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By Rebecca Bellan

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! We’ve got a lot to cover this morning, but top of mind are security concerns over Telegram’s supposed staffing, fresh funds for alternative chipmakers, and Amazon’s ChatGPT competitor. We also have notes on why Apple isn’t going to use Meta’s AI, the importance of using AI for pharma, and a new chip that can only do one thing. Let’s jump in! — Rebecca

Image Credits: Lam Yik/Bloomberg / Getty Images

1. Is Telegram actually that secure? Telegram founder Pavel Durov is apparently proud that he runs a lean ship of only 30 engineers. That may be great for efficiency, but security experts say that’s actually a red flag: Telegram chats aren’t end-to-end encrypted by default, and it’s also a social media platform, so there probably aren’t enough people helping safeguard all that user data. Read More

2. Tech companies have short memories: Back in 2004, Microsoft was forced to unbundle Windows Media Player from its operating system in the EU on anti-competitive grounds. Microsoft seems to have forgotten that: The European Commission is now angry at the company, saying it hasn’t done enough to address concerns that Teams being bundled with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 is hurting competition in the market for real-time communication apps for enterprises. Read More

3. VCs throw money at chipmakers that aren’t Nvidia: The success of generative AI vendors hinges on the whims of dominant chipmakers (read: Nvidia), but that means there’s demand for promising upstarts who want to challenge the status quo. Etched just raised a $120 million Series A to develop a chip that can run a single type of AI model: transformers. Transformers underpin pretty much all of the genAI tech today, so it’s a good place to focus on. Read More

A MESSAGE FROM DELINEA

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Image Credits: NicoElNino / Getty Images

AI for novel proteins: EvolutionaryScale has raised a massive $142 million seed for its AI model, ESM3, which can create proteins to enable entirely new classes of drugs, tools and therapeutics. Designing proteins in the lab is costly, and the company says ESM3, trained on a dataset of 2.78 billion proteins, can “reason over” protein sequences, structures and functions to generate new proteins for much cheaper. Read More

Save the plants, save the world: Not very long ago, everyone made fun of tree-huggers, but as we can all see now, they were right to protect trees. Foray Bioscience agrees, and has raised $3 million to use biomanufacturing to grow harvest-free plant-based materials, seeds and molecules. The startup uses a database approach to provide predictive insights and experimental direction to speed up R&D for plant species. Read More

Improving on the ghost kitchen model: General Catalyst has led a $40 million investment in Local Kitchens, a multi-brand restaurant concept that operates like a cloud or ghost kitchen. The cloud kitchen model is hard to run, but the winning difference here is Local Kitchens employs the people cooking the food, and works with partner restaurants and chefs to train its staff on their recipes. It also offers dining room service, and its digital format helps it manage orders for multiple brands from a single kitchen. Read More

TechWolf takes AI-sized bite out of internal recruiting: Tech talent is hard to come by, and that shortage is prompting companies to focus on how their talent is managed. Enter TechWolf, a Belgian startup whose AI engine can ingest data from internal workflows and spit out judgements about employees’ work ethics and skill sets. TechWolf already works with big names like HSBC and Booking.com, and has just raised almost $43 million to expand its business. Read More

Apple shelves Meta AI partnership over privacy concerns, reports Bloomberg. That’s not surprising at all, since Apple and Meta have long differed over their approach to privacy. When iOS updates made it difficult for apps and advertisers to track user activity, Facebook complained loudly that the move would hurt small businesses, when it was probably concerned about its own advertising revenue. Read More

Shipping containers can be interesting, too: The COVID-19 pandemic might be over, but the need to quickly and securely send valuable, fragile medicines endures. That’s why Swiss startup SkyCell just closed a $116 million Series D at a $635 million valuation. The startup builds “smart containers” that use software to maintain strict temperatures, humidity levels and levels of vibration, as well as a logistics system to transport the drugs around the globe on behalf of its pharma customers. Read More

Yelp updates accessibility features: Apparently Yelp has seen a 40% rise in searches for “wheelchair accessible” places between 2020 and 2023. So the company is updating its app to add attributes to businesses around mobility, hearing and vision to help people find accessible places. The update also brings AI-powered alt-text for images. Read More

Snapchat makes it easier to block creeps: Snapchat is introducing a new suite of safety features to make it harder to get creeped on. You can now see when someone you’ve blocked has created a new account on the same device, and the app will block new friend requests from someone if you’d already blocked them on a different account. Another feature reminds users who they’re advertising their location to on Snap Map, and recommends that users only share that info with close friends. Read More

From TikTok famous to acquisition: Swipewipe, a photo management app that gamifies the process of clearing out unwanted photos from your camera roll, recently got super popular with Gen Z on TikTok. And such was its fame that French mobile app publisher and developer, MWM, decided to acquire it. The deal gives Swipewipe’s founder access to life-changing money today and continued revenue-sharing in the future. Read More

A MESSAGE FROM NORTHERN DATA GROUP

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You, too, can run a full news site for $350: 404 Media apparently paid a freelancer on Fiverr about 350 bucks to set up an autonomous, ChatGPT-powered tech news site that steals other people’s original reporting. What reporter Emanuel Maiberg learned is that it’s now super easy and cheap to flood the internet with an infinite amount of pseudo-journalism, particularly since the infrastructure already exists (WordPress, Fiverr, Google) to convert clicks to dollars. Read More

Femtech has privacy problems: Femtech startups are finally getting the attention they deserve from investors, but some VCs are wary about which startups they invest in, avoiding ones with a lack of transparency on data privacy, reports The Financial Times. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to overturn women’s constitutional right to abortion, privacy concerns are front and center among some venture investors. Read More

Amazon is working on a ChatGPT killer: Amazon is working on an AI chatbot to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to Business Insider. The secret internal project is code-named “Metis,” and it’s powered by an AI model called Olympus, in keeping with the company’s Greek mythology theme. The chatbot can apparently converse with text and images, link to the sources of its responses, suggest follow up queries and more. Read More

Image Credits: Getty Images

Prepare to shamelessly engage in capitalism: It’s time for Amazon's annual Prime Day sales, when you can throw your environmental concerns and contempt for Jeff Bezos to the wind and get in on them insane deals. Sales kick off at 12:01 a.m. PT on July 16 in the U.S. citizens and will continue throughout the next day. Read More

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