UnitedHealth confirms ransomware attack

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By Christine Hall Thursday, February 29, 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome back to TechCrunch PM! UnitedHealth confirms one of its subsidiaries was hacked and gives names. Meanwhile, a U.S. government watchdog was able to "steal" some sensitive data of its own. We've also got a conversation with Brain.ai's CEO about the future of smartphones, and we discuss Figure's giant funding round, figuring out Reddit's IPO price, Venus Williams' new gig and a big new fund. — Christine Image Credits: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty Images

TechCrunch PM Top 3 UnitedHealth knows who hacked its subsidiary: UnitedHealth Group has confirmed a ransomware attack on its health tech subsidiary Change Healthcare and says "a cybercrime threat actor who has represented itself to us as ALPHV/Blackcat" is behind the hack. The Russia-based group is claiming it is behind it and stole personal information from millions of patients. This is just a test: A U.S. government watchdog was able to steal one gigabyte of seemingly sensitive personal data from the cloud systems of the U.S. Department of the Interior. The good news? It was just a test to see if the department's cloud infrastructure was safe. Spotify becomes a Song Psychic: The new feature plays on Wrapped, Spotify's year-end review of all the things you liked. Except instead of going back, you can ask Spotify the kinds of questions you might ask a psychic or a Magic 8 Ball for fun and get a musical answer. Image Credits: Hisham Ibrahim / Getty Images

More top reads This is your smartphone on generative AI. Any questions?: While at Mobile World Congress this week, Brian Heater met with Brain.ai founder and CEO Jerry Yue, and what resulted is a delightful chronicle of how generative AI might be foundational to the next generation of devices. Figure is now valued at $2.6 billion: Humanoid robots are having a moment, and in Figure's case, a giant, whopping funding moment. The company raised a $675 million Series B round from a group of investors, including Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia and Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. All things Google: The search engine giant is partnering with Stack Overflow to use its data to enrich Gemini for Google Cloud and provide validated Stack Overflow answers in the Google Cloud console. Meanwhile, Google is making some improvements so that search suggestions in Chrome are more helpful. Speaking of smarter: Microsoft is making Windows 11 Copilot smarter with a list of plugins and skills that include settings being changed, new AI editing integrations and improvements to widgets. A faster composter: Mill's new bin design turns a big pile of your food waste into something you can feed plants or chickens in a few hours rather than having to wait a whole day. Reddit's IPO price: Secondary investors tell us that Reddit is likely to have a successful IPO if it prices itself at $5 billion or less. We go into why, as well as why some of its more recent investors might not like the sound of that. More Brave AI: Brave is launching its AI-powered assistant, Leo, to all Android users, who can ask it questions, use it to translate or summarize pages and create content. iOS devices will get this soon. It's all about the money, money, money: Inspired Capital, which has backed companies like Habi, Teamshares and Rho, closed on its third fund with $330 million in capital commitments. Adtech startup Vibe raised $22.5 million to help small companies buy video ads on streaming services. And Particle.news grabbed $4.4 million to develop an AI-powered news reader. Set, point, design: Tennis icon-turned-entrepreneur Venus Williams launches Palazzo, an AI-powered interior design platform. One of its features is an "Aesthetic DNA" test where you can select room designs you like, and the results are turned into the prompts for the AI to generate renderings. MacPaw first to adopt Apple's new DMA rules in the EU: MacPaw offers Setapp, a subscription-based platform of curated apps, to iOS and Mac users. The move is notable because Apple has received a lot of pushback for how it’s complying with the EU regulation. Image Credits: Brian Heater

On the pods For this week's Chain Reaction, we're resharing a conversation Jacquelyn had in June 2023 with Jack Lu, CEO and co-founder of Magic Eden. Looking back on this conversation, we decided this episode was a great addition to the NFT series to add some context for what a crazy year it has been and how much things have changed (and some things stayed the same), especially for people building in the NFT space. They discussed why the NFT marketplace expanded its support to other blockchains, its BRC-20 token support and how the company plans on staying competitive in the constantly changing market. Listen here. Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

