Latest from Ingrid Lunden
Salespeople live and die by commissions. It’s no surprise, then, that Salesforce paid a premium to buy a platform that simplifies managing commissions.
A startup called Firefly that’s tackling the thorny and growing issue of cloud asset management with an “infrastructure as code” solution has raised $23 million in funding. That comes on…
Enterprise
OpenAI signs 100K PwC workers to ChatGPT’s enterprise tier as PwC becomes its first resale partner
PwC, the management consulting giant, will become OpenAI’s biggest customer to date, covering 100,000 users.
Enterprise
LumApps, the French ‘intranet super app,’ sells majority stake to Bridgepoint in a $650M deal
The deal will give LumApps a big nest egg to make acquisitions and scale its business.
Security
Bugcrowd, the crowdsourced white-hat hacker platform, acquires Informer to ramp up its security chops
On the heels of raising $102 million earlier this year, Bugcrowd is making good on its promise to use some of that funding to make acquisitions to strengthen its security…
A dodgy email containing a link that looks “legit” but is actually malicious remains one of the most dangerous, yet successful, tricks in a cybercriminal’s handbook. Now, an AI startup…
DeepL, which builds automated text translation and writing tools, has raised a $300 million round led by Index Ventures.
CyberArk — one of the army of larger security companies founded out of Israel — is acquiring Venafi, a specialist in machine identity, for $1.54 billion.
The AI Safety Institute, a U.K. body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, has said it will open a second location in San Francisco.
Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.
Alkira has raised $100M for its “network infrastructure as a service,” which lets users virtualize and orchestrate hybrid cloud assets, and manage them.
Commerce
Restaurant365 orders in $175M at $1B+ valuation to supersize its food service software stack
Restaurant365, which offers a restaurant management suite, has raised a hot $175M from ICONIQ Growth, KKR and L Catterton.
Facebook once had big ambitions to be a major player in enterprise communication and productivity, but today the social network’s parent company Meta will be closing a very significant chapter…
Accel has invested in more than 200 startups in the region to date, making it one of the more prolific VCs in this market.
On the heels of OpenAI announcing the latest iteration of its GPT large language model, its biggest rival in generative AI in the U.S. announced an expansion of its own.…
Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source large language models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation,…
Enterprise
Wiz raises $1B at a $12B valuation to expand its cloud security platform through acquisitions
Wiz, the buzzy startup building an all-in-one cloud security platform, is on an acquisition march to expand its business quickly en route to an IPO. Now, it has closed a…
A couple of weeks ago, TechCrunch broke the news that Akamai was in discussions to acquire Noname Security, a specialist in API security, for around $500 million. Today, the deal…
Two years after announcing plans, Amazon’s highly awaited e-commerce entry into sub-Saharan Africa has finally come to pass. On Tuesday, the tech giant launched its marketplace in South Africa. South…
Founders at the early stages of building their startups may have already created a strong solution, identified a gap in the market, or may simply have an inescapable and driving…
Gaming
LinkedIn launches gaming: 3 logic puzzles aimed at extending time spent on its networking platform
In an effort to attract more users and increase engagement, LinkedIn is launching three games: Queens, Crossclimb and Pinpoint.
With the number of people using e-mail globally approaching 5 billion, newsletters delivered regularly into people’s inboxes continue to look like a sticky way of getting attention for whatever it…
True to its business concept, Turkey’s “instant delivery” juggernaut Getir rose quickly. Now, with the quick commerce industry in free fall, it is nosediving just as fast. On Monday, the…
The company announced that it would start to let customers accept cryptocurrency payments, starting with USDC stablecoins, initially only on Solana, Ethereum and Polygon
Its latest version features avatars that provide more emotion, better lip tracking, and what Synthesia says are more expressive natural and human movements when they are fed text to generate…
Stripe continues to hold the title of being the biggest financial technology business still in private hands, with a current valuation of about $65 billion and a whopping $1 trillion in…
Nvidia is acquiring Run:ai, a Tel Aviv-based company that makes it easier for developers and operations teams to manage and optimize their AI hardware infrastructure. Terms of the deal aren’t…
Automation continues to be a major theme in the enterprise — underscored not least by the rise of AI as a tool to help fix some of the more routine,…
Perplexity, the AI search engine startup, is a hot property at the moment. TechCrunch has learned that the company is currently raising at least $250 million more at a valuation…
Artificial intelligence has been in the crosshairs of governments over how it might be misused for fraud, disinformation and other malicious online activity. Now, a U.K. regulator wants to explore…
