Author: Jason

After more than a year of helping solar installers sell, plan, and finance panels for residential and small commercial building owners, Niko found another opportunity. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Read more

Hours after Italian authorities requested information from DeepSeek about how the company handles user data, the Chinese AI startup’s app is no longer available in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. The app has claimed the top spot in the download charts in multiple countries, including in the U.S. where it is at the… Read more

U.K.-based engineering giant Smiths Group has confirmed a cybersecurity incident involving “unauthorized access” to its systems. The London-listed company, which operates across multiple sectors including energy, security, aerospace and defense, said Tuesday that it is currently “managing” the incident. The company said it isolated affected systems and activated its business continuity plans, implying a disruptive… Read more

Uber-backed Moove, an Africa-born mobility fintech that offers vehicle financing to ride-hailing and delivery app drivers across six continents, has acquired Kovi, a Brazilian urban mobility provider. The value of the deal is not being disclosed, but Moove confirmed it was an all-share transaction, and Kovi is now wholly owned by Moove. Moove co-founder and… Read more

The AI bubble hasn’t burst yet, at least when it comes to consumer spending on AI apps. Led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, overall spending on AI apps jumped to $1.42 billion in 2024, according to app analytics firm Appfigures. This marks a 274% increase from 2023 (the app launched in May of that year). Among tens… Read more

Martin Fengler knows a lot about the weather. Fengler got his Ph.D. in mathematics, focused on numerical weather prediction, before working for Meteomedia AG, a network of weather stations in Switzerland and Germany. But while he knew a lot about weather forecasting from the prediction side, he realized the gaps that remained on the consumption… Read more

AI chatbot DeepSeek has taken the world by storm, topping app store charts and sending Silicon Valley and Wall Street into meltdown. An offshoot of Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, DeepSeek’s cost-to-performance ratio makes for impressive reading compared to incumbents such as OpenAI. However, reports have increasingly documented some of the things the AI chatbot is… Read more

Just a few hours after David Sacks claimed DeepSeek used OpenAI’s models to train its own models, Bloomberg Law reports that Microsoft is investigating DeepSeek’s use of OpenAI’s application programming interface (API). According to security researchers working for Microsoft, the Chinese company behind the R1 reasoning model may have exfiltrated a large amount of data… Read more

If you talk to a fintech entrepreneur about their business, chances are they’ll end up talking about ledger issues at some point. A ledger is a record of money movements that serves as the source of truth for financial assets, but when a company starts having multiple bank accounts, payment processors and funds spread across… Read more

Until a few years ago, it used to be difficult to make payments across borders almost anywhere in the world. But it’s still a big problem in Africa, where fragmented, disconnected systems, high fees, and poor infrastructure make it tough for businesses and individuals to move money quickly and affordably. The majority of people and… Read more