporate-level profitability and consumer surplus are often at odds with one another. On TechCrunch’s Found podcast, we sat down with Thrive Market’s Nick Green to dig into how his company is trying to find a balance... Read More

A MESSAGE FROM TECHCRUNCH

The TechCrunch AM Auction Is Now Open

More than a quarter of a million users start their weekdays with TechCrunch AM. Want to talk to this engaged audience? TechCrunch’s auction for Q3 and Q4 inventory is open now and ends Wednesday, April 10. Email newsletter.auction@techcrunch.com for more information and to submit your bid.

Submit Your Bid

Around the Web

1. The critical Taiwanese tech industry is recovering today after an earthquake shook the island nation, Bloomberg reports. There might be bottlenecks in chip production and other critical tech products around the world... Read More

2. The Cyber Safety Review Board is not enthused by how Microsoft managed its own cybersecurity, leading to what the Washington Post called a “blistering indictment of a tech titan whose cloud infrastructure is widely used by consumers and governments around the world.” All I can say here is ouch... Read More

3. Gaming’s new reality is scale, but limited growth, per new data by VentureBeat. Sales of video games are rising, but slowly, and total played hours are fading slightly. Like many digital industries, gaming got a big boost from the COVID era, and is now digesting a return to more normal conditions... Read More

A MESSAGE FROM BRAINDATE

Braindate powers connections at TechCrunch Early Stage

Are you ready to network at TechCrunch Early Stage this year? Braindate is thrilled to be powering connections at the event. More than your typical networking tool, Braindate turns events into knowledge-sharing feasts! Braindate fosters knowledge-sharing conversations among people at events, communities, and organizations. Learn from your peers and meet new people based on shared interests!

Learn about Braindate

Before You Go

Biden joins the fediverse: This is a little complicated, but stay with me. Threads, Meta's Twitter competitor, is linked to the fediverse, a collection of servers that form a decentralized social network. So, you can post on your own terms. Threads is now linked to the fediverse, and the U.S. President made his first Thread-Fediverse post yesterday... Read More