Monday, April 29, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! We’re off to a quick start this morning with a new OpenAI content deal, more regulatory news from Europe about Apple, a cool startup that's raised $50 million to build CRMs for nonprofits, and another that wants to turn waste plastic into building supplies in Ethiopia. Let’s get into it! — Alex

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Apple

1. iPadOS to fall under DMA: The hits keep coming for Apple in the European Union. The bloc has said Apple’s tablet-specific operating system, iPadOS, will now fall under the Digital Markets Act. The EU forced Apple to open up its App Store by moving its smartphone OS under the DMA, so this decision is in line with the EU’s drive to take some heft away from the iPhone maker. Read More

2. OpenAI strikes deal with the Financial Times: The legal fight around AI and the material used to train large language models is far from over, but that's not stopping publishers from doing business with AI companies. The Financial Times has now struck a deal with OpenAI. Notably, it’s not just for access to the FT’s written work, as the publisher says it wants to “explore ways to deepen its use of AI.” Read More

3. Givebutter raises $50M for its nonprofit platform: Helping nonprofits raise money is, in fact, big business. That’s the lesson I took away from Rebecca Szkutak’s Deal Dive this week, which took a look at Givebutter, a startup that just raised $50 million to build an all-encompassing CRM system for nonprofits. Bessemer led the round. Read More

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Morning Must Reads

Image Credits: Greylock

How Greylock scored big on Rubrik: Now that IPOs are on the way back, we’re seeing some venture capital firms cash in on long-held bets. One such firm is Greylock, which backed the newly public Rubrik since its earliest days. As a result, it saw the value of its stake in Rubrik come in at more than $750 million. That’s a payday and a half! Read More

Big month for startups with names ending with “-ik”: Kubik is also having a good April. The Ethiopian plastic upcycling startup just raised $1.9 million in a seed extension round just months after it raised $3.34 million. It has a factory in Addis Ababa, where it turns “plastic waste into interlocking building materials like bricks, columns, beams and jambs,” TechCrunch’s Annie Njanja writes. Read More

If AI lies, who gets the blame? We’re going to find out. OpenAI is facing a privacy complaint stemming from AI hallucination and misinformation about individuals. The question in the EU is whether or not GDPR applies in this situation. If it does, would AI models have to get their wings clipped in Europe for some time? Read More

Falling with style: Say you build a humanoid robot that can do a lot of stuff. But it sometimes falls over. What do you do? Well, teach it to fall intelligently and then get back up. Else, we’re going to spend our future helping our metal comrades off the floor. No one wants that. Happily, progress is being made to help robots get back on their own feet. Read More

Here’s why investors are passing on your startup: At TechCrunch’s Early Stage event last week, Y Combinator's Tom Blomfield said that when early stage investors pass on your company, it’s because “they’re judging the perceived quality of the founder [and] they’re thinking in their head that this person is not impressive enough.” Damn. Why won’t they say it? To avoid hurting feelings and the risk of not getting a future pitch. Read More

If TikTok is banned, creator-economy startups will be alright: Thus reports TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling. It turns out that prior noise about banning TikTok led to creators ensuring that they were not too heavily indexed on a single service. Would losing TikTok help creators? Probably not, but its exit would also not prove fatal. Read More

Around the Web

Oracle wants a piece of the genAI market: CNBC reports that the venerable database-and-lawyer company is working hard to carve out a space for itself in the world of generative AI. Why does it have a shot? Because it’s a database company, which means it has lots and lots and lots of data. Read More

Tesla gets a boost in China: A regulatory nod regarding data security is boosting Tesla’s chances of rolling out more self-driving tech in China, which could bolster its sales. Not everyone is convinced that the U.S.-based company is going to be allowed to compete with Chinese rivals in self-driving, but hope is a powerful drug. Read More

Meta AI’s rollout is a little bit much: If you use a Meta service, you may have noticed that its search feature is now a prompt to chat with its AI models. Not everyone’s happy about that, and Fast Company has gone to lengths to pan it. I have mostly avoided the push, but hey, maybe it will get useful in time. Read More

Before You Go

Image Credits: Westend61 / Getty Images

Say hello to defense hacking in London: The London Defense Tech Hackathon brought “together some of the U.K.’s brightest minds in technology, venture capital, and national security in a military setting,” TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher reports. The goal is to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s invasion using money, conventional weapons, and some smart thinking to give the country an edge in a battlefield where it’s outnumbered and outgunned. Read More