Monday, June 24, 2024

Welcome back to TechCrunch PM, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package. As I get my inbox in order after being gone on some much needed R&R, let’s dig into today’s stories. OpenAI makes another acquisition, car dealerships are still dark following a cyberattack on software provider CDK, Google’s Gemini goes to school and Mixhalo has a new feature. Enjoy!

TechCrunch Top 3

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OpenAI hearts Multi: OpenAI has purchased Multi, a startup developing an enterprise-focused, video-first collaboration platform. A source is calling this more like an acquihire, but I don’t think Multi employees are sad. Read more

Putting on the brakes, literally: Some 15,000 car dealerships and auto shops are still waiting on CDK to resolve outages associated with a cyberattack that started on June 19. The company, which makes customer management software to manage customer and vehicle records, has “begun the restoration process” of its systems. Read more

European Commission bites into Apple: The European Commission was investigating the consumer tech giant for possible noncompliance with the Digital Markets Act. And the results are in — the current App Store rules are in breach of the DMA. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

a woman sitting on a couch using a laptop

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Shopify hits a bull’s-eye: Target is the first major retailer to collaborate with Shopify to introduce its merchants’ products into physical stores. Shopify sellers can apply to join Target Plus, the retail giant’s third-party marketplace where merchants can sell and manage orders. Read more

Google’s Gemini in the teacher seat: Teens already can use Google’s Gemini with their personal accounts. Now they can use them with their school accounts, too. Google says that giving teens access to Gemini can help prepare them with the skills they need to thrive in a future where generative AI exists. Read more

Emergence bags $97.2 million: Emergence emerged from stealth with $97.2 million in funding from Learn Capital plus credit lines totaling more than $100 million. The company claims to be building an “agent-based” system that can perform many of the tasks typically handled by knowledge workers, in part by routing these tasks to first- and third-party generative AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o. Read more

Shaking up live events: Mixhalo’s latest feature, Translate, couples the startup’s ultra-low latency in-person streaming with AI-generated audio translations. It’s a pairing that makes plenty of sense in a conference setting. Read more

Meet Matt Rogers: His company takes your table scraps and turns them into compost by morning. He’ll be at TechCrunch Disrupt to tell us all about it. Read more

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TechCrunch Minute

Image Credits: Getty Images / MirageC

Former Snap engineer made a social network for AI: Butterflies looks like Instagram, except it’s a platform where humans and AI coexist. With just a few quick prompts, which ask about things like your character’s backstory and appearance, you can instantly create a new AI influencer. Then, as you scroll through your feed — either as yourself or as one of the AI accounts you created — you can interact with other AIs. You can even DM them. But is socializing with some lines of code really all that socially fulfilling? Hit play and let’s chat!

Around the web

AI is coming for VC: Business Insider spoke to a group of venture capitalists about how artificial intelligence is going to affect their industry. And the results may surprise you … or not. Read more

Look out, Nvidia: These 11 semiconductor companies are hot on your tail, at least according to MarketWatch. Read more

More on the CDK cyberattack: You’ve read all about it above. Now dive more into the effects. When I bought a car in 2017, I had to sign stacks of paper documents. When I bought a car in 2024, there wasn’t much in the way of physical paperwork. In fact, the owner’s manual is in an app. Car dealerships affected by the CDK software cyberattack still remember those pen and paper days, and the Associated Press reports that it is now coming in handy. Read more