TECHNOLOGY

Silicon Valley’s full of people from all walks of life, but very little of its wealth is distributed evenly, especially when we’re talking about the LGBTQ+ community. Currently, it’s estimated that less than 1% of venture capital goes to openly LGBTQ+ founders. There are no numbers on how much of that capital goes specifically to

Twitter has changed many things related to its subscription program Twitter Blue in the last few hours. The company said that the paid plan is now available for purchase globally. It also changed the cooling-off period for new accounts to buy Twitter Blue to 30 days. When Elon Musk first launched the Twitter Blue plan

Twitter has picked April Fool’s Day, otherwise known as April 1, to start removing legacy blue checkmarks from the platform. Despite the significance of the day Twitter chose, the removal of legacy checkmarks has been anticipated for months now. Musk tweeted in December that the company would remove those checks “in a few months” because

OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, can now browse the internet — in certain cases. OpenAI today launched plugins for ChatGPT, which extend the bot’s functionality by granting it access to third-party knowledge sources and databases, including the worldwide web. Available in alpha to ChatGPT users and developers on the waitlist, OpenAI says that it’ll initially

YouTube is shutting down its live social commerce app Simsim less than two years after acquiring the Indian startup but insists that it’s committed to building “a seamless shopping experience for viewers and supporting creators’ businesses.” Simsim helped small businesses in India transition to e-commerce by leveraging the rising popularity of video and creators. The

Southeast Asia’s mental health startups are getting more investor attention. Last week, Intellect announced a strategic investment from IHH Healthcare, Asia’s largest private healthcare group. Now Thoughtfull, another digital mental health platform focused on Asia, has raised $4 million in a pre-Series A round led by Sheares Healthcare Group. Sheares is a wholly-owned subsidiary of

Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: How can I return

Fintech startup Checkout.com is better known for its payment processing product. But the company is launching a new product today as Checkout.com customers can now create payment cards for their own customers. The company has been testing Checkout.com Issuing for a while as there are already millions of cards that have been created with the

Kakao Mobility, the ride-hailing subsidiary of South Korean messaging and internet giant Kakao, has made its first acquisition as it looks to raise its international profile. It has acquired Splyt, a startup out of London that works with apps in areas like travel, ride-hailing and finance to help them build out “super app” strategies by

Nvidia and Quantum Machines, the Israeli startup offering an orchestration platform to controlling and operating quantum processors, today announced the launch of Nvidia DGX Quantum, which combines Nvidia’s Grace Hopper Superchip with Quantum Machines’ controller. Over the course of the last few years, it’s become increasingly clear that to effectively operate a quantum computer, you’ll

Organizations dealing with large amounts of data often struggle to ensure that data remains high-quality. According to a survey from Great Expectations, which creates open source tools for data testing, 77% of companies have data quality issues and 91% believe that it’s impacting their performance. In light of that, unsurprisingly, business has been quite healthy

Duolingo, a language learning app with over 500 million users, is working on a music app, TechCrunch has learned. The Pittsburgh-based tech company currently has a small team working on a music product and is hiring a learning scientist who is an “expert in music education who combines both theoretical knowledge of relevant learning science

When Amazon announced it was laying off another 9,000 employees today, AWS employees were not exempt with Amazon CEO (and former AWS CEO) Andy Jassy announcing the cloud division would be included into today’s round. TechCrunch is hearing that around 10% of today’s total came from AWS. The company would not confirm those numbers instead

Swedish company Candela will launch its 30-passenger commercial hydrofoil shuttle, the P-12, this summer — the vessel it believes will change the course of motorized water transport. Following on from its C-7 and C-8 leisure cruisers, Candela has already been making waves with its drive to transition to fossil-free waterways. “We are now heavy into

How to test and evaluate demand for hardware products before you crank up the factory Haje Jan Kamps 8 hours Manufacturing real-life, tangible objects that you can touch is often a lot riskier than developing software. Once you’ve created 10,000 thingamajigs, it’s far harder to make changes to them than in the software world, where

Before it crashed, Silicon Valley Bank was known to many startups and venture firms as the place to park their money or take out a capital line. But for emerging managers, it was a lot more than just a financial institution. Multiple emerging managers told TechCrunch+ that SVB was instrumental in helping them build their

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Maybe it’s the fact that “Succession” is back next week, or maybe it’s the fact that Silicon Valley just experienced its first banking crisis, but

Welcome to Week in Review, folks, TechCrunch’s regular recap of the week in tech. GPT-4, OpenAI’s text- and image-understanding AI, might’ve dominated the headlines over the past few days. But fresh drama around Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse emerged as well. We cover all that and more in this edition, so grab a coffee and settle

But there are reasons to be optimistic we’ll get a good crop of public offerings Alex Wilhelm 8 hours The IPO market thus far in 2023 has been a goose egg, and we probably won’t get any interesting IPOs for another quarter or two. This is incredibly sad for your friendly, local TechCrunch+ reporting crew

The Biden administration has recently ramped up pressure on TikTok over national security concerns stemming from its ties to China, and apparently the Justice Department and the FBI are also applying pressure of their own. Forbes first reported that the agencies are actively investigating ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. The investigation was reportedly initiated after some