Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch PM! Today was a full day of news, including how American companies are faring after Kaspersky’s ban, a new acquisition for Nubank, trouble at TikTok and more humanoid robots on the way. Enjoy!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto / Getty Images

Kaspersky calls U.S. ban “complete bulls••t”: The U.S. government announced an unprecedented ban on selling in the United States any software made by the Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky. Now some American companies that act as official Kaspersky resellers say they have been left confused, angry and worried about how the ban will impact them. Read more

Nubank acquires Hyperplane: And gains a San Francisco-based data intelligence startup that is building foundation models for banks. The news comes six months after Hyperplane secured $6 million in seed funding. Read more

The payment jungle: Rainforest is a Stripe alternative that allows software providers to facilitate payments from end customers to their business clients. And investors just gave it $20 million. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

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TikTok goes Whee, whee, whee, all the way home: TikTok’s new social app Whee, an Instagram-like service for taking photos to share with friends, isn’t doing so well. What’s more is that ByteDance isn’t really commenting on the plans it has for Whee. Read more

Another humanoid robot: MIT research scientist Jerry Pratt and Figure quietly parted ways last month. Now he has announced the founding of another entry in the increasingly crowded world of humanoids called Persona AI. Read more

A better sales funnel: Creatio, now with $200 million and a $1.2 billion valuation, wants to give your small business the customer relationship management workflow you need without the fees of a big CRM company. Read more

Flipkart launches payment app: A year after separating from PhonePe, the company is back with a new product, dubbed Super.money. It allows users to make mobile payments via UPI, an interoperable network that is the most popular way Indians transact online. Read more

Communication breakdown: The Supreme Court rejected a Republican-led challenge to the Biden administration’s communication with social media companies to combat online misinformation on topics related to COVID-19 and the 2020 election. Read more

Snaps to this video-editing tool: Video editing app Captions launched a new feature that takes an existing unedited video and adds custom graphics, zooms, music, sound effects, transitions and motion backgrounds based on the content. Read more

The winners are…: The European Union has announced the winners of a “Large AI Grand Challenge” it kicked off earlier this year in a bid to accelerate the pace of homegrown innovation by large-scale AI model makers. Read more

Hacker breaches Indian government portal: And is now claiming to be selling an extensive database of personal information by those who signed up for the eMigrate portal. It helps Indian labor legally emigrate overseas and provides emigration clearance tracking and insurance services to migrant workers. Read more

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY 💰

Fetcherr lands $90 million to get airlines on board with dynamic pricing. Read more

CData, which helps orgs use data across apps and build AI models, snaps up $350 million. Read more

Formation Bio raises $372 million to boost drug development with AI. Read more

Data lakehouse Onehouse nabs $35 million to capitalize on generative AI revolution. Read more

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TechCrunch Minute 🕒

Meta is labeling real photos as ‘Made with AI’: Artificial intelligence has us so spooked that even when someone tries to help us discern if a photo is real or AI, it just turns into a big mess. Meta is one of those companies trying, but their efforts are falling flat — for now. It has an automated tag to help people understand when what they’re seeing is real and when it’s been computer generated. However, photographers are claiming that Meta is tagging their real photos as “Made with AI” when it isn’t. Hit play and let’s chat!

Around the web 🌐

Figma gets a facelift: An AI one, too. The Verge reports the company unveiled a list of new features Wednesday that includes a major user interface redesign and generative AI tools that help users more easily make projects and built-in slideshow functionality. Read more

YouTube takes the streaming crown: How did it do it? CNBC has more