Monday, July 15, 2024

Good afternoon and welcome back to TechCrunch PM! Today, we bring you news of a possible Google acquisition, a moon cave, a few venture rounds, and a way to name and track the birds that frequent your yard. Let’s dig in!

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Image Credits: Google

Inside the Google/Wiz deal: Google intends to acquire cloud security startup Wiz for $23 billion. Wiz certainly looks good on paper, reaching annual recurring revenue of $100 million a mere 18 months after launching. However, the company was not looking for a buyer when Google approached it. In fact, it had plans for an initial public offering either this year or next year. So why is it agreeing to a sale? Read more

Yes, Tesla’s robotaxi is delayed: Last week, there were claims that the robotaxi event scheduled for August was pushed to October. Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed this today, explaining it was because he requested an “important design change to the front.” Read more

Moon cave! Scientists have identified what they believe is an accessible tunnel or cave on the moon. Such a feature, if real, may well define years of development by startups, governments and space companies aiming to create a lasting lunar colony. What matters here is that we appear to have discovered a highly stable (otherwise it would have collapsed sometime in the last few million years) moon cave that could serve as a base for lunar operations. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Hans Hansen / Getty Images

If you build it, they will come: Adaptive closed a $19 million Series A round led by Emergence Capital to deliver an array of workflow automations for financial management, including budgeting, expense tracking, accounts payable and electronic payments. Customers can upload documents like insurance agreements and payment requests in formats such as SMS and PDF and leverage automations to take action on these uploads, like approving requests and budgets. Read more

Give a hoot: As someone whose front porch area has become a haven for swallows, I find Bird Buddy’s new AI feature fun. It lets people name and identify individual birds. Name That Bird gathers information from a connected camera mounted on a bird feeder. Read more

Caliza raises $8.5 million: Real-time payments are becoming commonplace for individuals and businesses, but not yet for cross-border transactions. That’s what Caliza is hoping to change, starting with Latin America. The startup offers an alternative to transfers made via SWIFT, which are the norm in the Americas but can take days to settle. It provides an API and front-end payment system that use crypto stablecoins — specifically, Circle’s reserve-backed USDC — and existing real-time payment networks to allow for instant transfers and provide international merchants with U.S. digital dollar accounts. Read more

Create your own playlist in Deezer: It’s the latest music-streaming app to introduce an AI playlist feature. But for now, it’s only available to a select number of paid users: around 5%. Those users will be able to create custom playlists via its “Playlist with AI” feature. This is done with text prompts that describe moods, genres, decades or activities. For instance, you could ask Deezer to create an early 2000s pop-rock playlist for your workout. Or you could generate a 2010’s feel-good playlist for your next study session. Read more

YouTube is singing a new tune: YouTube Music has two new ways to boost song discovery on its platform. One is an AI-generated conversational radio feature, and the other is a new Shazam-like tool to help users discover the name of a song by singing, humming or playing parts of it. The conversational radio feature is only for select Premium users in the United States for now. Users can create a custom radio station by describing what they want to hear — for example, “catchy pop choruses” or “upbeat pop anthems.” Read more

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Around the web 🌐

AMD chips find their way into HP computers: When the new HP OmniBook comes out in August, it will feature AMD’s Ryzen AI 300-series processor instead of a Qualcomm chip, according to The Verge. Read more

Bitcoin is coming back: And Michael Saylor, called “the chief Bitcoin influencer,” is back on X with more motivational posts about the cryptocurrency, now that its decline is in reverse. The co-founder and executive chairman of MicroStrategy encourages people to get in on Bitcoin while it is somewhat affordable. TradingView has more