TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Carta

1. Don't try dark patterns on tech founders: Startup founders are complaining that Carta, a cap table management platform, is making it too hard to cancel their subscriptions. You need to speak to a human support agent to cancel, but they aren't available easily either. Bold move on Carta's part, given its customer base. Read More

2. Too little, too late: Character.Ai has released some teen safety protections, but it couldn't escape the government's notice. Texas AG Ken Paxton has launched an investigation into the company and 14 other platforms over child privacy and safety concerns. Read More

3. VC Boy Genius: Silicon Valley loves a promising young man to stir it up. The latest It Boy isn't dropping out of MIT to launch a startup, though. Koko X, a 21-year-old, launched his first solo fund dedicated to deep tech, and has already secured $17.5 million from backers like Marc Andreessen and Kevin Hartz. Read More

A message from Silicon Valley Bank

SVB delivers unmatched service and a best-in-class banking platform

Whether you've raised a first institutional round or Series A, we deeply understand the startup journey and deliver the service, products and expert guidance to support your business growth.

Learn More

Morning must-reads

Image Credits:

🫣 Live and learn: OpenAI's three-hour outage this week was caused after it deployed a new telemetry service to collect Kubernetes metrics. "This was a confluence of multiple systems and processes failing simultaneously and interacting in unexpected ways," OpenAI wrote in a blog post. Read More

👯 Meta can be a bit of a copycat: First it was Instagram Reels to compete with TikTok, now it's trying to imitate Bluesky's "Starter Packs" by releasing curated lists to help new users find people to follow. Nothing like a bit of competition to prompt the giants to improve their products. Read More

📈 ServiceTitan had a warm public debut this week, with its stock popping from $71 to $105 per share on day one of trading. While many hope this IPO will help open the floodgates to more, it's worth noting that ServiceTitan's motive to go public is less market related and more designed to appease some impatient investors. Read More

😳 A reason to be paranoid: Yahoo (TC's parent company) has laid off about a quarter of its cybersecurity team, affectionately known as The Paranoids, over the past year. The red team, or offensive security team, was cut entirely this week, the latest of several rounds of layoffs to hit the company this year. Read More

🪨 Space rocks! Australia-based Fleet Space Technologies has raised a $100 million Series D round, a notable exception in the generally dampened funding environment for late-stage space startups. Fleet will use the money to boost development of its platform that can prospect minerals from space in real time. Read More

🦆 Water off a duck's back: Meta is releasing an open-source tool that will allow devs to add imperceptible watermarks to AI-generated video clips. But will people use it? And even if they do, how useful will it be to find out after billions of people have seen a clip that, actually, is fake? Read More

🥊 Rage against the machine: As disinformation continues to rise with the explosion of AI, startups are cropping up to help companies detect and effectively respond to such threats. The latest is Refute, a London-based startup that just raised a $2.9 million pre-seed round from Playfair and Episode 1. Read More

A message from Comprehensive.io

FREE real-time salary data from 5,000 startups

Want to see what other companies are paying for a given role? Comprehensive.io offers salary data from 5,000 tech companies and startups, giving you insight into how pay is trending in the job market right now.

View Free Data

Around the web

🔍 Clio FTW: Platformer's Casey Newton has a neat inside look at Anthropic's internal tool, Clio (Claude insights and observations), which can identify new threats, disrupt coordinated abuse of the company's systems, and generate Claude usage insights. Read More

📸 Photobucket's coming back to haunt: Remember uploading embarrassing photos to Photobucket a couple of decades ago? Well, if you simply forgot about the existence of your account, your photos, including biometric identifiers like face and iris scans, might have been sold to companies training generative AI, reports Ars Technica. Read More

💰 Spend it while you can: Bosch is the latest company to land big money from Biden's CHIPS Act, which he's rushing to make good on before the administration changes. Bosch will get up to $225 million to support its own $1.9 billion investment to produce semiconductors at its California manufacturing facility. Read More

Before you go

Image Credits: The Good Brigade / Getty Images

🤳 Children are the future, but I'm not sure how I feel about that after seeing this Pew Research study that shows nearly half of all U.S. teens are online almost constantly. And surprisingly, they're mostly on YouTube, followed by TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. Facebook, unsurprisingly, seems to be for the boomers. Read More