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Apple wants everyone to know it’s working on AI, too, guys

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By Alex Wilhelm Thursday, February 29, 2024

Good morning and welcome to TechCrunch AM! If you had ever wondered why Apple's been strangely silent about AI, well, it just started shouting from the rooftops that it's been doing just that. And if you are a founder looking at accelerators, we have news for you this morning about how the venture downturn hasn't left anyone unscathed. We're gonna close with notes about the energy transition, and just how much money you can save if you are not into gas-powered or electric cars. – Alex

TechCrunch Top 3 Apple will 'break new ground' in GenAI, Cook claims: After scuttling its Apple Car initiative, the iPhone maker is leaving no stone unturned to ensure everyone knows that it is working hard on new AI technologies. The company doesn't want to lose its reputation for innovation after all. Here's hoping Siri will finally be useful for more than a few basic tasks. Techstars lost more money than expected last year, remains well-capitalized: The startup accelerator's decision to shutter some of its city-focused programs and trim staff came after it suffered bigger losses in 2023 than it had expected, per some internal documents. The good news for Techstars is that it seems to have ample cash reserves to fund its operations. Still, there’s no denying that the venture downturn is here and it's affecting everyone. Reliance, Disney combine India media assets in $8.5B deal: Reliance-owned media company Viacom18 and Disney are planning to combine their media assets in India to create “the largest media entity in the world's most populous nation,” Manish Singh reports. Disney will own 36.84% of the new entity, and will take a charge of $1.8 billion-$2.4 billion. The new entity is expected to control some 85% of the domestic streaming market, and about half of India’s television audience. Image Credits: Apple

Don't miss these Meta's expensive opt-out policy under scrutiny: When Meta started offering EU users a choice between opting-in for its ads and paying for an ad-free experience, it was trying to thread the needle between local regulations and making money. Now, eight regional consumer rights groups are suing the company over this choice, alleging violations of GDPR principles. Snowflake CEO to step down, stock melts: In a shocking move, Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake, announced that he intends to step down. The company also forecast its Q1 product revenue below what analysts expected, and the double whammy has sent its shares down more than 20%. Wall Street, it turns out, were big fans of Slootman. Elon, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) head to court: Last year, Musk-owned X sued the CCDH for making "misleading claims" about the service. The Center had reported on X's moderation choices and the potential financial benefits they might bring to the social media company. Oral arguments will start today in San Francisco, and are set to be livestreamed. Taiwanese startups hope for looser investing rules: When Lai Ching-te became Taiwan's president-elect, he inherited a contentious neighbor in China as well as the mandate to deal with the global rush to compete with the island-nation's semiconductor industry. Taiwan's entrepreneurs, though, are heartened by his upcoming tenure in office. TechCrunch's Catherine Shu reports that the country's startups are hopeful Lai's government will streamline and improve processes for fundraising and international expansion. Speaking of chips, India has approved the allocation of $15.2 billion to build three semiconductor plants, which will include the nation's first semiconductor fab. The investment may help India better compete with both China and Taiwan in the chip race. Ever since the chip shortage a few years ago, every nation wants to produce their own silicon, so this move makes a lot of sense. Money, money, money: French cybersecurity startup Filigran, the company behind the open-source product OpenCTI, has raised $16 million in a round led by Accel. Nigerian fintech debt-collection startup Bfree has raised $2.95 million to help lenders recover debt ethically. Singaporean web3 security firm Silence Laboratories has put together a $4.1 million round. Twodos is a fresh take on personal task management: There are a few tech projects that humans will work on until the end of time, and task management and note-taking appear to be two of them. In the case of the former, there's a new entrant in the market called Twodos. Built by Adam Whitcroft (he formerly worked with Rewind), this app is dead-simple in terms of features, and leans heavily on swiping gestures to sort upcoming tasks. Don't forget: TechCrunch's Early Stage event is just around the corner! Image Credits: Getty Images

Before you go Want a free Toyota? Between discounts and incentives, you can effectively get a 2023 Toyota Mirai for free. The catch? It runs on hydrogen fuel cells, and stations to refuel it are few and far between — even in California, the only market where it kinda makes sense to own a fuel cell car. Why the massive discount? Because while fuel cell technology is neat, the shift to electric cars around the world is coming along well. Image Credits: Toyota

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Stripe’s employee stock sale sets valuation at $65B

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By Christine Hall Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome to TechCrunch PM. Today's newsletter will get you updated on Stripe's spiked valuation (30% higher). We also look at how Bitcoin's rally is affecting Coinbase (badly) and Adobe getting into music (do-re-mi). There's also another update on Bumble and Mobile World Congress. In addition, we've got some car talk. — Christine Image Credits: SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty Images

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TechCrunch PM Top 3 Stripe's valuation jumps 30%: Stripe inked a liquidity deal with some of its investors to purchase over $1 billion of stock owned by current and former employees. The tender offer values the payments infrastructure giant at $65 billion. Not bad. The move also tells us that an anticipated IPO is not likely to happen this year. Bitcoin demand is to Coinbase's detriment: Some Coinbase customers must have been panicking when they saw a zero balance today. The crypto trading app has assured users that their assets are safe, but the company is still trying to figure out what caused the issue. For now, we think Bitcoin is the culprit. As of late, Bitcoin's price has surged close to its all-time high in 2021. And that has people flocking to apps like Coinbase to get in on the demand. What's old is new again for AI: Get an inside look at what diffusion transformers are and how they are a key component in OpenAI's Sora and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion 3.0. Image Credits: Chris Delmas / Contributor via AFP / Getty Images

More top reads Adobe is spinning music: Adobe is getting in on the generative AI–powered music editing and creation with Project Music GenAI Control, a platform that can generate audio from text descriptions or a reference melody and let users customize the results within the same workflow. Totango and Catalyst are merging: No money is changing hands, though. Think of this merger as two customer success companies coming together to take on the market's Goliath. Speaking of mergers: Reliance and Disney are merging their media businesses in India to create the largest media entity in the South Asian market, valued at $8.5 billion. Reliance thinks it's great. Disney, maybe not so much. We are family, a StarCoder family: Hugging Face and ServiceNow teamed up to create StarCoder, an open source code generator with a less restrictive license than some of the others out there. Now there's StarCoder 2. However, this isn't just one code-generating model, but three. Bumble is rethinking its vision: That's after announcing weak earnings and massive job cuts this week. Part of the plan includes pumping new life back into its Bumble BFF friend-finding business. Guess who works at Bluesky now?: Aaron Rodericks, Twitter's former Trust and Safety team co-led, is now heading up Trust and Safety over at X rival Bluesky. You may remember Rodericks became known more publicly after becoming the target of a right-wing campaign on X. Car talk: We learned that Motional, the autonomous vehicle joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv, told employees it will cut about 5% of its workforce. It's not a lot of its employees, but considering it made a 10% layoff in late 2022, it adds up. Meanwhile, Polestar secured a $950 million loan in what was described as "critical funds" needed to keep its electric vehicle plans moving forward after Volvo decided to pull back its financial support of the electric automaker. Image Credits: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

Before you go Mobile World Congress 2024 is wrapping up tomorrow. For an overview of the most important tech revealed at Mobile World Congress, head here. Today we learned that you can make thread from kombucha. And if we ever want a workout buddy, Liveliness has an app for that. Image Credits: TechCrunch

On the pods In today's Equity — the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines — Alex Wilhelm focused on startup and venture capital news. He went through Microsoft's investment in Mistral AI (sure, it's not the biggest check, but as regulators hover over Microsoft's shoulder, the deal makes sense); what the heck happened for Thrasio to file for bankruptcy; Glean's $200 million raise (it turns out that you can indeed raise mega-rounds in 2024. You just need to work in enterprise AI, have a few hundred customers and collect checks from a host of VCs at once); and a few new venture funds. Listen here. Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

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